"Vanity of vanities! All things expensive are vanity!"

Her eyes glistened and she slipped her arm through mine and patted the back of my hand.

"If you talk like that I shall cry and make a fool of myself," she said in a broken manner.

It is not so much the thing that is done or the thing that is said that matters, but the way of doing or saying it. In the commonplace pat on the hand, in the break in the commonplace words there was something that went straight to my heart. I squeezed her arm and whispered:

"Thank you, dear."

This sympathy so sure and yet so delicately conveyed was mine for the trouble of mounting the stairs that led to her drawing-room in Cadogan Gardens. She seemed to be watching my heart the whole time, so that without my asking, without my knowledge even, she could touch each sore spot as it appeared, with the healing finger. For herself she made no claims, and because she did not in any way declare herself to be unhappy, I, after the manner of men, took her happiness for granted. For lives there a man who does not believe that an uncomplaining woman has nothing to complain of? It is his masculine prerogative of density. Besides, does not he himself when hurt bellow like a bull? Why, he argues, should not wounded woman do the same? So, when I wanted companionship, I used to sit in the familiar room and make Adolphus, the Chow dog, shoulder arms with the poker, and gossip restfully with Lola, who sprawled in her old languorous, loose-limbed way among the cushions of her easy chair. Gradually my habitual reserve melted from me, and at last I gave her my whole confidence, telling her of my disastrous pursuit of eumoiriety, of Eleanor Faversham, of the attitude of Society, in fact, of most of what I have set down in the preceding pages. She was greatly interested in everything, especially in Eleanor Faversham. She wanted to know the colour of her eyes and hair and how she dressed. Women are odd creatures.

The weeks passed.

Besides ministering to my dilapidated spirit, Lola found occupation in looking after the cattery of Anastasius Papadopoulos, which the little man had left in the charge of his pupil and assistant, Quast. This Quast apparently was a faithful, stolid, but unintelligent and incapable German who had remained loyally at his post until Lola found him there in a state of semi-starvation. The sum of money with which Anastasius had provided him had been eked out to the last farthing. The cats were in a pitiable condition. Quast, in despair, was trying to make up his dull mind whether to sell them or eat them. Lola with superb feminine disregard of legal rights, annexed the whole cattery, maintained Quast in his position of pupil and assistant and informed the landlord that she would be responsible for the rent. Then she set to work to bring the cats into their proper condition of sleekness, and, that done, to put them through a systematic course of training. They had been thoroughly demoralised, she declared, under Quast's maladministration, and had almost degenerated into the unhistrionic pussies of domestic life. As for Hephaestus, the great ferocious tom, he was more like an insane tiger than a cat. He flew at the gate over which he used to jump, and clawed and bit it to matchwood, and after spitting in fury at the blazing hoop, sprang at the unhappy Quast as if he had been the contriver of the indignities to which he was being subjected. These tales of feline backsliding I used to hear from Lola, and when I asked her why she devoted her energies to the unproductive education of the uninspiring animals, she would shrug her shoulders and regard me with a Giaconda smile.

"In the first place it amuses me. You seem to forget I'm a dompteuse, a tamer of beasts; it's my profession, I was trained to it. It's the only thing I can do, and it's good to feel that I haven't lost my power. It's odd, but I feel a different woman when I'm impressing my will on these wretched cats. You must come one of these days and see a performance, when I've got them ship-shape. They'll astonish you. And then," she would add, "I can write to Anastasius and tell him how his beloved cats are getting on."

Well, it was an interest in her life which, Heaven knows, was not crowded with exciting incidents. Now that I can look back on these things with a philosophic eye, I can imagine no drearier existence than that of a friendless, unoccupied woman in a flat in Cadogan Gardens. At that time, I did not realise this as completely as I might have done. Because her old surgeon friend, Sir Joshua Oldfield, now and then took her out to dinner, I considered she was leading a cheerful if not a merry life. I smiled indulgently at Lola's devotion to the cats and congratulated her on having found another means whereby to beguile the tedium vitae which is the arch-enemy of content.

"I wish I could find such a means myself," said I.

I not only had the wish, but the imperative need to so do. To stand like Ajax defying the lightning is magnificent, but as a continuous avocation it is wearisome and unprofitable, especially if carried on in a tiny bachelor suite, an eyrie of a place, at the top of a block of flats in Victoria Street. Indeed, if I did not add soon to the meagre remains of my fortune, I should not be able to afford the luxury of the bachelor suite. Conscious of this, I left the lightning alone, after a last denunciatory shake of the fist, and descended into the busy ways of men to look for work.

Thus I entered on the second stage of my career—that of a soldier of Fortune. At first I was doubtful as to what path to glory and bread-and-butter I could carve out for myself. Hitherto I had been Fortune's darling instead of her mercenary, and she had most politely carved out my paths for me, until she had played her jade's trick and left me in the ditch. Now things were different. I stood alone, ironical, ambitionless, still questioning the utility of human effort, yet determined to play the game of life to its bitter end. What could I do?

It is true that I had been called to the Bar in my tentative youth, while I drafted documents for my betters to pull to pieces and rewrite at the Foreign Office; but I had never seen a brief, and my memories of Gaius, Justinian, Williams's "Real Property," and Austin's "Jurisprudence," were as nebulous as those of the Differential Calculus over whose facetiae I had pondered during my schooldays. The law was as closed to me as medicine. I had no profession. I therefore drifted into the one pursuit for which my training had qualified me, namely, political journalism. I had written much, in my amateur way, during my ten years' membership of Parliament; why, I hardly know—not because I needed money, not because I had thoughts which I burned to express, and certainly not through vain desire of notoriety. Perhaps the motive was twofold, an ingrained Puckish delight in the incongruous—it seemed incongruous for an airy epicurean like myself to spend stodgy hours writing stodgier articles on Pauper Lunacy and Poor Law Administration—and the same inherited sense of gentlemanly obligation to do something for one's king and country as made my ancestors, whether they liked it or not, clothe themselves in uncomfortable iron garments and go about fighting other gentlemen similarly clad, to their own great personal danger. At any rate, it complemented my work at St. Stephen's, and doubtless contributed to a reputation in the House which I did not gain through my oratory. I could therefore bring to editors the stock-in-trade of a fairly accurate knowledge of current political issues, an appreciation of personalities, and a philosophical subrident estimate of the bubbles that are for ever rising on the political surface. I found Finch of The Universal Review, James of The Weekly, and one or two others more than willing to give me employment. I put my pen also at the disposal of Raggles. It was as uplifting and about as mechanical as tax-collecting; but it involved less physical exertion and less unpleasant contact with my fellow creatures. I could also keep the ends of my moustache waxed, which was a great consolation.

My sister Agatha commended my courage and energy, and Lola read my articles with a glowing enthusiasm, which compensated for lack of exact understanding; but I was not proud of my position. It is one thing to stand at the top of a marble staircase and in a debonair, jesting fashion to fling insincere convictions to a recipient world. It is another to sell the same worthless commodity for money. I began, to my curious discomfort, to suspect that life had a meaning after all.



CHAPTER XVIII

One day I had walked from Cadogan Gardens with a gadfly phrase of Lola's tormenting my ears:

"You're not quite alive even yet."

I had spent most of the day over a weekly article for James's high-toned periodical, using the same old shibboleths, proclaiming Gilead to be the one place for balm, juggling with the same old sophistries, and proving that Pope must have been out of his mind when he declared that an honest man was the noblest work of God, seeing that nobler than the most honest man was the disingenuous government held up to eulogy; and I had gone tired, dispirited, out of conceit with myself to Lola for tea and consolation. I had not been the merriest company. I had spoken gloomily of the cosmos, and when Adolphus the Chow dog had walked down the room in his hind legs, I had railed at the futility of canine effort. To Lola, who had put forth all her artillery of artless and harmless coquetry in voice and gesture, in order to lure my thoughts into pleasanter ways, I exhibited the querulous grumpiness of a spoiled village octogenarian. We discussed the weather, which was worth discussing, for the spring, after long tarrying, had come. It was early May. Lola laughed.

"The spring has got into my blood."

"It hasn't got into mine," I declared. "It never will. I wonder what the deuce is the matter with me."

Then Lola had said, "My dear Simon, I know. You're not quite alive even yet."

I walked homewards pestered by the phrase. What did she mean by it? I stopped at the island round the clock-tower by Victoria Station and bought a couple of newspapers. There, in the centre of the whirlpool where swam dizzily omnibuses, luggage-laden cabs, whirling motors, feverish, train-seeking humans, dirty newsboys, I stood absently saying to myself, "You're not quite alive even yet."

