"Not vermin unattended," Anonyma explained. "She wanted to adopt Brown
Borough babies. She had been working desultorily in the Brown Borough
since War broke out."
"That might explain the peculiar and un-Jay-like remark in her letter to
you--that she would settle in no home except the Perfect Home. I hate
things in capital letters."
"Why didn't she get married?" grumbled Cousin Gustus. "She was engaged
for nearly three weeks to young William Morgan, a most respectable young
man. So few young men--"
"She wrote to me that she couldn't keep up that engagement," said Kew.
"Not even by looking upon it as War Work. She called him a 'Surface young
man,' and that again seemed unlike her. She usen't to mind surfaceness.
The War seems to have turned her upside down. But then, of course, the
War has turned us all upside down, and in that position you generally get
a rush of brains to the head. We're all feverish, that's what's the
matter with us. When I was in hospital I lived for three weeks on the top
of a high temperature, laughing. I want to laugh now.... It's a damn
funny world."
"I once knew a man who died of apoplexy while swearing," sniffed
Cousin Gustus.
"You have been damned unlucky in your friends, Cousin Gustus," said Kew.
He paused, and then added: "Besides, I hardly ever say Damn without
saying Un-damn to myself afterwards. It seems a pity to waste a precious
word on an inadequate cause, and I always retrieve it if I can."
"Before you came down to breakfast this morning, Kew," said Anonyma, "we
had an idea."
"Only one between you in all that time?" said Kew. "I was half an
hour late."
"Now, Kew, be an angel and agree with the idea. I've set my heart on it,"
said Mrs. Gustus.
When Mrs. Gustus talked in a womanly way like this, the change was always
unmistakable. She was naturally an unnatural talker, and when she
mentioned such natural things as angels, you knew she was resorting
deliberately to womanly charm in order to attain her end. There was
something very cold-blooded about Anonyma's womanly charm.
"Good Lord," said Kew, "I wish angels had never been invented. I never
am one, only people always tell me to be one. I never get officially
recognised in heaven. What is the plan?"
"There is Russell's car doing nothing," began Mrs. Gustus.
"Do you mean Christina?" interrupted Kew, shocked at such formality.
"Don't call her Russell's car, it sounds so cold."
"There is Russell's Christina doing nothing," compromised Anonyma. "And
petrol isn't so bad as it will be. And it's a beautiful time of year. And
you are not strong yet, really. And we want Jay back."
"A procession of facts doesn't make a plan," objected Kew.
"It may lead to one, eventually," said Mrs. Gustus. "Oh, Kew, I want to
go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear
the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a
wave of bluebells. I want to forget blood and Belgians and kiss Nature."
"Take a twenty-eight 'bus, and kiss Hampstead Heath," suggested Kew.
"The Spring has got there all right."
Anonyma, behind the coffee-pot, was jotting down in a notebook the
salient points in her outburst. She always placed her literary calling
first. And anyway, I should be rather proud if I could talk like that
about the Spring without any preparation.
"The idea originally," began Mr. Russell tentatively, "was not only
formed to allow Mrs. Gustus to enjoy the Spring, but also to make you
quite strong before you go back to work. And, again, not only that, but
also to try and trace your sister Jay."
Will you please imagine that continual intercourse with very talkative
people had made Mr. Russell an adept at vocal compression. He had now
almost lost the use of his vowels, and if I wrote as he spoke, the effect
would be like an advertisement for a housemaid during the shortage of
wood-pulp. I spare you this.
"There are three objections to the plan," said Kew. "First, that
Anonyma doesn't really want to kiss the Spring; second, that I don't
really want convalescent treatment; third, that Jay doesn't really want
to be traced."
When Mrs. Gustus did not know the answer to an objection she left
it unanswered. This is, of course, the simplest way. She snapped
her notebook.
"Oh, Kew," she said, "you promised you'd be an angel." The double row of
semi-detached buttons down her breast trembled with eagerness.
"Angeller and angeller," sighed Kew, "I never committed myself so far."
"I have a clue with which to trace Jay," said Mrs. Gustus. "I had a
letter from her this morning."
Kew was a satisfactory person to surprise. He is never supercilious.
"You heard from Jay!" he said, in a voice as high as his eyebrows.
