'I trust you understand that this choice of rooms is no affair of mine,' I said.

I thought his frozen expression showed a hint of softening at this, but he only said as he swept processionally away:

'I will give the requisite instructions.'

XIII

For some weeks I was rather interested by the manipulation of that correspondence. Treated in a romantic spirit, the work was not unlike novel or play-writing; and, on paper, I established interesting relations with quite a number of rural clergymen, country squires, London clubmen, a don or two, and some lady correspondents.

I availed myself generously of the hint about giving an occasional lead, and in starting new topics of discussion entered with zest into the task of creating and upholding imaginary partisans with one hand, whilst with the other hand bringing forth caustic opponents to vilify and belittle them. As a fact, I believe I made its correspondence the most amusing and interesting feature in the paper. But, as his way was, Arncliffe lost his enthusiasm for it after a time, and, delegating the care of its remains to some underling, spurred me on to fresh fields of journalistic enterprise.

It was not easy for me to develop quite the same interest in these later undertakings, whatever their intrinsic qualities, for the reason that my domestic circumstances were becoming steadily more and more of a preoccupation and an anxiety. It had not taken very long for me to learn that, in my case at all events, the fact of one's income being doubled does not necessarily mean that one's life is made smooth and easy upon its domestic side. By virtue of my increased earnings we had moved, after my first month as a salaried man, to rather better rooms; but there seemed no point in having more than two of them, since I now had a room of my own at the Advocate office, vice poor Dr. Powell and his leg-rest, now no longer to be met with in that building.

As time went on many unpleasant things became evident, among them the conclusion that ours, Fanny's and mine, was to be a nomadic sort of existence, though it was apparently never to fall to me to give notice of an intended change of residence. The notice invariably came from our landladies. And the better the lodging, the briefer our stay in it, because our notice came the sooner. In view of this it was, more than for any monetary reason—though, as a fact, it did seem to me that I was rather more short of money now than in my poorer days—that we took to living in shabby quarters, and in the frowzier types of apartment houses, where few questions are asked, and no particular etiquette is observed....

So I set these things down as though looking back across the years upon the affairs of some unfortunate stranger on the world's far side. But, Heaven knows, this is not because I have forgotten, or shall ever forget, any of the squalid misery, the crushing, all-befouling humiliation and wretchedness of those years. Just as one part of the period burnt its mark into me for ever by means of its effects upon my bodily health, just as surely as it burned its way through my poor wife's constitution; so indelibly did every phase of it imprint itself upon my brain, and permanently colour my outlook upon life.

Men, and even women, who have never come into personal contact with the pestilence that infected my married life, are able to speak lightly enough of it.

'Bit too fond of his glass, I'm told!'

'His wife is a bit peculiar, you know. Yes, he has to keep the decanters under lock and key, I believe.'

Remarks of that sort, often semi-jocular, are common enough. The pastry-cooks and the grocers know a lot about the feminine side of this tragedy, at which so many folk smile. But those who, from personal experience, know the thing, would more likely smile in the face of Death himself, or joke about leprosy and famine.

I had seen something of the working of the curse among London's very poor people. Now, I learned much more than I had ever known. At first I thought it terrible when, once in a month or so, Fanny became helpless and incapable from drinking gin. I came eventually to know what it meant to see ground for thankfulness, if not for hope, in a period of forty-eight consecutive hours of sobriety for my wife.

The practical difficulties in these cases are very great for people as comparatively poor as we were. They are intolerably acute in the households of workmen earning from one to two pounds a week. In such families the presence of children—and there generally are children—is an added horror, which sometimes leads to the most gruesome kind of murder; murder for which some poor, unhinged, broken-hearted devil of a man is hanged, and so at last flung out of his misery.

I never gave Fanny any money now if I could possibly avoid it. Accordingly, I discovered one day, when I had occasion to look for my dress clothes, that, having sold practically every garment of her own, my wife had cleared out the major portion of my small wardrobe.

But a far worse thing happened shortly afterwards, when my wife pawned some plated oddments belonging to our landlady. This episode kept me on the rack for a full week. Replacing the stolen articles was, fortunately, not difficult; but the landlady was. She was bent upon prosecution, and our escape was an excruciatingly narrow one. I had a four days' 'holiday' over this episode, during which my editor was allowed to picture me in cheerful recuperation up-river—one of a merry boating party.

After this I made inquiries about trained nurses, and gathered that they were quite beyond my means; not alone in the matter of the scale of remuneration they required, but, even more markedly, in the scale of household comfort which their employment necessitated. I talked the matter over very seriously with Fanny, and begged her to try the effect of three months in a curative institution of which I had obtained particulars. At first she was very bitter and angry in her refusal to discuss this. Then she wept, sobbed, and became hysterical in imploring me never to think of such a thing for her. But the extremely difficult and harrowing escape from police court proceedings had impressed me very deeply.

As soon as we could get together the bare necessities by way of furnishings, I insisted on our moving into unfurnished rooms in which we could cater for ourselves. But the result was not merely that there was never a meal prepared for me, but also that Fanny never had a proper meal. I engaged servants. They either gave notice after a week, or worse, much worse, my wife made boon companions of them. We moved again, this time into unfurnished rooms in a house whose landlady undertook to serve meals to us at stated hours. But the house was too respectable for us, and in a month we were given notice.

No, it was not easy to develop any very warm interest in Mr. Arncliffe's projects for the stimulation of the Advocate's circulation. But I occupied Dr. Powell's old room during most days, and did my best; and, rather to my surprise, when I quite casually said I was not able to afford some luxury or another—lawn tennis, I believe it was, recommended by my chief as a remedy for my fagged and unhealthy appearance—I was given an increase of salary to the extent of an additional fifty pounds a year. I expressed my thanks, and Arncliffe said:

'Not at all, not at all. I'm only too glad. Your work's first rate, and I much appreciate your suggestions. I don't want you to work less; but, in all seriousness, my dear fellow, you should take it easier. Do just as much work, but don't worry so much about it. Carry your whatsaname more lightly, you know. Believe me, that's the thing.'

I agreed of course, and went home to give Fanny the news of the increased salary. I found her helpless and comatose on the hearth-rug.

I had talked to doctors, and gleaned little or nothing therefrom. Now I tried a lawyer, with a view to finding out the legal aspect of my position. Was it possible to oblige my wife to enter a curative institution against her will? Certainly not, save by a magistrate's order, and as the result of repeated appearances in the dock at police courts.

The lawyer told me that our 'man-made' laws were pretty hard upon husbands in such cases as mine. They offered no relief or assistance whatever, he said; though in the case of a persistently drunken husband, the law was fortunately able to do a good deal for the wife. 'But nothing at all when it's the other way round,' he added; 'a fact which leads to much misery, and not a little crime, among the poorer classes. I'm very sorry for you,' he added; 'but to be frank, I must say that the law will not help you one atom; neither will it offer you any kind of redress if your wife sells up your home once a week. Neither may you legally put her out from your home because of that. Under our law a wife may claim and hold her husband's company until she drives him into the bankruptcy court, or the lunatic asylum—or his grave. It is worse than senseless, but it is the law; and if your business prevents you keeping watch and ward over your wife yourself, the only course is to employ some relative, or a professed caretaker, to do it for you. The law shows a little more common sense where the case is the other way round. A wife can always get a separation order to relieve her of the presence of a persistently drunken husband; and, with it, an order for her maintenance, which he must obey or go to prison.'

So I did not get very much for my six-and-eightpence, beyond an explicit confirmation of the impression already pretty firmly rooted in my mind, that the most burdensome portion of my particular load in life was something which nobody could help me to carry.

By this time Fanny had lost the sense of shame and humiliation which had characterised all her early recoveries, and informed all her good resolutions and frantic promises of amendment. She made no resolutions now, and in place of shame, poor soul, was conscious only of the physical penalties which her excesses brought in their train. These made her very sullen, and, at the same time, very irritable. There were times, as I well knew, when she had no other means of obtaining drink, but yet did obtain it, from that misguided woman—her mother, whose craving she inherited, without a tithe of the brute strength which apparently enabled the older woman to defy all consequences.

