I
1
As to Gyp Labelle, if she had known the part she played in their lives,
which in the nature of things was not possible, she would have broken
into that famous laugh of hers.
To her, at any rate, it would have seemed immensely, excruciatingly funny.
As the result of an exchange of two remarkably casual notes they met at
Brown's for dinner. Brown's had occurred to both of them as a natural
meeting-place. Cosgrave, it is true, had only dined there once and that
free (as a friend of Brown's friend), but the impression made upon a
stomach accustomed to Soho and tea-shop fare had been indelible.
Stonehouse himself dined there as a matter of custom. Besides, there was
a touch of sentiment to their choice--a rather bitter sharp-tasting
sentiment like an aperitif.
Brown himself had aged considerably, and did not remember very well.
"Old friend of the doctor's, sir? Well, so am I. Getting on--getting
on. But I'm waiting till I can squeeze my money's worth out of him.
When's that knighthood coming, doctor? I want to be able to tell that
story--as good a story as you'd read anywhere. He's got to keep me
alive, sir, till it comes true."
He went off to the kitchen tittering to himself over an ancient joke
which, together with his "feeling" for the psychological moment in the
matter of roasts, was about all that was left him.
Stonehouse, his chin resting in his hand, studied the menu from which
they had already chosen.
"When the last Honours List came out, he was quite serious and pathetic
about it," he said. "Things move either too slowly or too quickly for
old people. He does realize that I make quite a good story as I stand,
but he wants the finishing touches--the King clasping me by the hand, or
kissing me on both cheeks, or whatever he thinks happens on those
occasions--and wedding bells as a grand finale."
"The place seems to have grown shabby," Cosgrave said. "Or perhaps it's
only me."
"Oh, no. It is shabby. And perhaps you've noticed, they don't wait here
as they used to."
Cosgrave looked directly at his companion, almost for the first time, and
caught a spark in the eyes that stared into his--a rather dangerous
spark, which cleverer people than himself had found difficult to make
sure of. Then he laughed flatly.
"You can see how funny it is now----"
"I always did."
"--because you were so sure it would pan out--like this. How long is it?"
"About eight years."
"My word! Let's--let's look at one another and take stock."
Stonehouse sat back and bore the inspection with a faint smile. He knew
himself, and how he impressed others. The eight years had done a great
deal for him. His strength had cast its crudeness and had attained a
certain grace--the ease of absolute control and tried confidence in
itself. He still dressed badly--indifferently, rather--but his body had
toned down to the level of the fine hands, which he held loosely clasped
upon the table.
He looked at once very young and very fine drawn and, as Cosgrave
thought, a little cruel.
"You seem--awfully well and prosperous, Robert. And a sight better
looking."
Stonehouse laughed. All he said in reply was:
"And you look prosperous and ill. What was it? Enteric?"
Cosgrave shrugged his thin shoulders. He was still flamboyantly
red-headed and generously freckled, but now that the first flush of
excitement had ebbed, his face showed a parchment yellow. His eyes,
wistful in their setting, were faded, as though a relentless tropical sun
had drunk up their once vivid, boyish colouring.
"Oh yes, that and a few other trifles. I think I've housed most West
African bugs in my time. Everyone had them, but I was such poor pasture
that I got off better than most. Three of my superiors died of 'em, and
I stepped right into their shoes. It pays, you see, if you can hold out.
People like a fellow who isn't always clamouring to come home--and you
bet I never did. But, finally, I took an overdue leave and a hunk of
savings and trekked back. I'd always planned it--a good time, you
know--but somehow it hasn't come off. I expect I left it too long. In
the end I didn't really want to come at all--wanted to lie down and die,
but hadn't the strength of mind to insist. I'd been in London a week
before I wrote you--just drifting round--too weak-kneed to take the first
step. I tore up that idiotic note three times."
"Well, as long as you posted the fourth effort," Stonehouse said, "it's
all right."
They fell then unexpectedly into one of those difficult silences which
beset the road of friends who have been separated too long. The past
stood at their elbow like an importunate and shabby ghost. And yet it
was all they had to lead them back into the old intimacy.
"We've got too much to say," Cosgrave broke out at last, with a painful
effort, "too much ground to cover--and I dare say we don't want to cover
it. If we'd written--but I never heard from you after that one
letter--after Miss Christine's death."
"I was ill," Stonehouse explained, eating tranquilly. "I got through my
finals with a temperature which would have astonished my examiners, and
then I went to pieces altogether. Had to go into hospital myself. A
nervous breakdown. Three months I had of it. They were very decent to
me, and when I came out they got me a berth as ship's doctor on one of
the smaller transatlantic liners. I got hold of things again and pulled
them my way. But I didn't want to look back. My illness had made a
definite break--I wanted to keep free."
Cosgrave nodded. He had been playing with his food, and now a look of
disgust and weariness came into his thin face.
"I can understand that. I suppose it would have been better if I'd left
well alone, and not written at all."
"It wouldn't have made much difference," Stonehouse said: "A week or two.
Sooner or later we'd have run into one another. People who've been at
school together always seem to. And you and I especially."
"I don't know. I was always a poor specimen--I never meant much to you."
Stonehouse looked up at him and smiled. This time it was an unmistakable
smile and rather charming, like a warm line of light falling across his
face.
"I was awfully glad to get your letter," he said. "I'd begun to worry
rather."
Cosgrave flushed up.
"That's--that's about the nicest thing that's happened to me for a long
time. I'd probably cry with pleasure--only I don't seem able to feel
much anyway. It's those damn bugs, I suppose!"
"I'll pull you out of that."
"Got me diagnosed already?"
"It's not very difficult."
"I suppose--I suppose you're an awful swell, Stonehouse."
"Not yet. I'm better at my job than a great many men who are swells.
But I'm young--that'll cure itself. Oh, yes--I'm all right. Things have
gone on coming my way. I'll tell you about it sometime."
Cosgrave's eyes had rounded with their old solemn admiration.
"A fashionable West-End surgeon--oh, my word! I say, have you got a
bed-side manner tucked away somewhere?"
"No. That's not fashionable for one thing, and for another, it wouldn't
suit my style. I'm not interested in people. I'm interested in their
diseases. They know it, and rather like it." A touch of chill scorn
showed itself for a moment in his face. "They're frightened of me. I'm
as good as an electric shock to their lethargic, overfed carcasses. They
can't get over a young man with his way to make who wipes his boots on
them. They have to come back for more."
Cosgrave gave his little toneless laugh.
"I wish to God you'd frighten me. You know, when I felt how rotten I was
I thought of you. You always bucked me up--I believe I had a fool idea
that I'd find you in some scrubby suburban practice. Shows the bugs must
have got into my brain too, doesn't it? Now I suppose I'll have to ask
you to reduce your fees."
"I'll let you down easy. Say, a guinea a consultation!"
"I could manage that--if you don't want to consult too often. I've got
my bit saved. Not much to squander on out there, except whisky, and I
never took to that. Besides--my father's dead. He didn't mean to leave
me his money--you know how he loathed me--but there was a mix-up over the
will that was to cut me out--not properly witnessed or something.
Anyhow, I came out into a few thousand. Rather a joke on the old man,
wasn't it?"
"One might almost hope for another life if one were sure he were grinding
his teeth over it."
A faint perplexity flickered across the sallow face.
"Oh, I don't know. I don't seem to bear him any particular grudge now.
Perhaps it would be better if I could. When one's young one judges very
harshly. Parents and kids don't understand each other--not really--and
don't always love each other either, if the truth were known. Why should
they? The old man and I were like strangers tied to one another by the
leg. I used to think if I could pay him back for all the beastly times
he gave me I'd die happy. But I don't feel like that now. I expect he
was pretty miserable himself. There's too much of that sort of thing for
us to wish it on to one another."
"You're very tolerant," Stonehouse said. "I'm not. But then I haven't
inherited anything." He stopped abruptly and his manner hardened. But
Cosgrave did not pursue the subject. His interest had suddenly slumped
into what was evidently an habitual apathy, and only when they had paid
their bill and drifted out into the street did he revert for a moment to
the past.
"And the Gang--and Frances Wilmot?" he asked. He looked shyly at his
companion's profile, which showed up for a moment in a bold, tranquil
outline against the lamplight. It betrayed nothing.
"We might walk back to my rooms and talk in peace. Oh--Francey Wilmot?
I don't know much. She went abroad--finished her course very late--she
was always a bit of a dilettante. People with money usually are."
Cosgrave said no more. He knew all he wanted to know. It saddened him.
Somehow he had counted on that half-divined romance, had played with it
in his fancy as with a kind of vicarious happiness.
3
On board the S.S. _Launceston_ there had arrived, an hour before sailing,
an American gentleman--a certain Mr. Horace Fletcher, who, having been
called home suddenly, had had to take what accommodation he could get on
the first available boat. Two days later he had lain unconscious,
strapped to the captain's table, whilst the ship's doctor, a young man,
himself in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical
operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The
whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained
stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness,
comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of
seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted
at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat
performance--under the circumstances a masterpiece.
It was the nearest possible approach to a medical advertisement. Mr.
Fletcher was a member of a well-known New York family, and the papers had
given the story, with fantastic details as to the ship's doctor's career,
a first-page prominence. Mr. Fletcher himself had proved to be both
generous and grateful. In assessing the value of his own life at 1,000
pounds, he had argued with good humour and good sense, he had erred on
the side of modesty, and Robert Stonehouse, having weighed the argument
gravely, had accepted its practical conclusion as just and reasonable.
He had taken rooms, thereupon, if not actually in Harley Street, at least
under the ramparts, fitted them out with the most modern surgical
appliances that his capital allowed, and had sat down to wait.
