I
“OH no,” the specialist said, “I don’t see what purpose it would
serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed,
that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice
on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know
the fact doesn’t help us--it doesn’t help us towards the cure. All
we can do is to wait. His chance is that he’s not such a very young
man. If it had happened ten years ago there wouldn’t have been any
chance for him at all; but the brain-fibre--what the Germans call the
_Hirnstoff_--is tougher now. Anyhow, we can’t say.”
Sir William Wells, an unreasonably lugubrious man of fifty, having
in his eyes the look of a man doomed beyond hope, with ruffled grey
hair, an untidy grey beard, very dark eyebrows, a whitish complexion,
in which tints of blue predominated, except that on his cheek-bones
were patches of red so bright that he had the appearance of having
rouged--with an air, in fact, of having had all his hair ruffled up
the wrong way, and of remaining still a personage of importance--Sir
William Wells repeated:
“All we can do is to wait.”
“Don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said--they were in the great man’s
first-class consulting-room--a tall place, very gay, with white
walls, bright plaster-worked ceiling, chairs with seats and backs of
scarlet leather, and numerous cabinets inlaid with green and yellow
wood, very shiny and new, and yet conveying a sinister suspicion that
they contained not rose-leaves, silks, or bibelots, but instruments,
diagrams, and disinfectants--“don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said,
“that, since his mania, if it is a mania, is so much along the lines of
his ordinary character, that is an indication that his particular state
is not so very serious?”
“My dear sir,” the specialist answered, “what we’ve got to do is
to establish whether there is or isn’t a lesion in the brain. His
character’s nothing to do with it.”
“Of course we’re in your hands,” Grimshaw answered, “but I should have
thought that a man who’s been abnormal all his life ...”
“My dear sir,” Sir William repeated, shaking his glasses as if
minatorily at Grimshaw’s nose, “have you any profession? I suppose
not. But if you had a profession you would know how utterly impossible
the suggestions of laymen are to the professional. People come to
me for this sort of thing because I have had thousands--literally,
thousands--of similar cases. It’s no good my considering individual
eccentricities; my business is to put my finger on the spot.”
“Then, what do you propose to do?” Grimshaw said.
“Nothing,” the specialist answered. “For the present, absolutely
nothing.”
“But don’t you think a change ...” Grimshaw suggested.
Having entirely redecorated his house from top to bottom in order to
indicate that he was more prosperous than Dr. Gegg of No. 161, Sir
William, who was heavily indebted to Jews, was upon the turning-point
between bankruptcy and possible salvation.
“No,” he said determinedly, so that he seemed to bay like a dog from
his chest, “certainly not. If I am to cure him, I must have him under
my own close personal attention. There’s nothing to be done but to
wait.”
He rose upon the points of his toes, and then brought his heels sharply
down upon the floor.
“You understand, we know nothing yet. Your friend doesn’t speak a word.
He’s no doubt aware that he’s watched. He has a companion whom I have
personally instructed, and who will report to me. Get him to take as
much exercise as he can. Keep him fairly quiet, but have him in the
room when cheerful people are about. I will drop in at every moment of
the day that I can spare.”
He paused to glare at Robert Grimshaw.
“I’m a very busy man, but I’ll pay special attention to your friend’s
case. I will try to be always in and out of Mr. Leicester’s house. More
I can’t do.”
Backed up as he was by Katya Lascarides’ suggestion that Sir William
was a good man, Grimshaw felt an intense satisfaction--even a
gratitude--to Sir William; and whilst he slipped his five-pound
note carefully wrapped round five shillings under the specialist’s
paper-weight, which was made of one huge aqua-marine, he uttered a
formal speech of thanks.
“Mind,” Sir William shouted at him as he reached the door, “I don’t
promise you a cure. I’m not one of those quacks. But you know my
position, and you know my reputation. I work from ascertained facts,
not from theories. If it were possible to communicate with your
friend--if he’d speak, or if it were possible to manipulate him--we
might get at something. If, for instance, we could get him to stand
with his heels together, his hands at his sides, and his eyes shut; but
we can’t get him to speak, and he doesn’t listen when he’s spoken to.
There’s nothing to do but wait until he does.”
A period of strain, enhanced by the continual droppings in of Sir
William Wells, ensued for the house in Curzon Street, and nothing
happened, save that they all became personally acquainted with Sir
William’s idiosyncrasies. They discovered that he had a singular
prejudice against the eating of fish; that he was exceedingly insolent
to the servants; that he read the _Daily Telegraph_; that he liked
the singing of Scotch comedians, and considered all ballet-dancers to
be physically abnormal. They also had the perpetual company of a gentle
and black-haired youth called Held. This young man, with a singular
slimness and taciturnity, had been put in by Sir William as if he were
a bailiff in possession of Dudley Leicester. Dudley Leicester never
spoke, the young man hardly ever; but he was exceedingly nice in his
table manners, and eventually Pauline made the discovery at dinner that
he very much disliked cats, and was a Christian Scientist. And with
these additions the household continued its way.
To Robert Grimshaw the bright spot in this tenebrous affair was the
inflexible tranquillity of Pauline Leicester. Looking back upon it
afterwards he seemed to see her upon the background of his own terrible
pain--to see her as a golden and vibrating spot of light. She spoke
about the weather, about some improvements that were being made in the
village of Icking, about the forthcoming General Election, about her
clothes. She went everywhere that she could go without her husband.
She went to “at homes,” to private views, she was “at home.” She had
Dudley himself in her drawing-room where in the farther comers young
Mr. Held and Ellida Langham held animated conversations so close to his
passive form that it might appear that, monosyllabic as he always was,
he was at least attentive to the conversation. She drove regularly in
the Park with Dudley beside her, and most often with Robert Grimshaw
sitting opposite them; but she never mentioned her husband’s condition
to Grimshaw, and her face wore always its little, tender smile. He
was aware that in her there was a certain determination, almost a
fierceness. It wasn’t that in her deep black her face was more pallid,
or that her features hardened. It wasn’t that she chattered less. Her
little tongue was going perpetually, with its infantile gaiety, if her
eyes were for ever on the watch.
There was, moreover, a feeling of a General Election in the air--of
that General Election in which Dudley, as a foregone conclusion, was
to replace the member sitting for his division of the county; and one
afternoon Robert Grimshaw came in to one of Pauline’s “at homes.” The
little encampment round Dudley Leicester had its place usually in
the small, back drawing-room which Dudley’s great chair and Ellida’s
enormous hat and Mr. Held’s slim figure almost contrived to fill.
Dudley sprawled back, his complexion perfectly clear, his eyes gazing
abstractedly before him, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, on show
for anyone who chose to look at him; and Ellida and Mr. Held joined
in an unceasing and animated discussion on Christian Science. Robert
Grimshaw, having addressed a word or two to Madame de Bogota, and
having nodded to Mr. Balestier, who sat for a Midland county, and
having shaken hands with Mrs. Jimtort, the wife of a Recorder of a
south-western city, was moving slowly up to close in the little group
in the background. And suddenly, with an extraordinary running step,
Dudley Leicester shot past him straight at the member for the Midland
county. He had brought out the words: “Are you the man ...” when
already shooting, as it were sideways, between the people, Mr. Held had
very lightly touched his wrist.
“You know,” he said, “that you’re _not_ to talk politics this
afternoon. We’re all tired out.”
Leicester passed his hand lightly down his face, and, turning slowly,
went back to his arm-chair.
Mr. Balestier opened his eyes rather wide; he was a stoutish,
clean-shaven man of forty-five with a rather disagreeable expression,
who, probably because he was interested in South American railways,
went about everywhere with the Senhora de Bogota.
“Oh, I say,” he ejaculated to Pauline, “you have got them under your
thumb, if it’s you who insists they’re not to talk politics. It seems
to act like a military command.”
And Pauline stifled a yawn with her tiny hand.