I do not think it necessary to set down here precisely the miserable ways in which I saw her habits gradually sap all self-restraint and womanly decency from my wife. The process was gradual, pitilessly inexorable as the growth of a malignant tumour, and a ghastly and humiliating thing to witness. In the case of a woman, my impression is that alcoholism reacts even more directly upon character, and the mental and nervous system, than it does in men. Their fall is more complete. At least, for a man it is more horrible to witness than any degradation of another man.

XIV

In these days it was my habit each evening to make my way as directly as might be from the Advocate office to our home of the moment. There was, of course, always a certain measure of uncertainty in my mind as to what might await me in our rooms; and there were many occasions when my presence there as early as possible was highly desirable. It was my dismal task upon more than two or three occasions to visit police stations, and enter into bail to save my wife from spending a night in the cells.

Naturally, in view of all these circumstances, I remained as much a hermit as though living in Livorno Bay, so far as the social life of my colleagues and of London generally was concerned. During all this time social intercourse was for me confined to Fanny (who became steadily less social in her habits and inclinations) and to occasional meetings with Sidney Heron. Once and again a man at the office would ask me to dine with him (regarding me as a bachelor, of course), and always I felt bound to plead a prior engagement. One night, when Fanny had gone early to bed, feeling wretchedly ill, and sullenly angry because I would have no liquor of any sort on the premises, not even the lager beer which it had been my own habit for some time past to drink with meals, Heron sat with me in our living-room, smoking and staring into the fire. It was late, and something had moved Heron to stir me into giving him the outline of my early life and Australian experiences.

'Yes, you're a queer bird,' he opined, after a long silence. 'And your life confirms my old conviction that, broadly speaking, there are only two kinds of human beings: those who prey—with an "e," and rarely with an "a"—and those who are preyed upon: parasites and their hosts. There are doubtless subdivisions in infinite variety; but I have yet to meet the man or woman who, in essence, is not parasite or host, the preyer or the preyed upon.'

'And I——'

'Oh, clearly, and all along the line, you're the host. Mind, I waste no great sympathy upon you. It is quite an open point which class is the less deserving or the better off. But in your case it is, perhaps, rather a pity, because upon the whole I doubt if your fibre is tough enough to sustain the part. On the other hand, you haven't half enough—well—suction for a successful parasite; and those between are apt to get ground up rather small. My advice to you— But, Lord, is there any greater folly in all this foolish world than the giving of advice?'

'Never mind. Let's have it.'

'No, I'll not give advice. But I will state what I believe to be a fact; and that is that you would be the better for it if you were sedulously to cultivate a self-regarding policy of laissez-faire. It may be as rotten as you please as a national policy. Our own beloved countrymen are even now, I think, preparing for the world a most convincing demonstration of that. But for certain individuals—you among 'em—it has many points, and, pursued with discretion, is likely to prove highly beneficial.'

'Ah! The let-be policy?'

Heron nodded. 'Of all creeds,' he said, 'perhaps the one that calls for the most rigid self-control—for a certain type of man, the type that most needs its use.'

I had lowered my voice involuntarily, though I knew that Fanny had long since been sleeping heavily. 'Do you realise what it would mean in my particular case, on the domestic side?' I asked.

'Well, yes; I think so.'

'Hardly, my friend. It would mean relinquishing the care of my wife to the police.' There were no secrets between us in this matter.

'Yes, something rather like that, I suppose,' said Heron. 'And don't you think upon the whole they may be rather better equipped for the task?'

'My dear Heron!'

'Oh, of course, that tone's unanswerable. But lay aside the sentimental aspect, and consider the practical logic of it. You might as well see where you really stand, you know. It won't affect your actions, really. You belong to the wrong division of the race. But what are you doing to remedy your wife's case?'

I admitted I was doing nothing. I had tried in many directions, including the clandestine administration of costly specifics, which had merely seemed to rob poor Fanny of all appetite for food, without in any way affecting the lamentable craving which wrecked her life.

'Precisely,' resumed Heron. 'You are doing nothing to remedy it, because there is nothing you are in a position to do. You are merely "standing by," as sailors say, from sentimental motives. It is laissez-faire, of a sort; only, it's an infernally painful and wearing sort for you. It reduces your life to something like her own, without, so far as I can see, benefiting her in the least. I think the police could do as well. In fact, in your place, I should clear out altogether, and give Mrs. Pelly a show. But, failing that, I would at least wash my hands, so to say. I would refuse the situation any predominant place in my mind, join a club and use it, and— O Lord! what is the use of talking of absolutely hopeless things? I don't know that I'd do anything of the sort, and I do know very well that you won't.'

There fell another silence between us, which lasted several minutes. And then Heron rose to his feet, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and said he must be going. I walked down the road with him, and paused at its corner, where he would pick up an omnibus. The moon emerged from behind a cloud, touching with a delicate sepia some fleecy edge of cumuli.

'Has it ever occurred to you, my innocent, that there is anything in England beyond the metropolitan radius?' asked Heron suddenly. 'Honest, now; have you ever been ten miles from Charing Cross since you landed from that blessed ship?'

'Well, it does seem queer, now you mention it; but I don't believe I have— Except to Epping Forest, you know. I'm not sure how far that is; but I used often to go there at one time, not lately, but——'

'Before you mortgaged your soul to the Advocate, eh? Though I suppose the more serious mortgage was the one before that. Look here! Bring your wife on Saturday, and meet me at Victoria at ten o'clock. We'll go and have a look at Leith Hill. A tramp will do you both good. Will you come?'

By doing a certain amount of work there on Sunday, I could always absent myself from office on a Saturday. So I agreed to go. On the Friday Fanny seemed unusually calm and well. I was quite excited over the prospect of our little jaunt, and Fanny herself appeared to think cheerfully and kindly of it. In the lodging we occupied at that time I had a tiny bedroom of my own. I woke very early on the Saturday morning, but when I found it was barely five o'clock turned over for another doze. When next I woke it was to find, greatly to my annoyance, that the hour was half-past eight; and there were several little things I wanted to have done before starting for Victoria. I hurried into our sitting-room before dressing, meaning to rouse Fanny, whose room opened from it. But she was not in her bedroom, and returning to the other room I found a note on the table.

'I am not feeling well,' the note said, 'and cannot come with you to-day. So I shall spend the day with mother, and be back here about tea-time.'

For a moment I thought of hurrying round to Mrs. Pelly's, and seeing if I could prevail on Fanny to change her mind. But I hated going to that house, and, of late, I had had some experience of the futility of trying to influence Fanny in any way during these sullen morning hours, when she was very often possessed by a sort of lethargy, any interference with which provoked only excessive irritation.

It was most disappointing. But— 'Very well, then,' I muttered to myself, 'she must stay with her mother. I can't leave Heron waiting at Victoria.'

So I dressed and proceeded direct to the station, relying upon having a few minutes to spare there during which to break my fast in the refreshment-room.

Heron nodded rather grimly over my explanation of Fanny's absence, and we were both pretty silent during the journey to Dorking. But once out in the open, and tramping along a country road, we breathed deeper of an air clean enough to dispel town-bred languors. I felt my spirits rise, and we began to talk. The day was admirable, beginning with light mists, and ripening, by the time we began our tramp, into that mellow splendour which October does at times vouchsafe, especially in the gloriously wooded country which lies about Leith Hill.

The foliage, the occasional scent of burning wood—always a talisman for one who has slept in the open—glimpses of new-fallowed fields of an exquisite rose-madder hue, bracken and heather underfoot, and overhead blue sky sweetly diversified by snowy piles of cloud—these and a thousand other natural delights combined to enlarge one's heart, ease one's mind, and arouse one's dormant instinct to live, to laugh, and to enjoy. Worries rolled back from me. I responded jovially to Heron's grim quips, and felt more heartily alive than I had felt for years.

Having walked swingingly for four or five hours we sat down in a pleasant inn to a nondescript meal, at something like the eighteenth-century dining hour; consuming large quantities of cold boiled beef, salad, cheese, home-baked bread, and brown ale. (I had learned now to drink beer, on such occasions as this, at all events; and did it with a childish sense of holiday 'swagger.' Its associations with rural life pleased me. But in the town I was annoyed to find that even half a glass of it was apt to make my head ache villainously.) We sat and smoked, talking lazily in the twilight; missed one train, and walked leisurely to the next station to catch a later one.