The letter which Mrs. Gustus showed to Kew may be quoted here:
"This place has stood since the year twelve something, and its windows
look down without even the interruption of a sill at the coming and going
of the tides. It has hardly any garden, and immediately to the right and
the left of it the green down brims over the top of the cliff like the
froth of ale over a silver goblet. To-night the tide is low, the sea is
golden where the shallow waves break upon the sand, and ghostly green in
the distance. When the tide is high, the sound and the sight of it seem
to meet and make one thing. The waves press up the cliff then, and fall
back on each other. Do you know the lines that are written on the face of
a disappointed wave? To-night the clouds are like castles built on the
plain of the sea. There is an aeroplane at this moment--dim as a little
thought--coming between two turrets of cloud. I suppose it is that I can
hear, but it sounds like the distant singing of the moon. I have come
here to count up my theories, to count them and pile them up like money,
in heaps, according to their value. Theories are such beautiful things,
there must be some use in them. Or perhaps they are like money from a
distant country, and not in currency here. Yet just as sheer metal, they
must have some value.... It is wonderful that such happiness should come
to me, and that it should last. I have the Sea and a Friend; there is
nothing in the world I lack, and nothing that I regret...."
"What better clue could you want?" asked Mrs. Gustus. "We will take
Christina round the sea-coast."
"Looking for silver cliffs and a golden sea," sighed Kew.
I don't know if I have mentioned or conveyed to you that Mrs. Gustus was
a determined woman. At any rate she was, and it would therefore be waste
of time to describe the gradual defeat of Kew. The final stage was the
despatch of Kew to call on Nana in the Brown Borough. Jay's letter had
the Brown Borough postmark, so it had apparently been sent to Nana to
post. Nana might be described as the Second Clue in the pursuit of Jay.
She was the Family's only link with Jay. The one drawback of Nana as a
clue was that she was never to be found. Mrs. Gustus had called six
times, but had been repulsed on each occasion by a totally dumb front
door. But then Nana never had liked Anonyma. Nana was simple herself in
an amateurish, unconscious sort of way, and I expect she disliked
Anonyma's professional rivalry in the matter of simplicity. But Kew was
always a favourite.
The 'bus roared up the canyons of the City, and its voice accompanied Kew
in his tuneful meditations. A 'bus is not really well adapted for
meditation. On my feet I can stride across unseen miles musing on love,
in a taxi I can think about to-morrow's dinner, but on a 'bus my thoughts
will go no further than my eyes can see. So Kew, although he thought he
was thinking of Jay, was really considering the words in front of him--To
Stop O'Bus strike Bell at Rear.[Footnote: He must have changed at the
Bank into a Tilling 'bus.] He deduced from this that it was an Irish
'bus, and supposed that this accounted for its rather head-long
behaviour. He spent some moments in imagining the MacBus, child of a
sterner race, which would run gutturally without skids, and wear a
different cut of bonnet.
He dismounted into a faint yellow fog diluted with a faint twilight, in
the Brown Borough. The air was vague, making it not so much an
impossibility to decipher the features of people approaching as a
surprise to find it possible. A few rather premature bar row-flares
adapted Scripture to modern conditions by hiding their light under tin
substitutes for bushels, in the hope of protecting such valuables as
cat's meat and bananas from aerial outrage. Kew pranced over prostrate
children, and curved about the pavement to avoid artificially vivacious
passers-by, who emerged from the public-houses.
Nana lived in a little alley which was like a fiord of peace running in
from the shrill storm of the Brown Borough. Here little cottages shrank
together, passive resisters of the twentieth century. Low crooked windows
blinked through a mask of dirty creepers. Each little front garden
contained a shrub, and was guarded by a low railing, although there would
have been no room for a trespasser in addition to the shrub. Nana's
house, at the end of the alley, looked along it to the far turmoil of the
mother-street.
Kew insulted the gate, as usual, by stepping over it, and knocked at the
door. He held his breath, so that he might more keenly hear the first
whisperings of the floor upstairs, which would show that Nana was astir.
A gardenful of cats came and told him that his hopes were vain. Cats only
exist, I think, for the chastening of man. They never come to me except
to tell me the worst, and to crush me with quiet sarcasm should my
optimism survive their warning.
But before the cats had finished speaking, there was a most un-Nana-like
sound of bounding within, and Jay appeared. She threw herself out of the
darkness of the door on to the twilit Kew.
The cats were ashamed to be seen watching this almost canine display, and
went away.
"I didn't know you weren't in France," said Jay to Kew.
