WE AWAIT DEVELOPMENTS
If it were necessary to epitomize our attitude towards Mr. Carville
during that lunch, it might perhaps be discovered in the word "doubt."
Without accusing him of intentional deception, he had certainly led us
to believe that he would explain to us the many points of interest which
his previous history had raised. We had felt quite sure that in the
course of the morning we should learn of his meeting with his wife and
the reasons which led them to make their home in the United States. We
expected to have the mystery of the prodigal brother co-ordinated with
the painter-cousin's story. We--but of what avail was it to grumble? He
had set out to tell his tale in his own way and it was only right that
we should permit him to do so.
In one thing I agreed with Bill and differed from Mac--the question of
"Gladys."
"So her name's 'Gladys'?" said he, when he had brought Miss Fraenkel's
knowledge up to date.
"Oh, no!" exclaimed Bill. "Oh, no!"
"He said so," persisted her husband.
"No," I said, "so far he has not mentioned Mrs. Carville."
He came round to our view in the end, when I reminded him of the
_scaldino_. Personally, the idea was incredible. When I thought of Mrs.
Carville bending over the brazier, of her dark, noble face with its
large tragic eyes, and then of the smart convent-bred miss who was
called Gladys--absurd!
Miss Fraenkel remained faithful to her mission throughout the meal, and
enlisted our sympathy by recounting the struggles of Mrs. Wederslen to
capture the league for her own social purposes. It was an old story,
this of the ambition of Mrs. Wederslen. Mrs. Wederslen seemed to think
that in a community of artists the art-critic's wife is queen. Mrs.
Williams had rebelled against this, and there was tension between them.
Mrs. Wederslen had even made the insane experiment of trying to
patronize Bill. There had been a meeting, a few words on each side, and
the rest was silence. Without any definite verbal information on the
point, Mac and I knew that Bill's tongue would be stilled in death ere
she would speak charitably of Mrs. Wederslen. And here were Miss
Fraenkel's piquant features aglow with a flush of indignation and her
hazel eyes aflame with ladylike resentment, because that imperious woman
was endeavouring to assert her sovereignty over the league. In the great
problems thus raised it seemed likely that the smaller matter of Mrs.
Carville's allegiance might be swamped. I endeavoured to bring this
discussion into alignment with my own imaginings, a common human
weakness.
"But perhaps she's like me, hasn't got a vote," said Bill.
"Well," said Miss Fraenkel, "she may have some day. And anyhow, the
great thing is to spread the light in dark places. We want every woman
to know her power. Mrs. Wederslen----"
She began again. Mrs. Wederslen had done the one thing needful to rouse
Miss Fraenkel's feelings towards her to the temperature of Bill's: she
had expressed her opinion that civil servants should be debarred from
political activity. In spite of my efforts, the conversation became
sectional. Mac motioned me to join him on the porch for a smoke.
"What do you think?" he said, when he had lighted up.
"The time is past for imaginative forecast," I replied. "It is obvious
that Mr. Carville, having been tremendously interested in his own life,
is determined to tell us all about it. Before lunch I hardly knew what
to think, but now I feel fairly certain that he will bring us safely to
the conclusion."
"There never is a conclusion to stories in real life," said he.
"Well, you know what I mean. He'll account for the facts as we see them,
anyhow. His wife, his brother, his living here, and so on."
"And Gladys," added Mac.
"Ah! I expect we've heard the last of Gladys. She was evidently an early
flame, since gone out." I struck a match.
"I say, old man."
"What?"
"What a tale his brother could tell, eh?"
"Possibly; but perhaps his brother has not the faculty," I said.
"No. Here he comes!"
Mr. Carville appeared on the sidewalk, his Derby hat on his head, his
corn-cob in his mouth. For a moment he turned, and, looking back, flung
out his hand with a gesture expressive of petulance and dismissal
towards an invisible person at his door. And then he came towards us
sedately, caressing his pipe, eyes on the ground, and seated himself in
the Fourth Chair in silence.
"I was wondering," he said at last, "if after all you'd just as soon I
didn't tell you all this about myself and got right on to my married
life. Eh?"
"Speaking for myself," I said, hastily, "no! Please tell your story as
you have it in your mind. Don't edit it. _I'll_ do that."
He gave me one of his quick looks and smiled.
"Right!" he said, and shook himself straight in his chair. "I'll get
busy. I've got to get the five o'clock train, and the wife--she said
she'd have a bit of tea ready for me at four."