“Well, it’s perfectly true what Dudley’s secretary says. We are all
nearly worn out, so you’ll have to excuse my yawning,” Grimshaw heard
her say from behind his back. “And Dudley hasn’t been really well since
he had the ‘flu.’”
“Oh, you’re altogether too nervous,” Mr. Balestier’s fat voice came.
“Dudley’s absolutely certain of his seat, and as for not well, why,
he’s a picture of ox-like health. Just look at him!”
“But he’s so terribly thorough,” Pauline answered. “He’s much too
wrapped up in this work. Why, he thinks about nothing else all day and
all night. If you watch him you’ll see he hardly ever speaks. He’s
thinking, I wouldn’t mind betting, about how to win the heart of a man
called ”Down,“ with red whiskers, who’s an Antipedobaptist and not our@@@
tenant, and supposed to be able to influence thirty Nonconformists’
votes. You just keep your eye on Dudley.”
“Oh, I’ll take your word for his industry,” Mr. Balestier said. “But
I’ve got something much better worth keeping my eyes on.”
“Is that meant for you or me, Madame de Bogota?” Pauline said. “Or
possibly it’s you, Mrs. Jimtort!”
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Balestier said, “I was thinking of
Grimshaw’s dog. I feel convinced he’ll have a piece out of my leg, one
of these days.”
Robert Grimshaw meanwhile was supporting himself with one hand on the
blue curtains that decorated the archway between the two rooms. He was
positively supporting himself; the sudden shock of Leicester’s shooting
past him had left him weak and trembling. And suddenly he said:
“What’s the good?”
Ellida--for even Ellida had not yet recovered from the panic of
Dudley’s swift evasion--took with avidity this opening for a
recommencement of one of her eternal and animated conversations with
Mr. Held.
“What’s the good of exposing these impostures?” she said. “Why, all the
good in the world. Think of all the unfortunate people that are taken
in....”
And so she talked on until Mr. Held, the name of Mrs. Mary Baker G.
Eddy upon his lips, plunged again into the fray.
But Robert Grimshaw was not asking what was the good of Christian
Science. He had turned his back upon the front room. Nevertheless,
every word that Pauline uttered had at once its hearing, its meaning,
and its painful under-meaning in his ears. And when he had said,
“What’s the good?” it had been merely the question of what was the
good of Pauline’s going on with these terrible vigilances, this
heart-breaking pretence. And through his dreadfully tired mind
there went--and the vision carried with it a suggestion of sleep,
of deep restfulness--the vision of the logical sequence of events.
If they let Dudley Leicester down, if they no longer kept up the
pretence--the pretence that Dudley Leicester was no more an engrossed
politician--then Dudley Leicester would go out of things, and he and
Pauline ... he and Pauline would fall together. For how long could
Pauline keep it up?
The cruelty of the situation--of each word that was uttered, as of
each word that she uttered in return, the mere impish malignancy of
accidental circumstances--all these things changed for the moment his
very view of Society. And the people sitting behind him--Madame de
Bogota, with the voluptuous eyes and the sneering lips; Mrs. Jimtort,
whose lips curved and whose eyes were cold; Mr. Balestier, whose eyes
rolled round and round, so that they appeared to be about to burst out
of his head, and the deuce only knows what they didn’t see or what
conclusions they wouldn’t draw from what they did see--these three
seemed to be a small commission sent by Society to inquire into the
state of a household where it was suspected something was “wrong.” He
realized that it was probably only the state of his nerves; but every
new word added to his conviction that these were not merely “people,”
bland, smiling, idle, and innocuous--good people of social contacts.
They were, he was convinced, Inquisitors, representing each a separate
interest--Mrs. Jimtort standing for provincial Society, Madame de
Bogota for all the cosmopolitanism of the world’s centre that Western
London is, and Balestier for the Party. And outside there seemed to
be--he seemed to hear them--the innumerable whispers of the tongues of
all Society, canvassing the results of the report that would be brought
back by this committee of inquiry. It worked up, indeed, to an utterly
abominable climax when Balestier, with his rather strident voice,
exclaimed:
“Why don’t you let me mote you down to Well-lands one day, Mrs.
Leicester? You ought to know the Hudsons. Lady Etta’s a peach, as I
learned to say when I went over with the Newfoundland Commission.”
And at that even Ellida threw up her hands and gazed, her lips parted,
into Grimshaw’s eyes. From behind his back, a minute before, there had
come little rustlings of people standing up. He had heard Pauline say:
“What, you can’t all be going at once?” and he had heaved a great sigh
of relief. But in the dead silence that followed Mr. Balestier’s words,
whilst Robert Grimshaw was wondering whether Balestier had merely
and colossally put his almost ox-like foot into it, or whether this
actually was a “try on,” Pauline’s voice came:
“Oh, not just yet. I’m in mourning, you know. I think I go out a little
too much as it is.”
“Oh, she’s saved the situation again!” And then irresistibly it
came over him to ask what was the good of this eternally saving the
situation that neither of them really wanted to maintain. “She should,”
he said to himself fiercely, “give it up.” He wasn’t going to stand
by and see her tortured. Dudley Leicester had given in, and serve him
right, the cad! For all they could tell, he was having the time of his
life. Why shouldn’t they do the same?
“Oh, isn’t she _wonderful_!” Ellida exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t
wonder....” And then she gazed at him with her plaintive eyes. The
slim, dark Mr. Held brought out suddenly:
“It’s the most wonderful ...” but his voice died away in his jaws.
“After all,” he continued as suddenly, “perhaps she’s holding the
thought. You see, we Christian Scientists ...” But again his voice died
away; his dark eyes gazed, mournful and doglike, at Pauline’s dimly-lit
figure.
The tall, small room, with its large white panels, to which the frames
of pale-tinted pictures gave an occasional golden gleam, had about
it an air of blue dimness, for the curtains, straight at the sides,
and half concealing the very tall windows, were of a transparent and
ultramarine network. The little encampment around Dudley Leicester
occupied a small back drawing-room, where the window, being of stained
glass that showed on its small, square panels the story of St. George,
was, on account of its tall, dark furniture, almost in gloom. Little,
and as it were golden, Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the
room; she looked upon the floor, and appeared lost in reflection.
Then she touched one side of her fair hair, and without looking up
she came silently towards them. Ellida was upon the point of running
towards her, her arms outstretched, and of saying: “You _are_
wonderful!” but Pauline, with her brown eyes a little averted, brought
out without any visible emotion, as if she were very abstracted, the
words: “And how is your little Kitty? She is still at Brighton with
Miss Lascarides? Robert dear, just ring the bell for the tea-things to
be taken away.”
It was as if the strain upon her rendered her gently autocratic to
Robert Grimshaw, who watched her from another point, having settled
himself down in the arm-chair before the window looking into the
little back room. Against the rows of the stained-glass window Ellida
Langham appeared all black, impulsive, and ready as it were to stretch
out her arms to enfold this little creature in her cloak, to hide her
face under the great black hat with the drooping veil and the drooping
feathers. But as he understood it, Pauline fended off these approaches
by the attentive convention of her manner. They were in face of Dudley
Leicester’s condition; they had him under their eyes, but Pauline was
not going--even to the extent of accepting Ellida’s tenderness--to
acknowledge that there was any condition about Dudley Leicester
at all. It wasn’t, of course, that Ellida didn’t know, for Robert
Grimshaw himself had told her, and Ellida, with her great and impulsive
tenderness, had herself offered to come round and to play at animated
conversations with Dudley and Mr. Held. But except by little pressures
of the hand at meeting or at parting, and by little fluttering
attentions to Ellida’s hats and toilets when she rose to go, Pauline
was not going to show either gratitude or emotion for the moment. It
was her way of keeping her flag flying. And he admired her for it as he
admired her for everything, and looking down at Peter between his feet,
Robert shook his head very sadly. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself,
“until she knows it’s hopeless, she’s not going to acknowledge even to
herself that there’s anything the matter at all.”
