CHAPTER IX

I

Life, when it takes so giant a hand in its puppet show as to upturn a

cauldron of world war upon the puppets, may be imagined biting its

fingers in some chagrin at the little result in particular instances. As

vegetation beneath snow, so individual development beneath universal

calamity. Nature persists; individual life persists. The snow melts, the

calamity passes; the green things spring again, the individual lives are

but approached more nearly to their several destinations.

Sabre was called up in his Derby Class within eight weeks of his

enrolment,--at the end of February, 1916. He was nearly two years in the

war; but his ultimate encounter with life awaited him, and was met, at

Penny Green. It might have been reached precisely as it was reached

without agency of the war, certainly without participation in it. Of the

interval only those few events ultimately mattered which had connection

with his life at home. They seemed in the night of the war transient as

falling stars; they proved themselves lodestars of his destiny. They

seemed nothing, yet even as they flashed and passed he occupied himself

with them as the falling star catches the attention from all the fixed

and constant. They were of his own life: the war life was life in exile.

And, caught up at last in the enormous machinery of the war, his

feelings towards the war underwent a great change. First in the training

camp in Dorsetshire, afterwards, and much more so, in the trenches in

Flanders, it was only by a deliberate effort that he would recapture,

now and then, the old tremendous emotions in the thought of England

challenged and beset. He turned to it as stimulant in moments of

depression and of dismay, in hours of intense and miserable loathing of

some conditions of his early life in the ranks, and later in hours when

fatigue and bodily discomfort reached degrees he had not believed it

possible to endure--and go on with. He turned to it as stimulant and it

never failed of its stimulation. "I'm in it. What _does_ this matter?

This is the war. It's the war. Those infernal devils.... If these

frightful things were being done in England! Imagine if this was in

England! Thank God I'm in it. There you are! I'm absolutely all right

when I remember why I'm here." And enormous exaltation of spirit would

lift away the loneliness, remove the loathing, banish the exhaustion,

dissipate the fear. The fear--"And thy right hand shall show thee

terrible things"--He was more often than once in situations in which he

knew he was afraid and held fear away only because, with his old habit

of introspection, he knew it for fear,--a horrible thing that sought

mastery of him and by sheer force of mental detachment must be held away

where it could be looked at and known for the vile thing it was. In such

ordeals, in Flanders, he got the habit of saying to himself between his

teeth, "Six minutes, six hours, six days, six months, six years. Where

the hell will I be?" It somehow helped. The six minutes would go, and

one could believe that all the periods would go,--and wonder where they

would find one.

But more than that: now, caught up in the enormous machinery of the war,

he never could accept it, as other men seemed to accept it, as normal

and natural occupation that might be expected to go on for ever and

outside of which was nothing at all. His life was not here; it was at

home. He got the feeling that this business in which he was caught up

was a business apart altogether from his own individual life,--a kind of

trance in which his own life was held temporarily in abeyance, a kind of

transmigration in which he occupied another and a very strange identity:

from whose most strange personality, often so amazingly occupied, he

looked wonderingly upon the identity that was his own, waiting his

return.

And it was when, in thought or fleeting action, he came in touch with

that old, waiting identity, that there happened the things that seemed

transient as falling stars but moved into his horoscope as planets,--and

remained.

II

He first went to France, in one of the long string of Service battalions

that had sprung out of the Pinks, in the June following his enlistment.

Mabel had not wished to make any change in her manner of life while he

was still in England in training and she did not wish to when, at home

three days on his draft leave, he discussed it with her. She much

preferred, she said, to go on living in her own home. She was altogether

against any idea of going to be with her father at Tidborough, and there

was no cousin "or anybody like that" (her two sisters were married and

had homes of their own) that she would care to have in the house with

her. Relations were all very well in their right place but sharing the

house with you was not their right place. She had plenty to do with her

war work and one thing and another; if, in the matter of obviating

loneliness, she did make any change at all, it might be to get some sort

of paid companion: if you had any one permanently in the house it was

much better to have some one in a dependent position, not as your equal,

upsetting things.

The whole of these considerations were advanced again in a letter which

Sabre received in July and which gave him great pleasure. Mabel had

decided to get a paid companion--it was rather lonely in some ways--and

she had arranged to have "that girl, Miss Bright." Sabre, reading,

exclaimed aloud, "By Jove, that's good. I am glad." And he thought,

"Jolly little Effie! That's splendid." He somehow liked immensely the

idea of imagining Bright Effie about the house. He thought, "I wish she

could have been in long ago, when I was there. It would have made a

difference. Some one between us. We used to work on one another's

nerves. That was our trouble. Pretty little Effie! How jolly it would

have been! Like a jolly little sister."

He puckered his brows a little as he read on to Mabel's further

reflections on the new enterprise: "Of course she's not our class but

she's quite ladylike and on the whole I think it just as well not to

have a lady. It might be very difficult sometimes to give orders to any

one of one's own standing."

He didn't quite like that; but after all it was only just Mabel's way of

looking at things. It was the jolliest possible idea. He wrote back

enthusiastically about it and always after Effie was installed inquired

after her in his letters.

But Mabel did not reply to these inquiries.

III

He was writing regularly to Nona and regularly hearing from her. He

never could quite make out where she was, addressing her only to her

symbol in the Field post-office. She was car driving and working very

long hours. There was one letter that he never posted but of the

existence of which he permitted himself to tell her. "I carry it about

with me always in my Pay-book. It is addressed to you. If ever I get

outed it will go to you. In it I have said everything that I have never

said to you but that you know without my saying it. There'll be no harm

in your hearing it from my own hand if I'm dead. I keep on adding to it.

Every time we come back into rest, I add a little more. It all could be

said in the three words we have never said to one another. But all the

words that I could ever write would never say them to you as I feel

them. There! I must say no more of it. I ought not to have said so

much."

And she wrote, "Marko, I can read your letter, every line of it. I lie

awake, Marko, and imagine it to myself--word by word, line by line; and

word by word, line by line, in the same words and in the same lines, I

answer it. So when you read it to yourself for me, read it for yourself

from me. Oh, Marko--

"That I ever shall have cause to read it in actual fact I pray God never

to permit. But so many women are praying for so many men, and daily--.

So I am praying beyond that: for myself; for strength, if anything

should happen to you, to turn my heart to God. You see, then I can say,

'God keep you--in any amazement.'"

IV

Early in December he wrote to Mabel:

"A most extraordinary thing has happened. I'm coming home! I shall be

with you almost on top of this. It's too astonishing. I've suddenly been

told that I'm one of five men in the battalion who have been selected to

go home to an Officer Cadet battalion for a commission. Don't jump to

the conclusion that I'm the Pride of the Regiment or anything like

that. It's simply due to two things: one that this is not the kind of

battalion with many men who would think of taking commissions; the other

that both my platoon officer and the captain of my company happen to be

Old Tidburians and, as I've told you, have often been rather decent to

me. So when this chance came along the rest was easy. I know you'll be

glad. You've never liked the idea of my being in the ranks. But it's

rather wonderful, isn't it? I hope to be home on the third and I go to

the Cadet battalion, at Cambridge, on the fifth."

Two days later he started, very high of spirit, for England. As he was

leaving the village where the battalion was resting--his immediate

programme the adventure of "lorry-jumping" to the railhead--the mail

came in and brought him a letter from Mabel. It had crossed his own and

a paragraph in it somehow damped the tide of his spirits.

"I was very much annoyed with Miss Bright yesterday. I had been kept

rather late at our Red Cross Supply Depot owing to an urgent call for

accessories and when I came home I found that Miss Bright had actually

taken what I consider the great liberty of ordering up tea without

waiting for me. I considered it great presumption on her part and told

her so. I find her taking liberties in many ways. It's always the way

with that class,--once you treat them kindly they turn on you. However,

I have, I think, made it quite clear to her that she is not here for the

purpose of giving her own orders and being treated like a princess."

It clouded his excitement. His thought was, "Damn it, I hope she isn't

bullying Effie."

He had the luck almost at once to jump a lorry that would lift him a

long bit on his road, and the driver felicitated him with envious

cheerfulness on being off for "leaf." He would have responded with

immense heartiness before reading that letter. With Mabel's tart

sentences in his mind a certain gloom, a rather vexed gloom, bestrode

him. Her words presented her aspect and her attitude and her atmosphere

with a reminiscent flavour that took the edge off his eagerness for

home. On the road when the lorry had dropped him, on the interminable

journey in the train, on the boat, the feeling remained with him.

England--England!--merged into view across the water, and he was

astonished, as his heart bounded for joy at Folkestone coming into

sight, to realise from what depression of mind it bounded away. He was

ashamed of himself and perturbed with himself that he had not more

relished the journey: the journey that was the most glorious thing in

the dreams of every man in France. He thought, "Well, what am I coming

home to?"

The train went speeding through the English fields,--dear, familiar,

English lands, sodden and bare and unspeakably exquisite to him in their

December mood. He gazed upon them, flooding all his heart out to them.

He thought, "Why should there be anything to make me feel depressed? Why

should things be the same as they used to be? But dash that letter....

Dash it, I hope she's not been bullying that girl."

V

He made rather a boisterous entry into the house on his arrival,

arriving in the morning before breakfast. He entered the hall just after

eight o'clock and announced himself with a loud, "Hullo, everybody!" and

thumped the butt of his rifle on the floor. An enormous crash in the

kitchen and a shriek of "It's the master!" heralded the tumultuous

discharge upon him of High Jinks and Low Jinks. Effie appeared from the

dining room. He was surrounded and enthusiastically shaking hands.

"Hullo, you Jinkses! Isn't this ripping? By Jove, High--and Low--it's

famous to see you again. Hullo, Effie! Just fancy you being here! How

jolly fine, eh? High Jinks, I want the most enormous breakfast you've

ever cooked. Got any kippers? Good girl. That's the stuff to give the

troops. Where's the Mistress? Not down yet? I'll go up. Low Jinks--Low

Jinks, I'm dashed if you aren't crying! Well, it is jolly nice to see

you again, Low. How's the old bike? Look here, Low, I want the most

boiling bath--"

He broke off. "Hullo, Mabel! Hullo! Did you get my letter? I'm coming

up."

Mabel was in a wrapper at the head of the stairs. He ran up. "I'm simply

filthy. Do you mind?" He took her hand.

She said, "I never dreamt you'd be here at this hour. How are you, Mark?

Yes, I got your letter. But I never expected you till this evening. It's

very annoying that nothing is ready for you. Sarah, something is burning

in the kitchen. I shouldn't stand there, Rebecca, with so much to be

done; and I think you've forgotten your cap. Miss Bright,--oh, she's

gone."