A hand gripped my arm and a cheery voice said "Hallo!" I started and recognised Rex Campion. I also said "Hallo!" and shook hands with him. We had not met since the days when, having heard of my Monte Cristo lavishness, he had called at the Albany and had beguiled me into giving a thousand pounds to his beloved "Barbara's Building," the prodigious philanthropic institution which he had founded in the slums of South Lambeth. In spite of my dead and dazed state of being I was pleased to see his saturnine black-bearded face, and to hear his big voice. He was one of those men who always talked like a megaphone. The porticoes of Victoria Station re-echoed with his salutations. I greeted him less vociferously, but with equal cordiality.

"You're looking very fit. I head that you had gone through a miraculous operation. How are you?"

"Perfectly well," said I, "but I've been told that I'm not quite alive even yet."

He looked anxious. "Remains of trouble?"

"Not a vestige," I laughed.

"That's all right," he said breezily. "Now come along and hear Milligan speak."

It did not occur to him that I might have work, worries, or engagements, or that the evening's entertainment which he offered me might be the last thing I should appreciate. His head, for the moment, was full of Milligan, and it seemed to him only natural that the head of all humanity should be full of Milligan too. I made a wry face.

"That son of thunder?"

Milligan was a demagogue who had twice unsuccessfully attempted to get into Parliament in the Labour interest.

"Have you ever heard him?"

"Heaven forbid!" said I in my pride.

"Then come. He's speaking in the Hall of the Lambeth Biblical Society."

I was tempted, as I wanted company. In spite of my high resolve to out-Ishmael Ishmael, I could not kill a highly developed gregarious instinct. I also wanted a text for an article. But I wanted my dinner still more. Campion condemned the idea of dinner.

"You can have a cold supper," he roared, "like the rest of us."

I yielded. Campion dragged me helpless to a tram at the top of Vauxhall Bridge Road.

"It will do Your Mightiness good to mingle with the proletariat," he grinned.

I did not tell him that I had been mingling with it in this manner for some time past or that I repudiated the suggestion of its benign influence. I entered the tram meekly. As soon as we were seated, he began:

"I bet you won't guess what I've done with your thousand pounds. I'll give you a million guesses."

As I am a poor conjecturer, I put on a blank expression and shook my head. He waited for an instant, and then shouted with an air of triumph:

"I've founded a prize, my boy—a stroke of genius. I've called it by your name. 'The de Gex Prize for Housewives.' I didn't bother you about it as I knew you were in a world of worry. But just think of it. An annual prize of thirty pounds—practically the interest—for housewives!"

His eyes flashed in his enthusiasm; he brought his heavy hand down on my knee.

"Well?" I asked, not electrified by this announcement.

"Don't you see?" he exclaimed. "I throw the competition open to the women in the district, with certain qualifications, you know—I look after all that. They enter their names by a given date and then they start fair. The woman who keeps her home tidiest and her children cleanest collars the prize. Isn't it splendid?"

I agreed. "How many competitors?"

"Forty-three. And there they are working away, sweeping their floors and putting up clean curtains and scrubbing their children's noses till they shine like rubies and making their homes like little Dutch pictures. You see, thirty pounds is a devil of a lot of money for poor people. As one mother of a large family said to me, 'With that one could bury them all quite beautiful.'"

"You're a wonderful fellow," said I, somewhat enviously.

He gave an awkward laugh and tugged at his beard.

"I've only happened to find my job, and am doing it as well as I can," he said. "'Tisn't very much, after all. Sometimes one gets discouraged; people are such ungrateful pigs, but now and again one does help a lame dog over a stile which bucks one up, you know. Why don't you come down and have a look at us one of these days? You've been promising to do so for years."

"I will," said I with sudden interest.

"You can have a peep at one or two of the competing homes. We pop into them unexpectedly at all hours. That's a part of the game. We've a complicated system of marks which I'll show you. Of course, no woman knows how she's getting on, otherwise many would lose heart."

"How do the men like this disconcerting ubiquity of soap and water?"

"They love it!" he cried. "They're keen on the prize too. Some think they'll grab the lot and have the devil's own drunk when the year's up. But I'll look after that. Besides, when a chap has been living in the pride of cleanliness for a year he'll get into the way of it and be less likely to make a beast of himself. Anyway, I hope for the best. My God, de Gex, if I didn't hope and hope and hope," he cried earnestly, "I don't know how I should get through anything without hope and a faith in the ultimate good of things."

"The same inconvincible optimist?" said I.

"Yes. Thank heaven. And you?"

I paused. There came a self-revelatory flash. "At the present moment," I said, "I'm a perfectly convincible vacuist."

We left the tram and the main thoroughfare, and turned into frowsy streets, peopled with frowsy men and women and raucous with the bickering play of frowsy children. It was still daylight. Over London the spring had fluttered its golden pinions, and I knew that in more blessed quarters—in the great parks, in Piccadilly, in Old Palace Yard, half a mile away—its fragrance lingered, quickening blood already quickened by hope, and making happier hearts already happy. But here the ray of spring had never penetrated either that day or the days of former springs; so there was no lingering fragrance. Here no one heeded the aspects of the changing year save when suffocated by sweltering heat, or frozen in the bitter cold, or drenched by the pouring rain. Otherwise in these gray, frowsy streets spring, summer, autumn, winter were all the same to the grey, frowsy people. It is true that youth laughed—pale, animal boys, and pale, flat-chested girls. But it laughed chiefly at inane obscenity.

One of these days, when phonography is as practicable as photography, some one will make accurate records in these frowsy streets, and then, after the manner of the elegant writers of Bucolics and Pastorals, publish such a series of Urbanics and Pavimentals, phonographic dialogues between the Colins and Dulcibellas of the pavement and the gutter as will freeze up Hell with horror.

An anemic, flirtatious group passed us, the girls in front, the boys behind.

"Good God, Campion, what can you do?" I asked.

"Pay them, old chap," he returned quickly.

"What's the good of that?"

"Good? Oh, I see!" He laughed, with a touch of scorn. "It's a question of definition. When you see a fellow creature suffering and it shocks your refined susceptibilities and you say 'poor devil' and pass on, you think you have pitied him. But you haven't. You think pity's a passive virtue. It isn't. If you really pity anybody, you go mad to help him—you don't stand by with tears of sensibility running down your cheeks. You stretch out your hand, because you've damn well got to. If he won't take it, or wipes you over the head, that's his look-out. You can't work miracles. But once in a way he does take it, and then—well, you work like hell to pull him through. And if you do, what bigger thing is there in the world than the salvation of a human soul?"

"It's worth living for," said I.

"It's worth doing any confounded old thing for," he declared.

I envied Campion as I had envied no man before. He was alive in heart and soul and brain; I was not quite alive even yet. But I felt better for meeting him. I told him so. He tugged his beard again and laughed.

"I am a happy old crank. Perhaps that's the reason."

At the door of the hall of the Lambeth Ethical Society he stopped short and turned on me; his jaw dropped and he regarded me in dismay.

"I'm the flightiest and feather-headedest ass that ever brayed," he informed me. "I just remember I sent Miss Faversham a ticket for this meeting about a fortnight ago. I had clean forgotten it, though something uncomfortable has been tickling the back of my head all the time. I'm miserably sorry."

I hastened to reassure him. "Miss Faversham and I are still good friends. I don't think she'll mind my nodding to her from the other side of the room." Indeed, she had written me one or two letters since my recovery perfect in tact and sympathy, and had put her loyal friendship at my service.

"Even if we meet," I smiled, "nothing tragic will happen."

He expressed his relief.

"But what," I asked, "is Miss Faversham doing in this galley?"

"I suppose she is displaying an intelligent interest in modern thought," he said, with boyish delight at the chance I had offered him.

"Touche," said I, with a bow, and we entered the hall.

It was crowded. The audience consisted of the better class of artisans, tradesmen, and foremen in factories: there was a sprinkling of black-coated clerks and unskilled labouring men. A few women's hats sprouted here and there among the men's heads like weeds in a desert. There were women, too, in proportionately greater numbers, on the platform at the end of the hall, and among them I was quick to notice Eleanor Faversham. As Campion disliked platforms and high places in synagogues, we sat on one of the benches near the door. He explained it was also out of consideration for me.

"If Milligan is too strong for your proud, aristocratic stomach," he whispered, "you can cut and run without attracting attention."

