CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER I
As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very
narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist,
lawyers’ clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady
typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where
beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is
better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the
air with your left hand.
One afternoon in the beginning of October when the traffic was becoming
brisk a tall man strode along the edge of the pavement with a lady on
his arm. Angry glances struck upon their backs. The small, agitated
figures—for in comparison with this couple most people looked
small—decorated with fountain pens, and burdened with despatch-boxes,
had appointments to keep, and drew a weekly salary, so that there was
some reason for the unfriendly stare which was bestowed upon Mr.
Ambrose’s height and upon Mrs. Ambrose’s cloak. But some enchantment
had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity.
In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought;
and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her at a
level above the eyes of most that it was sorrow. It was only by
scorning all she met that she kept herself from tears, and the friction
of people brushing past her was evidently painful. After watching the
traffic on the Embankment for a minute or two with a stoical gaze she
twitched her husband’s sleeve, and they crossed between the swift
discharge of motor cars. When they were safe on the further side, she
gently withdrew her arm from his, allowing her mouth at the same time
to relax, to tremble; then tears rolled down, and leaning her elbows on
the balustrade, she shielded her face from the curious. Mr. Ambrose
attempted consolation; he patted her shoulder; but she showed no signs
of admitting him, and feeling it awkward to stand beside a grief that
was greater than his, he crossed his arms behind him, and took a turn
along the pavement.
The embankment juts out in angles here and there, like pulpits; instead
of preachers, however, small boys occupy them, dangling string,
dropping pebbles, or launching wads of paper for a cruise. With their
sharp eye for eccentricity, they were inclined to think Mr. Ambrose
awful; but the quickest witted cried “Bluebeard!” as he passed. In case
they should proceed to tease his wife, Mr. Ambrose flourished his stick
at them, upon which they decided that he was grotesque merely, and four
instead of one cried “Bluebeard!” in chorus.
Although Mrs. Ambrose stood quite still, much longer than is natural,
the little boys let her be. Some one is always looking into the river
near Waterloo Bridge; a couple will stand there talking for half an
hour on a fine afternoon; most people, walking for pleasure,
contemplate for three minutes; when, having compared the occasion with
other occasions, or made some sentence, they pass on. Sometimes the
flats and churches and hotels of Westminster are like the outlines of
Constantinople in a mist; sometimes the river is an opulent purple,
sometimes mud-coloured, sometimes sparkling blue like the sea. It is
always worth while to look down and see what is happening. But this
lady looked neither up nor down; the only thing she had seen, since she
stood there, was a circular iridescent patch slowly floating past with
a straw in the middle of it. The straw and the patch swam again and
again behind the tremulous medium of a great welling tear, and the tear
rose and fell and dropped into the river. Then there struck close upon
her ears—
Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the nine Gods he swore—
and then more faintly, as if the speaker had passed her on his walk—
That the Great House of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
Yes, she knew she must go back to all that, but at present she must
weep. Screening her face she sobbed more steadily than she had yet
done, her shoulders rising and falling with great regularity. It was
this figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished
Sphinx, having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards,
he turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his
hand on her shoulder, and said, “Dearest.” His voice was supplicating.
But she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, “You can’t
possibly understand.”
As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to
raise them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank. She
saw also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across
them, like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen
blankly, but to see anything was of course to end her weeping and begin
to walk.
“I would rather walk,” she said, her husband having hailed a cab
already occupied by two city men.
The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The
shooting motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial
objects, the thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black
broughams, made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there
above the pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her
children were now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for
the mass of streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them,
she only felt at this moment how little London had done to make her
love it, although thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street.
She knew how to read the people who were passing her; there were the
rich who were running to and from each others’ houses at this hour;
there were the bigoted workers driving in a straight line to their
offices; there were the poor who were unhappy and rightly malignant.
Already, though there was sunlight in the haze, tattered old men and
women were nodding off to sleep upon the seats. When one gave up seeing
the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath.
A fine rain now made her still more dismal; vans with the odd names of
those engaged in odd industries—Sprules, Manufacturer of Saw-dust;
Grabb, to whom no piece of waste paper comes amiss—fell flat as a bad
joke; bold lovers, sheltered behind one cloak, seemed to her sordid,
past their passion; the flower women, a contented company, whose talk
is always worth hearing, were sodden hags; the red, yellow, and blue
flowers, whose heads were pressed together, would not blaze. Moreover,
her husband walking with a quick rhythmic stride, jerking his free hand
occasionally, was either a Viking or a stricken Nelson; the sea-gulls
had changed his note.