Just the same Mabel! But he wasn't going to let her be the same! He had

made up his mind to that as he had come along with eager strides from

the station. She turned to him and they exchanged their greetings and he

went on, pursuing his resolution, "Look here, I've got a tremendous

idea. When I get through this cadet business I shall have quite a bit of

leave _and_ my Sam Browne belt. I thought we'd go up to town and stick

up at an hotel--the Savoy or somewhere--and have no end of a bust.

Theatres and all the rest of it. Shall we?"

That chilly, vexed manner of hers, caused as he well knew by the uproar

of his arrival, disappeared. "Oh, I'd love to. Yes, do let's. Now you

want a bath, don't you? I'm annoyed there was all that disturbance just

when I was meeting you. I've been having a little trouble lately--"

"Oh, well, never mind that now, Mabel. Come and watch me struggle out of

this pack. Yes, look here, as soon as ever I know for certain when the

course ends we'll write for rooms at the Savoy. I hear you have to do it

weeks ahead. We'll spend pots of money and have no end of a time."

She reflected his good spirits. Ripping! He splashed and wallowed in the

bath, singing lustily one of the songs out there:

"Ho, ho, ho, it's a lovely war!"

VI

But the three days at home were not to go on this singing note. They

were marred by the discovery that his suspicion was well founded; she

_was_ bullying Effie. He began to notice it at once. Effie, with whom he

had anticipated a lot of fun, was different: not nearly so bright;

subdued; her eyes, not always, but only by occasional flashes, sparkling

that intense appreciation of the oddities of life that had so much

attracted him in her. Yes, dash it, Mabel was treating her in a rotten

way. Bullying. No, it was not exactly bullying, it was snubbing, a

certain acid quality always present in Mabel's voice when she addressed

her,--that and a manner of always being what he thought of as "at her."

The girl seemed to have an astonishing number of quite trivial duties to

perform--trivial; there certainly was no suggestion of her being imposed

upon as he had always felt Miss Bypass up at the vicarage was imposed

upon, but Mabel was perpetually and acidly "at her" over one trivial

thing or another. It was forever, "Miss Bright, I think you ought to be

in the morning room, oughtn't you?" "Miss Bright, I really must ask you

not to leave your door open every time you come out of your room. You

know how I dislike the doors standing open." "Miss Bright, if you've

finished your tea, there's really no need for you to remain."

He hated it. He said nothing, but it was often on the tip of his tongue

to say something, and he showed that he intensely disliked it, and he

knew that Mabel knew he disliked it. On the whole it was rather a relief

when the three days were up and he went down to the Cadet battalion at

Cambridge.

In March he came back, a second lieutenant; and immediately, when in

time to come he looked back, things set in train for that ultimate

encounter with life which was awaiting him.

The projected visit to town did not come off. While he was at Cambridge

Mabel wrote to say that the Garden Home Amateur Dramatic Society was

going to do "His Excellency The Governor" in aid of the Red Cross funds

at the end of March. She was taking part, she was fearfully excited

about it, and as rehearsals began early in the month she naturally could

not be away. She was sure he would understand and would not mind.

He did not mind in the least. They were years past the stage when it

would have so much as crossed his mind that she might give up this

engagement for the sake of spending his leave on a bit of gaiety in

town; he had only suggested the idea on her account; personally he much

preferred the prospect of doing long walks about his beloved countryside

now passing into spring.

VII

Arriving, he began at once to do so. He went over for one visit to the

office at Tidborough. Not so much enthusiasm greeted him as to encourage

a second. Twyning and Mr. Fortune were immersed in adapting the

workshops to war work for the Government. Normal business was coming to

a standstill. Now Twyning had conceived the immense, patriotic, and

profitable idea of making aeroplane parts, and it was made sufficiently

clear to Sabre that, so long away and immediately to be off again, there

could be no interest for him in the enterprise.

"You won't want to go into all we are doing, my dear fellow," said Mr.

Fortune. "Your hard-earned leave, eh? We mustn't expect you to give it

up to business, eh, Twyning?"

And Twyning responded, "No, no, old man. Not likely, old man. Well, it's

jolly to see you in the office again"; and he looked at his watch and

said a word to Mr. Fortune about "Meeting that man" with an air which

quite clearly informed Sabre that it would be jollier still to see him

put on his cap and walk out of the office again.

Well, it was only what he had expected; a trifle pronounced, perhaps,

but the obvious sequel to their latter-day manner towards him: they had

wanted to get him out; he was out and they desired to keep him out.

He rose to go. "Oh, that's all right. I'm not going to keep you. I only

called in to show off my officer's uniform."

Twyning said, "Yes, congratulations again, old man." He laughed. "You

mustn't think you're going to have Harold saluting you though, if you

ever meet. He's getting a commission too." His manner, directly he

began to speak of Harold, changed to that enormous affection and

admiration for his son which Sabre well remembered on the occasion of

Harold joining up. His face shone, his mouth trembled with loving pride

at what Harold had been through and what he had done. And he was such a

good boy,--wrote twice a week to his mother and once when he was sick in

hospital the Padre of his battalion had written to say what a good and

sterling boy he was. Yes, he had been recommended for a commission and

was coming home that month to a Cadet battalion at Bournemouth.

When Sabre made his congratulations Twyning accompanied him downstairs

to the street and warmly shook his hand. "Thanks, old man; thanks most

awfully. Yes, he's everything to me, my Harold. And of course it's a

strain never knowing.... Well, well, he's in God's hands; and he's such

a good, earnest boy."

Extraordinarily different Twyning the father of Harold, and Twyning in

daily relations.

VIII

His leave drew on. He might get his orders any day now. Mabel was much

occupied with her rehearsals. He spent his time in long walks alone and,

whenever they were possible, in the old evenings with Mr. Fargus. In

Mabel's absence he and Effie were much thrown together. Mabel frequently

came upon them thus together, and when she did she had a mannerism that

somehow seemed to suggest "catching" them together. And sometimes she

used that expression. It would have been uncommonly jolly to have had

Bright Effie as companion on the walks, and once or twice he did. But

Mabel showed very clearly that this was very far from having her

approval and on the second occasion said so. There was the slightest

possible little tiff about it; and thenceforward--the subject having

been opened--there were frequent little passages over Effie, arising

always out of his doing what Mabel called "forever sticking up for her."

How frequent they were, and how much they annoyed Mabel, he did not

realise until, in the last week of his leave, and in the midst of a

sticking up for her scene, Mabel surprisingly announced, "Well, anyway

I'm sick and tired of the girl, and I'm sick and tired of having you

always sticking up for her, and I'm going to get rid of her--to-morrow."

He said, "To-morrow? How can you? I don't say it's not the best thing to

do. She's pretty miserable, I should imagine, the way you're always

picking at her, but you can't rush her off like that, Mabel."

"Well, I'm going to. I'm going to pay her up and let her go."

"But, Mabel--what will her people think?"

"I'm sure I don't care what they think. If you're so concerned about the

precious girl, I'll tell her mother that I was going to make other

arrangements in any case and that as this was your last week we thought

we'd like to be alone together. Will that satisfy you?"

"I hope it will satisfy them. And I hope very much indeed that you won't

do it."

IX

But she did do it. On the following day Effie left. Sabre, pretending to

know nothing about it, went for a long walk all day. When he returned

Effie had gone. He said nothing. Her name was not again mentioned

between him and Mabel. It happened that the only reference to her sudden

departure in which he was concerned was with Twyning.

Setting out on his return to France--his orders were to join a Fusilier

battalion, reporting to 34th Division--he found Twyning on the platform

at Tidborough station buying a paper.

"Hullo, old man," said Twyning. "Just off? I say, old man, old Bright's

very upset about Effie getting the sack from your place like that. How

was it?"

He felt himself flush. Beastly, having to defend Mabel's unfairness like

this. "Oh, I fancy my wife had the idea of getting some relation to live

with her, that's all."

Twyning was looking keenly at him. "Oh, I see. But a bit sudden, wasn't

it? I mean to say, I thought you were on such friendly terms with the

girl. Why, only a couple of days before she left I saw you with her

having tea in the Cloister tea rooms. I don't think you saw me, did you,

old man?"

"No, I didn't. Yes, I remember; we were waiting for my wife. There'd

been a dress rehearsal of this play down at the Corn Exchange."

"Oh, yes, waiting for your wife, were you?" Twyning appeared to be

thinking. "Well, that's what I mean, old man. So friendly with the

girl--both of you--and then sending her off so suddenly like that."

Sabre essayed to laugh it off. "My wife's rather a sudden person, you

know."

Twyning joined very heartily in the laugh. "Is she?" He looked around.

"She's seeing you off, I suppose?"

"No, she's not. She's not too well. Got a rotten cold."

Twyning stared again in what struck Sabre as rather an odd way. "Oh, I'm

sorry, old man. Nothing much, I hope. Well, you'll want to be getting

in. I'll tell old Bright what you say about Effie. Nothing in it. I

quite understand. Seemed a bit funny at first, that's all. Good-by, old

man. Jolly good luck. Take care of yourself. Jolly good luck."

He put out his hand and squeezed Sabre's in his intensely friendly grip;

and destiny put out its hand and added another and a vital hour to

Sabre's ultimate encounter with life.

X

His leave ended with the one thing utterly unexpected and flagrantly

impossible. One of those meetings so astounding in the fact that the

deviation of a single minute, of half a minute, of what one has been

doing previously would have prevented it; and out of it one of those

frightful things that ought to come with premonition, by hints, by

stages, but that come careering headlong as though malignity, bitter and

wanton, had loosed a savage bolt.

He arranged to spend the night at the Officers' Rest House near Victoria

station. Arriving about nine and disinclined for food, he strolled up to

St. James's Park and walked about a little, then back to the station and

into the yard to buy a paper. He stood on a street refuge to let by a

cab coming out of the station. As it passed he saw its occupants--two

women; and one saw him--Nona! Of all incredible things, Nona!

She stopped the cab and he hurried after it.

"Nona!"

"Marko!"

She said, "I'm hurrying to Euston to catch a train. Tony's mother is

with me."

He could not see her well in the dim light, but he thought she looked

terribly pale and fatigued. And her manner odd. He said, "I'm just going

back. But you, Nona? I thought you were in France?"

"I was--this morning. I only came over to-day."

How funny her voice was. "Nona, you look ill. You sound ill. What's up?

Is anything wrong?"

She said, "Oh, Marko, Tony's killed."

"Nona!"

... That came careering headlong, as though malignity, bitter and wanton,

had loosed a savage bolt.

Tybar killed! The cab was away and he was standing there. Tybar killed.