Fortunately he had learnt the art of starving before. He slept in a
garret, and the bottom drawer of the handsome mahogany desk in his
consulting-room knew the grim secret of his mid-day meals. But in six
months the tide had turned. Doctors had remembered him from his hospital
days when, if they had not liked him, they had learnt to respect his
genius and his courage, and had sent him patients. The patients
themselves, oddly enough, took a fancy to this gaunt, very serious young
man, who so obviously cared nothing at all about them, but whose interest
in their diseases was almost passionate. And within two years the tide
had brought him in sight of land.
This was what he had meant by "getting hold of things again and pulling
them his way." There was perhaps something rather simple in a theory of
life which had necessitated so much suffering on the part of Mr. Fletcher
in order that Dr. Stonehouse might take the first long stride in his
career. But Cosgrave, listening to Stonehouse's own account of the
incident, saw in it only an example of a strange, inexorable truth. What
men called "Fate" was the shadow of themselves. They imposed their
characters upon events, significant or insignificant, willingly or
unwillingly. Beyond that there was no such thing as Fate at all.
They stepped back from the crowd into the shelter of the Piccadilly Tube.
They had been walking the streets for an hour, and as much of their lives
as they were able to tell one another had been told. Now they were both
baffled and tired out. Of what had really happened to them they could
say nothing, and their memories, disinterred in a kind of desperate haste
("Do you remember that row with Dickson about my hair, Robert?") had
crumbled, after a moment's apparent vitality, into a heap of dust. It
was all too utterly dead--too unreal to both of them. The things that
had mattered so much, which had seemed so laughable or so tragic, were
like the repetition of a story in which they could only force a polite
interest. Their laughter, their exclamations, sounded shallow and
insincere.
And yet it was borne in upon them that they did still care for one
another. They had had no other friendship to compare with this.
Strictly speaking, there had been no other friends. There had been
acquaintances--people whom you talked to because you worked with them.
Robert Stonehouse had always known his own loneliness. His patients
believed in him; his colleagues respected him. Their knowledge of him
went no further than the operating theatre where they knew him best. He
had reckoned loneliness as an asset. But to feel it, as he felt it now
beneath this stilted exchange, was to become aware of a dull, stupid
pain. He found himself staring over the heads of the people, and wishing
that Cosgrave had never come back. And Cosgrave said gently, as though
he had read his thought and had made up his mind to have done with
insincerities:
"You're not to bother about me, Robert. It's been jolly, seeing you
again and all that, but we'd better let it end here. It always puzzled
me--your caring, you know, about a hapless fellow like myself. It's
against your real principles. I'm a dead weight. I couldn't give anyone
a solitary water-tight reason for my being alive. I think you did it
because you'd got your teeth into me by accident and couldn't let go. I
don't want you to get your teeth into me again."
"I don't believe," Stonehouse said, with an impatient laugh, "that I ever
let go at all."
His attention fixed itself on the illuminated sign that hung from the
portico of the Olympic Theatre opposite, and mechanically he began to
spell out the flaming letters:
"Gyp Labelle--Gyp Labelle!" At first the name scarcely reached his
consciousness, but in some strange way it focused his disquiet. It was
as though for a long time past he too had been indefinitely ill, and now
at an exasperating touch the poisoned blood rushed to a head of pain. He
felt Cosgrave plucking at his sleeve, fretfully like a sick child, raised
to a sudden interest.
"I say, Stonehouse, don't you remember?"
"The Circus? Yes, I was just thinking about it. It's not likely to be
the same though."
"Why not? She was a nailer. Oh--but you didn't think so, did you? It
was the woman on the horse--the big barmaid person--I forget her
name--Madame--Madame----"
It was ridiculous--but even now it annoyed him to be reminded of her
essential vulgarity. There was a glamour--almost a halo about her memory
because of all that he had felt for her. A silly boy's passion. But he
would never feel like that again.
"Well, she could ride, anyhow. I don't know what your long-legged
favourite was good for."
"She made me laugh," Cosgrave said. He asked after a moment: "Have you
ever wanted anything so much as you wanted to go to that Circus,
Stonehouse?"
"Oh, yes--crowds of things!"
"I don't believe it somehow. I know I haven't. Oh, I say, I wish I
could want again like that--anything--to get drunk--to go to the
dogs--anything in the world. It's this damnable not wanting. Do you
know I've been trying every night this week to drift into that show--just
to see if it were really that funny kid. I felt I ought to want to.
Why, even the fellows down in Angola had heard of her."
"She's probably well known in hotter places than that," Stonehouse
remarked.
"Yes--so I gathered. That's what made them so keen. They used to talk
of her--telling the wildest yarns, as though it did them good just to
think there was someone left alive who had so much go in them. Queer,
isn't it? Do you remember what a susceptible chap I used to be--that
poor little Connie--what's-her-name, whom I nearly scared out of her five
senses? Well, I've not cared a snap for any woman since then. And I
want to--I want to. I'd be so awfully happy if I could only care for
some nice girl and marry her. There was someone on the boat--such a
jolly good sort--and I think if I only could have cared she'd have cared
too. But I couldn't. I tried to work myself up--but it was like
scratching on a dead nerve--as though something vital had gone clean out
of me."
His voice cracked. Stonehouse, startled from his own reflections, became
aware that Cosgrave, whose apathy had hung about them like a fog, hiding
them from each other, was on the point of tears--of breaking down
helplessly in the crowded entrance. And instantly their old relationship
was re-born. He took him by the arm, sternly, authoritatively, as he had
always done when little Rufus Cosgrave had begun to flag or cry.
"You're coming home with me. When you're fit enough we'll do the show
opposite and make a night of it. We'll see what going to the devil can
do for you."
"Perhaps she'd make me laugh again," Cosgrave said, quavering
hysterically.
4
At any rate he had kept faith with himself. That theatre-night with
Frances Wilmot had been the first and last until now, and now assuredly
he did not care any more. But it made him remember. How intoxicated he
had been! He had walked home like a man translated into a strange
country--words had rushed past his ears in floods of music, and the
silver and black streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had
Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly
harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was
older--but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in
himself. It was in the atmosphere about him--in the stale air, stamped
on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces
of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps
the spirit which had driven them into these dark boxes to gaze
open-mouthed, crying or laughing, through a peep-hole into a world of
ideal happiness, or even ideal sorrow, was dead and gone like their faith
in God and every other futile shadow which they had tried to interpose
between themselves and truth. This that remained was perhaps no more
than a tradition--a convention. When people were bored or unhappy they
said: "Let's go to a theatre!" and when they came out they wondered why
they had been, or what they had hoped for.
Reality was beginning to press hard on men. It was driving them into an
iron cul-de-sac, from which there was no escape. Suicide and madness,
obscure and hideous maladies of the brain herded in it. Perhaps, after
all, there had been some value in those old fairy stories. And he
remembered, with a faint movement of impatience, Francey Wilmot's final
shaft: "If there isn't a God you'll have to make one up." But even if a
man were to juggle with his own integrity, turn charlatan, there was no
faith-serum which you could inject into a patient's veins.
Cosgrave sat limply in his stall, and by the reflected light from the
stage Stonehouse could see his look of wan indifference. He was no
better. All day long he lay on his bed in the small spare room Robert
had given him and stared up at the white ceiling. There was a crack,
running zig-zag from the window to the door, which reminded him, so he
said, of a river in Angola, a beastly slimy thing trailing through
mosquito-infested swamps and villainous-tangled jungles. When he dozed
it became real, and he felt the heat descend on him like a sticky hand,
and heard the menacing drone of the mosquitoes and the splash of oars as
unfriendly natives who had tracked him along the water's edge shot out
suddenly from under the shadow of the mango trees in their long
boats--deadly and swift as striking adders.
And then, near the door, the river broke off--poured into the open
sea--or fell over a cataract--he did not know what--and he woke up with a
sweating start and took his medicine. He was so painstakingly docile
about his medicine that Robert Stonehouse guessed he had no faith in it.
Sometimes indeed he had an idea that Cosgrave was rather sorry for him,
very much as old people are sorry for the young, knowing the end to all
their enthusiasms. It was as though he had travelled ahead, and had
found out how meaningless everything was, even his clever friend's
strength and cleverness.
So he did not get better. And the forces that Robert Stonehouse had
counted on had failed. He had been a successful physician outside his
specialty and his sheer indifference to his patients as human beings had
been one of his chief weapons. He braced them, imposing his sense of
values so that their own sufferings became insignificant, and they ceased
to worry so much about themselves. But with Cosgrave he was not
indifferent. Some indefinable element of emotion had been thrown into
the scales, upsetting the delicate balance of his judgment.
And his old influence had gone too. It had failed him from that moment
in Connie Edwards' room when suddenly Cosgrave had realized the general
futility of things.
"I'll see him through all the same," Stonehouse thought, with a kind of
violence, "I'll pull him through."
After the first few moments he had ignored the scene before him. It was
boring--imbecile. Even to him, with his contempt for the average of
human intelligence, it seemed incredible that the gyrating of a few
half-naked women and the silly obscenities of a comedian dressed in a
humourless caricature of a gentleman should hold the attention of sane
men for a minute. Now abruptly the orchestra caught hold of him, shook
him and dragged him back. It was playing something which he had heard
before--on a street barrel-organ, and which he disliked now with an
intensity for which he could give no reason. It was perhaps because he
wanted to remain aloof and indifferent, and because it would not let him
be. It destroyed his isolation. His pulse caught up its beat like the
rest. His personality lost outline--merging itself into the cumbrous
uncouth being of the audience.
Though it was a rhythm rather than a tune it was not rag-time. Rag-time
Stonehouse appreciated. He recognized it as a symptom of the _mal du
siecle_, a deliberate break with the natural rhythm of life, a desperate
ennui, the hysterical pressure upon an aching cancer. Ragtime twitched
at the nerves. This thing jostled you, bustled you. It was a shout--a
caper--the ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay of its day, riotous and vulgar. It was
the sort of thing coster-women danced to on the pavements of Epsom on
Derby night.