Milligan had evidently just began his discourse. I had not listened to him for five minutes when I found myself caught in the grip which he was famous for fastening on his audience. With his subject—Nationalisation of the Land—and his arguments I had been perfectly familiar for years. As a boy I had read Henry George's "Progress and Poverty" with the superciliousness of the young believer in the divine right of Britain's landed gentry, and before the Eton Debating Society I had demolished the whole theory to my own and every one else's satisfaction. Later, as a practical politician, I had kept myself abreast of the Socialist movement. I did not need Mr. John Milligan, whom my lingering flippancy had called a son of thunder, to teach me the elements of the matter. But at this peculiar crisis of my life I felt that, in a queer, unknown way, Milligan had a message for me. It was uncanny. I sat and listened to the exposition of Utopia with the rapt intensity of any cheesemonger's assistant there before whose captured spirit floated the vision of days to come when the land should so flow with milk and money that golden cheeses would be like buttercups for the plucking. It was not the man's gospel that fascinated me nor his illuminated prophecy of the millennium that produced the vibrations in my soul, but the surging passion of his faith, the tempest of his enthusiasm. I had enough experience of public speaking to distinguish between the theatrical and the genuine in oratory. Here was no tub-thumping soothsayer, but an inspired zealot. He lived his impassioned creed in every fibre of his frame and faculties. He was Titanic, this rough miner, in his unconquerable hope, divine in his yearning love of humanity.

When he ended there was a dead silence for a second, and then a roar of applause from the pale, earnest, city-stamped faces. A lump rose in my throat. Campion clutched my knee. A light burned in his eyes.

"Well? What about Boanerges?"

"Only one thing," said I, "I wish I were as alive as that man."

A negligible person proposed a vote of thanks to Milligan, after which the hall began to empty. Campion, caught by a group of his proletariat friends, signalled to me to wait for him. And as I waited I saw Eleanor Faversham come slowly from the platform down the central gangway. Her eyes fixed themselves on me at once—for standing there alone I must have been a conspicuous figure, an intruder from the gorgeous West—and with a little start of pleasure she hurried her pace. I made my way past the chattering loiterers in my row, and met her. We shook hands.

"Well? Saul among the prophets? Who would have thought of seeing you here!"

I waved my hand towards Campion. "We have the same sponsor." She glanced at him for a swift instant and then at me.

"Did you like it?"

"Have you seen Niagara?"

"Yes."

"Did you like it?"

"I'm so glad," she cried. "I thought perhaps——" she broke off. "Why haven't you tried to see me?"

"There are certain conventions."

"I know," she said. "They're idiotic."

"There's also Mrs. Faversham," said I.

"Mother is the dearest thing in life," she replied, "but Mrs. Faversham is a convention." She came nearer to me, in order to allow a freer passage down the gangway and also in order to be out of earshot of an elderly woman who was obviously accompanying her. "Simon, I've been a good friend to you. I believe in you. Nothing will shake my convictions. You couldn't look into my eyes like that if—well—you know."

"I couldn't," said I.

"Then why can't two honourable, loyal people meet? We only need meet once. But I want to tell you things I can't write—things I can't say here. I also want to hear of things. I think I've got a kind of claim—haven't I?"

"I've told you, Eleanor. My letters—"

"Letters are rubbish!" she declared with a laugh. "Where can we meet?"

"Agatha is a good soul," said I.

"Well, fix it up by telephone to-morrow."

"Alas!" said I; "I don't run to telephones in my eagle's nest on Himalaya Mansions."

She knitted her brows. "That's not the last address you wrote from."

"No," I replied, smiling at this glimpse of the matter-of-fact Eleanor. "It was a joke."

"You're incorrigible!" she said rebukingly.

"I don't joke so well in rags as in silken motley," I returned with a smile, "but I do my best."

She disdained a retort. "We'll arrange, anyhow, with Agatha."

Campion, escaping from his friends, came up and chatted for a minute. Then he saw Eleanor and her companion to their carriage.

"Now," said he a moment later, "come to Barbara and have some supper. You won't mind if Jenkins joins us?"

"Who's Jenkins?" I asked.

"Jenkins is an intelligent gas-fitter of Sociological tastes. He classes Herbert Spencer, Benjamin Kidd, and Lombroso as light literature. He also helps us with our young criminals. I should like you to meet him."

"I should be delighted," I said.

So Jenkins was summoned from a little knot a few yards off and duly presented. Whereupon we proceeded to Campion's plain but comfortably furnished quarters in Barbara's Building, where he entertained us till nearly midnight with cold beef and cheese and strenuous conversation.

As I walked across Westminster Bridge on my homeward way it seemed as if London had grown less hostile. Big Ben chimed twelve and there was a distinct Dick Whittington touch about the music. The light on the tower no longer mocked me. As I passed by the gates of Palace Yard, a policeman on duty recognised me and saluted. I strode on with a springier tread and noticed that the next policeman who did not know me, still regarded me with an air of benevolence. A pale moon shone in the heavens and gave me shyly to understand that she was as much my moon as any one else's. As I turned into Victoria Street, omnibuses passed me with a lurch of friendliness. The ban was lifted. I danced (figuratively) along the pavement.

What it portended I did not realise. I was conscious of nothing but a spiritual exhilaration comparable only with the physical exhilaration I experienced in the garden at Algiers when my bodily health had been finally established. As the body then felt the need of expressing itself in violent action—in leaping and running (an impulse which I firmly subdued), so now did my spirit crave some sort of expression in violent emotion. I was in a mood for enraptured converse with an archangel.

Looking back, I see that Campion's friendly "Hallo" had awakened me from a world of shadows and set me among realities; the impact of Milligan's vehement personality had changed the conditions of my life from static to dynamic; and that a Providence which is not always as ironical as it pleases us to assert had sent Eleanor Faversham's graciousness to mitigate the severity of the shock. I see how just was Lola's diagnosis. "You're not quite alive even yet." I had been going about in a state of suspended spiritual animation.

My recovery dated from that evening.



CHAPTER XIX

Agatha proved herself the good soul I had represented her to be.

"Certainly, dear," she said when I came the following morning with my request. "You can have my boudoir all to yourselves."

"I am grateful," said I, "and for the first time I forgive you for calling it by that abominable name."

It was an old quarrel between us. Every lover of language picks out certain words in common use that he hates with an unreasoning ferocity.

"I'll change it's title if you like," she said meekly.

"If you do, my dear Agatha, my gratitude will be eternal."

"I remember a certain superior person, when Tom and I were engaged, calling mother's boudoir—the only quiet place in the house—the osculatorium."

She laughed with the air of a small bird who after long waiting had at last got even with a hawk. But I did not even smile. For the only time in our lives I considered that Agatha had committed a breach of good taste. I said rather stiffly:

"It is not going to be a lovers' meeting, my dear."

She flushed. "It was silly of me. But why shouldn't it be a lovers' meeting?" she added audaciously. "If nothing had happened, you two would have been married by this time—"

"Not till June."

"Oh, yes, you would. I should have seen about that—a ridiculously long engagement. Anyhow, it was only your illness that broke it off. You were told you were going to die. You did the only honourable and sensible thing—both of you. Now you're in splendid health again—"

"Stop, stop!" I interrupted. "You seem to be entirely oblivious of the circumstances—"

"I'm oblivious of no circumstances. Neither is Eleanor. And if she still cares for you she won't care twopence for the circumstances. I know I wouldn't."

And to cut off my reply she clapped the receiver of the telephone to her ear and called up Eleanor, with whom she proceeded to arrange a date for the interview. Presently she screwed her head round.

"She says she can come at four this afternoon. Will that suit you?"

"Perfectly," said I.

When she replaced the receiver I stepped behind her and put my hands on her shoulders.

"'The mother of mischief,'" I quoted, "'is no bigger than a midge's wing,' and the grandmother is the match-making microbe that lurks in every woman's system."

She caught one of my hands and looked up into my face.

"You're not cross with me, Simon?"

Her tone was that of the old Agatha. I laughed, remembering the policeman's salute of the previous night, and noted this recovery of my ascendancy as another indication of the general improvement in the attitude of London.

"Of course not, Tom Tit," said I, calling her by her nursery name. "But I absolutely forbid your thinking of playing Fairy Godmother."

"You can forbid my playing," she laughed, "and I can obey you. But you can't prevent my thinking. Thought is free."

"Sometimes, my dear," I retorted, "it is better chained up."

With this rebuke I left her. No doubt, she considered a renewal of my engagement with Eleanor Faversham a romantic solution of difficulties. I could only regard it as preposterous, and as I walked back to Victoria Street I convinced myself that Eleanor's frank offer of friendship proved that such an idea never entered her head. I took vehement pains to convince myself Spring had come; like the year, I had awakened from my lethargy. I viewed life through new eyes; I felt it with a new heart. Such vehement pains I was not capable of taking yesterday.

"It has never entered her head!" I declared conclusively.

