All the way along, in the warm twilight, Madame Beattie was gay over the
prospect of being fought for. With the utmost precision and unflagging
spirit she arranged a plausible cause for combat, and Jeffrey, not in
the least intending to play his allotted part, yet enjoyed the moment
fully.
"You shall do it," Madame Beattie assured him, as if she permitted him
to enter upon a task for which there was wide competition. "You shall
thrash him, and he will put it in his paper, and the European papers
will copy."
"I haven't much idea the _Argosy_ is read in foreign capitals," Jeff
felt bound to assure her.
"Oh, but we can cable it. The French journals--they used to be very good
to me."
With that her face darkened, not in a softening melancholy, but old
bitterness and defeat. She was not always able to ignore the contrast
between the spring of youth and this meagre eld. Jeffrey saw the
tremendous recognition she assuredly had had, grown through the illusive
fructifying of memory into something overwhelming, and he was glad
starved vanity might once more be fed. She seemed to him a most piteous
spectacle, youth and power in ruins, and age too poor to nourish even a
vine to drape the crumbling walls.
"Patricia Beattie," she continued, "again a _casus belli_. Combat
between two men--" "There won't be any combat," Jeff reminded her. "If I
kick Weedie, he'll take it lying down. That's Weedie."
"I shall stand by," said Madame Beattie. "If you go too far I shall
interfere. So you can go as far as you like."
"I do rather want to know what Weedie's at," said Jeff. "But I sha'n't
kick him. He doesn't deserve it at one time any more than another,
though he has different degrees of making himself offensive."
She was ingenuously disappointed. She even reproached him:
"You said you were going to do it."
"That was in my haste," said Jeffrey. "I can't lick him with a woman
standing by. I should feel like a fool."
Denny was drawing up at the circus-ground.
"Well," said Madame Beattie, "you've disappointed me tremendously.
That's all I can say."
It was dark now, and though the season was more advanced, Jeffrey could
imagine that this was the moment of his arrival that other night, save
that he was not now footsore or dull in the mind. But the same dusk of
crowding forms lay thickly on the field, and there, he knew, was the
stationary car; there were the two figures standing in it, Moore and his
interpreter. He could fill out the picture with a perfect accuracy,
Moore gesticulating and throwing frenzy into his high-pitched voice,
which now came stridently. Madame Beattie breathed out excitement.
Nothing so spiced had ever befallen her in Addington.
"Is he actually speaking?" she asked, in a hoarse whisper. "They say
insects make noises with their hind legs. It's more like that than a
voice. Take me round there, Jeffrey."
He was quite willing. With a good old pal like this to egg you on, he
thought, there actually was some fun left. So he handed her out, and
told Denny to wait for them, and they skirted the high board fence to
the gap in the back. Madame Beattie, holding up her long dress in one
hand and tripping quite nimbly, was clinging to his arm. By the gap they
halted for her to recover breath; she drew her hand from Jeff's arm,
opened her little bag, took out a bit of powder paper and mechanically
rubbed her face. Jeff looked on indulgently. He knew she did not expect
to need an enhanced complexion in this obscurity. The act refreshed her,
that was all.
Weedon, it was easy to note, was battering down tradition.
"They talk about their laws," he shrilled. "I am a lawyer, and I tell
you it breaks my heart every time I go back to worm-eaten precedent. But
I have to do it, because, if I didn't talk that language the judges
wouldn't understand me. Do you know what precedent is? It is the opinion
of some man a hundred years ago on a case tried a hundred years ago. Do
we want that kind of an opinion? No. We want our own opinions on cases
that are tried to-day."
The warm rapid voice of the interpreter came in here, and Madame
Beattie, who was standing apart from Jeffrey, touched his arm. He bent
to listen.
"The man's a fool," said she.
"No," said Jeffrey, "he's not a fool. He knows mighty well what he's
saying and how it'll take."
"If I had all the lawbooks in the world," said Weedon, "I'd pile them up
here on this ground we've made free ground because we have free speech
on it, and I'd touch a match to them, and by the light they made we'd
sit down here and frame our own laws. And they would be laws for the
rich as well as the poor. Columbus did one good thing for us. He
discovered a new world. The capitalists have done their best to spoil
it, and turn it into a world as rotten as the old ones. But Columbus
showed us you can find a new world if you try. And we're going to have a
new world out of this one yet. New laws, new laws, I tell you, new
laws!"
