THE LADY EVA
1
The Speaker’s reception was a gorgeous and tedious assembly, held in
the afternoon for the better convenience of a society which had but
indifferent resources in the way of artificial light. A great hall in
the Treasury had been prepared for it; and here the “big men,” and
their wives and sons and daughters, showed themselves, paid their
respects to the Speaker and to the Lady Burney, paraded a little,
gathered into groups for conversation, at last took their leave.
Jeremy walked through the crowd at the Speaker’s elbow and was
presented by him to the most important of the guests. This was a
mark of favor, of recognition, almost of adoption. He had at first
been afraid of it and had wished to avoid it. But the Speaker’s
determination was unalterable.
“If it were nothing more,” he said, with a contemptuous smile on his
heavy but mobile mouth, “I shall be giving them pleasure by exhibiting
you. You are a show, a curiosity to them. They are all longing to see
you--once.... Only you and I know that you are something more. And to
know it pleases me; I hope it pleases you.”
This explanation hardly reconciled Jeremy to the ordeal; but the
Speaker had easily overborne his reluctance. They walked through the
room together, a couple strangely unlike; and the old man showed
towards the younger all the tenderness, all the proud complaisances of
a father to a son.
From this post of vantage Jeremy could at least see all that was to
be seen. The assembly seemed to be gay and animated. The men wore the
dress of ceremony, the latter-day version of evening dress; and some of
them, especially the more youthful, were daring in the colors of their
coats and in the bravado of lace at throat and breast and wrist. The
women wore more elaborate forms of the gown of every day, simply cut in
straight lines, descending to the heel and tortuously ornamented with
embroideries in violent colors. Jeremy saw one stout matron who was
covered from neck to shoes in a pattern of blowsy roses and fat yellow
butterflies, like a wall-paper of the nineteenth century, another whose
embroidery took the shape of zigzag stripes of crimson, blue and green,
adjoining on the bodice, separated on the skirt.
But he was impressed by a certain effect of good breeding which their
behavior produced and which contradicted his first opinion, based on
the strangeness of their dress. They nodded to him (for the shaking of
hands had gone quite out of fashion), stared at him a little, asked a
colorless question or two, murmured politely on his reply, and drifted
away from him. Where he expected crudity and vulgarity, he found a
prevailing vagueness, tepidity, indifference, almost fatigue.... He was
forced to conclude that the flamboyancy of their appearance was mild to
themselves, that they had no wish to appear startling, and did so only
as the result of a universal lack of taste.
He moved among them, steadfastly following the Speaker, but feeling
tired and stiff and inert. His limbs ached with unaccustomed labor,
his left hand was torn and bandaged, and he had still in his nostrils
the thick, greasy smell of the workshops in which he had spent the
morning. Here, after his first shock of surprise at the sight of the
guns, he had soon understood that he was expected to do much more than
admire and approve. These, the Speaker said, were by no means his first
experiments in the art of gun-casting. And, after that, the old man had
recounted to Jeremy, assisted by occasional uncouth ejaculations from
the aged foreman of that amazing gang of centenarians, a story that had
been nothing less than stupefying.
The last men in whose fading minds some glimmer of the art still
remained had been gathered together, at the cost of infinite trouble,
from the districts where machinery was still most in use, chiefly
from Scotland, Yorkshire, and Wales. They had been brought thither
on the pretense that their experience was needed in the central
repairing-shops of the railways; and apparently it had been necessary
in all possible ways to deceive and to reassure the principal men of
their native districts. Once they had been obtained, they had slaved
for years with senile docility to satisfy the demands which the
Speaker’s senile and half-lunatic enthusiasm made on their disappearing
knowledge. Somehow he had created in them a queer pride, a queer spirit
of endeavor. That grotesque chorus of ancients had become inspired with
a single anxiety, to create before they perished a gun which could be
fired without instantly destroying those who fired it.
They had had trouble with the breech mechanism, the Speaker
nonchalantly remarked; and Jeremy had a vision of men blown to pieces
in the remote and lonely valley where the first guns were tried.