And yet, as we sat together a few hours later in Agatha's little room a doubt began to creep into the corners of my mind. In her strong way she had brushed away the scandal that hung around my name. She did not believe a word of it. I told her of my loss of fortune. My lunacy rather raised than lowered me in her esteem. How then was I personally different from the man she had engaged herself to marry six months before? I remembered our parting. I remembered her letters. Her presence here was proof of her unchanging regard. But was it something more? Was there a hope throbbing beneath that calm sweet surface to which I did not respond? For it often happens that the more direct a woman is, the more in her feminine heart is she elusive.

Clean-built, clean-hearted, clean-eyed, of that clean complexion which suggests the open air, Eleanor impressed you with a sense of bodily and mental wholesomeness. Her taste in dress ran in the direction of plain tailor-made gowns (I am told, by the way, that these can be fairly expensive), and shrank instinctively from the frills and fripperies to which daughters of Eve are notoriously addicted. She spoke in a clear voice which some called hard, though I never found it so; she carried herself proudly. Chaste in thought, frank in deed, she was a perfect specimen of the highly bred, purely English type of woman who, looking at facts squarely in the face, accepts them as facts and does not allow her imagination to dally in any atmosphere wherein they may be invested. To this type a vow is irrefragable. Loyalty is inherent in her like her blood. She never changes. What feminine inconsistencies she had at fifteen she retains at five-and-twenty, and preserves to add to the charms of her old age. She is the exemplary wife, the great-hearted mother of children. She has sent her sons in thousands to fight her country's battles overseas. Those things which lie in the outer temper of her soul she gives lavishly. That which is hidden in her inner shrine has to be wrested from her by the one hand she loves. Was mine that hand?

It will be perceived that I was beginning to take life seriously.

Eleanor must have also perceived something of the sort; for during our talk she said irrelevantly:

"You've changed!"

"In what way?" I asked.

"I don't know. You're not the same as you were. I seem to know you better in some ways, and yet I seem to know you less. Why is it?"

I said, "No one can go through the Valley of the Grotesque as I have done without suffering some change."

"I don't see why you should call it 'the Valley of the Grotesque.'"

I smiled at her instinctive rejection of the fanciful.

"Don't you? Call it the Valley of the Shadow, if you like. But don't you think the attendant circumstances were rather mediaeval, gargoyley, Orcagnesque? Don't you think the whole passage lacked the dignity which one associates with the Valley of the Shadow of Death?"

"You mean the murder?" she said with a faint shiver.

"That," said I, "might be termed the central feature. Just look at things as they happened. I am condemned to death. I try to face it like a man and a gentleman. I make my arrangements. I give up what I can call mine no longer. I think I will devote the rest of my days to performing such acts of helpfulness and charity as would be impossible for a sound man with a long life before him to undertake. I do it in a half-jesting spirit, refusing to take death seriously. I pledge myself to an act of helpfulness which I regard at first as merely an incident in my career of beneficence. I am gradually caught in the tangle of a drama which at times develops into sheer burlesque, and before I can realise what is going to happen, it turns into ghastly tragedy. I am overwhelmed in grotesque disaster—it is the only word. Instead of creating happiness all around me, I have played havoc with human lives. I stand on the brink and look back and see that it is all one gigantic devil-jest at my expense. I thank God I am going to die. I do die—for practical purposes. I come back to life and—here I am. Can I be quite the same person I was a year ago?"

She reflected for a few moments. Then she said:

"No. You can't be—quite the same. A man of your nature would either have his satirical view of life hardened into bitter cynicism or he would be softened by suffering and face things with new and nobler ideals. He would either still regard life as a jest—but instead of its being an odd, merry jest it would be a grim, meaningless, hideous one; or he would see that it wasn't a jest at all, but a full, wonderful, big reality. I've expressed myself badly, but you see what I mean."

"And what do you think has happened?" I asked.

"I think you have changed for the better."

I smiled inwardly. It sounded rather dull. I said with a smile:

"You never liked my cap and bells, Eleanor."

"No!" she replied emphatically. "What's the use of mockery? See where it led you."

I rose, half-laughing at her earnestness, half-ashamed of myself, and took a couple of turns across the room.

"You're right," I cried. "It led me to perdition. You might make an allegory out of my career and entitle it 'The Mocker's Progress.'" I paused for a second or two, and then said suddenly, "Why did you from the first refuse to believe what everybody else does—before I had the chance of looking you in the eyes?"

She averted her face. "You forget that I had had the chance of searching deep beneath the mocker."

I cannot, in reverence to her, set down what she said she found there. I stood humbled and rebuked, as a man must do when the best in him is laid out before his sight by a good woman.

A maidservant brought in tea, set the table, and departed, Eleanor drew off her gloves and my glance fell on her right hand.

"It's good of you to wear my ring to-day," I said.

"To-day?" she echoed, with the tiniest touch of injury in her voice. "Do you think I put it on to just please you to-day?"

"It would have been gracious of you to do so," said I.

"It wouldn't," she declared. "It would have been mawkish and sentimental. When we parted I told you to do what you liked with the ring. Do you remember? You put it on this finger"—she waved her right hand—"and there it has stayed ever since."

I caught the hand and touched it lightly with my lips. She coloured faintly.

"Two lumps of sugar and no milk, I think that's right?" She handed me the tea-cup.

"It's like you not to have forgotten."

"I'm a practical person," she replied with a laugh.

Presently she said, "Tell me more about your illness—or rather your recovery. I know nothing except that you had a successful operation which all the London surgeons said was impossible. Who nursed you?"

"I had a trained nurse," said I.

"Wasn't Madame Brandt with you?"

"Yes," said I. "She was very good to me. In fact, I think I owe her my life."

Hitherto the delicacy of the situation had caused me to refer to Lola no more than was necessary, and in my narrative I had purposely left her vague.

"That's a great debt," said Eleanor.

"It is, indeed."

"You're not the man to leave such a debt unpaid?"

"I try to repay it by giving Madame Brandt my devoted friendship."

Her eyes never wavered as they held mine.

"That's one of the things I wanted to know. Tell me something about her."

I felt some surprise, as Eleanor was of a nature too proud for curiosity.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because she interests me intensely. Is she young?"

"About thirty-two."

"Good-looking?"

"She is a woman of remarkable personality."

"Describe her."

I tried, stumbled, and halted. The effort evoked in my mind a picture of Lola lithe, seductive, exotic, with gold flecks in her dusky, melting eyes, with strong shapely arms that had as yet only held me motherwise, with her pantherine suggestion of tremendous strength in languorous repose, with her lazy gestures and parted lips showing the wonderful white even teeth, with all her fascination and charm—a picture of Lola such as I had not seen since my emergence from the Valley—a picture of Lola, generous, tender, wistful, strong, yielding, fragrant, lovable, desirable, amorous—a picture of Lola which I could not put before this other woman equally brave and straight, who looked at me composedly out of her calm, blue eyes.

My description resolved itself into a loutish catalogue.

"It is not painful to you to talk of her, Simon?"

"Not at all. There are not many great-hearted women going about. It is my privilege to know two."

"Am I the other?"

"Who else?"

"I'm glad you have the courage to class Madame Brandt and myself together."

"Why?" I asked.

"It proves beyond a doubt that you are honest with me. Now tell me about a few externals—things that don't matter—but help one to form an impression. Is she educated?"

"From books, no; from observation, yes."

"Her manners?"

"Observation had educated them."

"Accent?"

"She is sufficiently polyglot to have none."

"She dresses and talks and behaves generally like a lady?"

"She does," said I.

"In what way then does she differ from the women of our class?"

"She is less schooled, less reticent, franker, more natural. What is on her tongue to say, she says."

"Temper?"

"I have never heard her say an angry word to or of a human creature. She has queer delicacies of feeling. For instance——"

I told her of Anastasius Papadopoulos's tawdry, gimcrack presents which Lola has suffered to remain in her drawing-room so as not to hurt the poor little wretch.

"That's very touching. Where does she live?"

"She has a flat in Cadogan Gardens."

"Is she in London now?"

"Yes."

"I should like very much to know her," she said calmly.

I vow and declare again that the more straightforward and open-eyed, the less subtle, temperamental, and neurotic are women, the more are they baffling. I had wondered for some time whither the catechism tended, and now, with a sudden jerk, it stopped short at this most unexpected terminus. It was startling. I rose and mechanically placed my empty tea-cup on the tray by her side.

"The wish, my dear Eleanor," said I, quite formally, "does great credit to your heart."

There was a short pause, marking an automatic close of the subject. Deeply as I admired both women, I shrank from the idea of their meeting. It seemed curiously indelicate, in view both of my former engagement to Eleanor and of Lola's frank avowal of her feelings towards me before what I shall always regard as my death. It is true that we had never alluded to it since my resurrection; but what of that? Lola's feelings, I was sure, remained unaltered. It also flashed on me that, with all the goodwill in the world, Eleanor would not understand Lola. An interview would develop into a duel. I pictured it for a second, and my sudden fierce partisanship for Lola staggered me. Decidedly an acquaintance between these two was preposterous.