"I didn't know you weren't in Heaven," said Kew to Jay. "What's all this
about golden seas and aeroplanes snarling around?"
"Oh, snarling.... That's just what they do," said Jay. "Let's pretend I
said that."
It seemed as if childhood turned its face to them again after a thousand
years. These roaring months of War run like a sea between us and our
peaceful beginnings, so that a catchword flashed across out of our past
is as beautiful and as incredible as the light in a dream.
When they were little they used to bargain for expressive words. Their
childhood was full of such hair-splittings as: "If you tell how we said
Wank-wank to the milkman, you must let me have the old lady who had a
palpitation and puffocated running after the 'bus."
They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a love of
words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit of
overweighting common life with romance. It was perhaps good for them to
have acquired such a very simple relation by marriage as Anonyma.
"About the sea," said Jay, "I'll tell you later."
"Well, tell me first why you found home so suddenly unbearable. You've
stood it for eighteen years."
"I've been a child all through those eighteen years. And to a child just
the fact of grown-upness is so admirable. I wonder why. But under the
fierce light that beats from the eye of a woman suddenly and violently
grown old, Cousin Gustus and Anonyma don't--well, Kew, do they?"
The dusk filled the room as water fills a cup, and to look up at the
light of an outside lamp on the ceiling was like looking up through water
at the surface. Jay wore a dress of the same colour of the dusk, and her
round face, faint as a bubble, seemed to float on its background
unsupported.
"Didn't you think about adopting a baby?" suggested Kew. "That evidently
put Cousin Gustus's back up."
"I didn't put Cousin Gustus's back up so high as he put mine," answered
Jay. "Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the use
of this war of one generation against another? Old people and young
people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the possibility
of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity wrong?"
"What did you do, tell me, and what are you going to do?"
"Oh well, I felt something like frost in the air, and I couldn't define
it. Really, it was work waiting to be done. Not work for the poor, but
work with the poor. At home I talked about work, and Anonyma wrote about
it, and Cousin Gustus shuddered at it. You were doing it all right, but
where was I? Three days a week with soldiers' wives. My brow never
sweated a drop. I thought there must be something better than a
bird's-eye view of work. So I took a job at a bolster place.... Oh well,
it doesn't matter now. I earned ten shillings a week, and paid
half-a-crown for a little basement back. On Saturdays I got my Sunday
clothes out of pawn, and came to tea with Nana. Do you remember the
scones and the Welsh Rarebit that Nana used to make? I believe those
things were worth the terror of the pawnshop. Oh, Kew, those pawnshops!
Those little secret stalls that put shame into you where none was before.
The pawn man--why is it that when you're already frightened is the moment
that men choose to frighten you? Because weakness is the worst crime.
That I have proved. My work was putting fluff into bolsters. There was a
big bright grocers' calendar--the Death of Nelson--and if I could see it
through the fog of fluff I felt that was a lucky day. I had to eat my
lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches--not fruit jam, you know, but
raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to get fluffy in that air.
The others sat round and munched and picked their teeth and read Jew
newspapers. Have you ever noticed that whichever way up you look at a Jew
newspaper, you always feel as if you could read it better if you were
standing on your head? My governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he
looked wet, and his hair was a horror to me. His voice was tired of
dealing with fluff--though he didn't deal with it so intimately as we
did--and it only allowed him to whisper. The forewoman was always cross,
but always as if she would rather not be so, as if she were being cross
for a bet, and as if some one were watching her to see she was not kind
by mistake. She looked terribly ill, because she had worked there for
three months, which was a record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a
hemorrhage--only from the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to
bed, but you can't, because the panel doctors in these parts will not
come to you. My doctor was half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he
only existed between seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so
as not to get too weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my
stamps. I had only five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences
had been stopped out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that
time that the Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an
absurd idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a
hard case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he
said, was allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to
tell him I was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I
told him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very
angry too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said
it was unfair for ladies to interfere in things they knew nothing about.
I said I interfered because I knew nothing about it, but that now I knew.
I said that ladies and women had exactly the same kind of inside, and it
was a kind that never thrived on fluff instead of food. I told him how I
spent my ten shillings. He couldn't interrupt really, because he had no
voice. Then I fainted, and a friend I have there, called Mrs. Love, came
in. She had been listening at the door. She was very good to me.