The stage, set with a stereotyped drawing-room, was empty as the curtain
rose. Two hands, dead white under their load of emeralds, held the black
hangings over the centre doorway--then parted them brusquely. Stonehouse
heard the audience stir in their seats, but there was only a faint
applause. No one had come to the theatre for any other purpose than to
see her, but they knew her history. And, after all, they were
respectable people.
Cosgrave caught him by the arm.
"Oh, my word--it's her right enough!"
She stood there, motionless, her fair head with its monstrous crest of
many-coloured ostrich feathers flaming against the dead background. Her
dress was impudent. It winked at its own transparent pretence at
covering a body which was, in fact, too slender, too nervously alive to
be quite beautiful (Stonehouse remembered her legs--the long, thin legs
in the parti-coloured tights, like sticks of peppermint, belabouring the
rotund sides of her imperturbable pony). But her jewels clothed her.
Their authentic fire seemed to blaze out of herself--to be fed by her.
And each one of them, no doubt, had its romance--its scandal. That rope
of pearls in itself was a king's ransom. People nudged each other. It
was part of the show that she should flaunt them.
She had been a plain child, and now, if she was really pretty at all, it
was after the fashion of most French women, without right or reason, by
force of some secret magnetism that was not even physical. Her wide
mouth was open in a rather vacant, childish smile, and she was looking up
towards the gallery as though she were expecting something. "Hallo,
everyone!" she said tentatively, gaily. They stared back at her, stolid
and antagonistic, defying her. She began to laugh then, as she laughed
every night at the same moment, spontaneously, shrilly, helplessly, until
suddenly she had them. It was like a whirlwind. It spared no one. They
were like dead leaves dancing helplessly in its midst. Even Stonehouse
felt it at his throat, a choking, senseless laughter.
He saw Cosgrave lean forward, and in the half light he had a queer,
startled look. With his thick red hair and small white face he might
have been some sick thing of the woods scenting the air in answer to
far-off familiar piping's. He made Robert Stonehouse see the faun in
Frances Wilmot's room, the room itself and Frances Wilmot, with her chin
resting in her hands, gazing into the fire. The picture was gone almost
before he knew what he had seen. But it was knife-sharp. It was as
though a hand fumbling over a blank wall had touched by accident a secret
spring and a door had flown wide open, closing instantly.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;
If you dance with me
You must dance to my tune
Whatever it be."
She jumped into the incessant music as a child jumps into a whirling
skipping-rope. She had a quaint French accent, but she couldn't sing.
She had no voice. And after that one doggerel verse she made a gesture
of good-humoured contempt and danced. But she couldn't dance either. It
was a wild gymnastic--a display of incredible, riotous energy, the
delirious caperings of a gutter-urchin caught in the midst of some
gutter-urchin's windfall by a jolly tune. A long-haired youth leapt on
to the stage from the stage-box, and caught her by the waist and swung
her about him and over his shoulder so that her plumes swept the ground
and the great chain of pearls made a circle of white light about them
both.
"Those pearls!" Stonehouse heard a man behind him say loudly. "Prince
Frederick gave them to her. And then he shot himself. They belonged to
the family. He had no right, of course, but she wanted them."
He could feel Cosgrave stir impatiently.
It went on, as it seemed to him, for an incredible length of time. It
was like a prairie fire that spread and blazed up, higher and brighter.
And there was no escape. He had a queer conviction that his was the only
static spirit in the whole theatre, that secretly, in their hearts, the
audience had flung themselves into the riot with her, the oldest and
staidest of them, as perhaps they had often wanted to do when they heard
a jolly tune like that. It was artless, graceless. One only needed to
let oneself go.
"I'm Gyp Labelle,
Come dance with me."
The jaded disgust and weariness were gone. Something had come into the
theatre that had not been there before. Nothing mattered either so much
or so little. The main business was to have a good time somehow--not to
worry or care.
She had whirled catherine-wheel fashion, head over heels from end to end
of the stage. The long-haired youth swept the hair from his hot,
blue-jowled face in time to catch her, and they stood side by side, she
with her thin arms stretched up straight in a gesture of triumph, her
lips still parted in that curiously empty, expectant smile.
Then it was over. Once the curtain rose to perfunctory applause. People
settled back in their seats, or prepared to go. It was as though the
fire had been withdrawn from a molten metal which began instantly to
harden. A woman next to Stonehouse tittered.
"So vulgar and silly--I don't know what people see in her."
"I want to get away," Cosgrave said sharply. "It's this beastly
closeness."
He looked and walked as though he had been drinking.
Although the show was not over, the majority of the audience had begun to
stream out. Two men who loitered in the gangway in front of Stonehouse
exchanged laconic comments.
"A live wire, eh, what?"
For some reason or other Stonehouse saw clearly and remembered afterwards
the face of the man who answered. It was bloated and full of a weary,
humorous intelligence.
"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself!"
5
Cosgrave scarcely answered his companion's comments. He withdrew
suddenly into himself, and after that he shirked the subject,
understandably enough, for if he had had illusions on her account they
must have been effectively shattered. But also he ceased to lie all day
on his bed and stare up at the mosquito-infested river of his nightmare.
He grew restless and shy, as though he were engaged with secret business
of his own of which Stonehouse knew nothing, and of which he could say
nothing. Yet Stonehouse had caught his eyes fixed on him with the
doubtful, rather wistful earnestness of a child trying to make up its
mind to confide. (There was still something pathetically young about
Rufus Cosgrave. Now that his body was growing stronger, youth peered out
of his wan face like a famished prisoner demanding liberty.)
What he did with himself during the long hours when Stonehouse was in his
consulting-room or on his rounds Stonehouse never asked. At night he sat
at the study window of his friend's flat (shabby and high up since all
spare money was diverted to other and better purposes), and looked over
the roofs of the houses opposite, smoking and watching the dull red glow
that rose up from the blazing theatres westwards.
"It is a fire," he said once, "and all the cold, tired people in London
come to warm their hands at it."
Robert Stonehouse went on with his writing under the lamplight.
"Are you cold?"
"Not now." He added unexpectedly: "You think I'd be all right, don't
you, if only you could have a go at my tonsils or my adenoids? I believe
you're just waiting to have a go at them."
"Your tonsils are septic," Stonehouse agreed gravely. "I told you so,
but I wouldn't advise anything drastic until you're stronger. We'll
think about it in a month or two. You're better already."
Cosgrave chuckled to himself. In the shadow in which he sat the chuckle
sounded elfish and almost mocking.
"Oh, yes, I'm better!"
Stonehouse took his first holiday for three years, and carried Cosgrave
off with him to a rough shooting-box in the Highlands lent him by a
grateful and sporting patient, and for a week they tramped the moors
together and stalked deer and fished in the salmon river that ran in and
out among the desolate hills. The place was little more than a
shepherd's cottage, growing grey and stubborn as a rock out of the
heather, and beyond that proffered them occasionally by a morose and
distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship. They won
their food for themselves, cooked it by the smoking fire, and washed
heroically in the icy river water. A sting of winter was already in the
wind and a melancholy and bitter rain swept the hills, giving way at
evening to unearthly sunsets. They saw themselves as pioneers at the
world's end. And Stonehouse, who had calculated its effect on Cosgrave,
was himself caught up in the fierce, rough charm of that daily life. He
who had never played since that circus night played now in passionate
earnest. He proved a good shot, and, for all his inexperience, an
indomitable and clever hunter. His close-confined physical energy could
not shake itself. He liked the long and dogged pursuit, the cruel, often
fruitless struggle up the mountain-sides, the patient waiting, the
triumph of that final shot from a hand unshaken by excitement or fatigue.
A stag showing itself for an instant against the sky-line called up all
the stubborn purpose in him; then he would not turn back until either his
quarry had fallen to him, or night had swallowed them both.
And Cosgrave, half forgotten, tagged docilely at his heels, or lay in the
wet heather on the crest of a hill overlooking the world, and watched and
waited with strange, wide-open eyes. But he never gave the signal. He
shot nothing. His failure seemed to amuse and even please him. A faint,
excited colour came into his cheeks, lashed up by the wind and rain. And
once, a hare running out from under his feet, he gave a wild "halloo!"
like a boy and set off in pursuit, headlong down the stony hillside, his
gun at full cock, threatening indiscriminate destruction.
"You might have killed yourself," Robert said angrily. But Cosgrave
laughed, his eyes narrowed to blue-grey slits as though he did not want
Stonehouse to see all that was in them.
"I shouldn't have minded," he panted, "going off on the crest like
that--I wanted to run--I forgot."
"Well, for the Lord's sake, don't forget."
But for an instant at least he knew what Cosgrave meant. It had been the
sight of that downward rushing hill and the sudden choking exultation.
He had felt it too--that night in Acacia Grove in pursuit of the Greatest
Show--and once again. He could smell the scent of the trees and the
young grass blowing in his face.
And at the bottom there had been a mysterious wood like a deep, green
pool.
Then on the eighth day Cosgrave disappeared. He had set out in the early
morning for the nearest station to fetch their letters and fresh
provisions, and at dusk a village youth reached Stonehouse with a note
which had been scrawled in such haste that it was almost illegible. It
was as though Cosgrave had yielded suddenly and utterly to a prolonged
pressure.
He had to go back to town. It was something urgent. Stonehouse was not
to bother. He would be all right now.
The next day Stonehouse stalked and brought down his first "Royal." This
time the chase had cost him every ounce of his endurance, and in the
chill dusk he stood watching the gillie at his work on the lovely body
(still so warm and lissom that one could almost see the last sorrowful
heaving of its golden flanks) with a kind of stolid triumph as though now
he had wiped out that other failure, for he realized that he had been
both too sanguine and too impatient. When you were angling a man with a
sick brain back to health, you had to go slowly--delicately.