“Ridley, shall we drive? Shall we drive, Ridley?”
Mrs. Ambrose had to speak sharply; by this time he was far away.
The cab, by trotting steadily along the same road, soon withdrew them
from the West End, and plunged them into London. It appeared that this
was a great manufacturing place, where the people were engaged in
making things, as though the West End, with its electric lamps, its
vast plate-glass windows all shining yellow, its carefully-finished
houses, and tiny live figures trotting on the pavement, or bowled along
on wheels in the road, was the finished work. It appeared to her a very
small bit of work for such an enormous factory to have made. For some
reason it appeared to her as a small golden tassel on the edge of a
vast black cloak.
Observing that they passed no other hansom cab, but only vans and
waggons, and that not one of the thousand men and women she saw was
either a gentleman or a lady, Mrs. Ambrose understood that after all it
is the ordinary thing to be poor, and that London is the city of
innumerable poor people. Startled by this discovery and seeing herself
pacing a circle all the days of her life round Picadilly Circus she was
greatly relieved to pass a building put up by the London County Council
for Night Schools.
“Lord, how gloomy it is!” her husband groaned. “Poor creatures!”
What with the misery for her children, the poor, and the rain, her mind
was like a wound exposed to dry in the air.
At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed
like an egg-shell. The wide Embankment which had had room for
cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming
with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons. While her husband
read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which
certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to
find information. From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons
with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither
help nor attention. It seemed a miracle when an old man approached,
guessed their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in
the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of
steps. With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their
places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having
shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square
buildings and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child’s avenue of
bricks.
The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it,
ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by
tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the
current. The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed
across the line of traffic. In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands
upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he
had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any. He
seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried
delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.
“They want bridges now,” he said, indicating the monstrous outline of
the Tower Bridge. Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water
between her and her children. Mournfully she gazed at the ship they
were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly
read her name—_Euphrosyne_.
Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging,
the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.
As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped
his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all the
world over flew that flag the day they sailed. In the minds of both the
passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment
for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose, gathered their things
together, and climbed on deck.
Down in the saloon of her father’s ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged
twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously. To begin with,
though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with,
they were elderly people, and finally, as her father’s daughter she
must be in some sort prepared to entertain them. She looked forward to
seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first
sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature of an
approaching physical discomfort—a tight shoe or a draughty window. She
was already unnaturally braced to receive them. As she occupied herself
in laying forks severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a
man’s voice saying gloomily:
“On a dark night one would fall down these stairs head foremost,” to
which a woman’s voice added, “And be killed.”
As she spoke the last words the woman stood in the doorway. Tall,
large-eyed, draped in purple shawls, Mrs. Ambrose was romantic and
beautiful; not perhaps sympathetic, for her eyes looked straight and
considered what they saw. Her face was much warmer than a Greek face;
on the other hand it was much bolder than the face of the usual pretty
Englishwoman.
“Oh, Rachel, how d’you do,” she said, shaking hands.
“How are you, dear,” said Mr. Ambrose, inclining his forehead to be
kissed. His niece instinctively liked his thin angular body, and the
big head with its sweeping features, and the acute, innocent eyes.
“Tell Mr. Pepper,” Rachel bade the servant. Husband and wife then sat
down on one side of the table, with their niece opposite to them.
“My father told me to begin,” she explained. “He is very busy with the
men. . . . You know Mr. Pepper?”
A little man who was bent as some trees are by a gale on one side of
them had slipped in. Nodding to Mr. Ambrose, he shook hands with Helen.
“Draughts,” he said, erecting the collar of his coat.
“You are still rheumatic?” asked Helen. Her voice was low and
seductive, though she spoke absently enough, the sight of town and
river being still present to her mind.
“Once rheumatic, always rheumatic, I fear,” he replied. “To some extent
it depends on the weather, though not so much as people are apt to
think.”
“One does not die of it, at any rate,” said Helen.
“As a general rule—no,” said Mr. Pepper.
“Soup, Uncle Ridley?” asked Rachel.
“Thank you, dear,” he said, and, as he held his plate out, sighed
audibly, “Ah! she’s not like her mother.” Helen was just too late in
thumping her tumbler on the table to prevent Rachel from hearing, and
from blushing scarlet with embarrassment.
“The way servants treat flowers!” she said hastily. She drew a green
vase with a crinkled lip towards her, and began pulling out the tight
little chrysanthemums, which she laid on the table-cloth, arranging
them fastidiously side by side.