The approach to London rather chilled and saddened me by the sharp demand it seemed to make for the laying aside of calm reflection or cheerful conversation, and the taking up of stern realities, practical considerations—the hard, concrete facts of daily life. The outlines of the huddled houses, the moving lights of thronged streets, the Town— It seemed to grip me by the shoulder.

'Come! Wake up from your fancies. Been laughing, joking, chatting, drawing deep breaths, have you? Ah, well, here am I. You know me. Hear the ring of the hurrying horses' feet on my hard ways? See the anxious ferret faces of my workers? I am Reality. I am your master, and the world's master. You may escape me for a day, and dream you are a free man in the open. Grrrr!—' The train jars to a standstill. 'That may be well enough for a dream; but I am Reality. Come! There's no time here for reflection. Pick up your load. Get on; get on; or I'll smash you down in my gutters, where my human wastage lies!'

That is how cities have always spoken to me as I have entered them from the country. And yet—and yet, most of my life has been spent within their confines. Long imprisonment makes men fear liberty, they say. But how could a man fear the kindly country and its liberty for reflection? And, attaining to it, how could he possibly desire return to the noisy, crowded cells of the city? Impossible, surely, unless of course the city offered him a living, his life; and the country—calm and beautiful—refused it. And that perhaps is rather often the position, for your sedentary man, at all events; your modern, who cannot dig and is ashamed to beg—a numerous and ever increasing body.

Big Ben struck the hour of eight as we trundled past into Whitehall on the top of an omnibus. I thought of Fanny with some self-reproach. She would have reached the lodgings by about five, and our evening meal hour was seven. I hoped she had not waited without her meal. I left Heron on the 'bus, for he had farther than I to go, and hurried along to No. 46 Kent Street—the dingy house in which we had been living now for a month or more.

Fanny was not there, and, to my surprise, the landlady told me she had not been in all day, save for five minutes in the early afternoon, after which she went out carrying a parcel. I went to my bedroom for an overcoat, as the night was chilly. I possessed two of these garments at the time—one rather heavy and warm, the other a light coat. Both were missing from their accustomed pegs.

'Tcha! Now what does this mean?' I growled to myself; knowing quite well what it meant. 'And I take holidays in the country! I might have known better.'

And with that—all the brightness of the day forgotten now—I hurried out, bound for Howard Street and Mrs. Pelly's house.

But Mrs. Pelly had no idea as to her daughter's whereabouts. It seemed Fanny had left her before three o'clock, intending to go home.

Then began a search of the kind which had become only too familiar with me of late. I suppose I must have entered upon scores of such dismal quests since my marriage. First, I visited some twenty or thirty different 'gin-mills.' (In one of them I stayed a few minutes to eat a piece of bread and cheese.) Then I went to two police stations, at the two opposite ends of that locality. Finally, I tramped back to Kent Street, thinking to find Fanny there, and picturing in advance the condition in which I should find her. The most I ventured to hope was that she had been able to reach her room without assistance. But she had not been there at all.

I went out again into the street, somewhat at a loss. It was now past ten o'clock. After some hesitation I caught a passing omnibus and journeyed back towards Howard Street, near which stood a third police station, which I had not before visited.

'Wait there a minute, will you?' said the officer to whom my inquiry here was addressed. A moment later I heard his voice from an adjacent corridor; 'Has the doctor gone?' it asked. I did not hear the answer. But a minute or two later a tall man in a frock coat entered the room and walked up to me. I could see the top of a stethoscope protruding from one of his inner breast-coat pockets.

'Name of Freydon?' he said tersely.

'Yes.'

'Ah! Will you step this way, please, to my room?'

And, as we passed into an inner room, he wheeled upon me with a look of grave sympathy in his eyes. 'I have serious news for you, Mr. Freydon; if—if it is your wife who is here.'

Then I knew. Something in the doctor's grave eyes and meaning voice told me. It was not really necessary for me to ask. I knew quite certainly, and had no wish, no intention to say anything. My subconscious self apparently was bent upon explicitness. For, next moment, I heard my own voice, some little distance from me, saying, in quite a low tone:

'My God! My God! My God!' And then: 'You don't mean that she is dead?'

But I knew all the time.

Then I heard the doctor speaking. His body was close to me, but his voice, like my own, came from some distance away.

'A woman was brought here by a constable this afternoon ... helpless ... intoxication.... Did your wife ... is she addicted to drink?' I may have nodded. 'There was a pawnticket in the name of Freydon.... She passed away less than an hour ago.... The condition ... heart undoubtedly accelerated ... alcoholism ... a very short time, in any case.... Medically, an inquest would be quite unnecessary, but.... Will you come with me, and ...'

From a long way off now these phrases trickled into my consciousness, the sense of them somewhat blurred and interrupted by a continuous buzzing noise in my head. We walked along dead white passages, and down steps. We stopped at length where a man in uniform stood at a door, which he opened for us at a sign from the doctor. Inside, a woman was bending over a low pallet, and on the little bed was my wife Fanny. A greyish sheet was drawn over her body to the chin. I think it was so drawn up as we entered the room. I stared down upon Fanny's calm, white face, in which there was now a refinement, a pathetic dignity, a something delicate and womanly which I had not seen there before; not even in the early days, when gentle prettiness had been its quality.

The thought that flashed through my mind as I stood there was not the sort of thought that would be associated with such a scene. The buzzing noise was still going on in my head, but yet I was conscious of a vast silence all about me; and looking down upon my wife's face, I thought:

'Death has certainly been courteous, considerate, to poor Fanny.'



MANHOOD—ENGLAND: SECOND PERIOD

I

My wife was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, a populous London city of the dead. And that afternoon I resigned my position on the staff of the Advocate.

I do not think that even at the time I had any definite reason for this step, and I do not know of any now. I remember Arncliffe remonstrated very kindly with me, spoke of plans he had in view for me, about which he was unable to enter into detail just then, and strongly urged me to reconsider the matter. I told him, without much relevance really, that I had buried my wife that morning; and he, very naturally, said he had not even known I was a married man.

'Look here, Freydon,' he said; 'be guided by me. Take a month's holiday, and then come and talk to me again.'

This was no doubt both wise and kindly advice, but I merely repeated that I must leave; and, within a week or two, I did leave, Arncliffe, in the most friendly way, making things easy for me, and agreeing to take a certain contribution from me once a week. This gave me three guineas a week, and I was grateful for the arrangement.

'You must let me see something of you occasionally. I'm really sorry to lose you. You know I've always appreciated your suggestions,' said Arncliffe, when I looked in to bid him good-bye. He spoke with a friendly sincerity which I valued; because it was a fact that he had, as editor, adopted and developed a good many suggestions of mine, without apparent acknowledgment, and after keeping them in his pigeon-holes until, as I thought, he had forgotten their existence, and come to think the ideas subsequently acted upon were his own.

With funds in hand amounting to something well under twenty pounds, I took lodgings on the outskirts of Dorking—a bedroom and a sitting-room in the rather pretty cottage of a jobbing carpenter and joiner named Gilchrist. Mrs. Gilchrist, a wholesome, capable woman, performed some humble duties in the church close by, in which she made use of a very long-handled feather duster, and sundry cloths of a blue and white checked pattern. Her husband had a small workshop in the cottage garden, but his work more often than not took him away from home during the day. Jasmine and a crimson rambler strayed about the window of my little study, from which the view of the surrounding hills was delightful. For some days I explored the neighbourhood assiduously. And then I began to write my fourth book. The third—a volume of short stories of mean streets, written in the days preceding my marriage—was then passing through the press.

When I first went to Dorking my health was in a very poor way. I imagine I must at the time have been on the verge of a pretty bad breakdown. The preceding six or eight months had greatly aggravated my digestive troubles, and I had also suffered a good deal from neuralgia. The constantly increasing stress of my domestic affairs, superimposed upon steady sedentary work in which the quest for new ideas was a continuous preoccupation, and combined with the effects of an irregular and indifferent dietary and lack of air and exercise, had reduced me physically to a low ebb.