"It's because I care," he thought, half amused and half angry. "And why
do I care? It's as he said--a rotten habit."
But he returned to town. He tracked Cosgrave to his former
lodging-house, where a stout, heavily-breathing landlady showed every
readiness to be communicative and helpful.
"Yes, sir--he's here again--I think he was expecting you--mentioned your
name--he's out now and won't be back till late--dinner at the Carlton, he
said. If you'd like to leave a note, sir----"
She led him upstairs and watched him with a fat amusement as he stood
silent and frowning on the threshold.
"It _is_ a fair mess," she admitted blandly. "I was just trying to get
things a bit together when you rang, sir. I'm to throw away all that old
stuff, he said. A reg'lar new start he's making--_and_ a lively one, I
don't think. Theatres and supper parties ever since he's been back, sir,
and right glad I've been to see it, though I don't 'old with
carryings-on, in a general way. But after them there tropiks he'd need a
change. He was that down, sir, when he first came, I didn't know what to
think."
The room might have belonged to a young dandy returned to London from the
wilds of Central Africa. It was littered with half-open boxes, new
suits, a disorderly regiment of shining, unworn boots and shoes, a pile
of ties that must have been chosen for sheer expensiveness. (Stonehouse
remembered the spotted affair with which Cosgrave had wooed Connie
Edward's approval.) The shabby suit in which Stonehouse had first met
him had been flung with the other cast-offs into a far corner. It was
all very young and reckless and jolly. One could see the owner, as he
rampaged about the room, whistling and cursing in a good-humoured haste.
"'Ere's 'is writing-table; I'll just make room for you, sir----"
He stopped her.
"It doesn't matter. If he's to be at the Carlton I'll probably look him
up myself."
"Dining early, he said, sir--seven o'clock."
"Yes--thank you."
A folded, grey-tinted letter lay half hidden in the general melee. It
had a bold, irrepressible look, as though it were aware of having blown
the room to smithereens and was rather amused. Stonehouse could see the
large, sprawling hand that covered it. He touched it, not knowing
why--nor yet that he was angry. Something that had been asleep in him
for a long time stirred uneasily and stretched itself.
"Ladies"--his companion simpered---"always the ladies, sir."
Stonehouse laughed.
An hour later he was waiting for Cosgrave in the Carlton lounge. He had
never been in the place before--or in any place like it--and it confused
and astonished him. He was like a monk who had come unprepared into the
crude noise and glitter of a society desperately pleasure-seeking. He
could regard the men and women round him with contempt, but not with
indifference, for they represented a force against which he had not yet
tried himself except in theory. And they set a new standard. Here his
life and his attainments were of no account. What mattered was that he
wore his travelling clothes, and that he stood stockily in the gangway
like a man who does not know what is expected of him. It was ridiculous,
but it was true that he became ashamed.
But he held his ground stubbornly. He was not aware of any definite plan
or expectation. If he had asked himself what he intended he would have
said he meant to look after Cosgrave, who was in a bad way. As a friend
and as a doctor he had the right. He would not have admitted that his
own personality had become involved, that he had felt himself obscurely
challenged.
Then he saw Cosgrave. He saw him before his companion, though for
everyone else she obscured him utterly. She walked a few steps ahead, a
bizarre, fantastic figure, her fair head with its deep band of diamonds
lifted audaciously, the same fixed smile of childish expectancy on her
oval, painted face. Her dress had left vulgarity behind. It was too
much a part of herself--in its way too genuine--to be merely laughable.
It was like her execrable dancing, the expression of an exuberant,
inexhaustible life. As she walked, with short impatient steps, she
swayed the great ostrich-feather fan and twisted her rope of pearls
between her slender fingers. The open stare that greeted her seemed to
amuse and please her.
And Cosgrave. Saville Row, Stonehouse reflected rapidly and
contemptuously, must have been bribed to have turned out such perfection
at such short notice. Too much perfection and too new. An upstart young
rake. No, not quite that, either. Pain had lent an elusive beauty to
the plain and freckled face, and happiness had made it lovable. It was
obvious that he was trying to suppress his pride and astonishment at
himself and not succeeding. The corners of his mouth quivered shyly and
self-consciously, and the wide-open eyes were fixed with an engaging
steadfastness on the figure in front of him as though he knew that if he
looked to the right or left he would give himself away altogether.
Stonehouse could almost hear his voice, high-pitched and boyish.
"Oh, I say, Robert, isn't it wonderful--isn't she splendid?"
Stonehouse himself stood right across their path. It was accidental, and
now he could not move. He had grown to rely too much on his emotional
inaccessibility, and the violence and suddenness of his anger transfixed
him. This woman had trapped Cosgrave. She had caught him in the
dangerous moment of convalescence--in that rebound from inertia which
carries men to an excess incredible to their normal conscience. And she
was infamous. She had broken one man after another.
She could not have overlooked Stonehouse. Apart from his conspicuous
clothes, his immobility and white-set face must have inevitably drawn her
attention to him. Her eyes, very blue and shadowless, met his stare with
a kind of bonhomie--almost a Masonic understanding--and the
uncompromising antagonism that replied seemed to check her. She
hesitated, then as he at last stood back, passed on still smiling, but
mechanically, as though something had surprised her into forgetting why
she smiled.
Cosgrave followed her. He brushed against Stonehouse without recognition.
In that moment Stonehouse's anger ran away with him. Thrusting aside the
protests of a puzzled and rather frightened waiter he chose a table that
faced them both. Cosgrave, blindly absorbed, never looked towards him,
but twice she met his eyes, still with a faintly puzzled amusement, as
though every moment she expected to penetrate a mask of crude enmity to a
no less crude admiration and desire. Then she spoke to Cosgrave
laughingly, as Stonehouse knew, with the light curiosity of a woman who
has met something tantalizingly novel, and Cosgrave turned, uttered an
exclamation, and a moment later came across. He acted like a man
suffering from aphasia. He seemed totally oblivious of the immediate
past. They might have been casual friends who had met casually. He was
radiant.
"What luck your being here. I didn't know you went in for frivolity of
this sort--if you call it frivolous dining in solitary state. Come over
and join us. We're just having a bite before the show. You remember
Mademoiselle Labelle, don't you?"
Stonehouse nodded assent. He left his table at once. He seemed frigidly
composed, but he was sure that she would not be deceived. She knew too
much about men--that was her business--and she meant to pay him out, make
him seem crude and absurd in his own eyes.
"It's Stonehouse--my old friend--I was telling you about him--we don't
need to introduce you, Mademoiselle."
She gave him her hand, palm down, to kiss, and he turned it over
deliberately. The fingers were loaded to the knuckles. He reflected
that each of these stones had its history, tragic, comic or merely
sordid. He let her hand drop. He saw that the affront had not touched
her. Perhaps others had begun like that.
"_Ce cher docteur_--'e don't like me," she complained pathetically to
Cosgrave. "'E sit opposite to me and glare like a 'ungry tiger. Believe
me, I grow quite cold with fear. Tell me why you don't like me,
Monsieur?"
"He was only wanting to be asked," Cosgrave broke in with his high,
excited laugh. "Why, he introduced us. I was all down and out--couldn't
decide which bridge to chuck myself off from--and he lugged me into your
show. He said----"
"Well, what 'e say?"
Cosgrave blushed.
"He said: 'Let's see what going to the devil can do for you.'"
She jerked a jewelled thumb at him, appealing to Stonehouse.
"'E 'as cheek, that young man. 'E send in 'is card to my dressing-room,
saying 'e got to meet me. _Comme ca_! As though anyone could just walk
in! I was curious to see a young man with cheek like that. So I let 'im
come. _Et nous voila_!" She leant across to Stonehouse, speaking
confidentially, earnestly. "But you--_c'est autre chose_--_monsieur est
bien range_--an artist perhaps for all that--'e see me dance and think
perhaps, '_Voyons_--she cannot dance at all--nor sing--nor nozzings.
Just enjoy 'erself.' You think I don't deserve all I get, _hein_?"
"I think," said Stonehouse smiling, "that there are others in your
profession less fortunate, Mademoiselle."
As, for instance, that woman in the hospital--Frances Wilmot's protegee.
Queer how the memory of that ruined, frightened face peering over the
bed-clothes and begging for life should come back to him after eight
years. And yet the connexion was obvious enough. He looked at
Mademoiselle Labelle with a new interest. It was impossible that she
should have read his thoughts, but he knew by the little twist of her red
mouth that she had understood his insult. She seemed to ponder over it
dispassionately.
"That's true--_c'est bien vrai, ca_. I 'ave been lucky. I shall always
be lucky. Everybody knows that. They say: 'Our Gyp, she will 'ave a
good time at 'er funeral.' No, no. Monsieur Rufus, I will not drink.
If I drink I might dance--'ere on this table--and ze company is so ver'
respectable. Listen." She laid her hand on Stonehouse's arm as
unconsciously as though he had been an old friend. "Listen. They play
ze 'Gyp Gal-lop.' That is because I am 'ere. Ze conductor, 'e know
me--he like 'is leetle joke. _C'est drole_--every time I 'ear it played
I want to get up and dance and dance----" She hummed under her breath,
beating time with her cigarette.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;
If you dance with me. . . ."
Obviously she knew that the severely elegant men and women on either hand
watched her with a covert, chilly hostility. But there was something
oddly simple in her acceptance of their attitude. Therein, no doubt, lay
some of her power. She was herself. She didn't care. She was too
strong. She had ruined people like that--people every whit as hostile,
and self-assured, and respectable--and had gone free without a scratch.
She could afford to laugh at them, to ignore them, as it pleased her.