"Then, when I was well again, I found another job, but I shan't tell you
what it is. As for the Inspectors, I complained, but--what's the use? So
long as you must put fluff of that pernicious kind into bolsters, just so
long will you kill the strength and the beauty of women. It looked so
like a deadlock that it frightened me, and now in this wonderful life I
lead, my Friend won't let me think of it. A deadlock is a dreadful
accident, isn't it? because in theory it doesn't exist. I am working for
a new end now. Isn't it splendid that there is really no Place Called
Stop? There is always an end beyond the end, always something to love and
look forward to. Life is a luxury, isn't it? there's no use in it--but
how delightful!"
"You haven't told me about the sea yet," said Kew.
"Because I don't think you'd believe me. We were always liars, weren't
we? That's because we're romantic, or if it's not romance, the symptoms
of the disease are very like. Why can't we get rid of it all as Anonyma
does? She has no gift except the gift of being able to get rid of
superfluous romance. She takes that great ease impersonally, her pose
is, 'It's a gift from Heaven, and an infernal bore.' But I never get
nearer to joy than I do in this Secret World of mine, and with my
Secret Friend."
"But what is it? What is he like?"
"I should be guilty of the murder of a secret if I told you. He isn't
particularly romantic. I have seen him in a poor light; I have watched
him in a most undignified temper; I have known him when he wanted a
shave. I don't exist in this World of mine. I am just a column of thin
air, watching with my soul."
"Then you're really telling lies to Anonyma when you write about it all?
I'm not reproaching you of course, I only want to get my mind clear."
"I suppose they're lies," assented Jay ruefully, "though it seems
sacrilege to say so, for I know these things better than I know myself.
But Truth--or Untruth, what's the use of words like that when miracles
are in question?"
"Oh, damn this What's the Use Trick," said Kew. "I suppose you
picked that up in this private Heaven of yours. The whole thing's
absolutely--My dear little Jay, am I offending you?"
"Yes," said Jay.
Kew sighed.
Chloris sighed too. Chloris had played the thankless part of third in
this interview. She was Jay's friend, a terrier with a black eye. She
shared Jay's burning desire to be of use, and, like most embryo
reformers, she had a poor taste in dress. She wore her tail at an aimless
angle, without chic; her markings were all lopsided. But her soul was
ardent, and her life was always directed by some rather inscrutable
theory or other. As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs
like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit. Later she
had adopted a vigorous anarchist policy, and had inaugurated what was
probably known in her set as the "Bite at Sight Campaign." Cured of this,
she had become a gentle Socialist, and embraced the belief that all
property--especially edible property--should be shared. Appetites, she
argued, were meant to be appeased, and the preservation of game--or
anything else--in the larder was an offence against the community. Now,
at the age of five or so, she affected cynicism, pretended temporarily
that life had left a bitter taste in her mouth, and sighed frequently.
"Kew," said Jay presently, "will you promise not to tell the Family you
saw me? I don't want it to know about me. After all, theories are driving
me, and theories don't concern that Family of ours. What's the use of a
Family? (I'm saying this just to exasperate you.) A Family's just a
little knot of not necessarily congenial people, with Fate rubbing their
heads together so as to strike sparks of love. Love--what's the use of
Love? I'd like to catch that Love and box his ears, making such a fool of
the world. What's the use?"
"God knows," said Kew. "Cheer up, my friend, I promise I won't tell the
Family I've seen you, or anything about you." At the same moment he
remembered the motor tour.
"Promise faithfully?"
"Faithfully."
"It's a lovely word faithful, isn't it?" she said, wriggling in her
chair. "Yours faithfully is a most beautiful ending to a letter. Why is
it that faith with a little F is such a perfect thing, and yet Faith,
grown-up Faith in Church, is so tiring?"
"Perhaps one is overworked and the other isn't," suggested Kew.
As he went out into the darkness the noise of London sprang into his
ears, and the remote brown room where he had left Jay seemed to become
divided from him by great distances. The town was like a garden, and he,
an insect, pressed through its undergrowth. The rare lamps and the stars
flowered above him.
My yesterday has gone, has gone, and left me tired;
And now to-morrow comes and beats upon the door;
So I have built to-day, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more,
Lest comfort come no more.
So I have built to-day, a proud and perfect day,
And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands.
The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way.
The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands,
Grew pink beneath my hands.
So I have built to-day, more precious than a dream;
And I have painted peace upon the sky above;
And I have made immense and misty seas that seem
More kind to me than life, more fair to me than love,
More beautiful than love.