He screamed it at the end, this passion for new laws, and the
interpreter, though he had too just an instinct to take so high a key,
followed him with an able crescendo. Weedie thought he had his audience
in hand, though it was the interpreter who really had it, and he
ventured another stroke:
"I don't want them to tell me what some man taught in Bible days. I want
to know what a man thinks right here in Addington. I don't want them to
tell me what they thought in Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome are dead.
The only part of them that's alive is the Greece and Rome of to-day."
When the interpreter passed this on, he stopped at a dissentient murmur.
There were those who knew the bright history of their natal country and
adored it.
"Oh, the man's a fool," said Madame Beattie again. "I'm going in there."
She took up the tail of her gown, put her feather-crowned head through
the gap in the fence and drew her august person after, and Jeffrey
followed her. He had a gay sense of irresponsibility, of seeking the
event. He was grateful to Madame Beattie. They went on, and as it was
that other night, some withdrew to leave a pathway and others stared,
but, finding no specific reason, did not hinder them. Madame Beattie
spoke once or twice, a brief mandate in a foreign tongue, and that, Jeff
noted, was effective. She stepped up on the running-board of the car and
laid her hand on the interpreter's arm.
"You may go, my friend," said she, quite affectionately. "I do not need
you." Then she said something, possibly the same thing, Jeff thought,
in another language, and the man laughed. Madame Beattie, without
showing sign of recognising Moore, who was at her elbow, bent forward
into the darkness and gave a shrill call. The crowd gathered nearer. Its
breath was but one breath. The blackness of the assemblage was as if you
poured ink into water and made it dense. Jeffrey felt at once how
sympathetic they were with her. What was the cry she gave? Was it some
international password or a gipsy note of universal import? Had she
called them friend in a tongue they knew? Now she began speaking,
huskily at first, with tumultuous syllables and wide open vowels, and at
the first pause they cheered. The inky multitude that had kept silence,
by preconcerted plan, while Weedon Moore talked to them, lost control of
itself and yelled. She went on speaking and they crashed in on her
pauses with more plaudits, and presently she laid her hand on Jeffrey's
shoulder and said to him:
"Come up here beside me."
He shook his head. He was highly entertained, but the mysterious game
was hers and Weedie's. She gave an order, it seemed, in a foreign
tongue, and the thing was managed. The interpreter had stepped from the
car, and now gentle yet forcible hands lifted down Weedon Moore, and set
him beside it and other hands as gently set up Jeffrey in his place.
There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the
carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It
was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her
and that warmly breathing mass: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they
were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went
on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to
the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:
"What is she saying?"
The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more
than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the passionate black
eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and
feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before
him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self,
an attack of adoring admiration.
"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter
snatched one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.
"For God's sake, don't do that," Jeff heard himself saying, and withdrew
his hand and straightened at a safe distance from the adoring face, and
he heard Madame Beattie going on in her fiery periods. Whatever she was
saying, they loved it, loved it to the point of madness. They cheered
her, and the interpreter did not check them, but cheered too. To Jeffrey
it was all a medley of strange thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and
not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did
not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went
on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired
but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice
playing upon the hearts of the multitude, their hot responses, all this
gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth.
Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's voice failed a little; something
ebbed in it, not so much force as quality.
"That's all," she said, in a quick aside to him. "Let's go." She gave an
order, in English now, and a figure started out of the crowd and cranked
the car.
"We can't go in this," Jeffrey said to her. "This is Moore's car."
But Madame Beattie had seated herself majestically. Her feathers even
were portentous in the moonlight, like the plumage of some gigantic
bird. She gave another order, whereupon the man who had cranked the
machine took his place in it, and the crowd parted for them to pass.
Jeffrey was amused and dashed. He couldn't leave her, nor could they
sail away in Weedon's car. He put a hand on her arm.
"See here, Madame Beattie," said he, "we can't do this. We must get out
at the gate, at least."
But Madame Beattie was bowing graciously to right and left. Once she
rose for an instant and addressed a curt sentence to the crowd, and in
answer they cheered, a full-mouthed chorus of one word in different
tongues.
"What are they yelling?" Jeffrey asked.