The immediate purpose for which Jeremy’s help was required was the
adjustment of the process of cutting the interrupted screw-thread
by which the breech-block was locked into the gun. He had toiled at
it all the morning, surrounded by jumping and antic old men, whose
speech he could hardly understand and to whom he could only with the
greatest exertion communicate his own opinions. He had wrestled with,
and tugged at, antiquated and dilapidated machinery, had cursed and
sworn, had given himself a great cut on the palm of his left hand and
had descended almost to the level of his ridiculous fellow-workers. And
yet, when he had finished, the difficult screw-thread was in a fair way
to be properly cut.
He came hot from these nightmare experiences to the Speaker’s
reception; and when he looked round and contrasted the one scene with
the other, he had a sense of phantasmagoria that made him feel dizzy.
It was almost too much for his reason ... on top of a transition that
would have overbalanced most normal men.... He was recalled from his
bewildering reflections by the Speaker’s voice, low and grumbling in
his ear.
They had drifted for a moment away from the thickest of the crowd into
a corner of the room, and the old man was able to speak without fear of
being overheard. “It is as I have noticed for years,” he said, “but it
gets worse and worse. These are only from the south.”
Jeremy started and replied a little at random: “Only from the
south...?”
“Listen carefully to all I say to you. It is all useful. These people
here are only from the south, from Essex, like that young Roger Vaile,
and Kent and Surrey and Sussex and Hampshire. The big men from the
north and west come every year less often to the Treasury. And yet
these fools hardly notice it, and would see nothing remarkable in it if
they did.”
“You mean ...” Jeremy began. But before he could get farther he saw
the Speaker turn aside with a smile of obvious falsity and exaggerated
sweetness. The sinister little person, whom Jeremy knew from a distance
as “the Canadian,” was approaching them with a characteristically
arrogant step and bearing.
The Speaker made them known to one another in a manner that barely
concealed a certain uneasiness and unrest. “Thomas Wells,” he explained
in a loud and formal voice, “is the son of one of the chief of the
Canadian Bosses, whom we reckon among our subjects and who by courtesy
allow themselves to be described as such. But I reckon it as an honor
to have Thomas Wells, the son of George Wells, for my guest in the
Treasury.”
“That’s so,” said the Canadian gravely, without making it quite clear
which part of the Speaker’s remark he thus corroborated. Then he
stared keenly at Jeremy, apparently controlling a strong instinct of
discomfort and dislike by an effort of will. Jeremy returned the stare
inimically.
“I believe we have met before,” he suggested, not without a little
malice.
“That’s so,” the Canadian agreed; and as he spoke he sketched the sign
of the cross in an unobtrusive manner that made it appear as though it
might have been a chance movement of his hand. The Speaker hung over
them with evident anxiety, and at last said:
“You two are both strangers to this country. You ought to be able to
compare your impressions.”
“I would much rather hear something about Canada,” Jeremy answered.
Thomas Wells shrugged his shoulders. “It isn’t like this country,” he
said carelessly. “We can’t be as easy-going as the people are here.
We have to fight--but we do fight and win,” he concluded, momentarily
baring his teeth in a savage grin.
“The Canadians, as every one knows, are the best soldiers in the
world,” the Speaker interpolated. “They are always fighting.”
“And whom do you fight?” Jeremy asked.
“Oh, anybody.... You see, the people to the south of us are always
quarreling among themselves, and we chip in. And then sometimes we send
armies down to Mexico or the Isthmus.”
“But the people to the south ...” Jeremy began. “Haven’t you still got
the United States to the south of you? And I should have thought they’d
be too many for you?”
“There are no United States now--I’ve heard of them.” Thomas Wells’s
dislike of Jeremy seemed to have been overcome by a swelling impulse
of boastfulness. “From what I can make out, they never did get their
people in hand as we did. They’ve always been disturbed. Their leaders
don’t last long, and they fight one another. And we’re always growing
in numbers and getting harder, while they get fewer and softer. Why,
they’re easy fruit!”
Jeremy could find nothing for this but polite and impressed assent.
Thomas Wells allowed his lean face to be split by a startling grin and
went on: “I suppose you’ve never heard of me? No! Well, I’m not like
these people here. I was brought up to fight. My dad fought his way to
the top. _His_ dad was a small man, out Edmonton way, with not more
than two or three thousand bayonets. But he kept at it, and now none
of the Bosses in Canada are bigger than we are. It was me that led the
raid on Boston when I was only twenty.”