And I have built a House, a House upon the brink
Of high and twisted cliffs,--the sea's low singing fills it.
And there my Secret Friend abides, and there I think
I'll hide my heart away before to-morrow kills it,
A cold to-morrow kills it.
Yes, I have built to-day, a wall against to-morrow,
So let to-morrow knock, I shall not be afraid,
For none shall give me death, and none shall give me sorrow,
And none shall spoil this darling day that I have made.
No storm shall stir my sea. No night but mine shall shade
This day that I have made.
"We will start on our quest to-morrow," said Anonyma. "To-day I
must work."
Nobody in Anonyma's circle was ever allowed to forget that she spent
four hours a week in the service of her country. You would never guess
how much insight into the souls of the poor, four hours a week can give
to a person like Anonyma. She had written two books about the Brown
Borough since the outbreak of War. The provincial Press had been much
impressed by their vivid picture of slum realities. Anonyma's poor were
always yearning, yearning to be understood and loved by a ministering
upper class, yearning for light, for art, for self-expression, for
novels by high-souled ladies. The atmosphere of Anonyma's fiction was
thick with yearning.
Anonyma always came home from her Work with what she called
"word-vignettes" in her notebook. She gave her Family the benefit of
these during the rest of the week, besides fitting them into her books.
So that although Cousin Gustus always conscientiously bought a dozen
copies of each novel as it came out, he really wasted his money, for he
was obliged to know all his wife's copy by heart before it got into
print. By speaking each thought as well as writing it, Anonyma rather
unfairly won a reputation twice over with the same material.
Anonyma produced a vignette now, in order to show how necessary it was
that she should hurry to her yearning flock.
"I came into the room of one of my sailors' wives last week, and I found
her with a baby sobbing on her breast, and an empty hearth at her feet. I
thought of the eternal tragedy of womanhood. I said, 'Will my love help,
my dear?'"
There was a pause, and Cousin Gustus sighed.
"What did she say?" asked Kew, without expecting an answer from the
artist. After all, a word-vignette is not intended to have a sequel. It
is supposed to fall complete with a little splash into your silent
understanding. I must say Kew was rather tiresome in refusing to be
content with the splash.
"So few women really understand how to stop a child crying," said Cousin
Gustus, speaking from bitter and universal experience.
"That's the point," said Kew. "The child had probably swallowed a pin."
It generally breaks my heart to hear a story spoilt, but with Anonyma's
word-vignettes I did not mind, because they were told as true, and yet
they did not ring true. I must tell you that Anonyma had married into a
family of accomplished white liars, and to them the ring of truth was as
unmistakable as the dinner-bell. Few people could lie successfully to Kew
or Jay, they knew that art from the inside. White lies are easily
justified, but almost any lie can be whitewashed. Apart from the mutual
attitude of Kew and Jay, who possessed something between them that might
be called good faith, there was hardly any trust included in that family
relationship. Cousin Gustus distrusted youth. He thought young people
were always either lying to him or laughing at him, and indeed they often
were. Only not so often as he thought. He was no prop on which to repose
confidence, and it was very easy both to tell him lies and not to tell
him facts.
Mrs. Gustus had no gift of intimacy. She was reserved about everything
except herself, or what she believed to be herself. The self that she
shared so generously with others was, however, not founded on fact, but
modelled on the heroine of all her books. She killed her heroine whenever
possible--I think she only once married her,--yet still the creature
remained immortal in Mrs. Gustus's public personality. She concealed or
transformed everything that did not seem artistic. Her notebook was a
tangle of self-deceptions. The rest of the Family knew this. They never
pretended to believe her.
Kew and Jay were skilled romancers, fact was clay in their hands.
Nobody had ever taught them such a dull lesson as exact truthfulness.
If they built the bare bones of their structures fairly accurately,
they placed the whole in an artificial light, altering in some
effective way the spirit of the facts. Education had impressed the
importance of technical truthfulness on Kew. But he was a quick
talker, and in order to keep him in line with his tongue, nature had
made him quick of wit, quick in argument, and unconsciously quick in
making and seeing loopholes for escape.
He was at present perfectly comfortable in his anomalous position
regarding a search round the sea-coast for a Jay he knew to be in the
Brown Borough.
"If I am going to work, I must go," said Anonyma. "Russ and I will go
together as far as the Underground."