The silence was definite enough to mark a period, but not long enough to cause embarrassment. Eleanor commented on my present employment. I must find it good to get back to politics.

"I find it to the contrary," said I, with a laugh. "My convictions, always lukewarm, are now stone-cold. I don't say that the principles of the party are wrong. But they're wrong for me, which is all-important. If they are not right for me, what care I how right they be? And as I don't believe in those of the other side, I'm going to give up politics altogether."

"What will you do?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't. But I have an insistent premonition that I shall soon find myself doing something utterly idiotic, which to me will be the most real thing in life."

I had indeed awakened that morning with an exhilarating thrill of anticipation, comparable to that of the mountain climber who knows not what panorama of glory may be disclosed to his eyes when he reaches the summit. I had whistled in my bath—a most unusual thing.

"Are you going to turn Socialist?"

"Qui lo sa? I'm willing to turn anything alive and honest. It doesn't matter what a man professes so long as he professes it with all the faith of all his soul."

I broke into a laugh, for the echo of my words rang comic in my ears.

"Why do you laugh?" she asked.

"Don't you think it funny to hear me talk like a two-penny Carlyle?"

"Not a bit," she said seriously.

"I can't undertake to talk like that always," I said warningly.

"I thought you said you were going to be serious."

"So I am—but platitudinous—Heaven forbid!"

The little clock on the mantelpiece struck six. Eleanor rose in alarm.

"How the time has flown! I must be getting back. Well?"

Our eyes met. "Well?" said I.

"Are we ever to meet again?"

"It's for you to say."

"No," she said. And then very distinctly, very deliberately, "It's for you."

I understood. She made the offer simply, nobly, unreservedly. My heart was filled with great gratitude. She was so true, so loyal, so thorough. Why could I not take her at her word? I murmured:

"I'll remember what you say."

She put out her hand. "Good-bye!"

"Good-bye and God bless you!" I said.

I accompanied her to the front door, hailed a passing cab, and waited till she had driven off. Was there ever a sweeter, grander, more loyal woman? The three little words had changed the current of my being.

I returned to take leave of Agatha. I found her in the drawing-room reading a novel. She twisted her head sideways and regarded me with a bird-like air of curiosity.

"Eleanor gone?"

Her tone jarred on me. I nodded and dropped into a chair.

"Interview passed off satisfactorily?"

"We were quite comfortable, thank you. The only drawback was the tea. Why a woman in your position can't give people China tea instead of that Ceylon syrup will be a mystery to me to my dying day."

She rose in her wrath and shook me.

"You're the most aggravating wretch on earth!"

"My dear Tom-Tit," said I gravely. "Remember the moral tale of Bluebeard."

"Look here, Simon"—she planted herself in front of me—"I'm not a bit inquisitive. I don't in the least want to know what passed between you and Eleanor. But what I would give my ears to understand is how you can go through a two hours' conversation with the girl you were engaged to—a conversation which must have affected the lives of both of you—and then come up to me and talk drivel about China tea and Bluebeard."

"Once on a time, my dear," said I, "I flattered myself on being an artist in life. I am humbler now and acknowledge myself a wretched bungling amateur. But I still recognise the value of chiaroscuro."

"You're hopeless," said Agatha, somewhat crossly. "You get more flippant and cynical every day."



CHAPTER XX

I went home to my solitary dinner, and afterwards took down a volume of Emerson and tried to read. I thought the cool and spacious philosopher might allay a certain fever in my blood. But he did nothing of the kind. He wrote for cool and spacious people like himself; not for corpses like me revivified suddenly with an overcharge of vital force. I pitched him—how much more truly companionable is a book than its author!—I pitched him across the room, and thrusting my hands in my pockets and stretching out my legs, stared in a certain wonder at myself.

I, Simon de Gex, was in love; and, horribile dictu! in love with two women at once. It was Oriental, Mormonic, New Century, what you will; but there it was. I am ashamed to avow that if, at that moment, both women had appeared before me and said "Marry us," I should have—well, reflected seriously on the proposal. I had passed through curious enough experiences, Heaven knows, already; but none so baffling as this. The two women came alternately and knocked at my heart, and whispered in my ear their irrefutable claims to my love. I listened throbbingly to each, and to each I said, "I love you."

I was in an extraordinary psychological predicament. Lola had remarked, "You are not quite alive even yet." I had come to complete life too suddenly. This was the result. I got up and paced the bird-cage, which the house-agents termed a reception-room, and wondered whether I were going mad. It was not as if one woman represented the flesh and the other the spirit. Then I might have seen the way to a decision. But both had the large nature that comprises all. I could not exalt one in any way to the abasement of the other. All my inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor. I was clamouring for the real. Was she not the incarnation of the real? Her very directness piqued me to a perverse and delicious obliquity. And I knew, as I knew when I parted from her months before, that it was only for me to awaken things that lay virginally dormant. On the other hand stood Lola, with her magnetic seduction, her rich atmosphere, her great wide simplicity of heart, holding out arms into which I longed to throw myself.

It was monstrous, abnormal. I hated the abominable indelicacy of weighing one against the other, as I had hated the idea of their meeting.

I paced my bird-cage until it shrank to the size of a rat-trap. Then I clapped on my hat and fled down into the streets. I jumped into the first cab I saw and bade the driver take me to Barbara's Building. Campion suddenly occurred to me as the best antidote to the poison that had entered my blood.

I found him alone, clearing from the table the remains of supper. In spite of his soul's hospitable instincts, he stared at me.

"Why, what the——?"

"Yes, I know. You're surprised to see me bursting in on you like a wild animal. I'm not going to do it every night, but this evening I claim a bit of our old friendship."

"Claim it all, my dear de Gex!" he said cordially. "What can I do for you?"

It was characteristic of Campion to put his question in that form. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have asked what was the matter with me. But Campion, who all his life had given, wanted to know what he could co.

"Tell me fairy tales of Lambeth and idylls of the Waterloo Bridge Road. Or light your pipe and talk to me of Barbara."

He folded up the tablecloth and put it in the sideboard drawer.

"If it's elegant distraction you want," said he, "I can do better than that." He planted himself in front of me. "Would you like to do a night's real work?"

"Certainly," said I.

"A gentleman of my acquaintance named Judd is in the ramping stage of delirium tremens. He requires a couple of men to hold him down so as to prevent him from getting out of bed and smashing his furniture and his wife and things. I was going to relieve one of the fellows there now, so that he can get a few hours' sleep, and if you like to come and relieve the other, you'll be doing a good action. But I warn you it won't be funny."

"I'm in the mood for anything," I said.

"You'll come?"

"Of course."

"That's splendid!" he shouted. "I hardly thought you were in earnest. Wait till I telephone for some medicine to be sent up from the dispensary. I promised to take it round with me."

He telephoned instructions, and presently a porter brought in the medicine. Campion explained that it had been prescribed by the doctor attached to the institution who was attending the case.

"You must come and see the working of our surgery and dispensary!" he cried enthusiastically. "We charge those who can afford a sixpence for visit and medicine. Those who can't are provided, after inquiry, with coupons. We don't want to encourage the well-to-do to get their medical advice gratis, or we wouldn't be able to cope with the really poor. We pay the doctor a fixed salary, and the fees go to the general fund of the Building, so it doesn't matter a hang to him whether a patient pays or not."

"You must be proud of all this, Campion?" I said.

"In a way," he replied, lighting his pipe; "but it's mainly a question of money—my poor old father's money which he worked for, not I."

I reminded him that other sons had been known to put their poor old father's money to baser uses.

"I suppose Barbara is more useful to the community that steam yachts or racing stables; but there, you see, I hate yachting because I'm always sea-sick, and I scarcely know which end of a horse you put the bridle on. Every man to his job. This is mine. I like it."

"I wonder whether holding down people suffering from delirium tremens is my job," said I. "If so, I'm afraid I shan't like it."

"If it's really your job," replied Campion, "you will. You must. You can't help it. God made man so."