Jeremy turned aside from the last announcement with a feeling
of disgust. He thought that Thomas Wells looked like some small
blood-thirsty animal, a ferret or a stoat, with pale burning eyes and
thin stretched mouth that sought the throat of a living creature. He
was saved from the necessity for an answer by the Canadian turning
sharply on his heel, as though something had touched a spring in his
body. Jeremy followed the movement with his eyes and saw the Lady Eva
making her way towards them through the crowd.
Thomas Wells went to meet her with an air of exaggerated gallantry, and
murmured something with his bow. She seemed to be to-day in a mood of
modest behavior, for she received his salutation with downcast eyes and
no more than a movement of the lips. As he watched them Jeremy again
became aware of the Speaker standing beside him, whom he had for a
moment forgotten. He stole a look at the old man and saw that his brow
was troubled and that, though his hands were clasped behind his back
in an apparently careless attitude, the fingers were clenched and the
knuckles white. As he registered these impressions, the Lady Eva, still
with downward glance, sailed past Thomas Wells and approached him. When
he saw her intention, a faint disturbance sprang up in his heart and
interfered with his breathing.
She had already halted beside him when he realized that now, in the
presence of this company, her deportment being what it was, he must
make the first speech. He stuttered awkwardly and said: “I have been
hoping to see you again.”
She raised her eyes a trifle, and he fancied that he saw the shadow of
a smile in the corners of her mouth. Her reply was pitched in so low a
tone as to be at first incomprehensible, and there followed a moment
of emptiness before he realized that she had said, “You have been with
Roger Vaile.”
He interpreted it as in some sort of a reproach, and was about to
protest when he saw the Speaker frowning at him. He did not understand
the frown, but he moderated his vehemence. “I have been learning,” he
said in level tones. “I have been learning a great deal.” And then he
added more quietly, “Not but what you could teach me much more.”
At this she raised her head and laughed frankly; and he, looking up
too, saw that the Speaker had drawn Thomas Wells away and that the
backs of both were disappearing in the throng. A strange, uncomfortable
sense of an intrigue, which he could not understand, oppressed him. He
glared suspiciously at the girl, but read nothing more than mischief
and merriment in her face.
“I was well scolded the last time I spoke to you,” she said, “but I
have behaved well this time, haven’t I?”
Exhilaration chased all his doubts away. He gazed at her openly, took
in the wide eyes, the straight nose, the sensitive mouth, the healthy
skin. Then he tried to pull himself together, to recover a dry, sane
consciousness of his situation. It was absurd, he told himself--at his
age!--to be unsettled by a conversation with a beautiful girl who might
have been, if he had had any, one of his remote descendants. He felt
unaccountably like a man glissading on the smooth, steep slope of a
hill. Of course, he would in a moment be able to catch hold of a tuft
of grass, to steady himself by digging his heels into the ground....
But meanwhile the Lady Eva was looking at him.
“What do you think I could teach you?” she asked.
“I know so little,” he answered haphazard. “I know nothing about any of
the people here. I suppose you know them all?”
“They are the big men and their wives. What can I tell you about them?”
“What do you think of them yourself?”
She eyed him a little askance, doubtful but almost laughing. “What
would you think ... what would they think--if I were to tell you that?”
“But they will never know,” he urged, in a tone of ridiculously serious
entreaty.
“Don’t you know that I am already considered a little ... strange? I
don’t think I could tell you anything about our society that would be
any use to you. My mother tells me every day that I don’t know how to
behave myself; and I daresay all these people would say the same.”
“But why?”
“Oh, I don’t know....” She half swung round, tapped the floor with her
heel and returned to him, grown almost grave. “I hate the ... the ...
the easiness of everybody. They all stroll through life, and the women
do nothing and behave modestly--they’re not alive. I suppose I am like
my father. He is odd too.”
“But I am like him,” Jeremy said earnestly. “If you are like him, then
I must be like you. But I don’t know enough to be sure how different
every one else is. They seem very amiable, very gentle....”
“I hate their gentleness,” she began in a louder tone. But instead of
going on, she dropped her eyes to the ground and stood silent. Jeremy,
perplexed for a minute, suddenly became aware of the Lady Burney beside
them, an expression of dull disapproval on her brilliantly carmined
face. He had the presence of mind to bow to her very respectfully.