She had said they were hurrying to Scotland, to Tony's home. Tybar

killed! He was getting in people's way. He went rather uncertainly to

the railings bounding the pavement where he stood, and leaned against

them and stared across into the dim cavern of the station yard. Tybar

dead....[2]

[Footnote 2: At a much later date Nona told Sabre of Tony's death:

"It was in that advance of ours. Just before Vimy Ridge. At Arras.

Marko, he was shot down leading his men. He wouldn't let them take him

away. Re was cheering them on. And then he was hit again. He was

terribly wounded. Oh, terribly. They got him down to the clearing

station. They didn't think he could possibly live. But you know how

wonderful he always was. Even in death that extraordinary spirit of

his.... They got him to Boulogne. I was there and I heard quite by

chance."

"You saw him, Nona?"

She nodded. "Just before he died. He couldn't speak. But he'd been

speaking just before I came. He left a message with the nurse."

She drew a long breath. "Marko, the nurse gave me the message. She

thought it was for me--and it wasn't."

She wiped her eyes. "He was watching us. I know he knew she was telling

me, and his eyes--you know that mocking kind of look they used to have?

Poor Tony! It was there. He died like that.... Marko, you know I'm very

glad he just had his old mocking way while he died. Now it's over I'm

glad. I wouldn't have had him sorry and unhappy just when he was dying.

He was just utterly untouched by anything all his life, not to be judged

as ordinary people are judged, and I know perfectly well he'd have

wished to go out just his mocking, careless self to the last. He was

utterly splendid. All that was between us, that was nothing once the war

came. Always think kindly of him, Marko."

Sabre said, "I do. I've never been able but to admire him." She said,

"Every one did Poor Tony. Brave Tony!"]

XI

On the following morning he crossed to France, there to take up again

that strange identity in whose occupancy his own self was held in

abeyance, waiting his return. Seven months passed before he returned to

that waiting identity and he resumed it then permanently,--done with the

war. The tremendous fighting of 1917--his participation in the war--his

tenancy of the strange personality caught up in the enormous machinery

of it all--ended for him in the great break through of the Hindenburg

Line in November. On top of a recollection of sudden shock, then of

whirling giddiness in which he was conscious of some enormous violence

going on but could not feel it--like (as he afterwards thought)

beginning to come to in the middle of a tooth extraction under gas--on

the top of these and of extraordinary things and scenes and people he

could not at all understand came some one saying:

"Well, it's good-by to the war for you, old man."

He knew that he was aware--and somehow for some time had been

aware--that he was in a cot in a ship. He said, "I got knocked out,

didn't I?"

... Some one was telling him some interminable story about some one being

wounded in the shoulder and in the knee. He said, and his voice appeared

to him to be all jumbled up and thick, "Well, I don't care a damn."

... Some one laughed.

Years--or minutes--after this he was talking to a nurse. He said, "What

did some one say to me about it being good-by to the war for me?"

The nurse smiled. "Well, poor thing, you've got it rather badly in the

knee, you know."

He puzzled over this. Presently he said, "Where are we?"

The nurse bent across the cot and peered through the port; then beamed

down on him:

"England!"

She said, "Aren't you glad? _What's_ the matter?"

His face was contracted in intensity of thought, extraordinary thought:

he felt the most extraordinary premonition of something disastrous

awaiting him: there was in his mind, meaninglessly, menacingly, over and

over again, "Good luck have thee with thine honour ... and thy right

hand shall show thee terrible things...."

"Terrible things!"

PART FOUR

MABEL--EFFIE--NONA

CHAPTER I

I

Said Hapgood--that garrulous Hapgood, solicitor, who first in this book

spoke of Sabre to a mutual friend--said Hapgood, seated in the

comfortable study of his fiat, to that same friend, staying the night:

"Well, now, old man, about Sabre. Well, I tell you it's a funny

business--a dashed funny business, the position old Puzzlehead Sabre has

got himself into. Of course you, with your coarse and sordid instincts,

will say it's just what it appears to be and a very old story at that.

Whereas to me, with my exquisitely delicate susceptibilities.... No,

don't throw that, old man. Sorry. I'll be serious. What I want just to

kick off with is that you know as well as I do that I've never been the

sort of chap who wept he knows not why; I've never nursed a tame gazelle

or any of that sort of stuff. In fact I've got about as much sentiment

in me as there is in a pound of lard. But when I see this poor beggar

Sabre as he is now, and when I hear him talk as he talked to me about

his position last week, and when I see how grey and ill he looks,

hobbling about on his old stick, well, I tell you, old man, I get--well,

look here, here it is from the Let Go.

"Look here, this is April, April, 1918, by all that's Hunnish--dashed

nearly four years of this infernal war. Well, old Sabre got knocked out

in France just about five months ago, back in November. He copped it

twice--shoulder and knee. Shoulder nothing much; knee pretty bad.

Thought they'd have to take his leg off, one time. Thought better of it,

thanks be; patched him up; discharged him from the Army; and sent him

home--very groggy, only just able to put the bad leg to the ground,

crutches, and going to be a stick and a bit of a limp all his life. Poor

old Puzzlehead. Think yourself lucky you were a Conscientious Objector,

old man.... Oh, damn you, that hurt.

"Very well. That's as he was when I first saw him again. Just making

first attempts in the stick and limp stage, poor beggar. That was back

in February. Early in February. Mark the date, as they say in the

detective stories. I can't remember what the date was, but never you

mind. You just mark it. Early in February, two months ago. There was

good old me down in Tidborough on business--good old me doing the heavy

London solicitor in a provincial town--they always put down a red carpet

for me at the station, you know; rather decent, don't you think?--and

remembering about old Sabre having been wounded and discharged, blew

into Fortune, East and Sabre's (business wasn't with them this time) for

news of him.

"Of course he wasn't there. Saw old Fortune and the man Twyning and

found them in regard to Sabre about as genial and communicative as a

maiden aunt over a married sister's new dress. Old Fortune looking like

a walking pulpit in a thundercloud--I should say he'd make about four of

me round the equator; and mind you, a chap stopped me in the street the

other day and offered me a job as Beefeater outside a moving-picture

show: yes, fact, I was wretchedly annoyed about it--and the man Twyning

with a lean and hungry look like Cassius, or was it Judas Iscariot?

Well, like Cassius out of a job or Judas Iscariot in the middle of one,

anyway. That's Twyning's sort. Chap I never cottoned on to a bit.

They'd precious little to say about Sabre. Sort of handed out the

impression that he'd been out of the business so long that really they

weren't much in touch with his doings. Rather rotten, I thought it,

seeing that the poor beggar had done his bit in the war and done it

pretty thoroughly too. They said that really they hardly knew when he'd

be fit to get back to work again; not just yet awhile, anyway. And, yes,

he was at home over at Penny Green, so far as they knew,--in the kind of

tone that they didn't know much and cared less: at least, that was the

impression they gave me; only my fancy, I daresay, as the girl said when

she thought the soldier sat a bit too close to her in the tram.

"Well, I'd nothing to do till my train pulled out in the afternoon, so I

hopped it over to Penny Green Garden Home on the railway and walked down

to old Sabre's to scoop a free lunch off him. Found him a bit down the

road from his house trying out this game leg of his. By Jove, he was no

end bucked to see me. Came bounding along, dot and carry one, beaming

all over his old phiz, and wrung my honest hand as if he was Robinson

Crusoe discovering Man Friday on a desert island. I know I'm called

Popular Percy by thousands who can only admire me from afar, but I tell

you old Sabre fairly overwhelmed me. And talk! He simply jabbered. I

said, 'By Jove, Sabre, one would think you hadn't met any one for a

month the way you're unbelting the sacred rites of welcome.' He laughed

and said, 'Well, you see, I'm a bit tied to a post with this leg of

mine.'

"'How's the wife?' said I.

"'She's fine,' said he. 'You'll stay to lunch? I say, Hapgood, you will

stay to lunch, won't you?'

"I told him that's what I'd come for; and he seemed no end relieved,--so

relieved that I think I must have cocked my eye at him or something,

because he said in an apologetic sort of way, 'I mean, because my wife

will be delighted. It's a bit dull for her nowadays, only me and always

me, crawling about more or less helpless.'

"It struck me afterwards--oh, well, never mind that now. I said, 'I

suppose she's making no end of a fuss over you now, hero of the war, and

all that sort of thing?'

"'Oh, rather!' says old Sabre, and a minute or two later, as if he

hadn't said it heartily enough, 'Oh, rather. Rather, I should think

so.'"

II

"Well, we staggered along into the house, old Sabre talking away like a

soda-water bottle just uncorked, and he took me into a room on the

ground floor where they'd put up a bed for him, him not being able to do

the stairs, of course. 'This is my--my den,' he introduced it, 'where I

sit about and read and try to do a bit of work.'

"There didn't look to be much signs of either that I could see, and I

said so. And old Sabre, who'd been hobbling about the room in a rather

uncomfortable sort of way, exclaimed suddenly, 'I say, Hapgood, it's

absolutely ripping having you here talking like this. I never can settle

down properly in this room, and I've got a jolly place upstairs where

all my books and things are.'

"'Let's go up then,' I said.

"'I can't get up.'

"'Well, man alive, I can get you up. Come on. Let's go.'

"He seemed to hesitate for some reason I couldn't understand. 'It's got

to be in a chair,' he said. 'It's a business. I wonder--' That kind of

thing, as though it was something he oughtn't to do. 'But it would be

fine,' he said. 'I've not been up for days. I could show you some of my

history I'm going to take up again one of these days--one of these

days,' said he, with his nut rather wrinkled up. And then suddenly,

'Come on, let's go!'

"At the door he called out, 'I say, you Jinkses!' and two servant girls

came tumbling out rather as if they were falling out of a trap and each

trying to fall out first. 'I say,' old Sabre says, 'Mistress not back

yet, is she?' and when they told him No, 'Well', d'you think you'd like

to get me upstairs on that infernal chair?' he says.

"'Oh, we _will_, sir,' and they got out one of those invalid chairs and

started to lift him up. Course I wanted to take one end, but they

wouldn't hear of it. 'If you please, we like carrying the master, sir,'

and all that kind of thing; and they fussed him in and fiddled with his

legs, snapping at one another for being rough as if they were the two

women taking their disputed baby up to old Solomon.

"They'd scarcely got on to the stairs when the front door opened and in

walks his wife. My word, I thought they were going to drop him. She says

in a voice as though she was biting a chip off an ice block, 'Mark, is

it _really_ necessary--' Then she saw me and took her teeth out of the

ice. 'Oh, it's Mr. Hapgood, isn't it? How very nice! Staying to lunch,

of course? Do let's come into the drawing-room.' Very nice and affable.