II
BETWEEN his feet Peter’s nostrils jerked twice, and a little bubble
of sound escaped. He was trying to tell his master that a bad man was
coming up the stairs. It was, however, only Sir William Wells who,
with his brisk straightforwardness and his frowning authority, seemed
to push himself into the room as its master, and to scatter the tables
and chairs before him. In his harsh and minatory tones he informed them
that the Marchioness of Sandgate had gone to Exeter with Mrs. Jjohns,
and then he appeared to scatter the little group. It was, indeed, as if
he had thrown Ellida out of the room, so quickly--whilst she exclaimed
over her shoulder to Grimshaw: “Well, you’ll be round to dinner?”--did
she disappear.
With his rasping voice, shaking his glasses at her, Sir William
continued for some minutes to inform Pauline of the movements of
those of his patients who were of political prominence. They were
his patients of that class uneasily dispersing over the face of the
country, opening bazaars, bowling the first balls of cricket-seasons,
devising acts of graciousness all night, putting them into practice all
day, and perpetually shaking hands that soiled their delicate gloves.
For that particular world was full of the whispered words “General
Election.” When it was coming no one seemed to know, for the Prime
Minister with his amiable inscrutability very reasonably distrusted
the great majority of his followers. This disconcerted innumerable
hostesses, for no one knew when they wouldn’t have to pack up bag and
baggage and bolt like so many rabbits back to their burrows. This
febrile condition gave occupation of a secretarial kind to great
numbers of sleek and smooth-haired young gentlemen, but it was very
hard upon the London tradesman.
It was, Robert Grimshaw was thinking, very hard upon Pauline, too. He
couldn’t be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General
Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the
neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with
her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well--or
at least that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself.
But supposing it was to be a matter of some years, or even of some
months? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General
Election that hung over them? Mustn’t it add to her suspense? And
he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester
in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness, and run the
election off her own bat? She had already run Leicester down in their
car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the
cottagers. And there wasn’t much chance of the other side putting up a
candidate....
Between his feet Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction
whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small
dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled in a whisper
to keep the animal quiet. “All these details,” Grimshaw thought,
Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a
fierce determination to keep her end up, and to do it in silence and
loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled
with fear. He _knew_ her to be all this. But Sir William, having
ceased to impart his social information, turned his brows upon his
patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him
by the fireplace. And all she had to say was: “These coals really are
very poor!”
Silence and loneliness. In the long grass, engrossed, mere small spots
of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From
beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true
wood-notes, and overhead a wood-pigeon was crooning incessantly. The
path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work
upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble
from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the
tree-trunks there hung a light-blue haze.
Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his
pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the
excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and
his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly
a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood, and it was to satisfy this
restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end
of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously
upon his private affairs, and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward
and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long
time quite motionless when he heard the words: “You will not, I think,
object to my sharing your seat? I have a slight fit of dizziness.” He
turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square
and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oiled locks, with
a very chiselled nose, high dark brows and complexion as of marble,
and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black
cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary,
an Orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured:
“Assuredly not, Father,” in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at
the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity, and
a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He,
too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the
trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw
looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his
fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been
fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a
mossy green with age and between his lips a misformed cigarette.
“You haven’t got a light?” Grimshaw said, and the man fumbled in his
pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit
its emptiness.
“Oh, well, give me a light from your cigarette,” Grimshaw said.
A hesitancy came over the man’s whole being, but reluctantly he
surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light.
“Oh, here,” he said, and he drew out his bulky case, “that your last?
Here, take one of mine,” and he shook his case over the extended palm.
The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower.
“That’ll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it’s nothing. I’m only
obliged to you for the light. I wanted it.”
“Ah, you do want it when you do, guv’nor,” the man said. Then he walked
off, lifting his feet a little higher, with a little colour in his
cheeks and his back more erect.
“Poor devil!” Grimshaw said, half to himself.
“Surely,” the priest said beside him in fluting and lofty tones, “are
we not all poor devils in the sight of the Ruler of Ages?”
Robert Grimshaw minutely bowed his head.
“Your dizziness has left you, Father?” he asked. “It is the long
fasting. I was on the watch for you to fall.”
“You speak Greek,” the priest said, “and are acquainted with the
practices of the Church?” It was then just the end of Lent, for Easter
fell very late that year.
“My mother was a Lascarides and I have many interests in Greece,”
Grimshaw answered.
“Ah! the Lascarides were very faithful,” the priest said. “It was they
in the main who helped us to build the church here.”
“The church can’t be much more than a stone’s-throw from here. I was
wondering what brought you.”
“I am glad you are Greek,” the Father said, “for I think it was a
very good charity you did just now, and you spoke to that man like a
brother, which is not what the best of these English can do.”
“Oh, come!” Grimshaw said, “the English have their virtues.”
The priest bowed his head in courtesy.
“It is one of their traditions,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to give tobacco
instead of pence to beggars. It is less demoralizing.”
Again the priest bowed.
“Precisely so,” he said. “It is less demoralizing. It gives less
pleasure. I imagine that when the English blest spirit descends from
heaven once a year to the place of torment, he will bear a drop of
water to place upon the sufferer’s tongue. It will be less demoralizing
than the drop of healing oil that you and I will bear. Also, it will
teach the poor soul to know its place.... Tell me, my son,” he added
suddenly, “do we not, you and I, feel lonely in this place?”
“Well, it is a very good place,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I think it is
the best place in the world.”
“_Eemeision_!” the priest said. “I do not say that it is not. And
in that is shown the truth of the saying: ‘How evil are the good places
of this world!’”
“Assuredly you have fasted long, Father,” Grimshaw said.
“To a demoralizing degree!” the priest answered ironically. “And let
us consider where that leads us. If we have fasted long, we have given
ourselves to the angelic hosts. We have given our very substance to
these sweet beggars. So we have demoralized the poor of heaven by the
alms of our bodies.”
“Surely,” Robert Grimshaw said, “if we overburden our bodies with
fasting, we demoralize the image of our Creator and Saviour?”
“Not so!” the priest thundered suddenly, and his eyes blazed far back
in his skull. “We have mortified this our body which is from the devil,
and in the lowness of the tides of this life we see the truth. For I
tell you that when we see this place to be lonely, then, indeed, we see
the truth, and when we say that it is pleasant, we lie foully.”
“Then, indeed,” Robert Grimshaw said, “we--I mean you and I--are to
be creatures of two natures. We shall follow our passions--if they be
passions of well-doing--till they lead us, as always they must, into
evil.”
“And,” the priest assented, “we must purge then from us that
satisfaction of well-doing and well-being by abstentions and by
fastings, and by thinking of the things that are not of this world.”
“It is strange,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to hear your conversation. I
have heard so little of these things since I was a very young man. But
you teach me now as my aunt and foster-mother taught me at her knee.
She was Mrs. Peter Lascarides.”
“I knew her,” the priest said. “She was a very good woman. You could
not have had a better teacher.”
“And yet,” Robert Grimshaw said, “it was from her teaching that I have
evolved what has been the guiding phrase of my life: ‘Do what you want
and take what you get for it.’”
“And God in His mercy pardon the ill we do.” The priest crossed himself.
“I had forgotten that,” Grimshaw said, and he added gravely: “God in
His mercy pardon the ill I have done.”
“May it be pardoned to you,” the priest said. He stopped for a moment
to let the prayer ascend to Heaven. Then he added didactically: “With
that addition your motto is a very good one; for, with a good training,
a man should have few evil instincts. And to do what you want, unless
obviously it is evil, is to follow the dictates of the instincts that
God has placed in you. Thus, if you will feast, feast; if you will
fast, fast; if you will be charitable to your neighbour, pour out your
goods into the outstretched hands of the poor. Then, if you chance to
give three scudi into the hands of a robber, and with these three scudi
he purchase a knife wherewith he slay his brother, God may well pardon
it to you, who hung, omnipotent, upon the Cross, though thereby to
Cæsar was left power to oppress many of the Churches.”