During those last weeks in London, after Fanny's death, I was not conscious of this collapse; and my first week in Dorking had a curiously stimulating effect upon me. Indeed, I fancy that week was the saving of me. But at the end of it, after one long day's writing, I took to my bed with influenza, and remained there for some time, dallying also with bronchitis, incipient pneumonia, gastritis, and a diphtheritic throat.

Six weeks passed before I left my bedroom, but during only one of those weeks did I fail to produce my weekly contribution to the Advocate. If the quality of those contributions in any way reflected my low and febrile condition, Arncliffe mercifully refrained from drawing my attention to it. At the end of the six weeks I sat at an open window, amused by the ghostly refinement of my hands, and grateful to Providence for sunshine and clean air.

The doctor was a cheery soul, toward whom I felt most strongly drawn, because he was the only man I ever met in England who smoked my particular brand of Virginia plug tobacco. I had suffered from the lack of it since leaving Australia, but this good doctor told me how to get it in England, from an agent in Yorkshire; and I was deeply grateful to him for the information. He also told me, as I sat at the open window, that he did not think much of my stewardship of my own body.

'Let me tell you, Mr. Freydon, you have been sailing several points closer to the wind than a man has any right to sail. If you treated a child so, or a servant, aye, or a dumb beast, some preventive society would be at you for cruelty and neglect. They'd call me for the prosecution, and by gad, sir, my evidence would send you to Portland or Dartmoor—fine healthy places, both of 'em, by the way! But people seem to think they're licensed to treat their own bodies with any amount of cruelty and neglect. A grave mistake; a grave mistake! In the ideal state, sir, Citizen Jones will no more be allowed to maltreat and injure the health of Citizen Jones than he will be allowed to break the head or poison the food of Citizen Smith. Why should he? Each is of the same value in the eyes of the state; and, we may suppose, in the eyes of his Maker.'

The good man blew his nose, and endeavoured to introduce extreme severity into his kindly and indomitably cheerful expression.

'Yes, sir,' he resumed. 'You've got to turn over a new leaf from now on. Three good, plain meals a day, taken to the stroke of the clock. Eight hours in bed every night of your life, and nine if you can get 'em. Two hours of walkin', or other equally good exercise—if you can discover its equal; I can't—in the open air every day. And anything less will be a flat dereliction of duty, and bad citizenship, remember that. This is for by and by, of course. Just now you want twelve hours in bed, and half a dozen light meals a day. Mrs. Gilchrist knows all about that. Good, sensible woman, Mrs. Gilchrist. Wish there were more like her, these days. Oh, I'll be seeing you again, from time to time. Don't you bother your head about "accounts," my dear sir. And when you begin to get about now do oblige me by remembering your duty to yourself, as I've told you. As your doctor, I warn you, it's necessary in your case—absolutely necessary. Good-morning!'

And so he trotted off to his high dog-cart and his morning rounds. An excellent and kindly man, designed by Nature, his own temperament, and long use, for the precise part in life he played. Such adequacy and fitness are rare, and very admirable. I sometimes think that if I could have exactly obeyed this excellent physician, my whole life had been quite different. But then, to be able exactly to obey him, perhaps it would have been necessary for me to have been a different person in the beginning. And then, I might never have met him, and—there's the end of a profitless speculation.

As a fact I surreptitiously resumed work on that book long before the doctor gave permission, and within a week of settling his account I was once more living a life of which he would have strongly disapproved; though it certainly was a very much less wearing and unwholesome one than the life I had always lived in London. But, as against that, I now had a good deal less in the way of staying power and force of resistance. So far from having paid up in full, and wiped off all old scores, in the matter of those first years in London, I had barely discharged the first instalment of a penalty which was to prove part and parcel of every subsequent year in my life. And yet, as I have said, I sometimes think that doctor gave me my chance, if only it had been in me to live by his instructions. But, apparently, it was not.

II

Sidney Heron, the man who had introduced me to the country round about Leith Hill, was the first visitor received in my Dorking lodging. He came one Saturday morning when I had resumed work (though the doctor knew it not), and returned to town on the Sunday night.

I think Heron enjoyed his visit, though, out of consideration for my lack of condition, he walked less than he would have chosen. It was a real pleasure to me to have him there; and, in the retrospect, I can clearly see that I was powerfully stimulated by talk with him on literary subjects. So much was this so, that on the Saturday night when I lay down in bed I found my brain in a ferment of activity. I read for half an hour; but even then, after blowing out my candle, the plots of new books, ideas for future work, literary schemes of every sort and kind, all promising quite remarkable success, were spinning through my mind in most exhilarating fashion. The morning found me somewhat weary, though not unpleasantly so; and consideration of all this made me realise, as I had not realised before, the isolation and retirement of my life there in Dorking; the very marked change it represented from the busy routine of days spent in the Advocate office. I prized my retirement more than ever after this.

'For,' I thought, 'of what use or purport was all that ceaseless mental stress and fret in London? It was all quite barren and fruitless, really. Whereas, here—one can develop thoughts here. This life makes creative work possible.'

I am afraid I gave no credit to Heron, or to the stimulating effects upon my own mind of contact with his bracing, if somewhat harsh, intelligence. All was attributed by me at the time to the advantages of my sequestered life. The effect of mental stimulus was not by any means so evanescent as such things often are, and the Monday following upon Heron's return to town saw me hard at work upon the book which I had outlined and begun before my illness.

There followed, in that modest little cottage room of mine, some three or four months of incessant work at high pressure; long days, and nights, too, at the table, during which my only exercise and relaxation in a week would be an occasional five minutes' walk to the post-office, or a stroll after midnight, when I found the cool night silence soothed me greatly before going to my bedroom. The doctor's counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I would live by rote and acquire bucolic health, I told myself.

In most respects that period was thoroughly typical of my life during the next half dozen years. When the end of a book was reached, there came the long and wearing process of its revision. Then interviews with publishers, the correction of proof sheets, the excogitation of writings for magazines—fuel for the fire that kept my pot a-boiling. There were intervals of acute mental weariness, and there were intervals of acute bodily distress. But the intervals of reformed living, when they came at all, were too brief and spasmodic to make a stronger or a healthier man of me. My business visits to London were sometimes made to embrace friendly visits to Sidney Heron's lodgings. Two or three times I dined with Arncliffe, and very occasionally I was visited at Dorking by two of the literary journalists who had joined Arncliffe's staff at the time of his appointment.

With but very few exceptions the critics were very kindly to my published work, and I apprehend that other writers who read their reviews of my books must have thought of me as one of the coming men. (The early nineties was a prolific period in the matter of 'coming men.') I even indulged that thought myself for a time. But not, I think, for very long. Like every other writer who ever lived, I would have liked to reach a large and appreciative audience. But I had the most lofty scorn for the methods by which I supposed such an achievement might be accomplished.

For a long time I sincerely believed that it was not from any lack of substance, style, merit, or quality that my books failed to reach a really large public; but, rather, that they were without a certain vulgarity which would commend them to the multitude. If not precisely that they were too good, I doubtless thought that, whilst good in every literary sense, they happened to be couched in a vein only to be appreciated by the subtler minds of the minority. The critics certainly helped me to sustain this congenial theory; and it was not until long afterwards that I accepted (with more, perhaps, of sadness or sourness than philosophy) the conclusion that if my work never had appealed to a big audience, the simple reason was that it was not big enough to reach so far. It was perhaps, within the limits of literary judgment, to some extent praiseworthy. And it won praise. I should have been content.

I certainly was not content, and I dare say the life I led was too far removed from the normal, both socially and from a health standpoint, to permit of content for me, quite apart from any question of personal temperament or idiosyncrasy. I worked and I slept, and that was all. That is probably not enough for the purchase of healthy content; at all events, where the work is sedentary and productive of strain upon the mind, nerves, and emotions.

As society is constituted in England to-day, a man of my sort may be almost as completely isolated, socially, in a place like Dorking as he would expect to be in the middle of the Sahara. The labouring sort of folk, the trades-people, and the landowners and county families, each form compact social microcosms. The latter class, in normal circumstances, remains not so much indifferent to as unaware of the existence of such people as myself, as bachelors in country-town lodgings. The other two compact little worlds had nothing to offer me socially. And so, socially, I had no existence at all.