I always rather liked her. And we went along, I being rather captured

and doing the polite in my well-known matinée idol manner, you

understand; and I heard old Sabre saying, 'Well, let me out of the

damned thing, can't you? Help me out of the damn thing'; and presently

hobbled in and joined us, and soon after that lunch, exquisitely cooked

and served and all very nice, too.

"Well, as I say, old man, I always rather liked his wife.

I--always--rather--liked--her. But somehow, as we went on through lunch,

and then on after that, I didn't like her quite so much.

Not--quite--so--much. I don't know. Have you ever seen a woman unpicking

a bit of sewing? Always looks rather angry with it, I suppose because

it's got to be unpicked. They sort of flip the threads out, as much as

to say, '_Come_ out of it, drat you. _That's_ you, drat you.' Well, that

was the way she spoke to old Sabre. Sort of snipped off the end of what

he was saying and left it hanging, if you follow me. That was the way

she spoke to him when she did speak to him. But for the most part they

hardly spoke to one another at all. I talked to her, or I talked to him,

but the conversation never got triangular. Whenever it threatened to,

_snip!_ she'd have his corner off and leave him floating. Tell you what

it was, old man, I jolly soon saw that the reason old Sabre was so jolly

anxious for me to stay to lunch was because meals without dear old me or

some other chatty intellectual were about as much like a feast of reason

and a flow of soul as a vinegar bottle and a lukewarm potato on a cold

plate. Similarly with the exuberance of his greeting of me. I hate to

confess it, but it wasn't so much splendid old me he had been so

delighted to see as any old body to whom he could unloose his tongue

without having the end of his nose snipped off.

"Mind you, I don't mean that he was cowed and afraid to open his mouth

in his wife's presence. Nothing a bit like that. What I got out of it

was that he was starved, intellectually starved, mentally starved,

starved of the good old milk of human kindness--_that's_ what I mean.

Everything he put up he threw down, not because she wanted to snub him,

but because she either couldn't or wouldn't take the faintest interest

in anything that interested him. Course, she may have had jolly good

reason. I daresay she had. Still, there it was, and it seemed rather

rotten to me. I didn't like it. Damn it, the chap only had one decent

leg under the table and an uncommonly tired-looking face above it, and I

felt rather sorry for him."

III

"After lunch I said, 'Well, now, old man, what about going up to this

room of yours and having a look at this monumental history?' Saw him

shoot a glance in his wife's direction, and he said, 'Oh, no, not now,

Hapgood. Never mind now.' And his wife said, 'Mark, what _can_ there be

for Mr. Hapgood to see up there? It's too ridiculous. I'm sure he

doesn't want to be looking at lesson books.'

"I said, 'Oh, but I'd like to. In fact, I insist. None of your backing

out at the last minute, Sabre. I know your little games.'

"Sort of carried it off like that, d'you see; knowing perfectly well

the old chap was keen on going up, and seeing perfectly clearly that for

some extraordinary reason his wife stopped him going up.

"By Jove, he was pleased, I could see he was. We got in the maids and

upped him, to a room he used to sleep in, I gathered, and up there he

hobbled about, taking out this book and dusting up that book, and

fiddling over his table, and looking out of the window, for all the

world like an evicted emigrant restored to the home of his fathers.

"He said, 'Forgive me, old man, just a few minutes; you know I haven't

been up here for over three weeks.'

"I said, 'Why the devil haven't you, then?'

"'Oh, well,' says he. 'Oh, well, it makes a business in the house, you

know, heaving me up.'

"Well, that didn't cut any ice, you know, seeing that I'd seen the

servants rush to the job as if they were going to a school treat. It was

perfectly clear to me that the reason he was kept out of the room was

because his wife didn't want him being lugged up there; and for all I

knew never had liked him being there and now was able to stop it.

"However, his wife was his funeral, not mine, and I said nothing and

presently he settled himself down and we began talking. At least he did.

He's got some ideas, old Sabre has. He didn't talk about the war. He

talked a lot about the effect of the war, on people and on institutions,

and that sort of guff. Devilish deep, devilishly interesting. I won't

push it on to you. You're one of those soulless, earth-clogged natures.

"Tell you one thing, though, just to give you an idea of the way he's

been developing all these years. He talked about how sickened he was

with all this stuff in the papers and in the pulpits about how the

nation, in this war, is passing through the purging fires of salvation

and is going to emerge with higher, nobler, purer ideals, and all that.

He said not so. He quoted a thing at me out of one of his books.

Something about (as well as I can remember it) something about how

'Those waves of enthusiasm on whose crumbling crests we sometimes see

nations lifted for a gleaming moment are wont to have a gloomy trough

before and behind.' And he said:

"'That's what it is with us, Hapgood. We've been high on those crests in

this war and already they're crumbling. When the peace comes, you look

out for the glide down into the trough. They talk about the nation,

under this calamity, turning back to the old faiths, to the old simple

beliefs, to the old earnest ways, to the old God of their fathers. Man,'

he said, 'what can you see already? Temples everywhere to a new

God--Greed--Profit--Extortion. All out for it. All out for it,' I

remember him saying, 'all out to get the most and do the least.'

"He got up and hobbled about, excited, flushed, and talked like a man

who uses his headpiece for thinking. 'Where's that making to, Hapgood?'

he asked. 'I'll tell you,' he said. 'You'll get the people finding

there's a limit to the high prices they can demand for their labour:

apparently none to those the employers can go on piling up for their

profits. You'll get growing hatred by the middle classes with fixed

incomes of the labouring classes whose prices for their labour they'll

see--and feel--going up and up; and you'll get the same growing hatred

by the labouring classes for the capitalists. We've been nearly four

years on the crest, Hapgood,--on the crest of the war--and it's been all

classes as one class for the common good. I tell you, Hapgood, the

trough's ahead; we're steering for it; and it's rapid and perilous

sundering of the classes.

"'The new God,' old Sabre said. 'High prices, high prices: the highest

that can be squeezed. Temples to it everywhere. Ay, and sacrifices,

Hapgood. Immolations. Offering up of victims. No thought of those who

cannot pay the prices. Pay the prices, or get them, or go under. That's

the new God's creed.'

"I said to him, 'What's the remedy, Sabre?'

"He said to me, 'Hapgood, the remedy's the old remedy. The old God. But

it's more than that. It's Light: more light. The old revelation was good

for the old world, and suited to the old world, and told in terms of the

old world's understanding. Mystical for ages steeped in the mystical;

poetic for minds receptive of nothing beyond story and allegory and

parable. We want a new revelation in terms of the new world's

understanding. We want light, light! Do you suppose a man who lives on

meat is going to find sustenance in bread and milk? Do you suppose an

age that knows wireless and can fly is going to find spiritual

sustenance in the food of an age that thought thunder was God speaking?

Man's done with it. It means nothing to him; it gives nothing to him. He

turns all that's in him to get all he wants out of this world and let

the next go rip. Man cannot live by bread alone, the churches tell him;

but he says, "I _am_ living on bread alone, and doing well on it." But I

tell you, Hapgood, that plumb down in the crypt and abyss of every man's

soul is a hunger, a craving for other food than this earthy stuff. And

the churches know it; and instead of reaching down to him what he

wants--light, light--instead of that, they invite him to dancing and

picture shows, and you're a jolly good fellow, and religion's a jolly

fine thing and no spoilsport, and all that sort of latter-day tendency.

Damn it, he can get all that outside the churches and get it better.

Light, light! He wants light, Hapgood. And the padres come down and

drink beer with him, and watch boxing matches with him, and sing

music-hall songs with him, and dance Jazz with him, and call it making

religion a Living Thing in the Lives of the People. Lift the hearts of

the people to God, they say, by showing them that religion is not

incompatible with having a jolly fine time. _And there's no God there

that a man can understand for him to be lifted up to._ Hapgood, a man

wouldn't care _what_ he had to give up if he knew he was making for

something inestimably precious. But he doesn't know. Light,

light--that's what he wants; and the longer it's withheld the lower

he'll sink. Light! Light!'"

IV

"Well, I make no extra charge for that (said Hapgood, and helped himself

to a drink). That's not me. That's Sabre. And if you'd seen him as I saw

him, and if you'd heard him as I heard him, you'd have been as impressed

as I was impressed instead of lolling there like a surfeited python. I

tell you, old Sabre was all pink under his skin, and his eyes shining,

and his voice tingling. I tell you, if you were a real painter instead

of a base flatterer of bloated and wealthy sitters, and if you'd seen

him then, you'd have painted the masterpiece of your age and called it

The Visionary. I tell you, old Sabre was fine. He said he'd been

thinking all round that sort of stuff for years, and that now, for one

reason and another, it was beginning to crystallize in him and take form

and substance.

"I asked him, 'What reasons, Sabre?' and he said, 'Oh, I don't know. The

war; and being out there; and thinking about the death of an old woman I

attended once; and things I picked up from a slip of a girl; and things

from a woman I know--oh, all sorts of things, Hapgood; and I tell you

what chiefly--loneliness, my God, loneliness....'

"I didn't say anything. What could I say? When a chap suddenly rips a

cry out of his heart like that, what the devil can you say if you weigh

fourteen stone of solid contentment and look it? You can only feel you

weren't meant to hear and try to look as if you hadn't.

"Well, anyway, time came for me to go and I went. Sabre stayed where he

was. Would I mind leaving him up there? It was so seldom he got up; and

talking with me had brought back old feelings he thought he'd never

recapture again, and he was going to see if he couldn't start in and do

a bit of writing again. So I pulled out and left him; and that was old

Sabre as I saw him two months ago; and one way and another I thought a

good deal coming back in the train of what I had seen. Those sort of

ideas in his head and that sort of life with his wife. D'you remember

my telling you years--oh, years ago--that he looked like a chap who'd

lost something and was wondering where he'd put it? Well, the Sabre I

left down there two months ago had not only lost it, but knew it was

gone for good and all. That was Sabre--except when the pink got under

his skin when he got talking.

"All right. All right. Now that's just the prologue. That's just what

you're supposed to know before the Curtain goes up. Now, am I going on

to the drama or are we going to bed.... The drama? Right. You're a lewd

fellow of the baser sort, but you occasionally have wise instincts.

Right. The drama."