“So that we should not think too much of the effects of our deeds?”
Robert Grimshaw asked.
“Not too much,” the priest said. “For then we shall lose much Christian
charity. I know a lady who resides near our church and is noted for
a frosty sort of charity, going with tracts into the poorer regions.
I have heard that she said once to her niece: ‘My dear, never keep a
diary; it may be used against you!’” The priest pronounced these words
with a singular mixture of laughter and contempt. “Do you not hear all
England speaking in these words?” he asked suddenly.
A nurse, tall, pink and white, with a dove-coloured veil and cloak,
passed them, with averted face, pushing in a low cart a child, whose
blue eyes gazed with contentment upon the tree-tops.
“Well, hasn’t it given us that?” Grimshaw said.
“Yes, it has given that to the world,” the priest said. “A menial
who averts her eyes--a child who is inanimate by force of being kept
‘good’--a ‘good’ child. My son, a ‘good’ child is a thing to make the
angels cry; for is it not recorded of our Comforter that once He struck
His mother?”
“But should not the nursemaid avert her eyes?” Grimshaw said.
“Consider,” the black pope answered, “with what a laughing glance she
would have passed you had she been a Cypriote; or how she would have
gazed till her eyes started from her head at an English Bishop. But as
for this girl, she averts her gaze. Her aunt has told her that it might
be used against her.”
“It might be used against her, you know,” Grimshaw said.
“Oh, my son,” the priest said, “for what has God given a maiden eyes,
save to use them in innocent glances? And what use is the teaching of
our Church if passer-by may not smile upon passer-by and pass the time
of day by well-heads and in the shady groves? It may be used against
them. But tell me this, my son: Are there not four times more fallen
women and brothels in one-half of this city than in all Greece and
Cyprus and the Isles?”
“Yet there there is not one such nursemaid,” Grimshaw said. “And it is
that that our civilization has bent all its energies to produce. That,
without doubt, is why you and I are lonely here.” He added: “But is it
not wiser to strive to produce nursemaids?”
“Son,” the priest asked, “will you not come with me and confess your
troubles? For I am very certain that you have troubles. You have, is
it not, done what you wanted; you are now, therefore, taking what you
get for it? I have heard you say, may God pardon the ill you have done!
It is not that you regret having rained your cigarettes upon that poor
man?”
“Ah, I regret that less than other things,” Grimshaw said.
“Because you asked him first for the service of a light?”
“Why,” Grimshaw answered, “in this case I had really need of a light.
But I confess that quite often I have asked poor men for lights when I
had my own, that I might give them a taste of good tobacco.”
“And why did you first ask them for a light?” the priest asked. “Was it
that they might not be demoralized?”
“I hardly know,” Grimshaw said. “I think it was to get into touch with
them--to precede the pleasure of the tobacco with the pleasure of
having done me a service. One doesn’t inquire so closely into one’s
motives.”
“Ah,” the black pope answered, “from that alone one may perceive that
you are not English, for the English do not, like you, seek to come
into contact with their fellow-beings or with persons whom they may
meet by chance. They are always afraid of entanglements--that it may be
used against them.”
Robert Grimshaw leaned forward over his stick. It was pleasant to him
to come into contact with this representative of an unseen world--to
come for a moment out of the ring, very visible and circumscribed,
in which he moved. It gave him, as it were, a chance to stand upon a
little hill and look down into the misty “affair” in which he was so
deeply engaged.
“Then you don’t advise me,” he said suddenly in English, “to pull up my
sticks--to wash my hands of things and people and affections?”
“Assuredly,” the priest said, “I do not advise you to give away your
little dog for fear that one day it will die and rend your heart.”
Grimshaw looked meditatively at Peter, who was flapping through the
grass, his nose tracking some delicious odour beyond the path just
opposite them.
“I certainly will not give away my little dog,” Grimshaw said.
He meditated for a little longer, then he stood up, straightening
himself, with his stick behind his back.
“I know I may not offer you my arm,” he said, “to take you back to your
church.”
The priest smiled gently.
“That is forbidden to you,” he said, “for it would militate against
the dignity of my appearance; but all other human contacts lie open to
you. Cherish them.” The haughty curve of his brows became militant; his
voice took on the tone of a challenger. “Go out into the world; help
all that you may; induce all that you may to go into the right paths.
Bring one unto the other, that mutual comprehension may result. That
is the way of Christian fellowship; that is the way to bring about the
peace of God on earth.”
“And pray God to forgive any ill that I may do,” Grimshaw answered.
“That, too,” the priest answered; and, tall, haughty, his brows very
arched, his hair curled and his beard tended, he moved slowly away
towards the gates, casting looks, apparently of indignation, at the
chestnut-blossoms of the avenue.
III
THAT night Robert Grimshaw dined at the Langhams’. Little Kitty was
still at Brighton with Katya, and the room, in the pleasant shade of a
hanging-lamp above the table, was tranquil and soothing. Paul Langham,
who was the director of a bank doing most of its business with the
Orient, was a blond gentleman with a high nose, able to pass from the
soup to the coffee without speaking a word. And having that afternoon
purchased at a railway bookstall an engineer’s puzzle, by means of
which sixteen crescents of orange-coloured cardboard could be made to
fit the form of a perfect circle into a square box, Ellida was more
engaged with these little coloured objects than with either of her
companions.
And suddenly Mr. Held was in the room. He had the air of springing from
the dark floor into the little circle of light that the lamp cast. His
black hair hung down over his ears, his great black eyes were luminous
and very open, and his whole gentle being appeared to be pervaded by
some deep excitement.
“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with
extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his
chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know
that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”
Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the
figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his
swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an
untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said,
and it wasn’t--no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon
Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come
round.
In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing
Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never
quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him
in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that
young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for
Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous
eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like
a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end
of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even
select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he
did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention,
for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the
whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in
little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to
Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt--he had felt it in his bones,
in his soul--that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of
her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was
rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding
Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking
straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling--he couldn’t
explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do
with it--helped him to be telepathic.
But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where
Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at
Grimshaw’s entry.
“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in
consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”
And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.”
Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells
had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of
extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William
had shouted:
“What d’you say to light baths? _Heh_? What d’you say to zymotic
massage? _Heh_?” whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with
a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester’s
pulse, and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word,
and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over
the third--Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched
forward--had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared
like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same
feeling.
“No, they don’t seem much good,” he said.
She uttered, with a sudden fierceness, the words:
“Then it’s up to you to do what’s to be done.”
Robert Grimshaw recoiled a minute step.
“Oh, I don’t mean,” she said, “because it’s your fault, but simply--I
can’t think any more. It’s too lonely, yet I can’t talk about it. I
can’t.”
Mr. Held, his mouth wide open with agony, glided out of the room,
squeezing his ascetic hands together.
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Oh, I know,” she answered. “I _did_ talk to you about it. But it
does not somehow seem to be right any more. Don’t you understand? Not
only because it isn’t delicate or it doesn’t seem the right thing to
talk about one’s relations with one’s husband, but simply ... I can’t.
I can keep things going; I can run the house and keep it all dark....
But is he going to get well, or isn’t he? We know nothing. And I can’t
face the question alone. I can _do_ things. It drives me mad to
have to think about them. And I’ve no one to talk to, not a relation,
not a soul in the world.”
“You aren’t angry with me?” Grimshaw asked.
“Angry!” she answered, with almost a touch of contempt in her voice.
“Good heavens! I’d dust your shoes for all you’ve done for us, and for
all you’re doing. But you’ve got to do more. You’ve got to do much
more. And you have to do it alone.”
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.
Pauline remained silent. She began again to chafe Dudley Leicester’s
hands between her little palms. Suddenly she looked hard at Grimshaw.
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “I do, if you don’t, see where we’re
coming to.” His face expressed a forced want of comprehension, as if he
were afraid. She looked remorselessly into his eyes.