The same holds good, to a great extent, of my sort of person practically anywhere to-day. (The latter part of the nineteenth century produced a quite large number of people who belonged to no recognised class or order in our social cosmos.) But it is most noticeable in the case of such a man living in a country town. In London, or Paris, or New York, there is no longer any question of a man being in or out of society, since there is no longer any compact division of the community which forms society. Rather, the community divides itself into hundreds of circles, most of which meet others at some point of their circumference.

My doctor in Dorking was a bachelor. I did not attend any church. There literally was no person in that district with whom I held any social intercourse whatever. And then, by chance, and in a single day, I became acquainted with many of the socially superior sort of people in my neighbourhood.

Arncliffe's chief leader writer on the Advocate staff was a man called Ernest Lane, who, after winning considerable distinction at Oxford, falsified cynical anticipations by winning a good deal more distinction in the world outside the university. It was known that he had been invited to submit himself to the electors of a constituency in one of the Home counties, and his work while secretary to a prominent statesman had earned him a high reputation in political circles. His book on greater British legislation and administration added greatly to this reputation, and his friends were rather surprised when Lane showed that he intended to stick to the writer's life rather than enter parliament, or accept any political appointment. Without having become very intimate, Lane and myself had been distinctly upon good and friendly terms during my time in the Advocate office, and he had visited me three or four times in my retreat in Dorking. Lane thought well of my work, and he was the only man I knew whose political conversation and views had interested me. It was not without some pleasure, therefore, that I read a letter received from him in which he said he was coming to see me.

'It appears to be a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain,' this letter said; 'and, if you will put me up, I should like to spend Saturday and Sunday nights at your place. I think you will receive an invitation to Sir George and Lady Barthrop's garden-party on Saturday next, and if so I hope you will accept, and go there with me. The fact is, one of my sisters is about to marry Arnold Barthrop, the younger of the three sons, and the whole tribe of us are supposed to be there this week-end. I am not keen on these big house-parties, and would far sooner have the opportunity of seeing something of you if you would care to have me; but I have promised to attend the garden-party, and to bring you if I can. Some of the Barthrop's Dorking friends are rather interesting people, so it will be just as well for you, my dear hermit, to make their acquaintance.'

Of course, I wrote to Lane to the effect that he would be very welcome, which was perfectly true; but I was somewhat exercised in my mind regarding Lady Barthrop's garden-party, although, when her card of invitation reached me, I replied at once with a formal acceptance. Sir George Barthrop's house, Deene Place, was quite one of the show places of the district, and the baronet and his lady were very prominent people indeed in that part of the county.

Every time my eye fell upon the invitation card, I was conscious of a sense of irritation and disturbance. What had I to do with garden-parties? The idea of my attending such a function was absurd. I should have nothing whatever in common with the people there, nor they with me. Either I should never again meet one of them, or their acquaintance would be an irritation and a nuisance to me, robbing me of my treasured sense of complete independence in that countryside. Finally, I decided that I would have a headache when the time came, and get Lane to make my excuses— 'Not that the hostess, or any one else there, would know or care anything about my absence or presence,' I thought.

But my unsocial intention was airily swept aside by Ernest Lane. I did accompany him to Deene Place, and in due course was presented by him to Sir George and Lady Barthrop. No sooner had we left the host and hostess to make way for other guests than Lane touched my elbow.

'Here's the first of the five Graces,' he whispered, nodding towards a lady who was walking down the terrace in our direction. I remembered that my friend had five sisters, and a moment later I was being introduced to this particular member of the sisterhood, whose name, as I gathered, was Cynthia. As Lane moved away from us just then, to speak to some one else, I asked my companion if she had been going to any particular place when we met her. She smiled as we walked slowly down the terrace steps to the lawn.

'I am afraid my only object just then was the ungracious one of evading Sir George and Lady Barthrop,' she said. 'Theirs is such a dreadfully busy neighbourhood. I think being solemnly introduced to a stream of people is rather a terrible ordeal, don't you?'

'The experience would at least have the advantage of novelty for me,' I told her. 'But, upon the whole, I fancy I should perhaps prefer a visit to the dentist.'

'Really!' she laughed. 'Now I didn't know men ever felt like that. It's exactly how I feel about it. It really is worse than dentistry, you know, because you are not allowed gas.'

'At least, not laughing gas, but only gaseous laughter and small talk,' I suggested.

'Which makes you all hazy and muddled without the compensating boon of unconsciousness. But you are an author and a journalist, Mr. Freydon—my brother often speaks of you, you know—and so you must have had lots of experience of this sort of thing; enough to have made you as hardened as royalty, I should think. I always think of authors and journalists as living very much in the limelight.'

I explained that some might, but that I had spent several years in Dorking without, until that day, attending a single social function of any kind. This seemed to interest her greatly, once I had overcome her initial incredulity on the point. Then I had to answer questions about my way of living, and one or two, of a discreet and gently curious kind, about my methods of working, and the like. There was flattery of the most delightful kind in the one or two casual references she made to characters in books of mine. Miss Lane never said: 'I have read your books,' or, 'I have been interested by your books,' statements which always produce an awkward pause, and are not interesting in themselves. But she showed in a much more pleasing way that one's work had entered into her life, and been welcomed by her.

Quite apart from this, I do not think I could possibly have spent a quarter of an hour with Cynthia Lane without concluding that she was the most charming woman I had ever met. 'Charming woman,' I say. Heavens! How extraordinarily inadequate these threadbare words do look, as I write them, recalling the image of Cynthia Lane as she paced with me across that smooth-shaven lawn—green velvet it seemed, deeply shaded here and there by noble copper beeches.

I suppose Cynthia was beautiful, even judged by technical standards; for her figure was lissom and very shapely, and the contour of her sweet face perfect—so far, at least, as I am any judge of such matters. Her eyes and her hair had a rare loveliness which I have not seen equalled. But it was the soul of her, the indefinable essence that was Cynthia Lane, which made her truly lovely. This personality of hers, at once tender and adroit, bright and grave, humorous and most sweetly gentle, most admirably kind, shone out upon one from her face, from her very movements and gestures even, giving to her outward person a soft radiance which I cannot attempt to describe. This nimbus of delicate sweetness, this irradiation of her person by her personality it was, which made Cynthia Lane lovely, as no other woman I have met has been.

I must have stolen fully half an hour of her time that day, to the annoyance it may be of many other people. And it was not until she was being in a sense almost forcibly drawn away from me by the claims of others that I learned, from the manner in which she was addressed by Lady Barthrop, that she, Cynthia Lane, of whom I had thought only as one of Lane's five sisters, as one among my own fellow guests, was indeed the guest of the occasion, and the betrothed of Lady Barthrop's younger son.

Other things happened, no doubt. I was presently introduced to young Barthrop, the bridegroom to be; and, mechanically, I endeavoured to comport myself fittingly as a guest. But, for me, the entertainment ended with my separation from Cynthia.

'Do please stop being a recluse, and call while I am here,' she had said as she was being drawn away from me into a sort of maelstrom of gaily coloured dresses, and laughing, compliment-paying men. And I blessed her for that.

III

Charles Augustus Everard Barthrop, third son of the baronet and his wife, was the assistant manager of some financial company in London, of which his father was a director. I fancy the young man himself was also a director, but am not sure as to that. In any case he had the reputation of being one who was likely to achieve big things in the world of finance and company promotion, a world of which I was as profoundly ignorant as though a dweller in the planet Mars. In another field, too, this young man had won early distinction. He was a mighty footballer, and a rather notable boxer. He was very blonde, very handsome, very large, and, I gathered, of a very merry and kindly disposition. He looked it. His sunny face and bright blue eyes contained no more evidence of care or anxiety than one sees in the face of a healthy boy of twelve.

'Here is a man,' I thought, 'peculiarly rich in everything that I lack; and all his life long he has been equally rich in his possession of everything I have lacked. And now he is going to marry Cynthia Lane. The rest seems natural enough, but not this.'