CHAPTER II

I

Continued Hapgood:

"All right. That was two months ago. Last week I was down at Tidborough

again. Felt I'd got rather friendly with old Sabre on my last visit so

as soon as I could toddled off to the office to look him up. Felt quite

sure he'd be back there again by now. But he wasn't. He wasn't, and when

I began inquiring for him found there seemed to be some rummy mystery

about his absence. Like this. Some sort of a clerk was in the shop as I

went in. 'Mr. Sabre upstairs, eh?' I asked. 'No. No, Mr. Sabre's

not--not here,' says my gentleman, with rather an odd look at me.

"'What, not still laid up, is he?'

"The chap gave me a decidedly odd look. 'Mr. Sabre's not attending the

office at present, sir.'

"'Not attending the office? Not ill, is he?'

"'No, not ill, I think, sir. Not attending the office. Perhaps you'd

like to see one of the partners?'

"I looked at him. He looked at me. What the devil did he mean? Just then

I caught sight of an old bird I knew slightly coming down the stairs

with a book under his arm. Old chap called Bright. Sort of foreman or

something. Looked rather like Moses coming down the mountain with the

Tables of Stone in his fist. I said in my cheery way, 'Hullo, Mr.

Bright. Good morning. I was just inquiring for Mr. Sabre.'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute the old patriarch was going to heave

the tables of stone at my head. He caught up the book in both his hands

and gave a sort of choke and blazed at me out of his eyes--by gad, I

might have been poor old Aaron caught jazzing round the golden calf.

"'Let me tell you, sir, this is no place to inquire after Mr. Sabre,'

said he. 'Let me tell you--'

"Well, I'd ha' let him tell me any old thing. That was what I was there

for. But he shut himself up with a kind of gasp and cannoned himself

into his tabernacle under the stairs and left me there, wondering if I

was where I thought I was, or had got into a moving-picture show by

mistake. The clerk had fallen through the floor or something. I was

alone. Friendless. Nobody wanted me. I thought to myself, 'Percival, old

man, you're on the unpopular side of the argument. You're nonsuited, old

man.' And I thought I wouldn't take any more chances in this Biblical

film, not with old father Abraham Fortune or Friend Judas Iscariot

Twyning; I thought I'd push out to Penny Green and see old Sabre for

myself.

"So I did. I certainly did....

"You can imagine me, old man, in my natty little blue suit, tripping up

the path of Sabre's house and guessing to myself that the mystery wasn't

a mystery at all, but only the office perhaps rather fed up with Sabre

for staying away nursing his game leg so long. By Jove, it wasn't that.

House had rather a neglected appearance, I thought. Door knob not

polished, or blinds still down somewhere or something. I don't know.

Something. And what made me conscious of it was that I was kept a long

time waiting after I'd rung the bell. In fact, I had to ring twice. Then

I heard some one coming, and you know how your mind unconsciously

expects things and so gives you quite a start when the thing isn't

there; well, I suppose I'd been expecting to see one of Sabre's two

servants, 'my couple of Jinkses' as he calls them, and 'pon my soul I

was quite startled when the door opened and it wasn't one of them at

all, but a very different pair of shoes.

"It was a young woman; ladylike, dressed just in some ordinary sort of

clothes; I don't know; uncommonly pretty, or might have been if she

hadn't looked so uncommonly sad; and--this was what knocked me carrying

a baby. 'Pon my soul, I couldn't have been more astonished if the door

had been opened by the Kaiser carrying the Crown Prince.

"I don't know why I should have imagined she was the kid's mother, but I

did. I don't know why I should have looked at her hands, but I did. I

don't know why I should have expected to see a wedding ring, but I did.

And there wasn't one.

"Well, she was saying 'Yes?' in an inquiring, timid sort of way, me

standing there like a fool, you understand, and I suddenly recovered

from my flabbergasteration and guessed the obvious thing--that the

Sabres had let their house to strangers and gone away. Still more

obvious, you might say, that Mrs. Sabre had produced a baby, and that

the girl was her sister or some one, but that never occurred to me. No,

I guessed they'd gone away, and I said, 'I was calling to see Mr. Sabre.

Has he gone away?'

"I'd thought her looking timid. She was looking at me now decidedly as

if she were frightened of me. 'No, no, Mr. Sabre's not gone away. He's

here. Are you a friend of his?'

"I smiled at her. 'Well, I used to be,' I said. She didn't smile. What

the dickens was up? 'I used to be. I always thought I was. My name's

Hapgood.'

"'Perhaps you'd better come in.'

"You know, it was perfectly extraordinary. Her voice was as sad as her

face. I stepped in. What on earth was I going to hear? Sabre dying? Wife

dying? Air-raid bomb fallen on the house and everybody dead? 'Pon my

soul, I began to feel creepy. Scalp began to prick. Then suddenly there

was old Sabre at the head of the stairs. 'What is it, Effie?' Then he

saw me. 'Hullo, Hapgood!' His voice was devilish pleased. Then he said

again, rather in a thoughtful voice, 'Hullo, Hapgood,' and he began to

come down, slowly, with his stick.

"Well, _he_ wasn't dead, anyway; that was something to go on with. I

took his hand and said, 'Hullo, Sabre. How goes it, old man? Able to do

the stairs now, I see. I was down to Tidborough and thought I'd come and

look you up again.'

"'Fine,' he said, shaking my hand. 'Jolly nice of you.' Then he said,

'Did you go to the office for me, Hapgood?'

"'Just looked in,' I said offhandedly. 'Saw a clerk who said you weren't

down to-day, so I came along up.'

"He was doing some thinking, I could see that. He said, 'Jolly good of

you. I _am_ glad. You'll stay a bit, of course.' The girl had faded

away. He went a bit along the passage and called out, 'Effie, you can

scratch up a bit of lunch for Mr. Hapgood?'

"I suppose she said Yes. 'Lunch'll be on in about two minutes,' he came

back to me with. 'You're later than when you came up last time. Come

along in here.'

"Led me into the morning room and we sat down and pretended to talk.

Very poor pretence, I give you my word. Both of us manifestly straining

to do the brisk and hearty, and the two of us producing about as much

semblance of chatty interchange as a couple of victims waiting their

turn in a dentist's parlour. The door was open and I could hear some one

moving about laying the lunch. That was all I could hear (bar Sabre's

spasmodic jerks of speech) and I don't mind telling you I was a deal

more interested in what I could hear going on outside than in anything

we could put up between us. Or rather in what I couldn't hear going on

outside. No voices, none of those sounds, none of that sort of feeling

that tells you people are about the place. No, there was some mystery

knocking about the place somewhere, and it was on the other side of the

door, and that was where my attention was.

"Presently I heard the girl's voice outside, 'Lunch is ready.'

"We jumped up like two schoolboys released from detention and went along

in. More mystery. Lunch at Sabre's place was always a beautifully

conducted rite, as I was accustomed to it. Announced by two gongs,

warning and ready, to begin with, and here we'd been shuffled in by a

girl's casual remark in the passage; and beautifully appointed and

served when you got there and here was--Well, there were places laid for

two only and a ramshackle kind of cold picnic scattered about the cloth.

Everything there, help yourself kind of show. Bit of cold meat, half a

cold tart, lump of cheese, loaf of bread, assortment of plates, and so

on.

"Sabre said, 'Oh, by the way, my wife's not here. She's away.'

"I murmured the polite thing. He was staring at the two places, frowning

a bit. 'Half a minute,' he said and hopped off on his old stick. Then I

heard him talking to this mysterious girl. At least I heard her voice

first. 'Oh, I can't! I can't!'

"Then Sabre: 'Nonsense, Effie. You must. You must. I insist. Don't be

silly.'

"Then a door slammed.

"Well, I ask you! If I didn't say to myself, 'The plot thickens,' if I

didn't say it, I can promise you I thought it. I did. And it proceeded

to curdle. The door that had slammed opened and presently in comes Sabre

with the girl. And the girl with the baby in her arms. Sabre said in his

ordinary, easy voice--he's got a particularly nice voice, has old

Sabre--'This is a very retiring young person, Hapgood. Had to be dragged

in. Miss Bright. Her father's in the office. Perhaps you've met him,

have you?'

"Well, I don't know what I said, old man. I know what I thought. I

thought just precisely what you're thinking. Yes, I had a furiously

vivid shot of a recollection of old Bright as I'd seen him a couple of

hours before, of his blazing look, of his gesture of wanting to hurl the

Tables of Stone at me, and of his extraordinary remark about Sabre,--I

had that and I did what you're doing: I put two and two together and

found the obvious answer (same as you) and I jolly near fell down dead,

I did. Jolly near.

"But Sabre was going on, pleasant and natural as you please. 'Miss

Bright was here as companion to my wife while I was in France. Now she's

staying here a bit. Put the baby on the sofa, Effie, and let's get to

work. I'd like you two to be friends. Hapgood and I were at school

together, you know, about a thousand years ago. They used to call him

Porker because he was so thin.'

"The girl smiled faintly, I put up an hysterical sort of squeak, and we

sat down. The meal wasn't precisely a banquet. We helped ourselves and

stacked up the soiled plates as we used them. No servants, d'you see?

That was pretty clear by now. No wife, no servants, no wedding ring;

nothing but old Bright's daughter and old Bright's daughter's

baby--and--and--Sabre.

"I suppose I talked. I heard my voice sometimes. The easy flow Sabre had

started with didn't last long. The girl hardly spoke. I watched her a

lot. I liked the look of her. She must have been uncommonly pretty in a

vivacious sort of way before she ran up against her trouble, whatever it

was. I say Whatever it was. I'd no real reason to suppose I knew; though

mind you, I was guessing pretty shrewdly it was lying there on the sofa

wrapped up in what d'you call 'ems--swaddling clothes. Yes, uncommonly

pretty, but now sad--sad as a young widow at the funeral, that sort of

look. It was her eyes that especially showed it. Extraordinary eyes.

Like two great pools in a shadow. If I may quote poetry, at you,

Her eyes were deeper than the depth

Of waters stilled at even.

And all the sorrow in them of all the women since Mary Magdalen. All the

time but once. Once the baby whimpered, and she got up and went to it

and stooped over it the other side of the sofa from me, so I could see

her face. By gad, if you could have seen her eyes then! Motherhood!

Lucky you weren't there, because if you've any idea of ever painting a

picture called Motherhood, you'd ha' gone straight out and cut your

throat on the mat in despair. You certainly would.

"Well, anyway, the banquet got more and more awkward to endure as it

dragged on, and mighty glad I was when at last the girl got up--without

a word--and picked up the baby and left us. Left us. We were no more

chatty for being alone, I can promise you. I absolutely could not think

of a word to say, and any infernal thing that old Sabre managed to rake

up seemed complete and done to death the minute he'd said it.

"Then all of a sudden he began. He fished out some cigarettes and

chucked me one and we smoked like a couple of exhaust valves for about

two minutes and then he said, 'Hapgood, why on earth should I have to

explain all this to you? Why _should_ I?'