“It’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” she said, and then she
added in cold and precise words:
“You’re love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re drifting,
drifting. But I’m not the woman to drift. I mean to do what’s right,
and I mean to make you. There’s no more to be said.”
Robert Grimshaw walked to the farthest end of the tall room. He
remained for a long time with his face to the corner. He attempted no
denial. He could not deny, and once again he seemed older. His voice
was even a little husky when, looking at her feet, he said:
“I can’t think what’s to be done,” and, in a very low voice, he added,
“unless ...” She looked at him with her lips parted, and he uttered the
one word: “Katya!” Her hand went up over her heart.
And he remembered how she had said that her mother always looked most
characteristic when she sat, with her hand over her heart, erect,
listening for the storms in the distance. And suddenly her voice
appeared to be one issuing from a figure of stone:
“Yes, that is it! She was indicated from the first; we ought to have
asked her from the first. That came into my head this afternoon.”
“We couldn’t have done better than we have,” he said. “We didn’t know
how. We haven’t been letting time slip.”
She nodded her head slowly.
“We _have_ been letting time slip. I knew it when I saw these two
over Dudley this afternoon. I lost suddenly all faith in Sir William.
It went out of me like water out of a glass, and I saw at once that we
had been letting time slip.”
Grimshaw said: “_Oh_!”
But with her little air of sad obstinacy she continued:
“If we hadn’t, we should have seen from the first that that man was
a cold fool. You see it the moment you look for it. Yes, get Miss
Lascarides! That’s what you’ve got to do.”
And when Robert Grimshaw held out his hand to her she raised her own
with a little gesture of abstention.
“Go to-night and ask Ellida if she will lend us her sister, to put us
all straight.”
Eating the end of his meal--which he had begun at the Langhams’--with
young Held alone in the dining-room, Robert Grimshaw said:
“We’re going to call Miss Lascarides to the rescue.”
The lean boy’s dark eyes lit up with a huge delight.
“How exactly the right thing!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of her. She’s
a great professional reputation. You wouldn’t think there was a whole
world of us talking about each other, but there is, and you couldn’t do
better. How did you come to hear of her?” And then his face fell. “Of
course it means my going out of it,” he said.
Robert Grimshaw let his commiserating glance rest on the young man’s
open countenance, over which every emotion passed as openly and as
visibly as gusts of wind pass over still waters. Suddenly an expression
of timid appeal came into the swarthy face.
“I should like you to let me say,” the boy brought out, “how much I
appreciate the way you’ve all treated me. I mean, you know, exactly
as an equal. For instance, _you_ talked to me just as if I were
anybody else. And Mrs. Leicester!”
“Well, you are like anybody else, aren’t you?” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Of course, too,” Held said, “it’ll be such a tremendous thing for her
to have a woman to confide in. She does need it. I can feel that she
needs it. Oh, as for me, of course I took a first in classics, but
what’s the good of that when you aren’t any mortal use in the world? I
might be somebody’s secretary, but I don’t know how those jobs are got.
I never had any influence. My father was only Vicar of Melkham. The
only thing I could do would be to be a Healer. I’ve so much faith that
I am sure I could do it with good conscience, whereas I don’t think
I’ve been doing this quite conscientiously. I mean I don’t think that I
ever believed I could be much good.”
Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!”
“If there’d been anything to report to Sir William, I could have
reported it, for I am very observant, but there was nothing. There’s
been absolutely nothing. Or if there’d been any fear of violence--Sir
William always selects me for cases of intermittent violence.”
Again Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!” and his eyes went over Mr. Held’s
form.
“You see,” Held continued, “I’m so immensely strong. I held the amateur
belt for wrestling for three years, Græco-Roman style. I expect I
could hold it still if I kept in training. But wasn’t I right when
I said that Mrs. Leicester had some sort of psychological revulsion
this afternoon?” He spoke the words pleadingly, and added in an almost
inaudible voice: “You don’t mind my asking? It isn’t an impertinence?
It means such an immense amount to me.”
“Yes, I think perhaps you’re right,” Grimshaw said. “Something of the
sort must have occurred.”
“I felt it,” Held continued, speaking very quickly; “I felt it
inwardly. Isn’t it wonderful, these waves that come out from people
one’s keenly sympathetic to? Quite suddenly it came; about an hour
after Sir William had gone. She was sitting on the arm of Mr.
Leicester’s chair and I felt it.”
“But wasn’t it because her face fell--something like that?” Robert
Grimshaw asked.
“Oh no, oh no,” Held said; “I had my back to her. I was looking out of
the window. To tell the truth, I can’t bear to look at her when she
sits like that beside him; it’s so ...”
A spasm of agony passed over Mr. Held’s face and he swallowed
painfully. And then he continued, his face lighting up:
“Why it’s such a tremendous thing to me is that it means I can go
forward; I can go on to be a Healer without any conscientious doubts
as to my capacities. If I felt this mentality so much, I can feel it
in other cases, so that really it means life and death to me; because
this sort of thing, if it’s very good study, doesn’t mean any more than
being a male nurse, so that I’ve gained immensely, even if I do go out
of the house. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to be in contact
with your two natures. My mentality has drawn its strength, light; I’m
a different person from what I was six weeks ago.”
“Oh, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Oh, it’s true,” Mr. Held answered. “In the last place I was in I had
to have meals with the butler, and here you’ve been good, and I’ve
made this discovery, that my mentality _will_ synchronize with
another person’s if I’m much in sympathy with them.” And then he asked
anxiously: “Mrs. Leicester wasn’t very bad?”
“Oh no,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “it was only that she had come to
the resolution of calling in Miss Lascarides.”
“Now, I should have thought it was more than that,” Held said. “I was
almost certain that it was something very bitter and unpleasant. One of
those thoughts that seem suddenly to wreck one’s whole life.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was more than that,” Robert Grimshaw said; and
Mr. Held went on to declare at ecstatic lengths how splendid it would
be for Pauline to have Katya in the house, to have someone to confide
in, to unbosom herself to, to strengthen her mentality with, and
from whom to receive--he was sure she would receive it, since Miss
Lascarides was Mrs. Langham’s sister--to receive a deep and clinging
affection. Besides, Miss Lascarides having worked in the United States,
was certain to have imbibed some of Mrs. Eddy’s doctrine, so that,
except for Mr. Leicester’s state, it was, Mr. Held thought, going to
be an atmosphere of pure joy in the house. Mrs. Leicester so needed a
sister.
Robert Grimshaw sipped his coffee in a rather grim silence. “I wish
you’d get me the ‘ABC,’ or look up the trains for Brighton,” he said.
IV
“HERE comes mother and the bad man,” Kitty said from the top of her
donkey, and there sure enough to meet them, as they were returning
desultorily to lunch along the cliff-top, came Ellida Langham and
Robert Grimshaw. Ellida at the best of times was not much of a
pedestrian, and the donkey, for all it was large and very nearly white,
moved with an engrossed stubbornness that, even when she pulled it,
Katya found it difficult to change. On this occasion, however, she did
not even pull it, and the slowness of their mutual approach across the
green grass high up in the air had the effect of the coming together of
two combatant but reluctant forces.
“He’s a bad, bad man,” little Kitty said.
“And he’s a bad, bad man,” Katya answered her.
At her last parting it had been agreed between them that they parted
for good, or at least until Robert Grimshaw would give in to her
stipulation. He had said that this would not be until he had grown
very, very tired; and Katya felt it, like Mr. Held, in her bones that
Robert Grimshaw had not come now to submit to her. They approached,
however, in weather that was very bright, over the short turf beneath
dazzling seagulls overhead against the blue sky. And, Katya having
stood aside cool and decided in her grey dress, Ellida, dressed as she
always was in a loose black, flung herself upon the child. But, having
showered as many kisses and endearments as for the moment she needed,
she took the donkey by the bridle as a sign that she herself took
charge of that particular portion of the enterprise.