“I am glad to see you again, Jeremy Tuft,” she said with a heavy and
undeceiving graciousness. As she spoke she edged herself between him
and the Lady Eva; and Jeremy could quite plainly see her motioning her
daughter away with a gesture that she only affected to conceal. He
strove to keep an expression of annoyance from his face and answered as
enthusiastically as he could. She spoke a few more listless sentences
with an air of fighting a rearguard action. When she left him he sought
through the room for the Lady Eva, disregarding all who tried to accost
him; but he could not come at her again.
2
Roger Vaile was divided between disappointment and pride at Jeremy’s
favor with the Speaker, and expressed both feelings with the same
equability of demeanor.
“I hope I shall see you again some time,” he said; “but the Speaker has
always disliked me.”
Jeremy experienced an acute discomfort and sought to relieve himself by
replying with warmth, “But you saved my life. I told him that you did.”
Roger shook his head and smiled. “Of course he took no more notice of
that than I do. After all, it is rather absurd, isn’t it? I merely
happened to be the first man that saw you. But I liked looking after
you, and I should be sorry if I never saw you again. And so would my
uncle.”
At the mention of the priest contrition assailed Jeremy. He had a
vision of the old man desiring information about the twentieth century
and not receiving it. Roger saw what was passing through his mind and
again shook his head slightly.
“The Speaker thinks my uncle an old fool,” he went on reflectively,
“and from some points of view he’s right. And he thinks me a young
fool, which I shouldn’t presume to dispute. For that matter he
thinks most people are fools. And the Lady Burney thinks I am a
good-for-nothing young scoundrel--but she has her own reasons for that.”
“And what does the Lady Eva think of you?” Jeremy asked curiously.
“Oh, the Lady Eva’s a wonder!” Roger said with more fervor than he
usually displayed. “She’s not like any one else alive. Why, do you know
the other day, when she was out riding with her groom she beckoned to
me and made me ride with her for ten minutes while I told her all about
you.”
Jeremy supposed that this must be unusually daring conduct for a young
girl of the twenty-first century, and he acknowledged the impression it
made on him by nodding his head two or three times.
“That’s the chief reason why the Lady Burney hates me,” Roger
continued, a slight warmth still charging his voice. “But she doesn’t
understand her own daughter. The Lady Eva takes no particular interest
in me. She merely can’t bear being cooped up, like other girls, and
not being able to talk to any one she wants to. And because I’ve gone
to her once or twice when she has called to me, they think there’s
something between us. But there isn’t: I wish there were.”
Jeremy regarded with admiration this moderate and gentle display of
passion. “But whom will she marry?” he ventured, feeling himself a
little disturbed by his own question as soon as it was uttered.
“I believe the Lady Burney would like her to marry that horrible
Canadian. And her father would marry her to any one if he saw his
profit in it. It’s lucky for her that the Chairman of Bradford is
married already.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He’s the biggest man of the North and one of the men, so they say,
that the Speaker is most afraid of. There’s some kind of dispute
going on between them now. But it’s all nonsense,” Roger concluded
indifferently. “There’s really nothing for them to quarrel about and
nothing will come of it. But the Speaker always does excite himself
about nothing and always has. He’s a very strange old man; and the Lady
Eva is like him in some ways. And then there’s that Canadian.... You
will find yourself among a queer lot: I own that I don’t understand
them.”
But in spite of Roger’s wishes and Jeremy’s protestations their
meetings were, for some time after this conversation, casual and
infrequent. The Speaker, as he grimly said, had a use for Jeremy, and
was determined to see it accomplished. Day after day they went together
to the guarded and mysterious workshop behind Waterloo Station.
There, day after day, Jeremy painfully revived his rusty knowledge of
mechanics, and, himself driven by the Speaker, drove the gang of old
men to feats of astonishing skill.
He was astonished at the outset to see what they had actually done.
To have made two rifled, wire-wound guns, with their failing wits and
muscles and with the crazy museum of machinery which they showed him,
had been truly an amazing performance. He learnt later that this was
the eleventh pair that had been cast in fifteen years, and the first
since they had mastered the art of properly shrinking on the case.
They were still in difficulties with the screw-thread inside the gun
that locked the breech-block; and as he set them time and time again
at the task of remedying this or that fault in their workmanship,
he understood why they had taken so long and why so many guns had
blown up. What he could not understand was the Speaker’s indomitable
persistence in this fantastic undertaking, which, but for his own
arrival in the world, might have taken fifteen years more and outlasted
all the old men concerned in it.