As yet I had little enough of evidence on which to base conclusions. But, as I saw it, Charles Barthrop was a handsome and materially well-endowed young animal, whose work was company-promoting, and whose diversions hardly took him beyond football and the Gaiety Theatre. I dare say it was partly because he was so refulgently well-dressed that I assumed him devoid of intellect. As a fact, my assumption was not very wide of the mark.

'And Cynthia,' I thought, 'has a mind and a soul. She is mind and soul encased, as it happens, in a beautiful body. She is no more a mate for him than a great poet would be mate for a handsome fishwife; an Elizabeth Barrett Browning for a champion pugilist.'

It was natural that, during that Saturday evening and the following day, conversation between Lane and myself should turn more than once towards his sister Cynthia and her forthcoming marriage, which, I understood, was to take place within a few weeks at St. Margaret's, Westminster. We had become fairly intimate of late, Lane and myself, and the introduction to various members of his family seemed to have made us much more intimate.

'You have made no end of an impression on Miss Cynthia,' he said pleasantly on the Saturday evening. 'She was always the literary and artistic member of the sisterhood. She gave me special instructions to bring you along in time for some tea to-morrow, and she means to force you out of your hermitage while she is at Deene Place, so I warn you. Seriously, I think, it may be good for you. You will be sure to meet some decent people there, who will be worth knowing, not only just now, but when Cynthia is married and set up in Sloane Street. Barthrop has taken a house there, you know.'

With a duplicity not very creditable to me, I pretended thoughtful agreement. A brother can tell one a good deal without putting his information into plain words. I gathered from our talk then, and on the following day, that the Lane family occupied the difficult position of people who have, as it were, been born to greater riches than they possess. Of them more had always been expected, socially, than their straitened means permitted. The pinch had been a very real one of late years, towards the end of the grand struggle which their parents had passed through in educating and launching a family of two sons and five daughters. It was easy to gather that good marriages were very necessary for those five daughters, of whom Cynthia was the first-born. I even gathered that, a year or two earlier, there had been scenes and grave anxiety over a preference which Cynthia had shown for a painter, poor as a church mouse, who, very considerately, had proceeded to die of a fever in Southern Italy. Mrs. Lane had, to a large extent, arranged the forthcoming marriage with Charles Barthrop, I think. In the interests of the whole family Cynthia had been 'sensible'; she had been brought to see reason.

'And, mind you,' said Lane, 'I do think Barthrop is an excellent chap, you know. Oh, yes; he's quite a cut above your average city man. And a kinder-hearted chap you never met. The pater swears by him.'

I gathered that 'the pater' had been given the most useful information and guidance in financial matters by this Apollo of Throgmorton Street.

'He's modest, too,' continued Lane, 'which is unusual in his type, I think. He told me his favourite reading was detective stories, outside the sporting and financial news, of course; but he has the greatest respect for Cynthia's literary tastes— You know she has published some verse? Yes. Not in book form, but in some of the better magazines. Oh, yes, Barthrop's a good chap: simple-minded, a shade gross, too, perhaps, in some ways. These chaps in the city do themselves too well, I think. But quite a good chap, and sure to make an excellent husband. I fancy his kind do, you know—no tension, no fret, no introspection.'

Again I made signs of agreement which were not strictly honest.

On Sunday afternoon we both drank our tea under the copper beeches at Deene Place. I deliberately monopolised Cynthia's attention as long as I possibly could, and then devoted myself to the cold-blooded study of the man she was to marry. I found him very good-natured, gifted with abundant high spirits, agreeably modest, and, as it seemed to me, intellectually about on a par with a race-horse or a handsome St. Bernard dog.

'Cynthia tells me we are to bully you into coming out of your hermitage,' he said to me with a sunny smile. 'A good idea, too, you know. After all, being a recluse can't be good for one's health; and I suppose if a man isn't fit, it tells—er—even in literary work, doesn't it?'

I felt towards him as one feels towards some bright, handsome schoolboy. And yet, in many ways, I doubt not he had more of wisdom than I had. I had spoken to Cynthia of Leith Hill, and she had said that, when staying at Deene Place, she walked almost every day either on the hill or the common. Upon that I had relinquished her attention with a fair grace.

Of course, I was entirely unused to the amenities of society. I used no subterfuges, and made no attempt to disguise my interest in Cynthia, or to pretend to other interests. I dare say my directness was smiled upon, as part of the eccentricity of these literary people; one of Ernest's friends, quite a recluse, and so forth. I gathered as much a little later on.

Looking back upon it I must suppose that my conduct during the next week or so would be condemned by most right-thinking people as ungentlemanly and even dishonourable. I have no inclination to defend it; and I could not affirm that, at the time, I loved honour more than Cynthia Lane. To speak the naked truth, I believe I would have committed forgery, if by doing so I could have won Cynthia for my wife. The one and only way in which I showed any discretion (and that, not from any moral scruple, but purely as a matter of tactics) was in withholding any open declaration to Cynthia herself.

My feeling was that my chance of a life's happiness was confined to the cruelly short period of a week or two. There was no time for taking risks. There must be no refusals. I must use my time, every day of it, I thought, in the effort to win her heart; and trust to the very end to win her consent. I availed myself fully of my advantage in living in Dorking while my rival spent his days in London. The obstacles in my path were such as to justify me in grasping every possible advantage within reach, I told myself. Every day we met. Every day I walked and talked with Cynthia. Every day love possessed me more utterly. And, I believe I may say it, every day Cynthia drew nearer to me. No word did I breathe of marriage; that which was arranged, or that which I desired. It seemed to me that every available moment must be given to the moulding of her heart, to preparation for the last crucial test, when I should ask her to sacrifice everything, and cross the Channel and the Rubicon with me.

There is no need for me to burke the words. Cynthia did love me when she left Dorking for her parents' house in London; not, perhaps, with the absorbing passion she had inspired in me; yet well enough, as I was assured, to face social disaster and a break with her family, in order that she might entrust her life to me.

'Cynthia,' I said, at the end of that last walk, 'London is not to rob me of you? Promise me!'

'If you call me, I will come,' she said, looking at me through tears, and well I knew that perfect truth shone in those dear eyes.

Regarding this as the most serious undertaking of my life, I had endeavoured to overlook nothing. I had obtained a marriage licence. A London registrar's office was to serve our purpose. I had previously secured a temporary lodging in London, and now went there with my luggage. Love did not blind me to practical considerations. While Cynthia was still in Dorking I had no time to spare. Now that she was entangled in her own home among last preparations for the wedding that was not to be, I turned my attention to matters affecting her future life with me.

Three afternoon appointments I kept with Arncliffe in the Advocate office. When I left him after our third talk, I was definitely re-engaged as a member of his staff, at a salary of six hundred pounds per annum, having promised to take up my duties with him in one month from that date. Every nerve in my body had been keyed to the attainment of this result, and I was grateful, and not a little flattered by its achievement. I was still a poor man; but this salary, with the few hundred pounds I might hope to add to it in a year, by means of independent literary work, would at all events mean that Cynthia need not face actual discomfort in her life with me. Further, I sincerely believed (and may very well have been correct in this) that her influence upon me would enlarge the scope and appeal of my literary work. I realised clearly that my beautiful lady-love had very much to give me. My life till then had not entirely lacked culture or intellectuality. But it emphatically had lacked that grace, that element of gentle fineness and delicacy which Cynthia would give it.

Cynthia, who in giving me herself would give all that I desired which my life had lacked, should come to me empty-handed, I thought. I did not want her to borrow from out the life which for my sake she was relinquishing. On the day before that fixed upon for the wedding at St. Margaret's, she should come to me in the park, near her home. There would be quite another sort of wedding, and by the evening train we would leave for the Continent. Every detail was arranged for. We met on the afternoon of the preceding day. I put my whole fate to the test, and Cynthia never wavered. We arranged to meet at two o'clock next day.

On the morning itself, just before noon, I hurried out from my lodging upon a final errand, intending to change my clothes and lock my bags, upon my return, within half an hour. My papers were in the pockets of the clothes I intended to wear, and a supply of money was left locked in my handbag. The most important moment of my life was at hand, and, as I walked down the crowded Strand into Fleet Street, I was conscious of such a measure of exaltation as I had never known before that day.