(And what would Frances Wilmot with her wrong-headed toleration, have
urged in extenuation? A hard life, perhaps? Stonehouse smiled
ironically at himself. The old quarrel was like an ineradicable drop of
poison in the blood.)
She smoked incessantly. She ate very little. And as time went on she
seemed to draw away from the two men into a kind of secret ecstasy of
enjoyment like some fierce animal scenting freedom. The sentences she
dropped were shallow, impatient, even stupid. And yet there was Rufus
Cosgrave with his hungry eyes fixed on her, trapped by the nameless force
that lay behind her triviality, her daring commonness.
She rose to go at last.
"And you take him with you, _Monsieur le docteur_. If 'e sit many more
nights in ze front row 'e find out, too, I can't dance, and then I break
my 'eart. Besides, I 'ave my reputation to think of in this ver'
propaire England, _hein_?"
"I'm coming with you," Cosgrave said quietly.
She shrugged her shoulder.
"_Eh bien_, what can I do? They are all ze same. Good-bye, _Monsieur le
docteur_. You scare me stiff. But I like you. Nest time I 'ave ze
tummy-ache I ring you up.
"I shouldn't--if I were you."
"Why? You give me poison, p'raps?"
"I might," he said.
II
1
So Rufus Cosgrave disappeared, like an insignificant chip of wood
sucked into a whirlpool, and this time Stonehouse made no attempt to
plunge in after him. With other advanced and energetic men of his
profession he stood committed to a new enterprise--the creation of a
private hospital, which was to be a model to the hospitals of the
world--and he had no time to waste on a fool who wanted to ruin
himself. But though he never thought of Cosgrave, he could not
altogether forget him. At night he found himself turning instinctively
towards the window where the delicate, rather plaintive profile had
shown faintly against the glow of the streets, and the empty frame
caused him a sense of unrest, almost of insecurity, as though a ghost
had risen to convince him that the dead are never quite dead, and then
had vanished.
He took to returning to his consulting-rooms, where he regained his
balance and his normal outlook. The sober reality of the place thrust
ghosts out-of-doors. Here was no lingering shadow of poverty to recall
them. The bright, cold instruments in their glass cases, the neatly
ordered japanned tables, the cunning array of lights were there to
remind him that he was a man who had made a record career for himself
and who was going farther. In the day-time he took them as a matter of
course, but now he regarded them rather solemnly. He went from one to
another, handling them, testing them, switching the lights of special
electrical devices on and off, like a boy with a new and serious
plaything. There was no one to laugh at him, and he did not laugh at
himself. He stood in the midst of his possessions, a little
insolently, with his head up, as though he were calling them up one by
one to bear him witness. He was self-made. He had torn his life out
of the teeth of circumstance. There was not an instrument, not a chair
or table in the lofty, dignified room that he had not paid for with
sweat and sacrifice and deprivation. No one had given him help that he
had not earned. Even in himself he had been handicapped. The boy he
had been had wanted things terribly--silly, useless, gaudy things that
would have ruined him as they had ruined his father. He remembered how
in the twilight of Acacia Grove he had listened to the music of far-off
processions, and had longed to run to meet them and march with the
jolly, singing people, and how once it had all come true, and he had
lied and stolen.
Once only. Then he had stamped temptation under foot. He had become
master of himself. And now he was not tempted any more by foolish
desires. He meant to do work that would put him in the front rank of
big men.
And, thinking of the old struggle, he threw out his hand, as he had
done that night when he had met Francey Wilmot, and clenched the
slender, powerful fingers as though he had life by the throat, smiling
a little in the cold, rather cruel way that Cosgrave knew--a theatrical
gesture, had it been less passionately sincere.
It was in his consulting-room that Cosgrave found him after a
prolonged, muddle-headed search that had lasted till close on midnight.
Cosgrave himself was drunk--less with wine than with a kind of heady
exhilaration that made him in turn maudlingly sentimental or recklessly
hilarious. And yet there was a definite and serious purpose in his
coming--a rather pathetic desire to "put himself right," to get
Stonehouse, who leant against the mantleshelf watching him with a frank
contempt, to understand and sympathise.
"Of course--you're mad with me--you've got every right to be--it was a
rotten thing to do--bolting like that--beastly ungrateful and
inconsiderate. It was just because I couldn't explain. I knew you
thought it was the fresh air and--and hunting down those poor jolly
little beggars--and all the time it was just a girl and a blessed tune
running through my head."
He began to hum, beating time with tipsy solemnity, and even then the
wretched song brought something riotous and headlong into the subdued
room.
The door seemed to have been flung violently open with an explosive
gesture, as though some invisible showman had called out: "Look who's
here!" and the woman herself had catherine-wheeled into their midst,
standing there in her exotic gorgeousness, with her arms spread out in
salutation and her mouth parted in that rather simple smile. Robert
could almost smell the faint perfume that surrounded her like a cloud.
It was ridiculous--yet for the moment she was so real, that he could
have taken her by the shoulders and thrust her out.
"And you did want me to get better, didn't you?" Cosgrave pleaded
wistfully, "even if it wasn't with your medicine. And in a sort of way
it was your medicine, wasn't it? You made me go to see her."
Stonehouse had to sit down and pretend to rearrange his papers in order
to hide how impatient he felt.
"My professional vanity isn't wounded, if that's what you're getting
at. If you were better I'd be very glad. As far as I can see you're
only drunk."
"I know--a little--I'm not accustomed to it--but it's not that, Robert.
Really, it isn't. I'm jolly all--the time--even in the early morning.
Seem to have come back to life from a beastly long way off--all at
once--by special aeroplane. I don't think I've felt like this
since--since----"
"Since Connie Edwards' day," Robert suggested. "But I expect you've
forgotten her."
Cosgrave stared, round-eyed and open-mouthed and foolish.
"Connie----? No--I haven't. You bet I haven't. Often wonder what
became of her. She was a jolly good sort."
"You didn't think so by the time she'd finished with you."
"I was an ass. A giddy, hysterical ass. I didn't understand. Poor
old Connie! She could just swim for herself--but not for both of us.
And I scared her stiff--tying myself round her neck like that."
Stonehouse cut him short.
"Nobody could accuse Mademoiselle Labelle of being a poor swimmer," he
said. (He wondered at the same moment whether there was something
wrong with him. He was so intently conscious of her. He could see her
lounging idly in the big chair opposite, so damnably sure of herself
and amused. He wanted to insult and, if possible, hurt her.)
"You're awfully down on people, Robert. Hard on 'em. Often wonder why
you haven't chucked me off long ago. But that's an old story. You
ought to like her for being able to swim well. It's what you do
yourself."
"I don't mind her swimming well," Robert returned. "But I understand
that she's been able to drown quite a number of people better able to
look after themselves than you are. As far as you're concerned, it
seems--rather a pity."
Cosgrave shook his head. A certain quiet obstinacy, not altogether
that of intoxication, came into his flushed face. And yet he looked
sorry and almost ashamed.
"I'm not going to drown. You know--I hate standing out against you,
Robert. You've been so--so jolly decent to me--and I believe in
you--more than in anything in the world. Always have done. If you
said 'the earth's square,' I'd say, 'Why, yes, so it is--old chap!' But
this--this is different--it's like a dog eating grass--a sort of
instinct."
"Instinct!" Robert echoed ironically. "If you know where most
instincts lead to----" He stopped, and then went on in a cold,
matter-of-fact tone, as though he were diagnosing a disease. "It's not
my business--but since you've come here I'd be interested to hear what
you think is going to be the end of it all. I might persuade you to
look facts in the face. By position you're a little suburban nobody,
who was pushed out to West Africa to become a third-rate little trader.
You've survived, and you've got a little money to burn. To you it
seems a fortune. But it won't pay this woman's cigarette bills. She
makes you ridiculous."
"I am ridiculous," Cosgrave interrupted patiently. "I always have
been, you know. I expect I always shall be. I'm the square peg in the
round hole--and that's always comic. But she doesn't laugh at me.
She's just let me join in like a good sport. I know I'm out of place,
too, among her smart pals--you needn't rub it in--but she doesn't seem
to make any difference, I might be the smartest of the lot. I tell
you, when I think of the good times I've had, I feel--I feel"--absurd
and drunken tears came into his eyes--"as though I were in church--I'm
so awfully grateful."
"Her smart pals pay pretty dearly for their good times. It will be
time to be grateful when she's had enough of you." It escaped him
against his will. He knew the futility of such taunts which seemed to
betray an anger too senseless to be admitted. He did not care enough
to be angry.
"You--you don't understand, old chap. Seems cheek--my saying that to
you. But you're not like other people--you don't need the things they
have to have to keep going. And, anyhow, she's not responsible for the
asses men make of themselves." He was becoming more fuddled as the
warmth of the room closed over his wine-heated brain. But his eyes had
changed. They had narrowed to two twinkling slits of gay
secretiveness. "More things in heaven and earth than you dream of, old
chap. But you don't dream, do you? Never did. Got your teeth into
facts--diseases--and getting on--and all that. What's a song and a
dance to you? But I wish you liked her, all the same. P'raps you do,
only you won't own up. She liked you, you know. Fact is, it was she
sent me along to dig you out."
At that Stonehouse was caught up sharply out of his indifference. He
flushed and thrust his hands into his pockets to prevent them from
clenching themselves in absurd resentment.
"What do you mean?"
Cosgrave nodded. But he looked suddenly confused and rather sulky,
like a play-tired child who has been shaken out of its sleep to be
cross-examined.
"Well--some people would be jolly flattered. There's to be a big beano
on her birthday--a supper party behind the scenes--and she said: 'You
bring along your nice, sad, little friend--_ce pauvre jeune homme_.'
You know, Stonehouse, it made me laugh, her describing you like that.