There was a pause.
“You knew Jenkinson, didn’t you, Ambrose?” asked Mr. Pepper across the
table.
“Jenkinson of Peterhouse?”
“He’s dead,” said Mr. Pepper.
“Ah, dear!—I knew him—ages ago,” said Ridley. “He was the hero of the
punt accident, you remember? A queer card. Married a young woman out of
a tobacconist’s, and lived in the Fens—never heard what became of him.”
“Drink—drugs,” said Mr. Pepper with sinister conciseness. “He left a
commentary. Hopeless muddle, I’m told.”
“The man had really great abilities,” said Ridley.
“His introduction to Jellaby holds its own still,” went on Mr. Pepper,
“which is surprising, seeing how text-books change.”
“There was a theory about the planets, wasn’t there?” asked Ridley.
“A screw loose somewhere, no doubt of it,” said Mr. Pepper, shaking his
head.
Now a tremor ran through the table, and a light outside swerved. At the
same time an electric bell rang sharply again and again.
“We’re off,” said Ridley.
A slight but perceptible wave seemed to roll beneath the floor; then it
sank; then another came, more perceptible. Lights slid right across the
uncurtained window. The ship gave a loud melancholy moan.
“We’re off!” said Mr. Pepper. Other ships, as sad as she, answered her
outside on the river. The chuckling and hissing of water could be
plainly heard, and the ship heaved so that the steward bringing plates
had to balance himself as he drew the curtain. There was a pause.
“Jenkinson of Cats—d’you still keep up with him?” asked Ambrose.
“As much as one ever does,” said Mr. Pepper. “We meet annually. This
year he has had the misfortune to lose his wife, which made it painful,
of course.”
“Very painful,” Ridley agreed.
“There’s an unmarried daughter who keeps house for him, I believe, but
it’s never the same, not at his age.”
Both gentlemen nodded sagely as they carved their apples.
“There was a book, wasn’t there?” Ridley enquired.
“There _was_ a book, but there never _will_ be a book,” said Mr. Pepper
with such fierceness that both ladies looked up at him.
“There never will be a book, because some one else has written it for
him,” said Mr. Pepper with considerable acidity. “That’s what comes of
putting things off, and collecting fossils, and sticking Norman arches
on one’s pigsties.”
“I confess I sympathise,” said Ridley with a melancholy sigh. “I have a
weakness for people who can’t begin.”
“. . . The accumulations of a lifetime wasted,” continued Mr. pepper.
“He had accumulations enough to fill a barn.”
“It’s a vice that some of us escape,” said Ridley. “Our friend Miles
has another work out to-day.”
Mr. Pepper gave an acid little laugh. “According to my calculations,”
he said, “he has produced two volumes and a half annually, which,
allowing for time spent in the cradle and so forth, shows a commendable
industry.”
“Yes, the old Master’s saying of him has been pretty well realised,”
said Ridley.
“A way they had,” said Mr. Pepper. “You know the Bruce collection?—not
for publication, of course.”
“I should suppose not,” said Ridley significantly. “For a Divine he
was—remarkably free.”
“The Pump in Neville’s Row, for example?” enquired Mr. Pepper.
“Precisely,” said Ambrose.
Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly
trained in promoting men’s talk without listening to it, could
think—about the education of children, about the use of fog sirens in
an opera—without betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel
was perhaps too still for a hostess, and that she might have done
something with her hands.
“Perhaps—?” she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely
to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive
or had forgotten their presence.
“Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days,” they heard Ridley
say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway,
they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and
had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.
Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were
now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships at
anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy
drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the
lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of
domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would ever
settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for
hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for
ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to
adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound,
eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great
city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.
Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, “Won’t you be cold?”
Rachel replied, “No. . . . How beautiful!” she added a moment later.
Very little was visible—a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of
brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.
“It blows—it blows!” gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat.
Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit of
movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of
movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked
through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked
in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose throw himself violently
against the back of his chair, while Mr. Pepper crinkled his cheeks as
though they had been cut in wood. The ghost of a roar of laughter came
out to them, and was drowned at once in the wind. In the dry
yellow-lighted room Mr. Pepper and Mr. Ambrose were oblivious of all
tumult; they were in Cambridge, and it was probably about the year
1875.
“They’re old friends,” said Helen, smiling at the sight. “Now, is there
a room for us to sit in?”
Rachel opened a door.