“You’ve got,” she said to her sister, “to go a walk with Toto. I’ll
take this thing home.”
Katya gave Robert a keen scrutiny whilst she said to Ellida:
“You’ll never get it home. It will pull the arms out of your body.”
“Well, I’ll admit,” Ellida said, a little disconsolately, “that I
never expected to turn into a donkey-boy, but”--and she suddenly grew
more brisk--“it’s got to be done. You remember that you’re only my
nursemaid.”
“That doesn’t,” Katya said amiably, “give you the right to dispose of
me when it comes to followers.”
“Oh, get along, you cantankerous cat.” Ellida laughed at her. “The
gentleman isn’t here as a follower. He’s heard I’ve given you notice,
and he’s taken up your character. He thinks you’ll do. He wants to
employ you.”
Katya uttered “Oh,” with minute displeasure, and a little colour came
into her clear cheeks. She turned her profile towards them, and against
the blue sky it was like an extraordinary cameo, so clear, so pale, the
dark eyelashes so exact, the jet-black hair receiving only in its coils
the reflection of the large, white, linen hat that Katya wore because
she was careful of her complexion and her eyes and her whole face had
that air of distant and inscrutable determination that goes with the
aspect of a divinity like Diana.
“In fact, it’s only a matter of terms,” Robert Grimshaw said, looking
away down the long slopes of the downs inland.
“Everything is always a matter of terms,” Katya said.
The white donkey was placidly browsing the short grass and the daisy
heads.
“Oh, come up,” Ellida said, and eventually the white beast responded
to her exertions. It wasn’t, however, until the donkey was well out of
earshot that Grimshaw broke the silence that Katya seemed determined
to maintain. He pointed with his stick to where--a dark patch of trees
dominated by a squarish, dark tower, in the very bottom of a fold in
the downs--a hamlet occupied the extreme distance.
“I want to walk to there,” he said.
“I’m not at all certain that I want to walk at all,” she answered, and
he retorted:
“Oh yes, you do. Look how the weathercock shines in the sun. You know
how, when we were children, we always wanted to walk to where the
weathercock shone, and there was always something to prevent it. Now
we’re grown up, we’re going to do it.”
“Ah, it’s different now,” she answered. “When we were children we
expected to find something under the shining weathercocks. Now there’s
nothing in the world that we can want to find. It seems as if we’d got
all that we’re ever going to get.”
“Still, you don’t know what we mightn’t find under there,” he said.
She looked straight into his clear olive-coloured face. She noted that
his eyes were dark and tired.
“Oh, poor dear!” she said to herself, and then she uttered aloud: “Now,
look here, Toto, it’s understood once and for all that I’m ready to
live with you to-day. But I won’t marry you. If I go with you now,
there’s to be no more talking about that.”
“Oh, that’s understood,” he said.
“Well, then,” she replied, and she unfolded her white sunshade, “let’s
go and see what we find beneath the weathercock and she put her hand on
his arm.”
They strolled slowly down the turf. She was used enough to his method
of waiting, as if for the psychological moment, to begin a conversation
of importance, and for quite a long way they talked gaily and
pleasantly of the little herbs of which, as they got farther inland,
they discovered their carpet to be composed--the little mints, the
little yellow blossoms, the tiny, silvery leaves like ferns--and the
quiet and the thrilling of the innumerable larks. The wind seemed to
move low down and cool about their feet.
And she said that he didn’t know what it meant to her to be back--just
in the quiet.
“Over there,” she said, “it did seem to be rather dreadful--rather
comfortless, and even a little useless. It wasn’t that they hadn’t
got the things. Why, there are bits in Philadelphia and bits round
Philadelphia--old bits and old families and old people. There are even
grass and flowers and shade. But somehow, what was dreadful, what made
it so lonely, was that they didn’t know what they were there for. It
was as if no one knew--what he was there for. I don’t know.”
She stopped for a minute.
“I don’t know,” she said--“I don’t know how to express it. Over here
things seem to fit in, if it’s only a history that they fit into. They
go on. But over there one went on patching up people--we patched them
up by the score, by the hundred. And then they went and did it all over
again, and it seemed as if we only did it for the purpose of letting
them go and do it all over again. It was as if instead of preparing
them for life we merely prepared them for new breakdowns.”
“Well, I suppose life _isn’t_ very well worth living over there?”
Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, it isn’t the life,” she said. “The _life’s_ worth
living--more worth living than it is here.... But there’s something
more than mere life. There’s--you might call it the overtone of
life--the something that’s more than the mere living. It’s the what
gives softness to our existence that they haven’t got. It’s the ...
That’s it! It’s knowing one’s place; it’s feeling that one’s part of a
tradition, a link in the chain. And oh ...” she burst out, “I didn’t
want to talk about it. But it used to come over me like a fearful
doubt--the thought that I, too, might be growing into a creature
without a place. That’s why it’s heaven to be back,” she ended. She
looked down the valley with her eyes half closed, she leant a little on
his arm. “It’s heaven, heaven!” she repeated in a whisper.
“You were afraid,” he said, “that we shouldn’t keep a place for
you--Ellida, and I, and all of us?”
“Perhaps that was all it was,” she dropped her voice to say. He pressed
with his arm her hand against his heart.
“Oh,” he said, “it isn’t only the old place we want you to go into.
There’s a new one. You’ve heard that I’ve been taking up your
character?”
“Ah,” she said; and again she was on the alert in an instant. “I’m
to have a situation with you? Who’s the invalid? Peter?” The little
dog with the flapping ears was running wide on the turf, scenting the
unaccustomed grasses.
“Oh, Peter’s as near speaking as he can ever get,” Grimshaw said.
Katya laughed.
“That would be a solution,” she said, “if you took me on as Peter’s
nurse. But who’s your dumb child now? I suppose it’s your friend ...
ah! ... Dudley Leicester.”
“You remember,” Grimshaw said, “you used always to say he was like
Peter.”
“No; it was you I used to say were like Peter. W ell, what’s the matter
with Dudley Leicester? ... at least. No. Don’t tell me. I’ve heard a
good deal from Ellida. She’s gone clean mad about his wife.”
“Yes; she’s mad enough about Pauline,” Grimshaw said, “and so would you
be.”
“I dare say,” she answered. “She seems brave. That’s always a good
deal.”
“Oh, if you want braveness!” Grimshaw said. “But how can you consider
his case if you won’t hear about him?”
“I’ve had _one_ version,” she said. “I don’t want two. It would
obscure my view. What we know is that he sits about speechless, and
that he asks strangers in the street a question about a telephone.
That’s right, isn’t it?”
“What an admirable professional manner you’ve got!” Grimshaw said; and
he disengaged her hand from his arm to look better at her. “It’s quite
right about poor Dudley.”
“Well,” she said, “don’t be silly for a moment. This is my work in
life--you know you don’t look over-well yourself--but answer me one
question. I’m content to take Ellida’s version about him, because she
can’t influence my views. _You_ might. And one wants to look only
from personal observation. But ...” She stretched out her hand and felt
his pulse for a light minute.
“You aren’t well,” she said. “No, I don’t want to look at your tongue.
Here, take off your cap;” and suddenly she ran her fingers smoothly
and firmly over his temples, so that they seemed to explore deep
places, cool and restful. “That soothes you, doesn’t it?” she said.
“_That’s_ how I make my bread. But take care, dear thing, or it’ll
be you that I shall be nursing next.”
“It lies with you to cure it,” he answered.
She uttered a painful “_Oh_!” and looked down the valley between
her gloved fingers. When she took her hands down from her face, she
said:
“Look here! That’s not fair. You promised not to.”
He answered: “But how can I help it? How can I help it?”
She seemed to make her head grow rigid.
“One thing at a time, then,” she said. “You know everything. What
happened to him at the telephone?” And when he said that someone--when
he was in a place where he ought not to have been--had recognized his
voice, she said: “Oh!” and then again, “_Oh_! that explains.”
Grimshaw looked at her, his dark eyes imploring.