"I said, a tiny bit sharply--I was getting a bit on edge, you know--I

said, 'Well, who's asked you to? I haven't asked any questions, have I?'

"Sabre said, 'No, I know you haven't asked any, and I'm infernally

grateful to you. You're the first person across this threshold in months

that hasn't. But I know you're thinking them--hard. And I know I've got

to answer them. And I want to. I want to most frightfully. But what

beats me is this infernal feeling that I _must_ explain to you, to you

and to everybody, whether I want to or not. Why should I? It's my own

house. I can do what I like in it. I'm not, anyway, doing anything

wrong. I'm doing something more right than I've ever done in my life,

and yet everybody's got the right to question me and everybody's got the

right to be answered and--Hapgood, it's the most bewildering state of

affairs that can possibly be imagined. I'm up against a code of social

conventions, and by Jove I'm absolutely down and out. I'm absolutely

tied up hand and foot and chucked away. Do you know what I am,

Hapgood--?'

"He gave a laugh. He wasn't talking a bit savagely, and he never

did talk like that all through what he told me. He was just

talking in a tone of sheer, hopeless, extremely interested

puzzlement--bafflement--amazement; just as a man might talk to you of

some absolutely baffling conjuring trick he'd seen. In fact, he used

that very expression. 'Do you know what I am, Hapgood?' and he gave a

laugh, as I've said. 'I'm what they call a social outcast. A social

outcast. Beyond the pale. Unspeakable. Ostracized. Blackballed.

Excommunicated.' He got up and began to stump about the room, hands in

his pockets, chin on his collar, wrestling with it,--and wrestling,

mind you, just in profoundly interested bafflement.

"'Unspeakable,' he said. 'Excommunicated. By Jove, it's astounding. It's

amazing. It's like a stupendous conjuring trick. I've done something

that isn't done--not something that's wrong, something that's

incontestably right. But it isn't done. People don't do it, and I've

done it and therefore hey, presto, I'm turned into a leper, a pariah, an

outlaw. Amazing, astounding!'

"Then he settled down and told me. And this is what he told me."

II

"When he was out in France this girl I'd seen--this Effie, as he called

her, Effie Bright--had come to live as companion to his wife. It appears

he more or less got her the job. He'd seen her at the office with her

father and he'd taken a tremendous fancy to her. 'A jolly kid,' that was

the expression he used, and he said he was awfully fond of her just as

he might be of a jolly little sister. He got her some other job

previously with some friends or other, and then the old lady there died

and the girl came to his place while he was away. Something like that.

Anyway, she came. She came somewhere about October, '15, and she left

early in March following, just over a year ago. His wife got fed up with

her and got rid of her--that's what Sabre says--got fed up with her and

got rid of her. And Sabre was at home at the time. Mark that, old man,

because it's important. _Sabre was at home at the time_--about three

weeks--on leave.

"Very well. The girl got the sack and he went back to France. She got

another job somewhere as companion again. He doesn't quite know where.

He thinks at Bournemouth. Anyway, that's nothing to do with it. Well,

he got wounded and discharged from the Army, as you know, and in

February he was living at home again with his wife in the conditions I

described to you when I began. He said nothing to me about the

conditions--about the terms they were on; but I've told you what I saw.

It's important because it was exactly into the situation as I then saw

it that came to pass the thing that came to pass. This:

"The very week after I'd been down there, his wife, reading a letter at

breakfast one morning, gave a kind of a snort (as I can imagine it) and

chucked the letter over to him and said, 'Ha! There's your wonderful

Miss Bright for you! What did I tell you? What do you think of that?

Ha!'

"Those were her very words and her very snorts and what they meant--what

'Your wonderful Miss Bright for you' meant--was, as he explained to me,

that when he was home on leave, with the girl in the house, they were

frequently having words about her, because he thought his wife was a bit

sharp with her, and his wife, for her part, said he was forever sticking

up for her.

"'What do you think of that? Ha!' and she chucked the letter over to

him, and from what I know of her you can imagine her sitting bolt

upright, bridling with virtuous prescience confirmed, watching him,

while he read it.

"While he read it.... Sabre said the letter was the most frightfully

pathetic document he could ever have imagined. Smudged, he said, and

stained and badly expressed as if the writer--this girl--this Effie

Bright--was crying and incoherent with distress when she wrote it. And

she no doubt was. She said she'd got into terrible trouble. She'd got a

little baby. Sabre said it was awful to him the way she kept on in every

sentence calling it 'a little baby'--never a child, or just a baby, but

always 'a little baby,' 'my little baby.' He said it was awful. She

said it was born in December--you remember, old man, it was the previous

March she'd got the sack from them--and that she'd been living in

lodgings with it, and that now she was well enough to move, and had come

to the absolute end of her money, she was being turned out and was at

her wits' end with despair and nearly out of her mind to know what to do

and all that kind of thing. She said her father wouldn't have anything

to do with her, and no one would have anything to do with her--so long

as she kept her little baby. That was her plight: no one would have

anything to do with her while she had the baby. Her father was willing

to take her home, and some kind people had offered to take her into

service, and the clergyman where she was had said there were other

places he could get her, but only, all of them, if she would give up the

baby and put it out to nurse somewhere: and she said, and underlined it

about fourteen times, Sabre said, and cried over it so you could hardly

read it, she said: 'And, oh, Mrs. Sabre, I can't, I can't, I simply can

not give up my little baby.... He's mine,' she said. 'He looks at me,

and knows me, and stretches out his tiny little hands to me, and I can't

give him up. I can't let my little baby go. Whatever I've done, I'm his

mother and he's my little baby and I can't let him go.'

"Sabre said it was awful. I can believe it was. I'd seen the girl, and

I'd seen her stooping over her baby (like I told you) and I can well

believe awful was the word for it. Poor soul.

"And then she said--I can remember this bit--then she said, 'And so, in

my terrible distress, dear Mrs. Sabre, I am throwing myself on your

mercy, and begging you, imploring you, for the love of God to take in me

and my little baby and let me work for you and do anything for you and

bless you and ask God's blessing for ever upon you and teach my little

baby to pray for you as--' something or other, I forget. And then she

said a lot of hysterical things about working her fingers to the bone

for Mrs. Sabre, and knowing she was a wicked girl and not fit to be

spoken to by any one, and was willing, to sleep in a shed in the garden

and never to open her mouth, and all that sort of thing; and all the way

through 'my little baby,' 'my little baby.' Sabre said it was awful.

Also she said,--I'm telling you just what Sabre told me, and he told me

this bit deliberately, as you might say--also she said that she didn't

want to pretend she was more sinned against than sinning, but that if

Mrs. Sabre knew the truth she might judge her less harshly and be more

willing to help her. Yes, Sabre told me that....

"All right. Well, there was the appeal, 'there was this piteous appeal',

as Sabre said, and there was Sabre profoundly touched by it, and there

was his wife bridling over it--one up against her husband who'd always

stuck up for the girl, d'you see, and about two million up in

justification of her own opinion of her. There they were; and then Sabre

said, turning the letter over in his hands, 'Well, what are you going to

do about it?'

"You can imagine his wife's tone. '_Do_ about it! Do about it! What on

earth do you think I'm going to do about it?'

"And Sabre said, 'Well, I think we ought certainly to take the poor

creature in.'

"That's what he said; and I can perfectly imagine his face as he said

it--all twisted up with the intensity of the struggle he foresaw and

with the intensity of his feelings on the subject; and I can perfectly

well imagine his wife's face as she heard him, by Jove, I can. She was

furious. Absolutely white and speechless with fury; but not speechless

long, Sabre said, and I dare bet she wasn't. Sabre said she worked

herself up in the most awful way and used language about the girl that

cut him like a knife--language like speaking of the baby as 'that brat.'

It made him wince. It would--the sort of chap he is. And he said that

the more she railed, the more frightfully he realised the girl's

position, up against that sort of thing everywhere she turned.

"He described all that to me and then, so to speak, he stated his case.

He said to me, his face all twisted up with the strain of trying to make

some one else see what was so perfectly clear to himself, he said,

'Well, what I say to you, Hapgood, is just precisely what I said to my

wife. I felt that the girl had a claim on us. In the first place, she'd

turned to us in her abject misery for help and that alone established a

claim, even if it had come from an utter stranger. It established a

claim because here was a human creature absolutely down and out come to

_us_, picking _us_ out from everybody, for succour. Damn it, you've got

to respond. You're picked out. You! One human creature by another human

creature. Breathing the same air. Sharing the same mortality.

Responsible to the same God. You've got to! You can't help yourself.

You're caught. If you hear some one appealing to any one else you can

scuttle out of it. Get away. Pass by on the other side. Square it with

your conscience any old how. But when that some one comes to you, you're

done, you're fixed. You may hate it. You may loathe and detest the

position that's been forced on you. But it's there. You can't get out of

it. The same earth as your earth is there at your feet imploring you;

and if you've got a grain, a jot of humanity, you must, you must, out of

the very flesh and bones of you, respond to that cry of this your

brother or your sister made as you yourself are made.

"'Well, Hapgood,' he went on, 'that's one claim the girl had on us, and

to my way of thinking it was enough. But she had another, a personal

claim. She'd been in our house, in our service; she was our friend; sat

with us; eaten with us; talked with us; shared with us; and now, now,

turned to us. Good God, man, was that to be refused? Was that to be

denied? Were we going to repudiate that? Were we going to say, "Yes,

it's true you were here. You were all very well when you were of use to

us; that's all true and admitted; but now you're in trouble and you're

no use to us; you're in trouble and no use, and you can get to hell out

of it." Good God, were we to say that?'

"You should have seen his face; you should have heard his voice; you

should have seen him squirming and twisting in his chair as though this

was the very roots of him coming up out of him and hurting him. And I

tell you, old man, it was the very roots of him. It was his creed, it

was his religion, it was his composition; it was the whole nature and

basis and foundation of the man as it had been storing up within him all

his life, ever since he was the rummy, thoughtful sort of beggar he used

to be as a kid at old Wickamote's thirty years ago. It got me, I can

tell you. It made me feel funny. Yes, and the next thing he went on to

was equally the blood and bones of him. In a way even more

characteristic. He said, 'Mind you, Hapgood, I don't blame my wife that

all this had no effect on her. I don't blame her in the least, and I

never lost my temper or got angry over the business. I see her point of

view absolutely. And I see absolutely the point of view of the girl's

father and of every one else who's willing to take in the girl but

insists she must give up the baby. I see their point of view and

understand it as plain as I see and understand that calendar hanging on

the wall. I see it perfectly,' and he laughed in a whimsical sort of

way and said, 'That's the devil of it.'