He sat at the far end of the verandah, the furled hammock tickling his
ears, and he shifted the chair so that he faced north, looking towards
his own house. As he opened his mouth to replace his pipe, Bill opened
the door and led Miss Fraenkel out to be introduced.
It was a ceremonious bow with which Mr. Carville greeted her as he rose.
He did not offer to shake hands, as middle-class people generally do, to
their credit. He gave her one square look and then dropped his eyes, and
I couldn't detect him even glancing at her again. He seemed to have made
a brief examination and then dismissed her from his memory.
The problem of chairs was instantly solved by Bill. She opened the
window and she and Miss Fraenkel sat inside. Mr. Carville studied the
toe of his plain serviceable boot while these arrangements were being
carried out. He sat motionless in the Fourth Chair, and I could not help
feeling that the business of transferring Miss Fraenkel established Mr.
Carville's inalienable right to his seat.
"Full speed ahead!" said Mac, jocularly.
"I ought to explain," said Mr. Carville, "that as the years had gone by,
my mother and I had ceased to have very much sympathy with each other's
way of thinking. We had lived together, as was natural, but we had
gradually lost sight of the career my father had outlined for me. And
when I had lost my job in Victoria Street, really that was the last link
that snapped. I had no fancy for living in Oakleigh Park, especially
after what had happened to Gladys. You can understand that.
"Another thing. I had become in a small way an author. Don't imagine
that I'm setting up myself with you, sir. Not at all. I understand, I
hope, now, the difference between writing a book and being an author. It
was this way. To me, breaking into sea-life so sharp and suddenlike,
there were many things I noted that most men would never heed. I don't
heed them myself now. But then I did. And in port on Sundays, and
sometimes at sea when I couldn't sleep on the middle-watch, I'd jot
down little thumb-nail sketches, you might call them, of the things I
saw. 'Cameos of the Sea,' I'd put on the top. The whole thing wasn't as
long as some of the chapters in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' and, to
tell you the truth, I had no great opinion of them. I only mention them
because of what happened. I had the sheets tied up in brown paper in my
sailor-bag.
"Well, I told my mother I wanted to live in London awhile, and as I
needed to be within reach of the Board of Trade Offices until I had
passed my exam., she saw no good reason for objecting. The next day, as
I was walking up the Strand, one of those streets in London that I've
never seen anywhere else, I caught sight of an old gateway at the end of
a passage. There was a date, 1570 or something as old, on the arch, and
as I strolled in I remembered I'd called on an architect who lived there
in the old days, when I was in Victoria Street. It was Clifford's Inn. I
was looking round at the old houses and wondering if I could hire a room
or so there, when a girl came down one of the staircases.
"Well, I didn't recognize her at first. I remember wondering why she
jumped back when she caught sight of me. 'Hullo!' I said, 'what are you
doing here?' 'I live here,' she said; and sure enough there was her name
on the wall, bracketed with another one: _Miss Gladys Sanders and Miss
Octavia Flagg_.
"'You!' I said. 'You live here?' She nodded and asked me if I would come
up. We went up the dusty old stairs to the top floor, and she took a
key from her purse and opened the door. I felt there was something
pretty brazen about all this. This wasn't the sort of thing to appeal to
Oakleigh Park, I was quite sure, and said so. 'Oh, I've done with
Oakleigh Park,' she said, 'and they've done with me.' And then her
friend, Miss Flagg, came in, a thin woman of about thirty-five, with a
green dress and rather untidy hair. I said thin, but so was Gladys. It
almost seemed to me, when I'd seen them a few times, that there was some
fierce fire inside of those women, wearing them thin and showing
through. Neither of them was beautiful; they didn't try to be. They just
lived for--what do you think? I'll tell you in a minute.
"At first I was all abroad at the sudden meeting. A minute before Gladys
came down that staircase, if you'd asked me whether I cared for her I'd
have said no; it was all burned up long ago. But now I'd seen her again,
thin and sallow and changed as she was, it had all come back with a
rush. Do you know that kind of love? It's because of the way it rushes
back on you, knocks you down and tramples on you, makes you feel mean
and degraded and ashamed, that I pray God it may never happen on me
again. I like to think a man may never have it but for one woman.
Sometimes, away out East, when I've been drowsing in a hammock listening
to the sweat dripping on the deck and watching the blue hills in the
distance, it has come upon me. Sometimes in dreams I've seen her face
clearer than I ever saw it in life.... You know them, perhaps?...