"It's for you," Madame Beattie said composedly. "They're cheering you."
"Me? How do you know? That's not my name."
"No. It's The Prisoner. They're calling you The Prisoner."
They were at the gate now, and turned into the road and, with a free
course before him, the man put on speed and they were away. Jeffrey bent
forward to him, but Madame Beattie pulled him back.
"What are you doing?" she inquired. "We're going home."
"This is Moore's car," Jeffrey reminded her.
"No, it isn't. It's the proletariat's car." She rolled the _r_
surprisingly. "Do you suppose he comes out here to corrupt those poor
devils without making them pay for being corrupted? Jeffrey, take off
your coat."
"What for?" He had resigned himself to his position. It was a fit part
of the whole eccentric pastime, and after all it was only Weedie's car.
"I shall take cold. I got very warm speaking. My voice--"
To neither of them now was it absurd. Though it was years since she had
had a voice the habit of a passionate care was still alive in her.
Jeffrey had come on another rug, and wrapped it round her. He went back
to his first wonder.
"But what is there in being a prisoner to start up such a row?"
Madame Beattie had retired into the rug. She sunk her chin in it and
would talk no more. Without further interchange they drew up at her
house. Jeffrey got out and helped her, and she stood for a moment,
pressing her hand on his arm, heavily, as an old woman leans.
"Ah, Jeffrey," said she rapidly, in a low but quite a naked tone with no
lisping ornament, "this is a night. To think I should have to come back
here to this God-forsaken spot for a minute of the old game. Hundreds
hanging on my voice--" he fancied she had forgotten now whether she had
not sung to them--"and feeling what I told them to feel. They're capital
people. We'll talk to them again."
She had turned toward the door and now she came back and struck his arm
violently with her hand.
"Jeff," said she passionately, "you're a fool. You've still got your
youth and you won't use it. And the world looks like this--" she glanced
up at the radiant sky. "Even in Addington, the moon is after us trying
to seduce us to the old pleasures. You've got youth. Use it. For God's
sake, use it."
Now she did go up the steps and having rung the bell for her, ignoring
the grim knocker that looked as if it would take more than one summons
to get past its guard, Jeff told the man to drive back for Mr. Moore.
The car had gone, and still Madame Beattie rang. She knew and Jeffrey
suspected suddenly that Esther was paying her out for illicit roaming.
Suddenly Madame Beattie raised her voice and called twice:
"Esther! Esther!"
The sound echoed in the silent street, appallingly to one who knew what
Addington streets were and what proprieties lined them. Then the door
did open. Jeffrey fancied the smooth-faced maid had slipped the bolt.
Esther, from what he knew of her, was not by to face the music. He heard
the door shut cautiously and walked away, but not to go immediately
home. What did Madame Beattie mean by telling him to use his youth? All
he wanted was to hold commerce with the earth and dig hard enough to
keep himself tired so that he might sleep. For since he had come out of
prison he was every day more subject to this besetment of recalling the
past. It was growing upon him that he had always made wrong choices.
Youth, what seemed to him through the vista of vanished time a childhood
even, when he was but little over twenty, had been a delirium of
expectation in a world that was merely a gay-coloured spot where, if you
were reasonably fit, as youth should be, you could always snatch the
choicest fruit from the highest bough. Then he had met Esther, and the
world stopped being a playground and became an ordered pageant, and he
was the moving power, trying to make it move faster or more lightly, to
please Esther who was sitting in front to see it move, and who was of a
decided mind in pageants. It was always Esther who was to be pleased.
These things he had not thought of willingly during his imprisonment,
because it was necessary not to think, lest the discovery of the right
causes that brought him there should turn his brain. But now he had
leisure and freedom and a measure of solitude, and it began to strike
him that heretofore, being in the pageant and seeing it move, he had
not enjoyed it over much. There had been a good deal of laughter and
light and colour--there had to be, since these were the fruits Esther
lived on--but there had been no affectionate converse with the world.
Strange old Madame Beattie! she had brought him the world to-night. She
had taken strangers from its furthest quarters and welded them into a
little community that laughed and shouted and thought according things.
That they had hailed him, even as a prisoner, brought him a little
warmth. It was mysterious, but it seemed they somehow liked him, and he
went into the quiet house and to bed with the feeling of having touched
a hand.