It was only an hour or two later when, for the first time in my life, I came into practical touch with human misery, that I recognised the truth of Campion's perfervid optimism. No one could like our task that night in its outer essence. For a time it revolted me. The atmosphere of the close, dirty room, bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, bathroom, laundry—all in one, the home of man, wife and two children, caught me by the throat. It was sour. The physical contact with the flesh of the unclean, gibbering, shivering, maniacal brute on the foul bed was unutterably repugnant to me. Now and again, during intervals of comparative calm, I was forced to put my head out of the window to breathe the air of the street. Even that was tainted, for a fried-fish shop across the way and a public-house next door billowed forth their nauseating odours. After a while access to the window was denied me. A mattress and some rude coverings were stretched beneath it—the children's bed—on which we persuaded the helpless, dreary wife to lie down and try to rest. A neighbour had taken in the children for the night. The wife was a skinny, grey-faced, lined woman of six-and-twenty. In her attitude of hopeless incompetence she shed around her an atmosphere of unspeakable depression. Although I could not get to the window, I was glad when she lay down and spared me the sight of her moving fecklessly about the room or weeping huddled up on a broken-backed wooden chair and looking more like a half-animated dish-clout than a woman.

The poor wretch on the bed was a journeyman tailor who, when sober, could earn fair wages. The cry of the wife, before Campion awed her into comparative silence, was a monotonous upbraiding of her husband for bringing them down to this poverty. It seemed impossible to touch her intelligence and make her understand that no words from her or any one could reach his consciousness. His violence, his screams, his threats, the horrors of his fear left her unmoved. We were there to guard her from physical danger, and that to her was all that mattered.

In the course of an hour or so the nausea left me. I felt braced by the grimness of the thing, and during the paroxysms I had no time to think of anything but the mechanical work in hand. It was all that Campion and I, both fairly able-bodied men, could do to keep the puny little tailor in his bed. Horrible shapes menaced him from which he fought madly to escape. He writhed and shrieked with terror. Once he caught my hand in his teeth and bit it, and Campion had some difficulty in relaxing the wretch's jaw. Between the paroxysms Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word. The wife, poor creature, whimpered on her mattress. It was not a pleasant vigil. It lasted till the grey dawn crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion's men from Barbara's Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in to help the slatternly wife light a fire and make some tea. I have enjoyed few things more than the warm, bitter stuff which I drank out of the broken mug in that strange and depressing company.

I went out into the street with racked head and nerves and muscles. Campion kept his cloth cap in his hand, allowing the morning wind to ruffle his shaggy black hair, and drew a long breath.

"I think the worst is over now. As soon as he can be moved, I'll get him down to the annexe at Broadstairs. The sea air will pull him round."

"Isn't it rather hopeless?" I asked.

He turned on me. "Nothing's hopeless. If you once start the hopeless game down here you'd better distribute cyanide of potassium instead of coals and groceries. I've made up my mind to get that man decent again, and, by George, I'm going to do it! Fancy those two weaklings producing healthy offspring. But they have. Two of the most intelligent kids in the district. If you hold up your hands and say it's awful to contemplate their upbringing you're speaking the blatant truth. It's the contemplation that's awful. But why contemplate when you can do something?"

I admitted the justice of the remark. He went on.

"Look at yourself now. If you had gone in with me last night and just stared at the poor devil howling with D.T. in that filthy place, you'd have come out sick and said it was awful. Instead of that, you buckled to and worked and threw off everything save our common humanity, and have got interested in the Judds in spite of yourself. You'll go and see them again and do what you can for them, won't you?"

I was not in a merry mood, but I laughed. Campion had read the intention that had vaguely formulated itself in the back of my mind.

"Of course I will," I said.

We walked on a few steps down the still silent, disheartening street without speaking. Then he tugged his beard, half-halted, and glanced at me quickly.

"See here," said he, "the more sensible people I can get in to help us the better. Would you like me to hand you over the Judd family en bloc?"

This was startling to the amateur philanthropist. But it is the way of all professionals to regard their own business as of absorbing interest to the outside world. The stockbroking mind cannot conceive a sane man indifferent to the fluctuations of the money market, and to the professional cricketer the wide earth revolves around a wicket. How in the world could I be fairy godfather to the Judd family? Campion took my competence for granted.

"You may not understand exactly what I mean, my dear Campion," said I; "but I attribute the most unholy disasters of my life to a ghastly attempt of mine to play Deputy Providence."

"But who's asking you to play Deputy Providence?" he shouted. "It's the very last idiot thing I want done. I want you to do certain definite practical work for that family under the experienced direction of the authorities at Barbara's Building. There, do you understand now?"

"Very well, I'll do anything you like."

Thus it befell that I undertook to look after the moral, material, and spiritual welfare of the family of an alcoholic tailor by the name of Judd who dwelt in a vile slum in South Lambeth. My head was full of the prospect when I awoke at noon, for I had gone exhausted to sleep as soon as I reached home. If goodwill, backed by the experience of Barbara's Building, could do aught towards the alleviation of human misery, I determined that it should be done. And there was much misery to be alleviated in the Judd family. I had no clear notion of the means whereby I was to accomplish this; but I knew that it would be a philanthropic pursuit far different from my previous eumoirous wanderings abut London when, with a mind conscious of well-doing, I distributed embarrassing five-pound notes to the poor and needy.

I had known—what comfortable, well-fed gentleman does not?—that within easy walking distance of his London home thousands of human beings live like the beasts that perish; but never before had I spent an intimate night in one of the foul dens where the living and perishing take place. The awful pity of it entered my soul.

So deeply was I impressed with the responsibility of what I had undertaken, so grimly was I haunted by the sight of the pallid, howling travesty of a man and the squeezed-out, whimpering woman, that the memory of the conflicting emotions that had driven me to Campion the night before returned to me with a shock.

"It strikes me," I murmured, as I shaved, "that I am living very intensely indeed. Here am I in love with two women at once, and almost hysterically enthusiastic over a delirious tailor." Then I cut my cheek and murmured no more, until the operation was concluded.

I had arranged to accompany Lola that afternoon to the Zoological Gardens. This was a favourite resort of hers. She was on intimate terms with keepers and animals, and her curious magnetism allowed her to play such tricks with lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts as made my blood run cold. As for the bears, they greeted her approach with shrieking demonstrations of affection. On such occasions I felt the same curious physical antipathy as I did when she had dominated Anastasius's ill-conditioned cat. She seemed to enter another sphere of being in which neither I nor anything human had a place.

With some such dim thoughts in my head, I reached her door in Cadogan Gardens. The sight of her electric brougham that stood waiting switched my thoughts into another groove, but one running oddly parallel. Electric broughams also carried her out of my sphere. I had humbly performed the journey thither in an omnibus.

She received me in her big, expansive way.

"Lord! How good it is to see you. I was getting the—I was going to say 'the blind hump'—but you don't like it. I was going to turn crazy and bite the furniture."

"Why?" I asked with masculine directness.

"I've been trying to educate myself—to read poetry. Look here"—she caught a small brown-covered octavo volume from the table. "I can't make head or tail of it. It proved to me that it was no use. If I couldn't understand poetry, I couldn't understand anything. It was no good trying to educate myself. I gave it up. And then I got what you don't like me to call the hump."

"You dear Lola!" I cried, laughing. "I don't believe any one has ever made head or tail out of 'Sordello.' There once was a man who said there were only two intelligible lines in the poem—the first and the last—and that both were lies. 'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,' and 'Who would, has heard Sordello's story told.' Don't worry about not understanding it."

"Don't you?"

"Not a bit," said I.

"That's a comfort," she said, with a generous sigh of relief. "How well you're looking!" she cried suddenly. "You're a different man. What have you been doing to yourself?"

"I've grown quite alive."

"Good! Delightful! So am I. Quite alive now, thank you."

She looked it, in spite of the black outdoor costume. But there was a dash of white at her throat and some white lilies of the valley in her bosom, and a white feather in her great black hat poised with a Gainsborough swagger on the mass of her bronze hair.

"It's the spring," she added.

"Yes," said I, "it's the spring."

She approached me and brushed a few specks of dust from my shoulder.

"You want a new suit of clothes, Simon."

"Dear me!" said I, glancing hastily over the blue serge suit in which I had lounged at Mustapha Superieur. "I suppose I do."

It occurred to me that my wardrobe generally needed replenishing. I had been unaccustomed to think of these things, the excellent Rogers and his predecessors having done most of the thinking for me.

"I'll go to Poole's at once," said I.

And then it struck me, to my whimsical dismay, that in the present precarious state of my finances, especially in view of my decision to abandon political journalism in favour of I knew not what occupation, I could not afford to order clothes largely from a fashionable tailor.

"I shouldn't have mentioned it," said Lola apologetically, "but you're always so spick and span."

"And now I'm getting shabby!"

I threw back my head and laughed at the new and comical conception of Simon de Gex down at heel.

"Oh, not shabby!" echoed Lola.

"Yes, my dear. The days of purple and fine linen are vorbei. You'll have to put up with me in a threadbare coat and frayed cuffs and ragged hems to my trousers."

Lola declared that I was talking rubbish.