She looked at herself in the glass. The scarlet bird in her hat had an
arresting expression. As she was putting on her gloves she said, "I'm
sorry, Kew, about your disappointment, not finding Nana at home last
night. But I told you so."
She had no fear of this much-shunned phrase.
"Never mind," said Kew mildly. "We'll put Christina on the track
to-morrow."
Mr. Russell said a polite Good-bye to his Hound, and accompanied
his friend Anonyma to the Underground. That was a fateful little
journey for him.
As he turned from Anonyma's side at the bookstall, he noticed a 'bus
positively beckoning to him. It had a lady conductor, and she was poised
expectantly, one hand on the bell and the other beckoning to Mr. Russell.
His nature was docile, and the 'bus was bound for Chancery Lane, his
destination. He mounted the 'bus.
I need hardly tell you that a 'bus that makes deliberate advances to the
public is the rarest sight in London. The self-respecting 'bus looks upon
the public as dust beneath its tyres. Even a Brigadier-General with red
tabs, on his way to Whitehall, looks pathetically humble waggling his
cane at a 'bus. All 'bus-drivers have a kingly look; it comes from their
proud position. The rest of the world is only worthy to communicate with
that noble race by means of nods and becks and wreathed smiles.
"Chancery Lane, please," said Mr. Russell. "But why did you stop
specially for me?"
"I thought your wife hailed me, sir," lied the 'bus-conductor.
Any allusion to his wife mildly annoyed Mr. Russell. "Not my wife," he
said. "Merely a friend."
"Oh, I _beg_ your pardon, sir," said the 'bus-conductor, and underlined
the "beg" with the ting of her ticket-puncher. She was rather a darling
'bus-conductor, because she was also Jay. She had a short, though not a
fat face, soft eyes, and very soft hair cut short to just below the lobes
of her ears.
A gentleman with dingy but elaborate boot-uppers hailed and mounted the
'bus. "Shufftesbury Uvvenue?" he asked. He said it that way, of course,
because he was a Shakespearian actor. The 'bus-conductor gave him his
ticket, and then took her stand upon her platform, more or less unaware
that Mr. Russell and the actor, both next to the door and opposite to
each other, were looking at her with a pleased look.
Mr. Russell thought for some time, and then he said, "'T's a
b'tiful day."
"That's what it is," replied the 'bus-conductor. "I wonder if it's wrong
to enjoy being a 'bus-conductor?"
"I shouldn't think so," said Mr. Russell cautiously. "Why?"
The 'bus-conductor waved her hand towards a State hint that shouted in
letters six foot high from an opposite wall: "DON'T USE A MOTOR CAR FOR
PLEASURE." Mr. Russell read it very carefully and said nothing.
"This is a motor car," observed the 'bus-conductor, glancing at her
inaccessible chauffeur. "And as for pleasure ..."
The high houses rose out of the earth like Alps, and the roar in the
morning was like large music. She knew she had been an Olympian in a
recent life, because she found herself familiar with greater and more
gorgeous speed than any 'bus attains, and with the divine discords that
high mountains and high cities sing.
"I hope it's not wrong, because I'm going on a motor tour to-morrow,"
said Mr. Russell. "On business of a sort, and yet also on pleasure. On a
search, as a matter of fact."
"Oh, any search is pleasure," said the bus-conductor. "Especially if it's
an abstract search."
"'Tisn't," said Mr. Russell. "'T's a search for a person."
The 'bus-conductor looked at the sky. "And are Anonyma and Kew going
too?" she thought. You must bear in mind that she had deliberately
plucked him from the side of Anonyma.
"Perhaps any pleasure is wrong in these days," she said.
"Come, come," said the actor. "Whut's wrung with these days? A German
ship sunk yesterday. Thut's pleasurable enough."
The 'bus-conductor turned a cold eye upon him.
"I can cheer, but not laugh over such news as that," she said pompously.
"Doesn't even a German find the sea bitter to drown in? An English woman
or a German butcher, isn't it all the same when it comes to a Me, with a
throat full of water? Hasn't a German got a Me?"
The actor looked at his boot-uppers. Mr. Russell thought. Shufftesbury
Uvvenue arrived soon, and the actor alighted with some relief.
When the 'bus started again, the bus-conductor said, "Don't you think the
only way you can get pleasure out of it all is by treating life as a bead
upon a string?"
"That's a sufficient way, surely," said Mr. Russell. "If you can truly
reach it."