Dreams so vivid that one's brain and body ache with the pain of it? Ah!"
He paused and none offered to speak. I sat facing him in some
astonishment. There was to me something fundamentally shocking in a man
making such a confession. If it had been dark so that the words floated
to us invisibly; but in broad day! Perhaps more convincingly than
anything else did this impress upon my mind Mr. Carville's deliberate
intention to fashion for us a tale from the agony of his life, to give
us, with such art as he possessed, a picture of an obscure and alien
romance.
"Miss Flagg, it seems, was a journalist, and Gladys--well, she was a
journalist too, I suppose. From what she told me I gathered she did
translations for different agencies, and earned a little that way. When
I told them what I'd come in for, they said there was a flat in
Serjeant's Inn just around the corner, which was to be let furnished. I
told them I was going in for an exam. and afterwards I was going to take
my little papers to a publisher. Miss Flagg lit up like a bonfire at
this, and says she, 'I'm a literary agent. Do let me read it; I may be
able to place it.'
"I looked at her. To my mind she didn't seem the sort of woman who would
understand the things I'd been writing about; old Croasan and the Chief
with the glass eye, the firemen and all the rest of them. However, I
said I'd let her have it if she liked. Gladys looked at me when I came
out as an author. She'd never had any opinion of me, you see. She liked
_clever_ people, people with flash and glitter, who could dance and talk
with a spatter about everything--like my brother. You can believe I
wanted to know why she'd left him, if she'd ever gone to him. I said, 'I
thought you were going out when I saw you,' and she took the hint. We
went down again and out into the Strand.
"'Is it any use?' I said, and the big Law Courts' clock boomed out over
our heads. It sounded like NO in my ears.
"She shook her head. 'Quite impossible,' she said. 'Well, where's
Frank?' I asked her.
"She didn't know. He'd dropped her just the same as he dropped anything
else he had no use for, without a word. And I think it was shame more
than because she didn't care for me that made her say it was impossible.
I don't know--what is a woman's pride, anyhow? See how he'd treated her;
worse than I'd treat my dog. And yet when he came back, flush with money
and with flash friends, and he lifted his hand, she ran to him, _ran_!
Explain it if you can. I can't.
"That was later. I got my flat and passed my exam all right, and my
uncle in Fenchurch Street said I could have a job as soon as I liked.
But I thought I'd wait a bit. I was seeing London from a fresh angle,
you might say; seeing it as an outsider, as an alien. I had about a
hundred pounds to spend, and in a modest quiet way I enjoyed myself. The
razzle-dazzle of London doesn't appeal to a man much, when he's been on
the bend in sea-ports. Humph!
"And Miss Flagg took my manuscript and went crazy about it. She said she
sat up all night to read it. Knowing what I do of women now, I think she
was a liar. Besides, anyone could read it in two or three hours. The
point is she told the publisher that lie, and he believed it. Her
enthusiasm was contagious. He said it was fine, and gave me ten pounds
for it. Miss Flagg said it was a generous offer and raked off a
sovereign for her commission. I often wonder how authors bear up under
such generosity. But of course I know nothing about the business side of
it. Only for a short time did I get bitten about the idea of being an
author. I found I had nothing to say. Miss Flagg told me she knew a man
who 'did fiction' at the rate of twenty thousand words a week. She might
have lied, but then, how do I know? Anyway, I saw it wasn't in my
line--'fiction.'
"You see, when I went to their flat and met their literary friends and
heard them talking about their work, I felt out of it. I was an alien in
their world. I had no interest in the details of book-writing. I'd just
put down what happened to come into my mind. I wondered what they wrote
about. Love I suppose. I'd sit and look about me and try to imagine what
those people would have thought of the old _Corydon's_ engine-room.
Humph! Do _you_ know what those thin, half-fed men and women thought the
most important thing in the world? Not husbands and wives and children,
not war, nor even courage; not books nor pictures; nothing of this. No;
they were wearing their souls out clamouring for a _Vote_!"
We sat very still. You could have heard a pin drop.
"There was Gladys. She was only nineteen, and ought to have been helping
her mother at home; but no, she was emancipated, as she called it. Her
experience with my brother taught her that the _Vote_ was necessary.
Miss Flagg told me that unless women got the Vote England would drop
behind. They all said that. To me it was amazing. It showed me how far
I'd travelled away from the old ideas. It angered me to see women acting
like that, spoiling themselves, making themselves ridiculous and ugly,
all for that!