"Not quite such rubbish as you may think, my dear. Shall you mind?"

"It would break my heart. But why do you talk so? You can't be—as poor—as that?"

Her face manifested such tragic concern that I laughed. Besides, the idea of personal poverty amused me. When I gave up my political work I should only have what I had saved from my wreck—some two hundred a year—to support me until I should find some other means of livelihood. It was enough to keep me from starvation, and the little economies I had begun to practise afforded me enjoyment. On the other hand, how folks regulated their balance-sheets so as to live on two hundred a year I had but a dim notion. In the course of our walk from Barbara's Building to the Judds the night before I had asked Campion. He had laughed somewhat grimly.

"I don't know. I don't run an asylum for spendthrift plutocrats; but if you want to see how people live and bring up large families on fifteen shillings a week, I can show you heaps of examples."

This I felt would, in itself, be knowledge of the deepest interest; but it would in no way aid me to solve my own economic difficulty. I was always being brought up suddenly against the problem in some form or another, and, as I say, it caused me considerable amusement.

"I shall go on happily enough," said I, reassuringly. "In the meantime let us go and see the lions and tigers."

We started. The electric brougham glided along comfortably through the sunlit streets. A feeling of physical and spiritual content stole over me. Our hands met and lingered a long time in a sympathetic clasp. Whatever fortune held in store for me here at least I had an inalienable possession. For some time we said nothing, and when our eyes met she smiled. I think she had never felt my heart so near to hers. At last we broke the silence and talked of ordinary things. I told her of my vigil overnight and my undertaking to look after the Judds. She listened with great interest. When I had finished my tale, she said almost passionately:

"Oh, I wish I could do something like that!"

"You?"

"Why not? I came from those people. My grandfather swept the cages in Jamrach's down by the docks. He died of drink. He used to live in one horrible, squalid room near by. I remember my father taking me to see him when I was a little girl—we ourselves weren't very much better off at that time. I've been through it," she shivered. "I know what that awful poverty is. Sometimes it seems immoral of me to live luxuriously as I do now without doing a hand's turn to help."

"Chacun a son metier, my dear," said I. "There's no need to reproach yourself."

"But I think it might be my metier," she replied earnestly, "if only I could learn it."

"Why haven't you tried, then?"

"I've been lazy and the opportunity hasn't come my way."

"I'll introduce you to Campion," I said, "and doubtless he'll be able to find something for you to do. He has made a science of the matter. I'll take you down to see him."

"Will you?"

"Certainly," said I. There was a pause. Then an idea struck me. "I wonder, my dear Lola, whether you could apply that curious power you have over savage animals to the taming of the more brutal of humans."

"I wonder," she said thoughtfully.

"I should like to see you seize a drunken costermonger in the act of jumping on his wife by the scruff of the neck, and reduce him to such pulp that he sat up on his tail and begged."

"Oh, Simon!" she exclaimed reproachfully. "I quite thought you were serious."

"So I am, my dear," I returned quickly, "as serious as I can be."

She laughed. "Do you remember the first day you came to see me? You said that I could train any human bear to dance to whatever tune I pleased. I wonder if the same thought was at the back of your head."

"It wasn't. It was a bad and villainous thought. I came under the impression that you were a dangerous seductress."

"And I'm not?"

Oh, that spring day, that delicious tingle in the air, that laughing impertinence of the budding trees in the park through which we were then driving, that enveloping sense of fragrance and the nearness and the dearness of her! Oh, that overcharge of vitality! I leaned my head to hers so that my lips nearly touched her ear. My voice shook.

"You're a seductress and a witch and a sorcerer and an enchantress."

The blood rose to her dark face. She half closed her eyes.

"What else am I?" she murmured.

But, alas! I had not time to answer, for the brougham stopped at the gates of the Zoological Gardens. We both awakened from our foolishness. My hand was on the door-handle when she checked me.

"What's the good of a mind if you can't change it? I don't feel in a mood for wild beasts to-day, and I know you don't care to see me fooling about with them. I would much rather sit quiet and talk to you."

With a woman who wants to sacrifice herself there is no disputing. Besides, I had no desire to dispute. I acquiesced. We agreed to continue our drive.

"We'll go round by Hampstead Heath," she said to the chauffeur. As soon as we were in motion again, she drew ever so little nearer and said, in her lowest, richest notes, and with a coquetry that was bewildering on account of its frankness:

"What were we talking of before we pulled up?"

"I don't know what we were talking of," I said, "but we seem to have trodden on the fringe of a fairy-tale."

"Can't we tread on it again?" She laughed happily.

"You have only to cast the spell of your witchery over me again."

She drew yet a little nearer and whispered: "I'm trying to do it as hard as I can."

An adorable softness came into her eyes, and her hand instinctively closed round mine in its boneless clasp. The long pent-up longing of the woman vibrated from her in waves that shook me to my soul. My senses swam. Her face quivered glorious before me in a black world. Her lips were parted. Careless of all the eyes in all the houses in the Avenue Road, St. John's Wood, and in the head of a telegraph boy whom I only noticed afterwards, I kissed her on the lips.

All the fulness and strength of life danced through my veins.

"I told you I was quite alive!" I said with idiotic exultation.

She closed her eyes and leaned back. "Why did you do that?" she murmured.

"Because I love you," said I. "It has come at last."

Where we drove I have no recollection. Presumably an impression of green rolling plain with soft uplands in the distance signified that we passed along Hampstead Heath; the side thoroughfare with villa residences on either side may have been Kilburn High Road; the flourishing, busy, noisy suburb may have been Kilburn: the street leading thence to the Marble Arch may have been Maida Vale. To me they were paths in Dreamland. We spoke but little and what we did say was in the simple, commonplace language which all men use in the big crises of life.

There was no doubt now of my choice. I loved her. Love had come to me at last. That was all I knew at that hour and all I cared to know.

Lola was the first to awake from Dreamland. She shivered. I asked whether she felt cold.

"No. I can't believe that you love me. I can't. I can't."

I smiled in a masterful way. "I can soon show you that I do."

She shook her head. "I'm afraid, Simon, I'm afraid."

"What of?"

"Myself."

"Why?"

"I can't tell you. I can't explain. I don't know how to. I've been wrong—horribly wrong. I'm ashamed."

She gripped her hands together and looked down at them. I bent forward so as to see her face, which was full of pain.

"But, dearest of all women," I cried, "what in the world have you to be ashamed of?"

She paused, moistened her lips with her tongue, and then broke out:

"I'll tell you. A decent lady like your Eleanor Faversham wouldn't tell. But I can't keep these things in. Didn't you begin by saying I was a seductress? No, no, let me talk. Didn't you say I could make a man do what I wanted? Well, I wanted you to kiss me. And now you've done it, you think you love me; but you don't, you can't."

"You're talking the wickedest nonsense that ever proceeded out of the lips of a loving woman," I said aghast. "I repeat in the most solemn way that I love you with all my heart."

"In common decency you couldn't say otherwise."

Again I saw the futility of disputation. I put my hand on hers.

"Time will show, dear. At any rate, we have had our hour of fairyland."

"I wish we hadn't," she said. "Don't you see it was only my sorcery, as you call it, that took us there? I meant us to go."

At last we reached Cadogan Gardens. I descended and handed her out, and we entered the hall of the mansions. The porter stood with the lift-door open.

"I'm coming up to knock all this foolishness out of your head."

"No, don't, please, for Heaven's sake!" she whispered imploringly. "I must be alone—to think it all out. It's only because I love you so. And don't come to see me for a day or two—say two days. This is Wednesday. Come on Friday. You think it over as well. And if it's really true—I'll know then—when you come. Good-bye, dear. Make Gray drive you wherever you want to go."

She wrung my hand, turned and entered the lift. The gates swung to and she mounted out of sight. I went slowly back to the brougham, and gave the chauffeur the address of my eyrie. He touched his hat. I got in and we drove off. And then, for the first time, it struck me that an about-to-be-shabby gentleman with a beggarly two hundred a year, ought not, in spite of his quarterings, to be contemplating marriage with a wealthy woman who kept an electric brougham. The thought hit me like a stone in the midriff.

What on earth was to be done? My pride rose up like the deux ex machina in the melodrama and forbade the banns. To live on Lola's money—the idea was intolerable. Equally intolerable was the idea of earning an income by means against the honesty of which my soul clamoured aloud.

"Good God!" I cried. "Is life, now I've got to it, nothing but an infinite series of dilemmas? No sooner am I off one than I'm on another. No sooner do I find that Lola and not Eleanor Faversham is the woman sent down by Heaven to be my mate than I realise the same old dilemma—Lola on one horn and Eleanor replaced on the other by Pride and Honour and all sorts of capital-lettered considerations. Life is the very Deuce," said I, with a wry appreciation of the subtlety of language.