But while he slaved, sweating and harassed, sometimes despairing
because of a scrap of knowledge that evaded his memory or because of
the absence of some machine that would have ensured accurate working,
the Speaker hovered round him and, little by little, in long harangues
and confessions, laid bare the main-springs of his nature. These
extraordinary scenes lasted in Jeremy’s mind, moved before his eyes,
echoed in his ears, when he had left the shed, when he sat at dinner
or in the darkness when he was trying to sleep, until he found that he
was gradually being infected with a dogged, unreasoning enthusiasm like
that of his dotard fellow-workers. He even felt a little ashamed of
himself for succumbing to the fanatical influence of an insane old Jew.
But the Speaker would stand at his elbow, when he was adjusting a
decrepit lathe that ought to have been long ago on the scrap-heap, and
rhapsodize endlessly in his thick muttering voice that rose sometimes
to a shout, accompanied by lifted hands and flashing eyes.
“I was born too late,” he would cry, “and I should perhaps have given
up hope if I had not found you. But you and I, when this task is
done, will regenerate the kingdom. How long I have labored and these
easy-going fools have not once helped me or understood me! But now our
triumph begins--when the guns are made.”
Jeremy, standing up to ease his back and wiping his hands on an oily
rag, would reflect that if it took so long to cut a screw-thread
correctly, the regeneration of the whole kingdom was likely to be a
pretty considerable task. Besides, when he was away from the Speaker or
when his absorption in the machinery removed him from that formidable
influence, his thoughts took a wider cast. He was sometimes far from
sure that a regeneration which began by the manufacture of heavy
artillery was likely to be a process of which he could wholly approve.
He found this age sufficiently agreeable not to wish to change it.
It was true that innumerable conveniences had gone. But on the other
hand most of the people seemed to be reasonably contented, and no
one was ever in a hurry. The Speaker, Jeremy often thought, was
principally bent on regenerating those vices of which the world had
managed to cure itself. The trains were few and uncertain, and, from
the universal decay of mechanical knowledge, were bound in time to
cease altogether; but England, so far as Jeremy could see, would get
on very well without any trains at all. There was no telephone; but
that was in many ways a blessing. There was no electric light, except
here and there, notably, so he learnt, in some of the Cotswold towns,
which were again flourishing under the rule of the wool-merchants and
where it was provided by water-power to illuminate their great new
houses. But it was certainly possible to regard candles and lamps as
more beautiful. The streets were dark at night and not oversafe; but
no man went out unarmed or alone after sunset, and actual violence was
rare. Jeremy was anxious to see what the countryside looked like, when
the Speaker would allow him a tour out of London. He gathered that
it was richer and more prosperous than he had known it, and that the
small country town had come again into its own. He learnt with joy that
the wounds made by the bricks and mortar of the great manufacturing
cities had, save in isolated places, in parts of Yorkshire and Wales,
long been healed by the green touch of time. He formed for himself a
pleasant picture of the new England, and, when his mind was his own, he
shrank from disturbing it.
But when the Speaker, with mad eyes and clawing gestures, muttered
beside him, he turned again with an almost equal fanaticism to the
hopeless business of restoring all that was gone and that was better
gone. And, under this slave-driver’s eye, he had little time for
anything else. Even at night they generally dined alone together in the
Speaker’s own room; and Jeremy, drugged and stupefied with fatigue, sat
silent while the old man continued his unflagging monologue. And every
day his enthusiasm grew greater, his demands for haste more frequent
and more urgent. Only never, in all the ramblings of his speech, did he
once betray the use he intended to make of the guns, the reason for his
urgency.
Jeremy looked out from this existence and saw a resting world in which
he alone must labor. The strain began to tell on his nerves; and he
sometimes complained weakly to himself that the nightmare, into which
he had awakened, endured and seemed to have established itself as a
permanency. He had none save fleeting opportunities of seeing the Lady
Eva. On the few occasions when they met it had been in the presence of
the Lady Burney; and the girl had conducted herself with silent, almost
too perfect, propriety. Jeremy, much too tired and harassed to think
out anything clearly, concluded that circumstances had, once again in
his life, taken the wrong turn and that his luck was out.