I said: 'You don't need to be sorry for Robert Stonehouse. He can keep
his own end up as well as anybody.' But she said: '_Ce pauvre jeune
homme_.' I couldn't get her to see you were a damned lucky fellow."
He dropped back into the corner of the chesterfield and yawned and
stretched himself. "I want you to come too. Do you good. P'raps
she's right. P'raps you've had a rotten time in your own way. Though
I don't know--I'd be happy enough, if I were you--always seem to come
out on top--not to care for any damn thing on earth, except that--not
even Francey Wilmot--or even me--just a sort of pug-dog you trailed
behind on the end of a string--a sort of mascot."
He was going to sleep. He waggled his arm feebly, groping for
Stonehouse. "Say you'll come. I'd be awfully proud--show you off, you
know. Always was--awfully proud--have such a pal."
He was the very figure of stupid intoxication as he lay there with his
crumpled evening clothes and disordered hair--and yet not ugly either,
but in some way innocent and simple. (Robert could see little Rufus
Cosgrave, excited and tired out after the chase to the Greatest Show in
Europe, peering through the disguise of rowdy manhood.)
Stonehouse threw a rug over him, resigning himself to the inevitable.
But when he had switched off the main lights he gave an involuntary
glance over the suddenly shadowed room as though to make sure that the
darkness had exorcised an alien and detestable presence.
So she was sorry for him. That, at any rate, was amusing. Or perhaps
she thought he was afraid of her in the obscure duel that was being
fought out between them.
Cosgrave caught hold of him as he passed.
"The end of it all will be that I'll go back to my old swamp and tell
the fellows that I've had a first-rate leave. I'll tell 'em about her,
and they'll sit round open-mouthed--thinking I'm no end of a dog--and
that they'll do the same next time they get a chance. They'll be
awfully bucked to hear there's a good time going after all." He
pleaded drowsily: "Say you'll come though, Robert. You're such a
brick. I'm beastly fond of you, you know."
Robert Stonehouse withdrew his hand sharply from the hot, moist clasp.
(How he had run that night! As though the devil had been after him
instead of poor breathless little Cosgrave with his innocent
confession.)
"Oh, I'll come," he said.
2
After all, nothing changed very much. Grown-up people masqueraded.
They pretended to laugh at the young fools they had been and were still
behind the elaborate disguise of adult reasonableness and worldly
wisdom. For Robert Stonehouse, at any rate, it was ridiculously the
old business over again--children whose games he despised and could not
play, despising him.
It seemed that she had invited everyone and anyone whose name had come
into her head, without regard for taste or sense, and the result, half
raffish and half brilliant, somehow justified her. The notable and
notorious men there, the bar-loungers whose life gave them a look of
almost pathetic imbecility, the women of fashion and the too
fashionable ladies of the chorus had, at least temporarily, accepted
some common denominator. They rubbed shoulders in the stuffy, dingy,
green-room with an air of complete good-fellowship.
Robert Stonehouse stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had
prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and
master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and
aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose
sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but
these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings,
almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed
his very own), threw him from his security. They made him
self-conscious and self-distrustful. They might be ten times more
worthless than he believed them to be, and he might be ten times a
bigger man than the Robert Stonehouse who had made such a good thing of
his life. They had still the power to put him in the wrong and to make
him an oaf and an outsider. And they knew it. He felt their glances
slide over him furtively and a little mockingly. Yet outwardly he
conformed to them. He wore his clothes well enough, and his
self-control covered over his real distress with a rather repellent
arrogance. He was even handsome, as a plain man can become handsome
whose mind has dominated from the start over a fine body. And with
this air of power went his flagrant youthfulness.
But the girl standing next him dropped him a flippant question with
veiled irony and dislike in her stupid eyes, and turned away from him
before he answered. She was a vulgar, garish little creature, and he
could afford to smile satirically (and perhaps too consciously) at the
powdered shoulder which she jerked up at him. And yet he was deeply,
miserably shamed.
It was like a play in which he was the only one who did not know his
part. Even Cosgrave played up--a little too triumphantly, showing
off--as a tried man-of-the-world. And at her given moment the star
performer made a dramatic entry into the midst of them, a cloak of pale
blue brocade thrown over her scanty dress and her plumes still tossing
from the elaborately tousled head.
They greeted her with hand-clapping and laughter, and she held out her
thin arms, embracing them as old friends. In her attitude and in her
eyes which passed rapidly from one to another, there was good-humoured
understanding. She knew probably what the more immaculate among them
thought of her, and that they were there to boast about it as English
people boast of having visited Montmartre at midnight. It was daring
and amusing to be at this woman's notorious dinners. They thought they
patronized her, whatever else they knew. But in reality the joke was
on her side.
"_Allons_--to ze feast, friends."
She had seen Robert Stonehouse, and she went straight to him, waving
the rest aside like a flock of importunate pigeons, and took his arm.
"You and I lead the way, _Monsieur le docteur_."
He did not answer. He was glad that she had signalled him out. It
smoothed his raw pride. And yet he thought: "This is her way of making
fun of me." And he hated her and the scented warmth of her slim body
as it brushed lightly against his. He hated his own excited triumph.
For the first time he became aware of something definitely abnormal in
himself, as though a dead skin had been stripped off his senses and he
had begun to see and hear with a primitive and stupefying clearness.
The rest followed them noisily along grimy, winding passages and
between dusty wedges of improbable landscapes out on to the stage. A
long table had been laid in the midst of the stereotyped drawing-room,
which formed the scene of her grotesque dancing, and absurdly elaborate
waiters in powdered hair and knee-breeches hovered in the wings. They
were not real waiters, and from the moment they came out into the
footlights the guests themselves became the chorus of a musical comedy.
It was difficult to believe in the over-abundant flowers with which the
table was strewn or in the champagne lying ostentatiously in wait.
The curtain had been left up, and the dim and dingy auditorium gaped
dismally at them. The empty seats were threatening as a silent,
starving mob pressed against the windows of a feasting-house. But the
woman on Stonehouse's arm waved to them.
"I like it so. I see all my friends there--my old friends who are
gone--God knows where. They sit and laugh and clap and nod to one
another. They say: '_Voyons_, our Gyp still 'aving a good time.' And
I kiss my 'and to them all."
She kissed her hand and threw her head back in the familiar movement as
though she waited for their applause. And when it was over she looked
up into Robert Stonehouse's face.
"_Monsieur le docteur_ is a leetle pale. One is always nervous at
one's debut. You never act before, _hein_?"
"Not in a theatre like this," he said.
And he felt a momentary satisfaction because she knew that his answer
had a meaning which she did not understand.
She persisted.
"Monsieur Cosgrave say you would not come. To say you never do
nothing--only work and work. Is that true?"
"Yes."
"Don't dance--don't go to the theatre--don't love no one--don't get a
leetle drunk sometimes? Never, never?"
"No," he said scornfully.
"Don't want to, _hein_?"
"I hate that sort of thing."
(But she was making him into a ridiculous prig. She turned the values
of life topsy-turvy with that one ironic, good-natured gesture.)
"_Eh, bien_, it's a good thing for my sort there are not too many of
your sort, my friend. But per'aps it is not quite so bad as it seems,
for you 'are come after all."
"I had to," he thrust at her.
"'Ow you say--professionally?"
"Yes."
"But I 'ave not get ze tummy-ache--not yet."
"I don't care about you."
"You want to look after your leetle friend, _hein_?"
"Yes."
She was unruffled--even concerned to satisfy him.
"Well, then, you be policeman. You sit 'ere. It is always better to
watch ze thief than ze _coffre-fort_. You keep an eye on me and see I
don't run away with 'im. _Voyons, mesdames et messieurs_, our friend
'ere 'ave the place of honour. 'E sit next me and see I behave nice.
'E don't like me ver' much. 'E think me a bad woman."
They laughed with her and at him. He felt himself colour up and try to
laugh back. (And it was oddly like his attempt to propitiate Form I
when it had gibed him on that bitter pilgrimage from desk to desk.) He
took his place at her right hand. He could see Cosgrave half-way down
the table, and his thin, freckled face with its look of absurd
happiness. He was unselfishly overjoyed that his friend should have
been thus signalled out for honour. Perhaps he harboured some crazy
certainty that after this Stonehouse would understand and even share
his infatuation. He caught Robert's eye and smiled and nodded
triumphantly.
"Now you see what she's really like, don't you?"
A string band, hidden in the orchestra under a roof of palms, played
the first bars of her dance, and then stopped short and waited
solemnly. She still stood, glass in hand.
"It is my birthday. God and I alone know which one. I drink to
myself. I wish myself good luck. _Vive_ myself. _Vive_ Gyp Labelle
and all who 'ave loved 'er and love 'er and shall love 'er!"
She drank her wine to the last drop, and the band began to play again,
knitting the broken, noisy congratulations into a kind of triumphal
chorus. It was very crude and theatrical and effective. It did not
matter, any more than it matters in a well-acted play, that the whole
incident had been rehearsed. It was as calculated and as spontaneous
as that nightly, irresistible burst of laughter.
Rufus Cosgrave stood up shyly in his place. Had he been dressed a
shade less perfectly and resisted the gardenia in his button-hole, he
would have been better disguised. As it was, there could be no
mistaking a little fellow from the suburbs who had got into bad
company. And in spite of the West Africa swamp and its peculiar forms
of despairing vice, he was so frightfully innocent that he did not know
it,
"And--and we're here to--to wish you luck too--that you go on--as you
are--dancing and laughing--making us all laugh and dance with
you--however down in the dumps we are--for ever and ever--and to bring
you offerings--for you to remember us by."
There must have been a great deal more to it than that. Stonehouse
could see the notes clenched in one tense hand, but they had become
indecipherable and he let them drop. He came from his place, stumbling
over the back of somebody's chair, to where she stood, and laid a small
square box done up in tissue paper at her side. She laughed and caught
him by the ear, and kissed him on both flaming cheeks.