And then, for the second time in my life, brute force intervened, and made utter havoc of all my plans and prospects. Crossing Fleet Street, close to Chancery Lane, the pole of an omnibus struck my shoulder and flung me several yards along the road. The driver of a hansom cab shouted aloud as he jerked his horse to its haunches to avoid running over me. And in that moment, pawing wildly, the horse struck the back of my head with one of his fore feet.

For the second time in my life I lay in a hospital, suffering from concussion of the brain. Almost twelve hours passed before I first regained consciousness, and the morning of the following day was well advanced before I was able to inform the hospital authorities of my identity. No papers, nothing but a handful of silver, had been found in my pockets.

At eleven o'clock that morning there was solemnised at St. Margaret's Church the marriage of Cynthia and Charles Barthrop.

'If you call, I will come.'

But I had not called. I had even left Cynthia to pace to and fro through an afternoon in the park; at that most critical juncture in both our lives I had failed her. In a brief letter, posted to an address given me by her brother, I acquainted Cynthia with the facts of my accident, and nothing more than the facts.

In ten days I was out of the hospital; and Cynthia, another man's wife, was in Norway.

IV

I dare say no place would have looked very attractive to me when I came out from that hospital; but London and my lodging in it did seem past all bearing unattractive. The Dorking lodging had been definitely relinquished, and in any case I had no wish now to see Dorking, Leith Hill, or the common.

Knowing practically nothing of my native land outside its capital, I packed a small bag at my lodging, and walked to the nearest large railway station, which happened to be Paddington. Arrived there, I spent some dull moments in staring at way-bills, and finally took a ticket at a venture for Salisbury. There I found a quiet lodging, and spent the evening in idly wandering about the cathedral close.

The next day found me tramping over short turf—turf more ancient than the cathedral—in the neighbourhood of Stonehenge. And so I spent the better part of a fortnight, greatly to the benefit I dare say of my bodily health. I shall always love the tiny hamlets of that sun and wind-washed countryside, between Warminster, Andover, Stockbridge, and Salisbury. Yet always they will be associated in my mind with a bowing down sense of loneliness, of empty, unredeemed sadness, and of irretrievable loss. I cannot pretend that I experienced any sense of remorse or penitence, where my abortive attempt to win another man's bride was concerned. I had no such feeling. But, discreditable as that fact may be, it did not make the aching sorrow that possessed me any the less real.

I was conscious of no remorse, and yet, God knows my state of mind was humble enough, though too sombre and despairing to be called resigned. I believe that in the retrospect my loss seemed more, a great deal more to me, than just a lover's loss; though upon that score alone I was smitten to the very dust. It was rather as though, at the one blow, I had lost my heart's desire and a fortune and a position in the world; or, at least, that these had been snatched from my grasp in the moment of becoming mine.

I do not think I could ever explain this to any one else; since I suppose that in the monetary sense the rupture of my plans left me the better off. But I, who had always been something of an outlier in the social sense, an unplaced wanderer bearing the badge of no particular caste, I had grown in some way to feel that marriage with Cynthia would in this sense bring me to an anchorage, and admit me to a definite place of my own in the complex world of London. The idea was not wholly unreasonable. I had lived very rapidly in those few critical weeks. Years of hope, endeavour, determination, and emotional experience, I had crowded into my last days in Dorking. And through it all I had been upheld and exalted by a pervasive conviction (which I apprehend is not part of the ordinary lover's capital) that now, at length, I was to know peace, rest, content; the calm, glad realisation of all the vague yearnings and strivings which had spurred me to strenuousness, to unceasing effort, all my life long.

Cynthia had been the object of my love, of my passionate adoration, indeed. But she had also been a great deal more. When she had bowed her beautiful head to my wooing, when she had promised that upon my call she would come, she had (all unconsciously, of course) become more than my beloved. She became for me the actual embodiment, the incarnate end, aim, and reward of all the strivings of my lonely life, from the night of my flight from St. Peter's Orphanage down to that very day. In my rapt contemplation of her, of the personality which enthralled me far, far more than her beautiful person could, I smiled over recollection of my bitter struggles in London slums, of the heart-racking anxiety and grinding humiliation of life with poor Fanny. I smiled happily at that squalid vista as at some trifling inconvenience by the way, too small to be remembered as an obstacle in my path toward the all-sufficing and radiant peace of union with Cynthia.

'Now I see why all my life has been worth while,' I told myself on the eve of the clumsy, brutal blow of Fate's hand that had for ever robbed me of Cynthia.

In the living, the end had sometimes seemed too hopelessly far off to justify the wearing strain of the means. There had been so little refreshment by the way. But with Cynthia's promise there had come to me an all-embracing certainty that my whole life had been justified; that the end and reward of all my struggles was actually in my hands; that I now had arrived, and was about to step definitely out from the ranks of the striving, unsatisfied, hungry outliers, into the serene company of those whose faces shine with the light of assured happiness; of those who fight and struggle no longer; for the reason that they have found their allotted place in life, and are at anchor within the haven of their ambitions.

I may have been very greatly to blame in my passionate wooing of another man's affianced wife; but, at least, I believe that my loss of Cynthia was a far greater and more crushing loss for me than the loss of any woman could possibly have been for Charles Barthrop. For me, she had stood for all life held that was desirable—the sum and plexus of my aims. For Barthrop there were his keenly relished sports and pastimes, his host of friends, his family, his luxurious and well-defined place in the world—not to mention the city of London.

V

When I left the spacious purlieus of Salisbury, it was to engage chambers—bedroom, sitting-room, and bathroom—in a remodelled adjunct to one of the Inns of Court. Here my arrangement was that a simple breakfast should be served to me each day in my sitting-room, and that I was free to obtain my other meals wherever I might choose. Thus provided for in the matter of a place of residence, I resumed the discarded journalistic life, as a member of the Advocate's editorial staff, in accordance with the engagement entered into with Arncliffe, when I believed I had been arranging to secure an income for Cynthia and myself.

Before renting these rooms I had called upon Sidney Heron, and invited him to share a set of chambers with me.

'No,' he said, in his blunt way, 'I'd rather keep you as a friend.'

I dare say he was right; and, in any case, he had a fancy for living at a good distance from the centre of the town; whereas my own inclination was to avoid the town altogether, if that might be, and failing this to have one's sanctuary right in the centre of it. My chambers were within five minutes' walk of the Advocate office, and not much more than half that distance from the Thames Embankment—a spot which interested me as much as its lively neighbour, the Strand, irritated and worried me. An uneasy, shoddy street I thought the Strand, full of insistent tawdriness and of broken-spirited folk whose wretchedness had something in it more despicable than pitiable. Save for its occasional gaping rustics (whom I thought sadly misguided to be there at all) I cordially hated the Strand. But the Embankment I regarded as one of the most romantic thoroughfares in London; and many a score of articles (which brought me money) do I owe to the inspiration of that broad, darkling, river-skirted road, and the queer human flotsam and jetsam one may meet with there.

Among the direct results of Cynthia Lane's influence, I must place my interest in politics. I had hardly realised that women had any concern with politics until I met Cynthia. She was in no sense a politician, but she followed the political news of the day with the same bright and illuminating intelligence which she brought to bear upon all the affairs of her life; and her attitude toward them was informed by a fine patriotism, at once reasoning and ardent. Chance phrases from her lips had opened my eyes to the existence of a love for England, for our flag, and race, such as I had not dreamed of till that time.

We spoke once or twice of my Australian experiences. And here again Cynthia's patriotism suggested whole avenues of unsuspected thought and feeling to me. It was Cynthia who introduced to my mind the conception of the British Empire, and our race, as a single family, having many branching offshoots. I do not mean that Cynthia supplied facts or theories hitherto unknown to me. But I do mean that her woman's mind first made me feel these things, intimately and personally, as people feel the joys and sorrows of members of their own households.