One morning, about three weeks after his first visit to the workshop,
he succeeded for the first time in fitting the already completed
breech-block into the gun and satisfied himself that the delicate
mechanism, though it left much to be desired and would not last very
long, would do well enough. He looked up wearily from this triumph and
saw the old gnomes, his colleagues, grotesquely working all around him.
Gradually, as he became convinced of the Speaker’s insanity, these
uncouth creatures had grown more human and individual in his eyes and
less like a chorus in one of Maeterlinck’s plays. He had not been busy
all the time with that infernal screw-thread. He had looked now and
then into a smaller shed close by, where in the most primitive manner
and with an appalling disregard of safety, an aged workman occupied
himself with the production of explosives. This man was a little more
intelligent than the rest, and had studied with devotion a marvelous
collection of old and rapidly disintegrating handbooks on his subject.
He was a small and skinny creature, with an alert manner and a curious
skipping walk; and Jeremy had got used to seeing the hatchet face
bobbing towards him with demands for help.
Now, as he rested for a moment, there was a noise that penetrated even
his dulled consciousness; and, as he started up in alarm, Hatchet-face
skipped in, bursting with inarticulate excitement. It appeared, when
he was able to speak, that he had just missed blowing off his left
hand with the first detonator to function in an entirely satisfactory
way; and, while one of his fellows bandaged his hurts, he continued to
rejoice, showing a praiseworthy absence of self-concern. The hubbub
attracted the Speaker, who was not far away; and when he arrived he
learnt with delight of its cause. Jeremy capped this news with his of
the breech-lock; and for a moment the old man’s terrifying countenance
was lit up with a wholly human and simple happiness. Then he announced
that they would not attend at the workshop that afternoon. Jeremy, from
the bench on which he had laxly subsided, remarked that they deserved a
holiday.
“It is not that,” said the Speaker, frowning again. “It is a reception
to which I must go, an affair of ceremony, and I wish you to come with
me. There will be some kind of a show.”
Jeremy was not sure what significance this variable word might by
now have acquired, and he did not much care. He looked forward to an
afternoon’s relaxation. He was thankful for so much; but he wondered at
the back of his mind what the Speaker would want to start on now that
the guns were nearly finished.
3
The reception was to be held at the house of one Henry Watkins, a big
man with large estates near London and in Kent, whom Jeremy had met and
had a little remarked. He seemed to be the most influential and the
most consulted frequenter of the Treasury; and Jeremy observed that
the Speaker commonly mentioned him with rather less than his usual
contempt. His house was a large one, almost exactly on the site of
Charing Cross, with gardens stretching down to the river; and here,
when their carriage arrived, he came out and with easy respectfulness
helped the Speaker to alight.
He was a tall man, with a long, narrow face and a slightly fretful
expression. As he took the old man’s arm Jeremy fancied that he
whispered something, and that the Speaker shook his head. Then he
turned to Jeremy and said perfunctorily, “I have had the happiness of
making your acquaintance,” wheeled back to the Speaker and went on: “We
waited only for you, sir. The Lady Burney and the Lady Eva and Thomas
Wells are already here.”
“Then lead us to them,” the Speaker replied. And as they were being
conducted through a crowd of waiting guests, who made way for them
with a quiet buzz of deferential salutations, he observed in a gracious
tone, “I need not ask whether you have a good show for us, Henry
Watkins.”
“I trust that it will please you, sir,” the host replied. “I have heard
this troop very well spoken of.”
Jeremy was prepared by this conversation for something in the way of a
performance; and he was therefore not surprised when they were ushered
into a large room, which had been rudely fitted up as a theater. At the
front, standing by themselves, were four gilt armchairs, and on these
Jeremy thought he recognized the backs of the Speaker’s wife, of his
daughter, and of Thomas Wells. They caught the Speaker’s notice, too,
and he halted suddenly, craning his head forward and peering at them.
“There are only four chairs,” he said in a rasping voice. “I wish
another chair to be brought for my friend, Jeremy Tuft.” In a moment,
after some confusion, Jeremy found himself sitting next to the Lady Eva
and hearing her demure reply to his greeting, which was almost drowned
by the noise of the guests behind them entering the hall. When this had
died down, he essayed a second remark, but received no answer beyond an
inclination of the beautiful head, which he was devoutly studying with
a strained sidelong glance. He therefore examined the stage instead and
saw that it was already set with roughly-painted canvas flats. These
appeared to be intended to represent a wood. There was no curtain; and
the end of what looked remarkably like a piano was projecting from one
of the wings. Tall canvas screens ran from the two ends of the stage to
the walls of the room, covering on each side a space about five feet
long; and Jeremy surmised, from a persistent whispering and from an
occasional bulging of the canvas, that the players were hidden in these
narrow quarters.