“It can be cured?” he said.
“It ought to be,” she answered. “It depends. I’ll look at him.”
“Oh, you _must_,” he answered.
“Well, I will,” she retorted. “But, you understand, I must be paid my
fee.”
“Oh,” he said, “don’t rub it in just now.” “Well, you rubbed it in just
now,” she mocked him. “You tried to get round my sympathies. I’ve got
to harden myself to get back to where I was. You know you shook me. But
I’m a lonely woman. My work’s all I’ve got.”
“Katya!” he said. “You know your half of your father’s money is waiting
for you. I’ve not spent a penny of it.”
“I know you’re a dear,” she said, “but it doesn’t alter matters. I
won’t take money from a man who won’t make a sacrifice for me.”
“Ellida took her share,” he said.
“Ellida’s Ellida,” she answered. “She’s a darling, but she’s not me.
If you’d take the steps you might, you could have me, and I’d have
father’s money. But that’s all there is to it. I’ll do all I can for
Dudley Leicester. Don’t let’s talk about the other thing.”
They came down to the hard road over the bank.
“Now we shall see what’s under the weathercock,” she said.
V
IT was as if in the churchyard, amongst the old and slanting tombs, in
the sunlight and in the extended fingers of the yews, there was the
peace of God. In the highroad, as it passed through the little hamlet,
not a single person stirred. The cottage doors stood open, and as they
had passed they could hear even the ticking of the clocks. The dust on
the highroad was stamped into little patterns by the feet of a flock of
sheep that, from the hill above, they had seen progressing slowly at a
great distance.
“The peace of God,” Robert Grimshaw said. They were sitting in the
small plastered porch of the little old church.
“‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding....’ I’ve always
thought that those words, coming where they do, are the most beautiful
thing in any rite. It’s like ...” He seemed to be about to enter on a
long train of thought, but suddenly he said, “Oh, my dear,” and he laid
his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, and the lines of his face
drooping. They sat silent for a long time, and slowly into hers there
came an expression of a deep and restful tenderness, a minute softening
of all the lines and angles of his chiselled countenance; and at last
he said, very low: “Oh, you must end it!” and she answered in an echo
of his tone: “No, no. Don’t ask me. It isn’t fair;” and she knew that
if she looked at his tired face again, or if again his voice sounded so
weary, that she would surrender to his terms.
He answered: “Oh, I’m not asking that. I promised that I wouldn’t, and
I’m not. It’s the other thing that you must end. You don’t know what it
means to me.”
She said: “What?” with an expression of bewilderment, a queer numb
expression, and whilst he brought out in slow and rather broken
phrases, “It’s an unending strain ... And I feel I am responsible ...
It goes on night and day ... I can’t sleep ... I can’t eat ... I have
got the conviction that suddenly he might grow violent and murder....”
Her face was hardening all the while. It grew whiter and her eyes
darkened.
“You’re talking of Dudley Leicester?” she said, and slowly she removed
her arm from beneath his hand. She stood up in front of him, clear and
cool in her grey dress, and he recovered his mastery of himself.
“But, of course,” he went on, “that’s only a sort of nightmare, and
you’re going to put an end to it. If we start back now you could see
him to-night.”
She put her hands behind her back, and said with a distinct and clear
enunciation: “I am not going to.” He looked at her without much
comprehension.
“Well, to-morrow, then. Next week. Soon?”
“I am not going to at all,” she brought out still more hardly. “Not
to-day. Not this week. Not ever.” And before his bewilderment she began
to speak with a passionate scorn: “This is what I was to discover
beneath the weathercock! Do you consider what a ridiculous figure you
out? You bring me here to talk about that man. What’s he to you, or you
to him? Why should you maunder and moon and worry about him?”
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said, and she burst into a hard laugh.
“No wonder you can’t give in to me if you’ve got to be thinking of him
all the time. Well, put it how you will, I have done with him, and
I’ve done with you. Go your own idiotic ways together. I’ve done with
you.” And with her hands stretched down in front of her she snapped the
handle of her parasol, her face drawn and white. She looked down at the
two pieces contemptuously, and threw them against the iron-bolted, oak
church door. “That’s an end of it,” she said.
Grimshaw looked up at her, with his jaw dropping in amazement.
“But you’re jealous!” he said.
She kept herself calm for a minute longer.
“I’m sorry,” she said--“I’m sorry for his poor little wife. I’m sorry
for Ellida, who wants him cured, but it’s their fault for having to do
with such a soft, meddlesome creature as you.” And then suddenly she
burst out into a full torrent: “Jealous!” she said. “Yes, I’m jealous.
Is that news to you? It isn’t to me. That’s the secret of the whole
thing, if you come to think of it. Now that it’s all over between
us there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know it. All my life you’ve
tortured me. When I was a tiny child it was the same. I wanted you
altogether, body and soul, and you had always someone like that, that
you took an interest in; that you were always trying to get _me_
to take an interest in. Just you think the matter out. It’ll make you
understand a good many things.” She broke off, and then she began
again: “Jealous? Yes, if it’s jealousy to want a woman’s right--the
whole of a man altogether.” She closed her eyes and stood for a moment
shuddering. “Good-bye,” she said; and with an extreme stiffness she
went down the short path. As she turned to go through the gate she
called back: “You’d better try Morley Bishop.”
Grimshaw rose to his feet as if to follow her, but an extreme weariness
had overcome him. He picked up the pieces of her parasol, and with a
slow and halting gait went along the dusty road towards the village inn.
A little later he took from the nearest station the train up to London,
but the intolerable solitude of the slow journey, the thought of
Pauline’s despair, the whole weight of depression, of circumstance,
made him, on arriving at London Bridge, get out and cross the platform
to the down-train time-tables. He was going to return to Brighton.
Ellida was sitting in the hotel room about eleven, reading a novel that
concerned itself with the Court life of a country called “Nolhynia.”
She looked up at Robert Grimshaw, and said:
“Well, what have you two been up to?”
“Hasn’t Katya told you?”
Ellida, luxuriating at last in the sole possession of her little Kitty,
who by now prattled distractingly; luxuriating, too, in the possession
of many solid hours of a night of peace, stolen unexpectedly and
unavoidably from the duties of a London career, was really and paganly
sprawling in a very deep chair.
“No,” she said. “Katya hasn’t told me anything. Where is Katya? I
thought you’d decided to go off together at last, and leave poor little
Pauline to do the best she could;” and she held out, without moving
more than her hand, a pink telegram form which bore the words:
“Don’t worry about me. Am quite all right. See that Kitty’s milk is
properly metchnikoffed.”
“It was sent from Victoria,” she said, “so of _course_ I thought
you’d been and gone and done it. I didn’t know whether to be glad or
sorry, but I think I was mostly glad.” She looked up at his anxious
face curiously. “Haven’t you gone and done it?” she said. “You don’t
mean to say you’ve split again?”
“We’ve split again,” he answered. “Worse than ever before.” And he
added anxiously: “You don’t think she’ll have been doing anything rash?”
“Anything rash!” she mocked him pleasantly. “She’s never in her life
done anything else. But if you mean gone under a motor-bus, I can tell
you this, Mr. Toto, she too jolly well means to have you to do anything
of that sort. What’s the matter now?”
He related as carefully as he could, and then she said: “For a couple
of darlings you are the most extraordinary creatures on earth. Katya’s
Katya, of course; but why in Heaven’s name you can’t be reasonable it
passes me to understand.”
“Reasonable!” Grimshaw exclaimed.
“Well,” Ellida answered, “you don’t know Katya as I do. You think, I
dare say, that she’s a cool, manlike sort of chap. As a matter of fact,
she’s a mere bundle of nerves and insane obstinacies. I don’t mean to
say that she’s not adorable. She’s just the most feminine thing in the
world, but what you ought to do is perfectly plain. You ought to bring
her to her knees. If you won’t give in to her--it would be the easiest
thing to do--it would be just as easy to bring her to her knees.”