“It’s more like a landing than a room,” she said. Indeed it had nothing
of the shut stationary character of a room on shore. A table was rooted
in the middle, and seats were stuck to the sides. Happily the tropical
suns had bleached the tapestries to a faded blue-green colour, and the
mirror with its frame of shells, the work of the steward’s love, when
the time hung heavy in the southern seas, was quaint rather than ugly.
Twisted shells with red lips like unicorn’s horns ornamented the
mantelpiece, which was draped by a pall of purple plush from which
depended a certain number of balls. Two windows opened on to the deck,
and the light beating through them when the ship was roasted on the
Amazons had turned the prints on the opposite wall to a faint yellow
colour, so that “The Coliseum” was scarcely to be distinguished from
Queen Alexandra playing with her Spaniels. A pair of wicker arm-chairs
by the fireside invited one to warm one’s hands at a grate full of gilt
shavings; a great lamp swung above the table—the kind of lamp which
makes the light of civilisation across dark fields to one walking in
the country.
“It’s odd that every one should be an old friend of Mr. Pepper’s,”
Rachel started nervously, for the situation was difficult, the room
cold, and Helen curiously silent.
“I suppose you take him for granted?” said her aunt.
“He’s like this,” said Rachel, lighting on a fossilised fish in a
basin, and displaying it.
“I expect you’re too severe,” Helen remarked.
Rachel immediately tried to qualify what she had said against her
belief.
“I don’t really know him,” she said, and took refuge in facts,
believing that elderly people really like them better than feelings.
She produced what she knew of William Pepper. She told Helen that he
always called on Sundays when they were at home; he knew about a great
many things—about mathematics, history, Greek, zoology, economics, and
the Icelandic Sagas. He had turned Persian poetry into English prose,
and English prose into Greek iambics; he was an authority upon coins;
and—one other thing—oh yes, she thought it was vehicular traffic.
He was here either to get things out of the sea, or to write upon the
probable course of Odysseus, for Greek after all was his hobby.
“I’ve got all his pamphlets,” she said. “Little pamphlets. Little
yellow books.” It did not appear that she had read them.
“Has he ever been in love?” asked Helen, who had chosen a seat.
This was unexpectedly to the point.
“His heart’s a piece of old shoe leather,” Rachel declared, dropping
the fish. But when questioned she had to own that she had never asked
him.
“I shall ask him,” said Helen.
“The last time I saw you, you were buying a piano,” she continued. “Do
you remember—the piano, the room in the attic, and the great plants
with the prickles?”
“Yes, and my aunts said the piano would come through the floor, but at
their age one wouldn’t mind being killed in the night?” she enquired.
“I heard from Aunt Bessie not long ago,” Helen stated. “She is afraid
that you will spoil your arms if you insist upon so much practising.”
“The muscles of the forearm—and then one won’t marry?”
“She didn’t put it quite like that,” replied Mrs. Ambrose.
“Oh, no—of course she wouldn’t,” said Rachel with a sigh.
Helen looked at her. Her face was weak rather than decided, saved from
insipidity by the large enquiring eyes; denied beauty, now that she was
sheltered indoors, by the lack of colour and definite outline.
Moreover, a hesitation in speaking, or rather a tendency to use the
wrong words, made her seem more than normally incompetent for her
years. Mrs. Ambrose, who had been speaking much at random, now
reflected that she certainly did not look forward to the intimacy of
three or four weeks on board ship which was threatened. Women of her
own age usually boring her, she supposed that girls would be worse. She
glanced at Rachel again. Yes! how clear it was that she would be
vacillating, emotional, and when you said something to her it would
make no more lasting impression than the stroke of a stick upon water.
There was nothing to take hold of in girls—nothing hard, permanent,
satisfactory. Did Willoughby say three weeks, or did he say four? She
tried to remember.
At this point, however, the door opened and a tall burly man entered
the room, came forward and shook Helen’s hand with an emotional kind of
heartiness, Willoughby himself, Rachel’s father, Helen’s
brother-in-law. As a great deal of flesh would have been needed to make
a fat man of him, his frame being so large, he was not fat; his face
was a large framework too, looking, by the smallness of the features
and the glow in the hollow of the cheek, more fitted to withstand
assaults of the weather than to express sentiments and emotions, or to
respond to them in others.
“It is a great pleasure that you have come,” he said, “for both of us.”
Rachel murmured in obedience to her father’s glance.
“We’ll do our best to make you comfortable. And Ridley. We think it an
honour to have charge of him. Pepper’ll have some one to contradict
him—which I daren’t do. You find this child grown, don’t you? A young
woman, eh?”