Presently three loud raps were heard and a hush fell on the audience.
Jeremy started in his seat when an invisible performer at the piano
began to play what sounded like a mangled waltz, very loud, very
crude and very vulgar. The strings of the piano were in indifferent
condition, the skill of the executant was no better, and Jeremy, who
was proud of having some sympathy for music, suffered a little. When
he looked about him, however, he saw neither amusement nor annoyance
on any face. Luckily the performance lasted only a few minutes. As
soon as it was done, an actress tripped affectedly on to the stage
from the right side and began to declaim in a voice so high-pitched
and theatrical and with so many gestures and movements of her head
that Jeremy could hardly understand a word of what she was saying. He
gathered that she had come to this wood to meet her lover; and his
guess was confirmed when an actor strode on from the left, stamping his
feet on the resounding boards as he came. Then both began to declaim at
one another in voices of enormous power. Their stilted violence alarmed
and repelled Jeremy. He ceased to look at the stage, wondering whether,
under cover of the excitement which this scene must be causing, he
dared steal a glance at the Lady Eva. He did so, and discovered that
she was looking at him.
Both averted their eyes, and Jeremy sat staring at the floor, his heart
beating and, he felt certain, his cheeks burning. Above his head the
drama ranted along with a loud monotonous noise like the sea beating
on rocks, and made a background to his thoughts. That single glance
had precipitated his emotions, and he must now confess to himself, what
had been before a mere toy for the brain, that he loved this girl. The
admission carried his mind whirling wildly away, and he would have
been content to brood on it with a secret rising delight until he
was interrupted. But he could not help asking himself whether he had
not discovered something else, whether there had not been at least a
particular interest in the eyes of the Lady Eva. This second thought at
first terrified him by its revelation of his own audacity in conceiving
it. For a moment it stopped him still, and then suddenly there was
silence on the stage.
The actor and the actress were departing, she to the right, he to the
left, bowing as they went. The whole audience began clapping in a
decorous and gentle manner. The Lady Eva leant slightly towards Jeremy
as he sat stupefied and motionless, and whispered:
“You must clap. You will be thought impolite if you do not.”
He obeyed in a dazed way, watching her and seeing how she brought
the palms of her hands together, regularly but so softly that it
made hardly any sound. While the applause still continued, servants
came forward from the sides of the hall, sprang up on the stage and
began removing the scenery, which they replaced with other flats,
representing a street. And after an interval, and another performance
on the vile piano, the play resumed its course.
Jeremy must have followed it with some part of his mind of the
existence of which he was ignorant: for when it was all over he had a
reasonably clear notion of what it had been about. There had been two
lovers and a villain and a buffoon who fell over his own feet. There
had been one affecting moment when the heroine, deserted and hopeless,
had been deluged with small pieces of paper, not too skilfully
sprinkled on her, while she walked up and down, striving to comfort her
child and lamenting the perfidy of man. And the play itself, as well as
the acting, had been of an incredible theatricality and exaggeration.
If Jeremy’s conscious mind had been active while the performance was
going on he could not but have followed every point with amazement and
indulged in some interesting reflections on the dramatic tastes of his
new contemporaries. As it was, when it was over and he was able to look
back on it, he could only wonder whether his unaccountable recollection
of it was to be believed.
For after the end of the first scene, after the Lady Eva had spoken to
him, he was plunged even more deeply into that delicious but alarming
turmoil of feeling. His mind unbidden suggested to him sobering
considerations only for the pleasure, as it appeared, of seeing them
flung on one side. There was no certainty, no probability even, that
the girl had loved him. In his story there was enough reason why
she should look at him with interest, and he had learnt that her
usual manner was frank and unstudied, not therefore to be too easily
construed. Yet a mad certainty rose in his heart and overwhelmed this
sensible thought. Jeremy closed his eyes resolutely to the buffoon on
the stage, who was now imitating a drunken man and abandoned himself to
visions of the girl at his side.