Why did Lola say: "Your Eleanor Faversham?"

I had enough to think over for the rest of the evening. But I slept peacefully. Light loves had come and gone in the days past; but now for the first time love that was not light had come into my life.



CHAPTER XXI

"The Lord will find a way out of the dilemma," said I confidently to myself as I neared Cadogan Gardens two days after the revelatory drive. "Lola is in love with me and I am in love with Lola, and there is nothing to keep us apart but my pride over a matter of a few ha'-pence." I felt peculiarly jaunty. I had just posted to Finch the last of the articles I had agreed to write for his reactionary review, and only a couple of articles for another journal remained to be written in order to complete my literary engagements. Soon I should be out of the House of Bondage in which I had been a slave, at first willingly and now rebelliously, from my cradle. The great wide world with its infinite opportunities for development received my liberated spirit. I had broken the shackles of caste. I had thrown off the perfumed garments of epicureanism, the vesture of my servitude. My emotions, once stifled in the enervating atmosphere, now awake fresh and strong in the free air. I was elemental—the man wanting the woman; and I was happy because I knew I was going to get her. Such must be the state of being of a dragonfly on a sunny day. And—shall I confess it?—I had obeyed the dragon-fly's instinct and attired myself in the most resplendent raiment in my wardrobe. My morning coat was still irreproachable, my patent leather boots still gleamed, and having had some business in Piccadilly I had stepped into my hatter's and emerged with my silk hat newly ironed. I positively strutted along the pavement.

For two days I had not seen her or heard from her or written to her. I had scrupulously respected her wishes, foolish though they were. Now I was on my way to convince her that my love was not a moment's surge of the blood on a spring afternoon. I would take her into my arms at once, after the way of men, and she, after the way of women, would yield adorably. I had no doubt of it. I tasted in anticipation the bliss of that first embrace as if I had never kissed a woman in my life. And, indeed, what woman had I kissed with the passion that now ran through my veins? In that embrace all the ghosts of the past women would be laid for ever and a big and lusty future would make glorious beginning. "By Heaven," I cried, almost articulately, "with the splendour of the world at my command why should I not write plays, novels, poems, rhapsodies, so as to tell the blind, groping, loveless people what it is like?

"Take me up to Madame Brandt!" said I to the lift-porter. "Madame Brandt is not in town, sir," said the man.

I looked at him open-mouthed. "Not in town?"

"I think she has gone abroad, sir. She left with a lot of luggage yesterday, and her maid, and now the flat is shut up."

"Impossible!" I cried aghast.

The porter smiled. "I can only tell you what has happened, sir."

"Where has she gone to?"

"I couldn't say, sir."

"Her letters? Has she left no address to which they are to be forwarded?"

"Not with me, sir."

"Did she say when she was coming back?"

"No, sir. But she dismissed her cook with a month's wages, so it seems as though she was gone for a good spell."

"What time yesterday did she leave?"

"After lunch. The cabman was to drive her to Victoria—London, Chatham and Dover Railway."

"That looks like the 2.20 to Paris," said I.

But the lift-porter knew nothing of this. He had given me all the information in his power. I thanked him and went out into the sunshine a blinking, dazed, bewildered and piteously crushed man.

She had gone, without drum or trumpet, maid and baggage and all, having dismissed her cook and shut up the flat. It was incredible. I wandered aimlessly about Chelsea trying to make up my mind what to do. Should I go to Paris and bring her back by main force? But how did I know that she had gone to Paris? And if she was there how could I discover her address? Suddenly an idea struck me. She would not have left Quast and the cattery in the same unceremonious fashion to get on as best they might. She would have given Quast money and directions. At any rate, he would know more than the lift-porter of the mansions. I decided to go to him forthwith.

By means of trains and omnibuses I arrived at the house in the little street off Rosebery Avenue, Clerkenwell, where the maker of gymnastic appliances had his being. I knocked at the door. A grubby man appeared. I inquired for Quast.

Quast had left that morning in a van, taking his cages of cats with him. He had gone abroad and was never coming back again, not if he knew it, said the grubby man. The cats were poison and Quast was a low-down foreigner, and it would cost him a year's rent to put the place in order again. Whereupon he slammed the door in my face and left me disconsolate on the doorstep.

The only other person with whom I knew Lola to be on friendly terms was Sir Joshua Oldfield. I entered the first public telephone office I came to and rang him up. He had not seen Lola for a week, and had heard nothing from her relating to her sudden departure. I went sadly home to my bird-cage in Victoria Street, feeling that now at last the abomination of desolation had overspread my life.

Why had she gone? What was the meaning of it? Why not a line of explanation? And the simultaneous disappearance of Quast and the cats—what did that betoken? Had she been summoned, for any reason, to the Maison de Sante, where Anastasius Papadopoulos was incarcerated? If so, why this secrecy? Why should Lola of all people side with Destiny and make a greater Tom Fool of me than ever? This could be no other than the final jest.

I do not care to remember what I did and said in the privacy of my little room. There are things a man locks away even from himself.

I was in the midst of my misery when the bell of my tiny flat rang. I opened the door and found my sister Agatha smiling on the threshold.

"Hallo!" said I, gazing at her stupidly.

"You're not effusive in your welcome, my dear Simon," she remarked. "Won't you ask me to come in?"

"By all means," said I. "Come in!"

She entered and looked round my little sitting-room. "What a pill-box in the sky! I had no idea it was as tiny as this. I think I shall call you Saint Simon Stylites."

I was in no mood for Agatha. I bowed ironically and inquired to what I owed the honour of the visit.

"I want you to do me a favour—a great favour. I'm dying to see the new dances at the Palace Theatre. They say they dance on everything except their feet. I've got a box. Tom promised to take me. Now he finds he can't. I've telephoned all over the place for something uncompromising in or out of trousers to accompany me and I can't get hold of anybody. So I've come to you."

"I'm vastly flattered!" said I.

She dismissed my sarcasm with bird-like impatience.

"Don't be silly. If I had thought you would like it, I should have come to you first. I didn't want to bore you. But I did think you would pull me out of a hole."

"What's a hole?" I asked.

"I've paid for a box and I can't go by myself. How can I? Do take me, there's a dear."

"I'm afraid I'm too dull for haunts of merriment," said I.

She regarded me reproachfully.

"It isn't often I ask you to put yourself out for me. The last time was when I asked you to be the baby's godfather. And a pretty godfather you've been. I bet you anything you don't remember the name."

"I do," said I.

"What's it then?"

"It's—it's——" I snapped my fingers. The brat's name had for the moment gone out of my distracted head. She broke into a laugh and ran her arm through mine.

"Dorcas."

"Yes, of course—Dorcas. I was going to say so."

"Then you were going to say wrong, for it's Dorothy. Now you must come—for the sake of penance."

"I'll do anything you please!" I cried in desperation, "so long as you'll not talk to me of my own affairs and will let me sit as glum as ever I choose."

Then for the first time she manifested some interest in my mood. She put her head to one side and scanned my face narrowly.

"What's the matter, Simon?"

"I've absorbed too much life the last few days," said I, "and now I've got indigestion."

"I'm sorry, dear old boy, whatever it is," she said affectionately. "Come round and dine at 7.30, and I promise not to worry you."

What could I do? I accepted. The alternative to procuring Agatha an evening's amusement was pacing up and down my bird-cage and beating my wings (figuratively) and perhaps my head (literally) against the bars.

"It's awfully sweet of you," said Agatha. "Now I'll rush home and dress."

I accompanied her down the lift to the front door, and attended her to her carriage.

"I'll do you a good turn some day, dear," she said as she drove off.

I rather flatter myself that Agatha had no reason to complain of my dulness at dinner. In my converse with her I was faced by various alternatives. I might lay bare my heart, tell her of my love for Lola and my bewildered despair at her desertion; this I knew she would no more understand than if I had proclaimed a mad passion for a young lady who had waited on me at a tea-shop, or for a cassowary at the Zoo; even the best and most affectionate of sisters have their sympathetic limitations. I might have maintained a mysterious and Byronic gloom; this would have been sheer bad manners. I might have attributed my lack of spontaneous gaiety to toothache or stomach-ache; this would have aroused sisterly and matronly sympathies, and I should have had the devil's own job to escape from the house unpoisoned by the nostrums that lurk in the medicine chest of every well-conducted family. Agatha, I knew, had a peculiarly Borgiaesque equipment. Lastly, there was the worldly device, which I adopted, of dissimulating the furnace of my affliction beneath a smiling exterior. Agatha, therefore, found me an entertaining guest and drove me to the Palace Theatre in high good humour.