"I'd been home a couple of months, not more, when I began to get
restless. My mother asked me why I didn't get a job on shore. But I
couldn't see myself going to Victoria Street every day, clean collar and
umbrella, sitting at a desk dictating silly little letters to silly
little people. Those who wanted it let them do it. I went to my uncle
and asked for a job. His eyes twinkled when he said, 'Well, the
_Corydon's_ chartered for the Mediterranean, and they want a Second.'
"'When shall I join?' I said.
"'Oh, I was only joking,' says he. 'We'll get you a better ship than
that now.'
"'No,' I said, 'I'll go back to the _Corydon_. I know her and she knows
me. When shall I join?'"
Again Mr. Carville paused, and appeared to be lost in thought, oblivious
of our presence. An expression of gentle earnestness had settled upon
his face, almost melancholy. I imagined for a moment that he was
endeavouring to arrange his thoughts.
"I do hope," he remarked, without looking at us, "I do hope that
anything I've said hasn't given offence." He turned to us with a slight
smile. "I mix up so little with genteel people nowadays--you see?"
I nodded vaguely, and he relapsed into thought again.
"I was thinking," he observed presently, "as you are so quiet, I might
have said something. I remember that was the way they signified dissent,
so to speak. And--I wouldn't like to offend--anybody."
"Pray go on," I said. "We are not genteel in that sense of the word."
It was plain that, apart from any scruples concerning our gentility, he
had some difficulty in picking up the thread of his story. It was a
relief when he began to speak.
"I come now," he said, "to a time that I hardly know how to describe.
The next few years, taken together, were my _Wanderjaehre_. You know
Wilhelm Meister, of course? My apprenticeship was over, but I wasn't a
man yet for all that. There's an intermediate stage, what we engineers
call being 'an improver,' in a man's life. It seems strange that I
should speak of myself so at twenty-seven, but there it is; I was late
maturing. Again, I like to think that the Dutch are right when they use
the same word for husband and man. Until he is married a Dutchman is not
a 'Man.' That's how I looked at it!
"When I rejoined the _Corydon_, the Chief said the Second was going to
stay on one more trip, but old Croasan was clearing out and I could go
Third. I wouldn't mention these details, only they are important,
because--well, you'll see.
"Old Croasan was going ashore when I joined. Didn't even shake hands
with the Chief! I thought he was going home to the bonny Scotland he
always shouted about when he was canned, but the Second says, 'Na, na.
He'll never go back to Grangemouth,' and Chief says, 'He'll get a job
all right, all right.' Well, I was busy enough with my own concerns,
and, as usual, there was a-plenty to do on the _Corydon_; but one
evening I was up at Cully's Hotel talking to Miss Bevan, when in walks a
smart, tidy-looking man of, say, forty-five, and calls for a bottle of
Bass. I wouldn't have given him more than a passing glance if he hadn't
looked me in the eye. 'Eh, lad,' says he. 'Will ye have a drink?'
'Croasan?' I said. 'Ah, it's me,' says he. 'Ah'm away the morn in yon
big turret.'
"I was that astonished I couldn't reply, and he drank up his beer and
went out with a wave of the hand. Miss Bevan asked me if I knew him.
'Sure,' I said, 'but he was old and grey three days ago.' It was my
first experience of a sea-faker. He'd been up to Cardiff, had a Turkish
bath, hair-cut and shave, and the barber had dyed his hair and
moustache. Then he'd gone round to the offices and eventually got a
job. Of course, the first green sea that went over him would add twenty
years to his age, but he'd be signed on then. The Chief laughed when I
told him. 'And you'll see him in Genoa,' he says; 'yon turret steamer's
goin' there too,' I did see him. In a way, he introduced me to my wife."
Mr. Carville paused and struck a match. Bill's head appeared at the
window.
"Oh!" she said, "I thought you were never coming to it!"
He proceeded, carefully putting the burnt match on the window-sill and
blowing great clouds.
"The run to Genoa from the Tyne," he said, "takes a fortnight. It was
during that voyage that I began to see how I stood with regard to
Gladys. I suppose you read Ibsen? I used to, on the _Corydon_, and one
of the most remarkable of his plays, in my opinion, is _Love's Comedy_.