“It would?” Grimshaw asked.
“Yes,” she said, “easy, but I dare say a bit of a bore. You go off with
some other woman, and she’ll be after you with hatchets and knives in
ten seconds after she hears the news. That’s Katya. It’s Kitty, too,
and I dare say it would be me if I ever had anything in the world to
contrarify me.”
“Oh, I’m tired out,” he answered. “I told you some time ago that if I
grew very, very tired I should give in to her. Well, I’ve come down to
tell her that, if she’ll take on Dudley, she can take me on, too, on
her own terms.”
Ellida looked up at him with her quick and birdlike eyes.
“Well, look here, Mr. Toto,” she said, “if you’re going to do that,
you’d better get it told to her quick. If you don’t catch her on the
hop before she’s got time to harden into it as an obstinacy, you’ll
find that she’ll have made it a rule of life never to speak to you
again; and then there’ll be nothing for it but you’re carrying on
with--oh, say Etta Hudson--until Katya gets to the daggers and knives
stage.”
“But where is she?” Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, well, you’re a man who knows everything,” she answered. “I expect
she’s gone to one of the six or seven of her patients that are always
clamouring for her. You’d better hurry to find her, or she’ll be
off touring round the world before you know where you are.... I’ve
always thought,” she continued, “that you handled her wrongly at the
beginning. If the moment she’d begun that nonsense, you’d taken a
stick to her, or dragged her off to a registry office, or contrived
to pretend to be harsh and brutal, she’d have given in right at once;
but she got the cranky idea into her head, and now it’s hardened into
sheer pride. I don’t believe that she really wanted it then, after the
first day or two. She only wanted to bring you to your knees. If you
had given in then, she’d have backed out of it at the last moment, and
you’d have had St. George’s and orange-blossoms, and ‘The Voice that
breathed o’er Eden’ all complete.”
“Well, I can’t bother about it any longer,” Grimshaw said. “I’m done. I
give in.”
“Good old Toto,” Ellida said. And then she dropped her voice to say: “I
don’t know that it’s the sort of thing that a sister ought to encourage
a sister doing, but if you managed not to let anyone know--and that’s
easy enough, considering how you’ve set everybody talking about your
quarrels. You can just meet her at Athens, and then come back and
say you’ve made it up suddenly, and got married at the Consulate at
Scutari or Trebizond, or some old place where there isn’t a Consulate,
and nobody goes to--if nobody knows about it, I don’t see that I need
bother much.” She looked up at him and continued: “I suppose you’ll
think I’m immoral or whatever it is; but, after all, there was mother,
who was really the best woman in the world. Of course I know you think
of the future, but when everything’s said and done, I’m in the same
position that your children will be, and it doesn’t worry me very much.
It doesn’t worry Katya either, though she likes to pretend it does.”
“Oh, I’m not thinking of anything at all,” Grimshaw answered. “I just
give in. I just want the ... the peace of God.”
She looked up at him with her eyes slightly distended and wondering.
“Are you,” she said, “quite sure that you will get it? Katya is a
dear, of course, but she’s the determination of a tiger; she has been
play-acting from the first, and she has meant to have you since you
were in your cradles together. But she’s meant to have you humbled and
submissive, and tied utterly hand and foot. I don’t believe she ever
meant not to marry you. I don’t believe she means it now, but she means
to make you give in to her before she marries you. She thinks it will
be the final proof of your passion for her.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Robert Grimshaw answered. “I don’t know and I
don’t care. What I want is to have things settled. What does it matter
whether it’s for life or death?”
“And Pauline Leicester?” Mrs. Langham asked.
Robert Grimshaw made a little motion with his thumb and fingers, as if
he were crumbing between them a little piece of dried earth.
VI
IN the drawing-room with the blue curtains Mr. Held was saying to
Pauline Leicester: “Yes, it’s just gone ten. It’s too late for a
telegram, but I’m sure you’ll get a message somehow to say she’s
coming. After all, he can telephone from Brighton.”
“He mayn’t have succeeded,” Pauline said. “Oh, I’m sure he’s
succeeded,” Mr. Held answered. “I feel it in my bones.”
It was now the thirtieth or fortieth time that since eight o’clock he
had uttered some such words, and he was going on to say: “He and she
are great friends, aren’t they?” when Saunders opened the door to say
that a lady wished to speak to Mrs. Leicester.
“Oh, they are great friends,” Pauline answered Mr. Held. “Miss
Lascarides is his cousin”; and then to Saunders: “Who is it?”
Saunders answered that he didn’t know the lady, but that she appeared
to be a lady.
“What’s she like?” Pauline said.
The butler answered that she was very tall, very dark, and, if he might
say so, rather imperious.
Pauline’s mouth opened a little. “It’s not,” she said--“it’s not Lady
Hudson?”
“Oh, it isn’t Lady Hudson, mum. I know Lady Hudson very well by sight.
She goes past the house every day with a borzoi.”
In the dining-room, lit by a solitary light on the chimney-piece,
Pauline saw a lady--very tall, very dark, and very cool and collected.
They looked at each other for the shadow of a moment with the odd and
veiled hostility that mysterious woman bestows upon her fellow-mystery.
“You’re Pauline Leicester?” the stranger said. “You don’t know who I
am?”
“We’ve never met, I think,” Pauline answered.
“And you’ve never seen a photograph?”
“A photograph?” Pauline said. “No; I don’t think I’ve seen a
photograph.”
“Ah, you wouldn’t have a photograph of me that’s not a good many years’
old. It was a good deal before your time.”
With her head full of the possibilities of her husband’s past, for she
couldn’t tell that there mightn’t have been another, Pauline said, with
her brave distinctness:
“Are you, perhaps, the person who rang up 4,259 Mayfair? If you are ...”
The stranger’s rather regal eyes opened slightly. She was leaning one
arm on the chimney-piece and looking over her shoulder, but at that she
turned and held out both her hands.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s perfectly true what he said. You’re the
bravest woman in the world, and I’m Katya Lascarides.”
With the light full upon her face, Pauline Leicester hardly stirred.
“You’ve heard all about me,” she said, with a touch of sadness in her
voice, “from Robert Grimshaw?”
“No, from Ellida,” Katya answered, “and I’ve seen your photograph. She
carries it about with her.”
Pauline Leicester said, “Ah!” very slowly. And then, “Yes; Ellida’s
very fond of me. She’s very good to me.”
“My dear,” Katya said, “Ellida’s everything in the matter. At any
rate, if I’m going to do you any good, it’s she that’s got me here. I
shouldn’t have done it for Robert Grimshaw.”
Pauline turned slightly pale.
“You haven’t quarrelled with Robert?” she said. “I should be so sorry.”
“My dear,” Katya answered, “never mention his name to me again. It’s
only for you I’m here, because what Ellida told me has made me like
you;” and then she asked to see the patient.
Dudley Leicester, got into evening dress as he was by Saunders and
Mr. Held every evening, sat, blond and healthy to all seeming, sunk
in the eternal arm-chair, his fingers beating an eternal tattoo, his
eyes fixed upon vacancy. His appearance was so exactly natural that it
was impossible to believe he was in any “condition” at all. It was so
impossible to believe it that when, with a precision that seemed to add
many years to her age, Katya Lascarides approached, and, bending over
him, touched with the tips of her fingers little and definite points on
his temples and brows, touching them and retouching them as if she were
fingering a rounded wind-instrument, and that, when she asked: “Doesn’t
that make your head feel better?” it seemed merely normal that his
right hand should come up from the ceaseless drumming on the arm of the
chair to touch her wrist, and that plaintively his voice should say:
“Much better; oh, much better!”
And Pauline and Mr. Held said simultaneously: “He isn’t ...”
“Oh, he isn’t cured,” Katya said. “This is only a part of the process.
It’s to get him to like me, to make him have confidence in me, so that
I can get to know something about him. Now, go away. I can’t give you
any verdict till I’ve studied him.”