As a result I looked now with changed eyes upon many things. Before, I had loathed and detested the slums of London, and the vicious, ugly squalor of the lives of many of their inhabitants; hated them with the bitterness of one who has been made to feel their poison in his own veins. There had been far more of loathing than of pity or sorrow in my attitude toward the canker at London's heart. Gradually, now, because of the insight I had had into Cynthia's love of England, my view became more kindly. I looked upon the canker less with hatred, and more with the feeling one might have regarding some horrible and malignant disease in a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister. And, too, with more of a sense of responsibility and of shame.

So, from a lofty and quite ignorant scorn of things so essentially mundane, I grew to take an understanding interest in current politics, and more particularly in their wider aspects, as touching not England alone but all British lands and people. I obtained a press pass from Arncliffe, and attended an important debate in the House of Commons, subsequently recording my impressions, in the form of an article by an Outsider, from Australia. Journalistically, that article was a rather striking success; and I began to attend the House frequently, and to write more or less regular political impressions for the Advocate.

For several years my interest in these matters continued to be progressive. (Three volumes of a political or quasi-political and sociological character have appeared under my name.) I am grateful for that interest, because it gave me some additional hold upon life, at a time when such anchorage as I had had seemed to have been wrested from me.

There was a quite considerable period—five or six years, at least, I think—during which political work tended to broaden my mind, widen my sympathies, and enhance my esteem for a number of my contemporaries. Beyond that point I am afraid no good came to me from the study of politics; from which fact it is probably safe to assume that any influence I exercised ceased to be beneficial. For a time it had, I think, been helpful in its small way. That was while faith remained in me.

I remember conceiving a warm respect for a number of men engaged in political work as writers, organisers, and speakers. I admired these men for the fervour with which they appeared to devote their lives to the service of political ends. I even derived from my conception of their enthusiasm, strong, almost emotional interest in certain political issues, tendencies, and developments. Later, as I learned to know the men and their work better, came rather painful disillusionment. We differed fundamentally, it seemed, these eloquent fellows and myself. One actually told me in so many words, and with a cynical smile at his other companion of the moment, as who should say: 'Really, this innocent needs awakening'; that I was playing the gull's part on the surface of things. 'We are not concerned with principles,' he said, in effect. 'That may be all right for the groundlings—our audience. Our concern is parties, office—the historic game of ins and outs, in which we have our careers to make.'

Until I put the whole business for ever behind me, I never lost my interest in issues and principles; neither did I ever acquire one jot or tittle of the professional's interest in the political game, as such; or endeavour to utilise its complex machinery for the furtherance of my own career. But in the course of time the study, not so much of politics as of political life, came to fill me with a kind of sick weariness and disgust; a sort of dull nausea and shame, such as I imagine forms one of the penalties for the unfortunate sisterhood, of what is sardonically called the life of pleasure. Upon the whole, I am afraid there is a good deal in common between the political life and the life of the streets. Certainly, the camp followers in political warfare are a motley crew of mercenaries, and they take their tone from quite a number of their leaders.

It would be quite beside the mark to add that there are some fine men in British politics. There are, of course, in all professions, including (I dare say) that of burglary. There still are in the political arena gentlemen whose single aim, pursued with undeviating loftiness of purpose, is the service of their country. I will not pretend to think their number large, for I know it is not. (But I dare say it is larger than it will be a few years hence, when we have pursued a little farther the enlightened ideal of governance by the least fit for the least fit, by the most poorly equipped for the most poorly equipped, by the most ignorant and irresponsible for the most ignorant and irresponsible.) But the class of well-meaning, decent, clean-lived politicians is a fairly large one. As these worthy if unremarkable men have not a tithe of the brains of the most prominent among the quite unscrupulous sort—the undoubted birds of prey—their good intentions are of small value to their generation or their country, and represent little or nothing in the shape of hindrance to the skilled pirates of political waters.

But my personal concern was not so much with the rank and file of actual politicians as with the great army of camp followers; the band of fine, whole-souled, well-dressed, fluent fellows, for whom 'something must be done, you know,' because of this or that interest, because of the alleged wishes of this great person or the other; and because, above all, of their own quite wonderful pertinacity, untiring pushfulness, and, of course, their valuable services and great abilities as talkers, writers, 'organisers,' and what not.

I have known men who, for years, had found it worth not less than L800 or L1000 a year to them to have been spoken of by Mr. ——, Lord ——, or Sir ——, as 'an exceedingly capable organiser, and—er—devoted to the Cause.' No one ever knew precisely what they had organised (apart from their own comfortable subsistence in West End clubs and houses) or were to organise; but there they were, fine fellows all, tastefully dressed, in the best of health and spirits, and indefatigably fluent in—in—er—the service of the Cause, you know!

There was a period in which I fancied these parasites were the monopoly of one political party. But I soon learned that this was far from being the case. All the four parties which the twentieth century saw established in parliament are equally surrounded by their camp followers, who each differ from each other only superficially, and, not unseldom, transfer their allegiance in pursuit of fatter game. The differences do impress one at first, but, as I say, they are mainly superficial. All are equally self-centred and true to type as parasites; though one brood is better dressed than another, and has a more formidable appetite. What makes rich pickings for the follower of one camp would leave the follower of another camp lean and hungry indeed. But the necessary scale of expenditure being higher in one division than another, things equalise themselves pretty much. I believe it is much the same in the case of the other ancient profession I have mentioned.

I have seen quite a large number of promising young men, fresh from the Universities, and beginning life in London with high aspirations and genuine patriotism in their hearts, only to become gradually absorbed into the gigantic parasitical incubus of the body politic. The process of absorption was none the less saddening and embittering to watch, because its subjects usually waxed fatter and more apparently jovial with each stage in their gradual exchange of ideals for cash, patriotism for nepotism, enthusiasm for cynicism, and disinterestedness for toadyism. Some had in them the makings of very good and useful citizens. Their wives, so far as I was able to see, almost invariably (whether deliberately or unknowingly) egged them on in the downward path to complete surrender. As a rule, complete surrender meant less striving and contriving, a better establishment, and a freer use of hansom cabs in place of omnibuses. (I am thinking for the moment of the days which knew not taxi-cabs.)

When they were writers, a frequent sign of the beginning of their end (from my standpoint; of their success, from other standpoints, including, no doubt, those of their wives) was that they began to write of persons rather than principles; to eulogise rather than to exhort, criticise, and suggest. So surely as they began their written panegyrics of individuals, I found them laying aside the last remnants of their private hero-worship. Very soon after this stage they generally changed their clubs, becoming members of the most expensive of these establishments; and from that point on, their progress towards finished cynicism, fatty degeneration of the intellect, and smiling abandonment of all scruples, all ideals, and all modesty, was rapid and certain.

The inquiring student of such processes would perhaps have found banquets, luncheons, and public dinners of a more or less political colour his most prolific fields. Upon such occasions I always found the genus very strongly represented. In one camp the dress clothes of the followers would be of a better cut and more gracefully worn than in the other camp; and those of the better-dressed camp had more of assurance, more of brazen impudence, and more of hopelessly shallow cynicism, I think, than those of other divisions. In many cases, too, they had more of education; but, I fear, less of brains.

It was, I think, the contemplation of these gentlemen, even more perhaps than my saddening knowledge of their shifty, time-serving, shilly-shallying, or glaringly unscrupulous leaders and masters, that finally disgusted me with those branches of political work which were open to me. I have no wish to sit in judgment. Other and stronger men may find that they may keep the most evil sort of company without ever soiling their own hands. I know and very sincerely respect a few political journalists and workers of different parties, whose uprightness is beyond suspicion; whose fine enthusiasm remains untarnished, even to-day. I yield to none in my admiration for such men. But however much I admired, or even envied, it was not for me to emulate these gentlemen. I probably lacked the necessary strength of fibre.

Arncliffe was, as ever, very kindly when I showed him my feeling in the matter; and, so far as might be, he released me from all journalistic obligations of a political sort. But more, I was given a complimentary dinner. Speeches were made, and I was genuinely astonished by the length of the list of my avowed services to politics. It was affirmed that, under Providence, and Arncliffe, and one or two people with titles, I had been instrumental in starting movements, launching an organ of opinion, and bringing about all kinds of signs and portents. The occasion embarrassed me greatly.