"A precedent--fair play for all!" the man opposite Stonehouse shouted.
They came then, one after another, treading on each other's heels, and
she waited for them, an audacious figure of Pleasure receiving custom,
and kissed them, shading her kiss subtly so that each one became a
secret little joke out of the past or lying in wait in the future, at
which the rest could guess as they chose. Some of the women whom she
knew best joined in the stream. They bore her, for the most part, an
odd affinity and no ill-will. They had set out on the same road and
had failed, and their failure stared out of their crudely painted
faces. But perhaps they were grateful to her for not having forgotten
them--or for other more obscure reasons. They gave her what they
could--extemporary gifts some of them--a tawdry ring or a flower which
she stuck jauntily among the outrageous feathers. The significantly
small parcels she did not open--either from idle good nature or from
sheer indifference. Stonehouse wondered what Cosgrave's little box
contained. Probably a year or two of the mosquito-infested swamp to
which he would soon return to boast of this night's extravaganza.
"And you, _Monsieur le docteur_?"
For he had gone on eating and drinking with apparent tranquillity.
"Oh, I have nothing--nothing but admiration," he said smiling.
She shook her head.
"_Ca ne va pas_. The chief guest. Ah, no! That is not kind. A
birthday--_c'est une chose bien serieuse, voyons_. Who knows? Per'aps
you never 'ave another chance--and then you 'ave remorse--'orrible,
terrible remorse. Or do you never 'ave remorse either, _Monsieur le
docteur_?"
"No--not yet."
"You must not run ze risk, then."
He thought savagely.
"If I had a diamond stud she would make me give it her."
He took a shilling from his pocket and laid it gravely in the midst of
her trophies.
"Is that enough?"
And then before he could draw back she had kissed him between the eyes.
"_Quite_, then. I keep it for a mascot, and you will remember
to-morrow morning, when you are ver' grave and important with some poor
frightened patient, that Gyp Labelle kiss you last night, and that you
are not different from ze others, after all. And I will take my
shilling from under my pillow, and say: 'Poor Gyp, that's what you're
worth, my friend!'"
"He doesn't know you yet."
Robert Stonehouse looked up sharply. The interruption had started a
new train of thought. Beyond the flushed face of the man opposite him,
he could see the empty stalls, row after row of gaunt-ribbed and
featureless spectators, watching him. The play had become a nightmare
farce in which he had chosen a ludicrous, impossible part. But he had
to go on now.
"Except for Cosgrave there, I've known Mademoiselle Labelle longer than
any of you. I've known her ever since I was a boy."
He felt rather than saw their expressions change. She too stared with
an arrested interest, but he looked away from her to Cosgrave, smiling
ironically. If it humiliated her and made her ridiculous too--well,
that was what he wanted. He wanted to pay her back--most of all for
the excitement boiling in him--the sense of having been toppled out of
his serenity into a torrent of noise and colour by that audacious touch
of her lips upon his face. And there was Cosgrave--and then again some
older score to be paid off--something far off and indistinct that would
presently come clear.
"Don't you remember, Rufus?"
"Rather. But I know you a minute longer, Mademoiselle. I saw you
before he did."
"That was because Mademoiselle Moretti rode first."
"Ah--the Circus!" She threw her head back, drawing a deep breath
through her nostrils as though she savoured some long-lost perfume
blown in upon her by a sudden wind. "Now I remember too. Ze good
Moretti. She ride old Arabesque. 'E 'ave white spots all over 'im--on
'is chest and what you call 'is paws, and every evening she 'ave to
paint 'im like she paint 'er face. Madame Moretti--that was a good
sort--_bonne enfant_--what you say?--domestic--not really of ze Circus
at all. She like to wash up and cook leetle _bonnes-bouches_ for
supper. She was a German--Fredechen we call 'er--and she could make
Sauerkraut--_eh bien_, I--_moi qui vous parle_--_une bonne
Francaise_--I make myself sick with 'er Sauerkraut. Afterwards she
grow too stout and marry ze _proprietaire_ of what you call it?--a
public-'ouse--'Ze Crown and Garter' at some town where we stop a week.
By now, I think she 'ave many children and a chin for each."
Cosgrave laughed noisily.
"Didn't I tell you, Robert? A barmaid!"
"Yes--you had better taste." But he was hot with anger. "And then you
came at her heels, Mademoiselle. You rode--what was it--a donkey, a
fat pony? I forget which. Perhaps I was thinking too much of Madame
Moretti. But I remember you were dressed as a page and wore coloured
tights that didn't fit very well, and that everybody laughed because of
your thin long legs. And you threw kisses to us--even Cosgrave got
one, didn't you, Cosgrave? And then I'm afraid I forgot you
altogether. You see, there were camels and elephants and a legless
Wonder and I don't know what, and it was my first circus."
"It must 'ave been a donkey," she said, narrowing her eyes. "I 'ave
ridden so many donkeys."
He saw then that she did not mind at all the fact that she had once
been a circus-clown. Rather he had tossed her a memory on which she
feasted joyfully, almost greedily. She pushed her plate and glass away
from her, and sat with her face between her hands.
"Well--I 'ave 'ad good times always--but per'aps they were ze best of
all. Ah, ze good old Circus--ze jolly life--one big family--monkeys
and bears and camels and elephants and we poor 'umans, all shapes and
sizes, long legs and short legs and no legs--loving and
quarrelling--good friends always--Monsieur George with 'is big whip and
'is silly soft 'eart--ze gay dinners after we 'ave 'ad full 'ouse and
ze no dinners at all when things go bad--and then ze journeys from town
to town--sometimes it rain all day and sometimes it is so hot and the
dust rise up and smother us. But always when we come near ze town we
brighten up, we pretend we are not tired at all. We make jokes and
wonder what it will be like 'ere. Always new faces--new streets--new
policemen--and always ze same too--ze long procession and ze
torchlights and ze music and ze people running like leetle streams down
ze side streets to join up and march along--ze leetle boys and girls
with bright eyes--shouting and waving, so glad to see us."
It was not much that she said, and she did not say it to them. She
disregarded them all, and yet by some magic, through the medium of the
jerky, empty sentences she made them see the vulgar, gaudy thing as she
was seeing it. The subdued music, the tinkling of plates and glasses,
they themselves made a background for her swift picture. They watched
it--the old third-rate circus--trail its cheap glitter and flare and
bang out of darkness and across the stage and into darkness
again--tawdry and sordid, and yet kindly and gay and gallant-hearted
too.
Robert Stonehouse stared heavily in front of him. He had drunk--not
much, but too much. He was not accustomed to drinking. The very
austerity of his life betrayed him. These people too--these
women--half-naked with their feverish, restless eyes--these men with
their air of cynical and weary knowledge--were getting on his nerves.
He wished he had not come. He wished he had not reminded her of that
accursed circus, for it had involved remembering. He had called up a
little old tune that would not be easily forgotten, that would go on
grinding itself round and round inside his brain, and when he had
chased it out would come back, popping out at him, bringing other
small, pale ghosts to bear it company. He could see Cosgrave and
himself--the little boys with bright eyes--and feel the reverberations
of their astonishment, their incredulous delight. For a moment they
had held fast to the tail-end of the jolly marching procession, and
then it had been ripped out of their feeble hands. But the procession
went on. It was always there, round the corner, with its music and
fluttering lights, and if one was infirm of purpose like Cosgrave, or
like a certain James Stonehouse, one ran to meet it, flung oneself into
it, not counting the cost, lying and stealing.
He heard her voice again and pressed his hands to his hot eyes like a
man struggling back out of a deep sleep.
"Where are they all now? _Dieu sait_. Monsieur Georges 'e die. As
for me I go 'ome to ze old Folies Bergeres, and for six months I
wait--a leetle ugly nobody with long thin legs dancing with ten other
ugly leetle nobodies with all sorts of legs be'ind La Jolleta. You
don't remember 'er, '_hein_! Ah, _c'est vieux jeu ca_ and you are all
too young, _Mesdames et Messieurs_. She was ze passion of your
grandpapas. God knows why. Why do you all love me, _hein_? _Une
Mystere_. Well, she was ver' old then, but she 'ave ze good 'ealth and
ze thick skin of ze rhinoceros. And some'ow no one 'ave ze 'eart to
tell 'er. It become a sort of joke--'ow long she keep going--ze
Boulevards make bets about it. But for me it is no joke. I am in a
'urry, _moi_, and I know I can do better than she did ever--I 'ave
something--'ere--'ere--that she never 'ave. And so one night I put a
leetle pinch of something that a good friend of mine give me in La
Jolleta's champagne what she drink before she dance, and when ze
call-boy come she lie there on ze sofa--'er mouth open--_comme
ca_--snoring--like a pink elephant asleep--'ow you say--squiffy--dead
to ze world. Ze manager 'e tear 'is 'air out, and then I come and show
'im and 'e let me go on instead because there is no one else. And the
people boo and shriek at me, they are so angry and I make ze long nose
at them all--and presently they laugh and laugh."
They could see her. It wouldn't have seemed even impudent. Even then
she had been too sure of herself.
"And when I come off ze manager kiss me on both cheeks. _Et c'etait
fait_."
They applauded joyously. Her brutal egotism was a good joke. They
expected nothing else from her. She was like an animal whose cruelty
and cunning one could observe without moral qualms.
"It was a mean thing to have done," Stonehouse said loudly and
truculently--"a treacherous thing."
A shadow was on Cosgrave's face. He leant towards her, almost pleading.
"And La--La--what did you call her? La Jolleta--what became of her?"
She made a graphic gesture.
"She went into the sack, little one---into the sack. She was old. One
should go gracefully."