At that moment he would perhaps have been unwilling to be awakened to
speak to her, even to embrace her. That would come, must come; but
this exquisite dreaming, hitherto unknown to him, filled the circle
of his forces, satisfied all his desires. He pictured her as he had
seen her half-a-dozen times, walking across a room, lifting her eyes
to his with some question in them, once riding, once with a piece of
needlework in her hands, of which, without liking it, she was making a
sound and creditable job. He thought of her clear, wide eyes, her free,
athletic carriage, her pleasant voice. For a little while he was in
neither the strange nor the familiar world of his twofold experience:
his new hope had dissolved both recent and ancient memories alike. Then
suddenly across the texture of his passionate meditation came a thought
of himself. He shifted uneasily and felt cold. Who and what was he? He
told himself--a sport of nature, a young man unnaturally old, an old
man unnaturally young. Could he be certain yet what trick it was that
Trehanoc’s ray had played on him? Might he not, one day, to-morrow or
a year hence, perhaps in her very arms, suddenly expire, even crumble
into dust? He shuddered in the chilling air of these suggestions and
was filled with misery. But the next moment he could see himself
confessing his misery to the Lady Eva and receiving her comfort.
He woke. Mixed with the light clapping, in which from time to time he
had mechanically joined, there was a stir and shuffle as though the
audience was preparing to depart; and, looking up, he saw the whole
cast on the stage, bowing with a certain air of finality, the hero and
the villain holding each a hand of the heroine. The Speaker was rising
from his seat, and at that sign all the other persons in the room rose,
too, and waited. Jeremy, brought down out of dreams, searched in his
mind for something to say to the Lady Eva and dared not look at her
until he had found it. But when he turned to her he saw that she was
staring in another direction. A servant had just reached the Speaker
and had apparently given him a letter. The whole assembly stood hushed
and immobile while he read it, and Jeremy, his breath caught by an
inexplicable sense of crisis, saw that, half-way through, the old man’s
hand jerked suddenly and was steady again.
The interruption, the hushed seconds that followed, seemed to spread an
impalpable sense of dismay through the hall. Henry Watkins, his fretful
expression deepened to one of alarm, made his way to the Speaker’s side
and whispered something in an anxious voice; but the old man waved his
hand impatiently and went on reading.
“What is it?” Jeremy whispered sharply to the Lady Eva.
“I don’t know ... I don’t know ...” she uttered; and then, so low that
he could hardly catch it, “I am afraid for him....”
Jeremy stared all around in the hope that somewhere he might find some
enlightenment. But there was no trace of understanding on the faces
of any of the guests. The Lady Burney stood lumpishly by her husband
in an attitude of annoyance and boredom. Beyond her Thomas Wells
half-leant on his chair in a barbaric but graceful pose, like that of a
hunting animal at rest. Jeremy fancied for a moment that he could read
some sort of comprehension, some sort of satisfaction even, in those
vulpine features, in the small eyes, the swelling nostrils, the thin,
backward straining mouth. And still the Speaker read on, motionless,
without giving a sign, while Henry Watkins stood at his elbow as though
waiting for an order; and still the Lady Eva gazed at them, crumpling
restlessly with one hand a fold of her dress.
All at once the grouping broke up, and the Speaker’s voice came, steady
and clear but not loud. “I must go back to the Treasury,” he said. “I
am sorry I cannot stay to speak with your guests, Henry Watkins, but
you must dismiss them. I wish you to come with me. And I need you,
too, Jeremy Tuft; you must follow us at once. And----” he hesitated,
“if you will give me the benefit of your counsel in this grave matter,
Thomas Wells....” The Canadian bowed a little and grinned more thinly.
Jeremy found himself in a state of confusion walking at the end of
the Speaker’s party towards the door. In front of him the old man had
gripped Henry Watkins firmly by the sleeve and was talking to him
quietly and rapidly.
Jeremy’s passing by was the sign to the other guests that they might
now leave; and as he went through the door he could feel them thronging
behind him. He pressed on to keep the Speaker in sight, but slackened
his pace when a hand fell lightly on his shoulder. It was Roger Vaile.
“Do you know what the matter is?” Roger asked.
Jeremy shook his head.
“Well, be careful of that Canadian. I saw him looking at you while the
show was on, and he doesn’t like you.”