"Characteristic, eh? Wasn't that just exactly old Sabre at school

puzzling up his old nut and saying, 'Yes, but I see what he means'?

"Well, wait a bit. He came to that again afterwards. It seems that, if

you please, the very next day the girl herself follows up her letter by

walking into the house. Eh? Yes, you can well say 'By Jove.' In she

walked, baby and all. She'd walked all the way from Tidborough, and God

knows how far earlier in the day. Sabre said she was half dead. She'd

been to her father's house, and her father, that terrific-looking old

Moses coming down the mountain that I've described to you, had turned

her out. He'd take her--he had cried over her, the poor crying creature

said--if she'd send away her baby, also if she'd say who the father was,

but she wouldn't. 'I can't let my little baby go,' she said. Sabre said

it was awful, hearing her. And so he drove her out, the old Moses man

did, and the poor soul tried around for a bit--no money--and then

trailed out to them.

"Sabre wouldn't tell me all that happened between his wife and himself.

I gather that, in his quiet way, perfectly seeing his wife's point of

view and genuinely deeply distressed at the frightful pitch things were

coming to, in that sort of way he nevertheless got his back up against

his sense of what he ought to do and said the girl was not to be sent

away, that she was to stop.

"His wife said, 'You're determined?'

"He said, 'Mabel' (that's her name) 'Mabel, I'm desperately, poignantly

sorry, but I'm absolutely determined.'

"She said, 'Very well. If she's going to be in the house, I'm going out

of it. I'm going to my father's. Now. You'll not expect the servants to

stay in the house while you've got this--this woman living with you--'

(Yes, she said that.) 'So I shall pay them up and send them off, _now_,

before I go. Are you still determined?'

"The poor devil, standing there with his stick and his game leg, and his

face working, said, 'Mabel, Mabel, believe me, it kills me to say it,

but I am, absolutely. The girl's got no home. She only wants to keep her

baby. She must stop.'

"His wife went off to the kitchen.

"Pretty fierce, eh?

"Sabre said he sat where she'd left him, in the morning room in a

straight-backed chair, with his legs stuck out in front of him,

wrestling with it--like hell. The girl was in the dining room. His wife

and the servants were plunging about overhead.

"In about two hours his wife came back dressed to go. She said, 'I've

packed my boxes. I shall send for them. The maids have packed theirs and

they will send. I've sent them on to the station in front of me. There's

only one more thing I want to say to you. You say this woman--' ('This

woman, you know!' old Sabre said when he was telling me.) 'You say this

woman has a claim on us?'

"He began, 'Mabel, I do. I--'

"She said, 'Do you want my answer to that? My answer is that perhaps she

has a claim on _you!_'

"And she went."

III

"Well, there you are, old man. There it is. That's the story. That's the

end. That's the end of my story, but what the end of the story as

Sabre's living it is going to be, takes--well, it lets in some pretty

wide guessing. There he is, and there's the girl, and there's the baby;

and he's what he says he is--what I told you: a social outcast, beyond

the pale, ostracized, excommunicated. No one will have anything to do

with him. They've cleared him out of the office, or as good as done so.

He says the man Twyning worked that. The man Twyning--that Judas

Iscariot chap, you remember--is very thick with old Bright, the girl's

father. Old Bright pretty naturally thinks his daughter has gone back to

the man who is responsible for her ruin, and this Twyning person--who's

a partner, by the way--wrote to Sabre and told him that, although he

personally didn't believe it--'not for a moment, old man,' he

wrote--still Sabre would appreciate the horrible scandal that had

arisen, and would appreciate the fact that such a scandal could not be

permitted in a firm like theirs with its high and holy Church

connections. And so on. He said that he and Fortune had given the

position their most earnest and sympathetic thought and prayers--and

prayers, mark you--and that they'd come to the conclusion that the best

thing to be done was for Sabre to resign.

"Sabre says he was knocked pretty well silly by this step. He says it

was his first realisation of the attitude that everybody was going to

take up against him. He went off down and saw them, and you can imagine

there was a bit of a scene. He said he was dashed if he'd resign. Why on

earth should he resign? Was he to resign because he was doing in common

humanity what no one else had the common humanity to do? That sort of

thing. You can imagine it didn't cut much ice with that crowd. The

upshot of it was that Twyning, speaking for the firm, and calling him

about a thousand old mans and that sort of slush, told him that the

position would be reconsidered when he ceased to have the girl in his

house and that, in the interests of the firm, until he did that he must

cease to attend the office.

"And then old Sabre said he began to find himself in exactly the same

position with every one. Every door closed to him. No one having

anything to do with him. Even an old chap next door, a particular friend

of his called Fungus or Fargus or some such name--even this old bird's

house and his society is forbidden him. Sabre says old Fungus, or

whatever his name is, is all right, but it appears he's ruled by about

two dozen ramping great daughters, and they won't let their father have

anything to do with Sabre. No, he's shut right out, everywhere.

"And Sabre, mind you--this is Sabre's extraordinary point of view: he's

not a bit furious with all these people. He's feeling his position most

frightfully; it's eating the very heart out of him, but he's working up

not the least trace of bitterness over it. He says they're all

supporting an absolutely right and just convention, and that it's not

their fault if the convention is so hideously cruel in its application.

He says the absolute justice and the frightful cruelty of conventions

has always interested him, and that he remembers once putting up to a

great friend of his as an example this very instance of society's

attitude towards an unmarried girl who gets into trouble,--never

dreaming that one day he was going to find himself up against the full

force of it. He said, 'If this poor girl, if any girl, didn't find the

world against her and every door closed to her, just look where you'd

be, Hapgood. You'd have morality absolutely gone by the hoard. No, all

these people are right, absolutely right--and all conventions are

absolutely right--in their principle; it's their practice that's

sometimes so terrible. And when it is, how can you turn round and rage?

I can't.'

"Well, I said to him what I say to you, old man. I said, 'Yes, that's

all right, Sabre. That's true, though there're precious few would take

it as moderately as you; but look here, where's this going to end?

Where's it going to land you? It's landed you pretty fiercely as it is.

Have you thought what it may develop into? What are you doing about it?'

"He said he was writing round, writing to advertisers and to societies

and places, to find a place where the girl would be taken in to work and

allowed to have her baby with her. He said there must be hundreds of

kind-hearted people about the place who would do it; it was only a

question of finding them. Well, as to that, kind hearts are more than

coronets and all that kind of thing, but it strikes me they're a jolly

side harder than coronets to find when it comes to a question of an

unmarried mother _and_ her baby, _and_ when the kind hearts, being

found, come to make inquiries and find that the person making

application on the girl's behalf is the man she's apparently living

with, _and_ the man with Sabre's extraordinary record in regard to the

girl. I didn't say that to poor old Sabre. I hadn't the face to. But I

say it to you. You're no doubt thinking it for yourself. All that chain

of circumstances, eh? Went out of his way to get her her first job. Got

her into his house. In a way responsible for her getting the sack. Child

born just about when it must have been born after she'd been sacked.

Girl coming to him for help. Writing to his wife, 'If only you knew the

truth.' Wife leaving him. Eh? It's pretty fierce, isn't it? And I don't

believe he's got an idea of it. I don't believe he realises for a moment

what an extraordinary coil it all is. God help him if he ever does....

He'll want it.

"No, I didn't say a word like that to him. I couldn't. The nearest I got

to it was I said, 'Well, but time's getting on, you know, old man. It's

a--a funny position on the face of it. What do you suppose your wife's

thinking all this time?'

"He said his wife would be absolutely all right once he'd found a home

for the girl and sent her away. He said his wife was always a bit sharp

in her views of things, but that she'd be all right when it was all

over.

"I said, 'H'm. Heard from her?'

"He had--once. He showed me the letter. Well, you know, old man, every

fox knows what foxes smell like; and I smelt a dear brother solicitor's

smell in that letter. Smelt it strong. Asking him to make a home

possible for her to return to so they might resume their life together.

I recognised it. I've dictated dozens.

"I handed it back. I said, 'H'm' again. I said, 'H'm, you remember, old

man, there was that remark of hers just as she was leaving you--that

remark that perhaps the girl might have a claim on you. Remember that,

don't you?'

"By Jove, I thought for a minute he was going to flare up and let me

have it. But he laughed instead. Laughed as if I was a fool and said,

'Oh, good Lord, man, that's utterly ridiculous. That was only just my

wife's way. My wife's got plenty of faults to find with me--but that

kind of thing! Man alive, with all my faults, my wife knows me.'

"Perhaps--I say, my holy aunt, it's nearly two o'clock! Come on, I'm for

bed. Perhaps his wife does know him. What I'm thinking is, does he know

his wife? I'm a solicitor. I know what I'd say if she came to me."

CHAPTER III

I

On a day a month later--in May--Hapgood said:

"Now, I'll tell you. Old Sabre--by Jove, it's frightful. He's crashed.

The roof's fallen in on him. He's nearly out of his mind. I don't like

it. I don't like it a bit. I've only just left him. Here, in London. A

couple of hours ago. I oughtn't to have left him. The chap's not fit to

be left. But I had to. He cleared me off. I had to go. He wasn't in a

state to be argued with. I was frightened of irritating him. To tell you

the truth, I'm frightened now about him. Dead frightened.

"Look here, it's in two parts, this sudden development. Two parts as I

saw it. Begins all right and then works up. Two parts--morning and

afternoon yesterday and a bit to-day. And of all extraordinary places to

happen at--Brighton.

"Yes, Brighton. I was down there for a Saturday to Monday with my

Missus. This absolutely topping weather, you know. We were coming back

Monday evening. Yesterday. Very well. Monday morning we were sunning on

the pier, she and I. I was reading the paper, she was watching the

people and making remarks about them. If Paradise is doing in the next

world what you best liked doing in this, my wife will ask Peter if she

can sit at the gate and watch the demobilised souls arriving and pass

remarks about them. She certainly will.

"Well, all of a sudden she began, 'Oh, what a frightfully _in_teresting

face that man's got!' That's the way she talks. 'What a most

_in_teresting face. Do look, Percy.'

"I said, 'Well, so have I got an interesting face. Look at mine.'

"'Oh, but _do_, Percy. You _must_. On that seat by himself just

opposite. He's just staring at nothing and thinking and thinking. And

his face looks so worn and tired and yet so _very_ kind and such a

_wist_ful look as though he was thinking of--'

"I growled, still reading: 'He's probably thinking what he's going to

have for lunch. Oh, dash it, do stop jogging me. Where is he?'