Still holding Helen’s hand he drew his arm round Rachel’s shoulder,
thus making them come uncomfortably close, but Helen forbore to look.
“You think she does us credit?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Helen.
“Because we expect great things of her,” he continued, squeezing his
daughter’s arm and releasing her. “But about you now.” They sat down
side by side on the little sofa. “Did you leave the children well?
They’ll be ready for school, I suppose. Do they take after you or
Ambrose? They’ve got good heads on their shoulders, I’ll be bound?”
At this Helen immediately brightened more than she had yet done, and
explained that her son was six and her daughter ten. Everybody said
that her boy was like her and her girl like Ridley. As for brains, they
were quick brats, she thought, and modestly she ventured on a little
story about her son,—how left alone for a minute he had taken the pat
of butter in his fingers, run across the room with it, and put it on
the fire—merely for the fun of the thing, a feeling which she could
understand.
“And you had to show the young rascal that these tricks wouldn’t do,
eh?”
“A child of six? I don’t think they matter.”
“I’m an old-fashioned father.”
“Nonsense, Willoughby; Rachel knows better.”
Much as Willoughby would doubtless have liked his daughter to praise
him she did not; her eyes were unreflecting as water, her fingers still
toying with the fossilised fish, her mind absent. The elder people went
on to speak of arrangements that could be made for Ridley’s comfort—a
table placed where he couldn’t help looking at the sea, far from
boilers, at the same time sheltered from the view of people passing.
Unless he made this a holiday, when his books were all packed, he would
have no holiday whatever; for out at Santa Marina Helen knew, by
experience, that he would work all day; his boxes, she said, were
packed with books.
“Leave it to me—leave it to me!” said Willoughby, obviously intending
to do much more than she asked of him. But Ridley and Mr. Pepper were
heard fumbling at the door.
“How are you, Vinrace?” said Ridley, extending a limp hand as he came
in, as though the meeting were melancholy to both, but on the whole
more so to him.
Willoughby preserved his heartiness, tempered by respect. For the
moment nothing was said.
“We looked in and saw you laughing,” Helen remarked. “Mr. Pepper had
just told a very good story.”
“Pish. None of the stories were good,” said her husband peevishly.
“Still a severe judge, Ridley?” enquired Mr. Vinrace.
“We bored you so that you left,” said Ridley, speaking directly to his
wife.
As this was quite true Helen did not attempt to deny it, and her next
remark, “But didn’t they improve after we’d gone?” was unfortunate, for
her husband answered with a droop of his shoulders, “If possible they
got worse.”
The situation was now one of considerable discomfort for every one
concerned, as was proved by a long interval of constraint and silence.
Mr. Pepper, indeed, created a diversion of a kind by leaping on to his
seat, both feet tucked under him, with the action of a spinster who
detects a mouse, as the draught struck at his ankles. Drawn up there,
sucking at his cigar, with his arms encircling his knees, he looked
like the image of Buddha, and from this elevation began a discourse,
addressed to nobody, for nobody had called for it, upon the unplumbed
depths of ocean. He professed himself surprised to learn that although
Mr. Vinrace possessed ten ships, regularly plying between London and
Buenos Aires, not one of them was bidden to investigate the great white
monsters of the lower waters.
“No, no,” laughed Willoughby, “the monsters of the earth are too many
for me!”
Rachel was heard to sigh, “Poor little goats!”
“If it weren’t for the goats there’d be no music, my dear; music
depends upon goats,” said her father rather sharply, and Mr. Pepper
went on to describe the white, hairless, blind monsters lying curled on
the ridges of sand at the bottom of the sea, which would explode if you
brought them to the surface, their sides bursting asunder and
scattering entrails to the winds when released from pressure, with
considerable detail and with such show of knowledge, that Ridley was
disgusted, and begged him to stop.
From all this Helen drew her own conclusions, which were gloomy enough.
Pepper was a bore; Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of
confidences, the very first of which would be: “You see, I don’t get on
with my father.” Willoughby, as usual, loved his business and built his
Empire, and between them all she would be considerably bored. Being a
woman of action, however, she rose, and said that for her part she was
going to bed. At the door she glanced back instinctively at Rachel,
expecting that as two of the same sex they would leave the room
together. Rachel rose, looked vaguely into Helen’s face, and remarked
with her slight stammer, “I’m going out to t-t-triumph in the wind.”
Mrs. Ambrose’s worst suspicions were confirmed; she went down the
passage lurching from side to side, and fending off the wall now with
her right arm, now with her left; at each lurch she exclaimed
emphatically, “Damn!”