"You too," Stonehouse said, in a savage undertone.
"I---- Oh, no, _jamais, jamais_." She lifted the monstrous crest of
plumage from her head and set it in the midst of the flowers and
rumpled up her hair till she was like the child riding the fat pony.
"You see yourself--I never grow old, my friend."
"You are older already," he persisted.
But the man opposite broke in again. He leant towards Stonehouse, his
inflamed eye through the staring monocle fixing him with an
extraordinary tipsy earnestness.
"No, doctor, you are mis-mistaken. It would be intolerable--you
understand--quite intolerable. There are things that--that must not be
true--as there are other things that must be true. We've staked our
last penny on it, sir, and we've got to win. Mademoiselle here knows
all about it, and she'll play the game. A sport, doctor, a sport.
Won't let old friends go bankrupt--no--certainly not."
They laughed at him. It seemed unlikely that he himself knew what he
was talking about. But he shook his head and remained sunk in solemn
meditation, twirling the stem of his glass between thick, unsteady
fingers. The girl next him nudged him disgustedly.
"Oh, wake up! You'll be crying in a minute. Talk of something else."
"Tell us the story of the Duke and the Black Opal, Gyp."
She waved them off.
"No--no--that is not discreet. One must not tell tales. That might
frighten someone 'ere who loves me."
And she looked at Stonehouse, a little malicious and insolently,
childishly sure. He leant towards her, speaking in an undertone,
trying to stare her down.
"Do you mean me, Mademoiselle?"
"And why not, _Monsieur le docteur_? Would it be so strange? You say
you love nobody. But it seems you love ze poor fat Moretti--terribly,
terribly, no doubt, so that you almost break your small 'eart for 'er.
And per'aps someone else too. You say you don't drink--but you are
just a leetle drunk already. You are not different from ze rest. I
tell you that before--and I know. I am a connoisseur. It is
written--'ere in the eyes and in the mouth. It is dangerous, the way
you live. _Quant a moi_--I don't want you, my friend--we two--that
would be an eruption--a disaster--I should be afraid."
She pretended to shudder, and a moment later seemed to forget him
altogether. She pressed her cigarette out on her plate and went over
to the piano, touching Cosgrave lightly on the shoulder as she passed
him.
"Come, my latest best-beloved, we 'ave to amuse ze company. We sing
our leetle song together."
But first she made a deep low bow to the shadowy theatre. She kissed
her fingers to the empty boxes that stared down at her with hollow,
mournful eyes. (Were there ghosts there too, Stonehouse wondered
bitterly? The unlucky Frederick, perhaps, with the fatal hole gaping
above the temple, applauding, leaning towards her!)
She sang worse than usual. She was hoarse, and what voice she had gave
way altogether. It did not seem to matter either to her or to anyone
else. What she could not sing she danced. There was a chorus and they
joined in filling the gloom behind them with sullen, ironic echoes.
She reduced them all, Stonehouse thought, to the cabaret from which she
sprang.
And it was comic to see Cosgrave with his head thrown back, playing the
common, noisy stuff as though inspired.
When it was over he swung round, gaping at them with drunken,
confidential earnestness.
"You know, when I was a kid I used to see myself--on a stage like
this--playing the Moonlight Sonata."
She rumpled up his thick hair so that it stood on end like Loga's names.
"You play my song ver' nice. And that is much better than playing ze
Moonlight Sonata all wrong, my leetle friend."
3
It was a sort of invisible catastrophe.
No one else knew of it. In the day-time he himself did not believe in
it--did not, at first, think of it at all. It had all the astonishing
unreality of past pain. He went his way as usual, was arbitrary and
cocksure with his patients, and looked forward to the evening when he
could put them out of his mind altogether and give himself to his vital
work. For the hospital had become a fact. It stood equipped and
occupied, an unrecognized but actual witness to his tenacity. Other
men would get the credit. The Committee who had appointed him
consulting surgeon, not without references to his unusual youth and
their own daring break with tradition--had no suspicion that even the
fund which, in a fit of inexplicable far-seeingness they had allotted
to research, had been created under his ceaseless pressure. And not
even in his thoughts was he satirical at their expense. They had
provided the money and done what he wanted and so served their purpose.
Among his old colleagues he bore himself confidently but unobtrusively.
He could afford to pay them an apparent deference. He was going
farther than they were. His eyes were fixed on a future far beyond the
centres of their jealousies and ambitions when he would be freed from
the wasteful struggle with petty ailments and petty people, and the
last pretence of being concerned with individual life. It was a time
of respite and revision. He was young--in his profession
extraordinarily young--and he was able to look back, as a mountaineer
looks back from his first peep over the weary foothills, knowing that
the bitter drudgery is past and that before him lies the true and
splendid adventure.
That was in the day-time. But with the dusk, the discreet shutting of
doors and the retreating steps of the last patient, a change came. It
was like the subtle resistless withdrawal of a tide--a draining away of
power. He could do nothing against it. He could only sit motionless,
bowed over his papers, striving to keep a hold over the personality
that was slipping from him. And then into the emptiness there flowed
back slowly, painfully, a strange life--a stream choked and muddied at
its source--breaking through.
It was a physical thing. Some sort of nervous reaction. With the
dread of that former break-down overshadowing him he yielded
deliberately. He would leave the house and walk--anywhere--but always
where there were people--down Regent Street, sweeping like a broad
river into a fiery, restless lake. There he let go altogether, and the
crowds carried him. He eddied with them in the glittering backwaters
of the theatres, and studied the pallid, jaded faces that drifted in
and out of the lamp-light with the exaggerated attention of a mind on
guard against itself. He hated it all. It emphasized and justified
his aloofness from the mass of men. These people were sick and
ugly--sicklier and uglier in their pleasure-seeking than in their
stubborn struggle for survival, which had at least some elemental
dignity. It was from their poisoned lives that women like Gyp Labelle
sucked their strength. It was their childish perverted instincts that
made her possible. They made the very thought of immorality a grisly
joke. And yet their nearness, the touch of their ill-grown,
ill-cared-for, or grossly over-nurtured bodies against his, the sound
of their nasal strident voices brought him relief. He could not shake
off their fascination for him. He was like a man hanging round the
scene of some conquered, unforgotten vice.
It was one dismal November evening that, turning aimlessly into a Soho
side-street, he came upon an old man who stood on a soap-box under a
lamp and preached. He held a Bible to the light and read from it, and
at intervals leant forward and beat the tattered book with his open
hand.
"You hear that, men and women. This is the liar, the tyrant, the
self-confessed devil whom you have worshipped from the beginning of
your creation. You see for yourselves the sort of beast he is. There
isn't a brute amongst us who would do the things he's done. He's made
you fight and kill and torture each other for his sake. And all down
the ages he has laughed at you--he is laughing now because, after
all--he knows the truth--he knows what I tell you here night after
night"--and Mr. Ricardo leant forward and pointed a long, dirty finger
at the darkness--"that he doesn't exist--that he is a dream--a myth--a
hope----"
Someone cheered--perhaps because the last words had a sound of eloquent
conclusion--and Mr. Ricardo nodded and took breath. He was like a
scarecrow image that had been stuck up by a freakish joker in a London
street. The respectability that still clung to him made him the more
ludicrous. His clothes were the ruined cast-offs of a middle-class
tradesman, and over them he wore his old masters gown. It did not
flutter out behind now, but lay dank and heavy along his sides like the
wings of a shot bird.
Robert Stonehouse stood back against the shuttered windows of a shop
and stared at him. The sea, rushing out in some monstrous tidal wave
had left its floor littered with old wreckage, with dead, forgotten
people who stirred and lifted themselves. A grotesque, private
resurrection. . . .
The crowd around Mr. Ricardo listened in silence, not mocking him.
There were wide-eyed, haunted-looking children, and men and women not
quite sober who drifted out from the public-houses to gape heavily at
this cheaper form of entertainment. Possibly they thought he was some
missionary trying to induce them to sign the pledge. Some of them must
have known that he was mad. But even they did not laugh at him. Into
their own dark and formless thoughts there may have come the dim
realization that they, too, were misshapen and outcast. The rain
falling in long, slanting lines through the dingy lamplight seemed to
merge them into a mournful kinship.
He spoke rapidly, and for the most part the long, involved sentences
rolled themselves without meaning. But now and then something
struggled clear--a familiar phrase--an ironical echo. Then Robert
Stonehouse saw through the disfigurement to the man that had been--the
poor maimed and shackled fighter gibing and leering at his
fellow-prisoners.
"And now, my delightful and learned young friends----"
And yet he had stood up for little Robert Stonehouse in those days--had
armed him, and opened doors, and made himself into a stepping-stone to
the freedom he had never known. And had gone under. . . .
"That is all for tonight, men and women. I thank you for your support.
You may rest assured that the fight will go on. The end is in sight,
and if need be I shall lead the last attack in person."
Then he stepped down from his soap-box and swung it on to his shoulders
by means of a cord, and went limping off in a strange and anxious haste.
Stonehouse pushed roughly through the dispersing, purposeless crowd and
caught up with him as he was about to lose himself in a dark network of
little squalid streets. He felt oddly young and diffident, for the
schoolmaster is always the schoolmaster though he be mad and broken.
"Mr. Ricardo--don't you remember me?"
The old man stopped and blinked up uncertainly from under the sodden
brim of his hat. His dirty claw-like hands clutched his coat together
in an instinctive gesture of concealment. He seemed disturbed and even
rather offended at the interruption.
"I--ah--I beg your pardon. No, I'm afraid not. It is--ah--not
unnatural. You understand--I have too many supporters."
"Yes--yes--of course. But you knew me years ago when I was a boy.
Don't you remember Robert Stonehouse?"
It was evident that the name fanned some faint memory which flickered
up for a moment and then went out.