"And then I looked across. Old Sabre! By Jove, you might have pushed me

over with one finger. Old Sabre in a tweed suit and a soft hat, and his

game leg stuck out straight, and his old stick, and his hands about a

thousand miles deep in his pockets, and looking--yes, my wife said the

true thing when she said how he was looking. Any one would have taken a

second squint at old Sabre's face as I saw it then--taken a second

squint and wondered what he'd been through and what on earth his mind

could be on now. They certainly would.

"I knew. I knew; but I tell you this, I could see he'd been through a

tough lot more, and thought a considerable number of fathoms deeper, in

the month since I'd seen him last. Yes, by Jove, I could see that

without spectacles.

"I went over to him. You could have pushed _him_ off the seat with one

finger when he saw me. Except that you wouldn't have had any fingers

worth using as fingers, after he'd squeezed your hands as he squeezed

mine. Both of them. And his face like a shout on a sunny morning. Yes,

he was pleased. I like to think how jolly pleased the old chap was.

"I took him over to my wife, and my wife climbed all over him, and we

chatted round for a bit, and then I worked off my wife on a bunch of

people we knew and I got old Sabre on to a secluded bench and started in

on him. What on earth was he doing down at Brighton, and how were

things?

"He said 'Things...? Things are happening with me, Hapgood. Not to

me--with me. Happening pretty fierce and pretty quick. I'm right in the

middle of the most extraordinary, the most astounding, the most amazing

things. I had to get away from them for a bit. I simply had to. I came

down here for a week-end to get away from them and go on wrestling them

out when they weren't right under my eyes. I'm going back to-morrow.

Effie was all right--with her baby. She was glad I should go--glad for

me, I mean. Poor kid, poor kid. Top of her own misery, Hapgood, she's

miserable to death at what she says she's let me in for. She's always

crying about it. Crying. She's torn between knowing my house is the only

place where she can have her baby, between that and seeing what her

coming into the place has caused. She spends her time trying to do any

little thing she can to make me comfortable, hunts about for any little

thing she can do for me. It's pathetic, you know. At least, it's

pathetic to me. Jumped at this sudden idea of mine of getting away for a

couple of days. Said it would please her more than anything in the world

to know I was right away from it all for a bit. Fussed over me packing

up and all that, you know. Pathetic. Frightfully. Look, just to show you

how she hunts about for anything to do for me--said my old straw hat was

much too shabby for Brighton and would I get her some stuff, oxalic

acid, and let her clean it up for me. That sort of little trifle. As a

matter of fact she made such a shocking mess of the hat that I hardly

liked to wear it. Couldn't hurt her feelings, though. Chucked it into

the sea when I got here and bought this one. Make a funny story for her

when I get back about how it blew off. That's the sort of life we lead

together, Hapgood. She always trying to do little things for me and I

trying to think out little jokes for her to try and cheer her up. Give

you another example. Just when I had brought her the stuff for my hat.

Met me with, Had I lost anything? Made a mystery of it. Said I was to

guess. Guessed at last that it must be my cigarette case. It was. She'd

found it lying about and took me to show where she'd put it for

safety--in the back of the clock in my room. Said I was always to look

there for any little valuables I might miss, and wanted me to know how

she liked to be careful of my things like that. Fussing over me, d'you

see? Trying to make it seem we were living normal, ordinary lives.

"'That's the sort of life we lead together, Hapgood--together; but the

life I'm caught up in, the things that are happening with me, that I'm

right in the middle of, that I felt I had to get away from for a

bit--astounding, Hapgood, astounding, amazing....'

"I'm trying to give you exactly his own words, old man. I want you to

get this business just exactly as I got it. Old Sabre turned to me with

that--with that 'astounding, amazing'--turned and faced me and said:

"'Hapgood, I'm finding out the most extraordinary things about this life

as we've made it and as we live it. Hapgood, if I kept forty women in

different parts of London and made no secret of it, nothing would be

said. People would know I was rather a shameless lot, my little ways

would be an open secret, but nothing would be said. I should be received

everywhere. But I'm thought to have brought one woman into my house and

I'm banned. I'm unspeakable. Forty, flagrantly, outside, and I'm still

a received member of society. People are sorry for my wife, or pretend

to be, but I'm still all right, a bit of a rake, you know, but a decent

enough chap. But I take pity on one poor girl because she clings to her

motherhood although she's unmarried, and I'm beyond the pale. I'm

unspeakable. Amazing. Do you say it's not absolutely astounding?

"'Hapgood, look here. It's this. This is what I've found. You can do the

shocking things, and it can be known you do the shocking things. But you

mustn't be seen doing them. You can beat your wife, and it can be known

among your friends that you beat your wife. But you mustn't be seen

beating her. You mustn't beat her in the street or in your neighbour's

garden. You can drink, and it can be known you drink; but you mustn't be

seen drunk.

"'Do you see, Hapgood? Do you see? The conventions are all right, moral,

sound, excellent, admirable, but to save their own face there's a blind

side to them, a shut-eye side. Keep that side of them and you're all

right. They'll let you alone. They'll pretend they don't see you. But

come out and stand in front of them and they'll devour you. They'll

smash and grind and devour you, Hapgood. They're devouring me.

"'That's where they've got me in their jaws, Hapgood; and where they've

got Effie in their jaws is just precisely again on a blind, shut-eye

side.... They're rightly based, they're absolutely just, you can't

gainsay them, but to save their face, again, they're indomitably blind

and deaf to the hideous cruelties in their application. They mean well.

They cause the most frightful suffering, the most frightful tragedies,

but they won't look at them, they won't think of them, they won't speak

of them: they mean well....

"Old Sabre put his head in his hands. He might have been praying. He

looked to me sort of physically wrestling with what he called the jaws

that had got him and had got her. He looked up at me and he said,

'Hapgood, this is where I've got to. This is where I am. Hapgood, life's

all wrong, stupid, cruel, blundering, but it means well. We've shaped it

to fit us as we think we ought to live and it means well. Means well! My

God, Hapgood, the most terrible, the most lamentable self-confession

that ears can hear--"I meant well." Some frightful blunder committed,

some irreparable harm inflicted, and that piteous, heart-broken,

heart-breaking, maddening, infuriating excuse, "I meant well. I meant

well. Why didn't some one tell me?" Life means well, Hapgood. It does

mean well. It only wants some one to tell it where it's going wrong,

where it's blundering, where it's just missing, and why it's just

missing, all it means to do.'

"With that he went back to all that stuff I told you he told me when I

was down with him last month--that stuff about the need for a new

revelation suited to men's minds to-day, the need for new light. I can't

tell you all that--it's not in my line, that sort of talk. But he said,

his face all pink under his skin, he said, 'Hapgood, I'll tell you a

thing. I've got the secret. I've got the key to the riddle that's been

puzzling me all my life. I've got the new revelation in terms good

enough for me to understand. Light, more light. Here it is: God

is--_love_. Not this, that, nor the other that the intelligence revolts

at, and puts aside, and goes away, and goes on hungering, hungering and

unsatisfied; nothing like that; but just this: plain for a child, clear

as daylight for grown intelligence: God is--_love_. Listen to this,

Hapgood: "He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him; for

God _is_ love." Ecstasy, Hapgood, ecstasy! It explains everything to me.

I can reduce all the mysteries to terms of that. One of these days,

perhaps one of these days, I'll be able to write it and tell people.'

"I tell you, old man, you can think what you like about it, but old

Sabre, when he was telling me that, was a pretty first-class

advertisement for his own revelation. He'd found it all right. The look

on him was nearer the divine than anything I've ever come near seeing.

It certainly was.

"So you see that was the morning part of this that I'm telling you, what

I called the first part, and it was not too bad. He'd been through, he

was going through some pretty fierce things, but he was holding up under

them. Oh, some pretty fierce things. I haven't told you half. One thing

that hit him hard as he could bear was that that old pal of his, Fungus

or Fargus, Fargus as a matter of fact, that old chap fell dying and did

die--knocked out by pneumonia special constabling--and those dashed

ramping great daughters of his wouldn't let poor old Sabre into the

house to see him. Fact. He said it hurt him worse, made him realise

worse what a ban he was up against, than anything that's happened to

him. It would. That chap dying and him too shocking to be admitted.

"They did grant him one squint of his old friend, about five minutes,

and stood over him like dragons all the time, five of them. Came to him

one morning and said, as though they were speaking to a leper through

bars, said, sort of holding their noses, 'We have to ask you to come to

see Papa. The doctor thinks there is something Papa wishes to say to

you.'

"What it was, apparently, was that the old gentleman had some sort of

funny old notion that he was put into life for a definite purpose and

when Sabre saw him he could just whisper to Sabre that he was agonised

because he was dying before he'd done anything that could possibly be

it. Poor old Sabre said it was too terrible for him, because what could

he say with that pack of grim daughters standing over him to see he

didn't contaminate their papa on his death bed? He said he could only

hold his old pal's hand, and had the tears running down his face, and

couldn't say a word, and they hustled him out, sort of holding their

noses again, and sort of disinfecting the place as they went along. He

said to me, brokenly, 'Hapgood, I felt I'd touched bottom. My old

friend, you know.' He said he went again next morning, like a tradesman,

just to beg for news. They told him, 'Papa has passed away.' He asked

them, 'Did he say anything at the last? Do please tell me just that.'

They said he suddenly almost sat up and called out something they

couldn't understand about, 'Ay, ready!' Sabre said he understood and

thanked God for it. He didn't tell me what it meant; it broke him right

up even talking about it. There was another thing he mentioned but

wouldn't go into. Some other great friend, a woman, whom he said he'd

cut right off out of his acquaintance--wouldn't answer her letters:

realised how the world was regarding him and felt he couldn't impose

himself on any one. He seemed to suffer over that, too."

II

"Well, that was the morning, old man. That was the first part, and you

see how it went. He was pretty badly in the depths but he was holding

on. He'd got this great discovery of his, and the idea of writing about

it after his History, he said. 'If I'm ever able to take up my History

again,' he said. Badly down as he was, at least he'd got that and he'd

also got to help him the extraordinary, reasonable, reasoning view he

took of the whole business: no bitterness against any one, just

understanding their point of view as he always has understood the other

point of view, just that and puzzling over it all. On the whole, and

considering all things, not too bad. Not too bad. Bad, desperately

pathetic, I thought, but not too bad. That was the morning. He wouldn't

come to lunch with us. He hadn't liked meeting my wife as it was. And of

course I could understand how he felt, poor chap. So I left him.

"I left him. When I saw him again was about three o'clock, and I walked

right into the middle of the development that, as I told you, has pretty

well let the roof down on him.