You remember the moral of that play was that a man should never marry a
girl he is madly in love with. It sounds wicked if you put it that way,
but old Ibsen was right. He knew, as I knew, that a young man may be in
love with a girl who is not suited to him. He knew that there isn't much
difference between that sort of love and hate. He knew that you can have
a contempt for a girl and her ideals and yet love her. That sort of love
is like those big thin bowls they showed me in Japan--beautiful,
expensive and awful frail--no use at all for domestic purposes. I
thought this out on the voyage to Genoa, and put Gladys, so to speak, on
a shelf, where she is now. And as I thought it out, I saw how I stood.
I saw I was not only an alien wherever I went, but I was alone. I began
to be afraid. I used to look ahead and tried to see myself in twenty
years' time, alone. It is not good for a man to be alone. That's how I
felt when we reached Genoa.
"Those who know best often say that sailormen know less about foreign
countries than many people who have never travelled. I daresay that is
true of many of us. It is very likely true of any uneducated people who
go abroad. Most men who go to sea have very little education. They have
no knowledge of their own country, let alone others. To a certain extent
I was different. I had always wanted to see Italy. Years before, when I
was in Victoria Street, I had read about her history and art. I had even
learned a little of the language. And so, when we came into Genoa, and I
saw that beautiful city, with her white palaces and green domes and
fort-crowned hills, when I remembered what she'd been, and saw what she
was, I could hardly wait till nightfall to go ashore and see it all at
once!
"Since then I've been to nearly every port in the Mediterranean, from
Gibraltar to Smyrna and from Marseilles to Tunis, but I never
experienced anything like that first night ashore in Genoa. The next day
the Chief asked me where I'd been, and I told him. 'Why,' he says,
'didn't you go into the "Isle o' Man" or the "American"?' No, I hadn't
been in any of those places. He said they'd have to show me round.
"That night I went with them, leaving the new Fourth in charge, and I
learned why sailormen know so little of foreign places. All along the
Front, as they call it, were scores of dirty little bars with English
names. I wouldn't mention them at all, only it is necessary in a way, as
you'll see. We went into several and had a drink, and the Chief was
known in them all. Finally the Chief says, 'Let's get on to the "Isle o'
Man,"' and we went out and walked along the Via Milano a little further.
The 'Isle o' Man' was rather bigger than most of these places, and had a
very comfortable room with plush settees and marble tables shut off from
the main cafe. It was kept by a big, heavy, red-haired woman, about
fifty years old, who came in and sat down by the Chief and talked about
old times. I found she was married to a steward in the Hamburg-American
Line, who ran this show on the side. It was a mixed company in there,
skippers of all nations sitting round and drinking; and a tall young
chap, with a velvet coat and long hair, was playing a piano and singing
songs. After every song he would come round with a tin saucer and
collect pennies from us. I remember thinking how strange he looked. He
had a noble face, I should call it; he looked like a gentleman and spoke
like one, and there he was, collecting pennies! I was watching him
coming round to our table when a girl came in, a tall, dark young girl,
with a tray of glasses. 'Hello!' says the Chief, 'that's not Rosa, is
it?' The old woman nods and says, 'That's Rosa all right, Chief.' And
he called out to the girl to come over to us.
"She came at once. 'Here's a friend o' yours, Rosa,' says the old woman,
and the girl looks at the Chief and smiles a little. 'Why, she was only
so high last time I was here,' says the Chief. 'She has shot up.' 'Yes,'
says the old woman, who was called Rebecca, 'she'll be a fine woman one
o' these days.'
"They told me about her as we went back to the ship. No one knew who her
parents were. She had always been at the 'Isle o' Man,' and sailormen
had petted her because she was a nice little thing and would rap out a
bit of slang without knowing in the least what it meant. But now, as the
Chief said, it was a different matter. She was 'too big to kiss now.'
One point in her history I was very interested in, and that was the fact
that neither the Chief nor anyone else I ever heard speak of her ever
suggested that she wasn't straight. I liked that. There she was, living
among all the draggled, dirty seaport crowd, and yet the seafaring men
that took their drinks from her believed she was straight.
"I was coming down from the theatre one night about a week later, and I
thought I'd look in at the 'Isle o' Man' for a drink before going
aboard. There was a good few in there, Greek and Norwegian skippers; and
a Belgian engineer was sitting across from me with old Croasan. The
piano was going with _Little Dolly Daydream_, _Pride of Idaho_, when in
comes Rosa with her tray. To get past she had to squeeze between old
Croasan's table and the piano, and I saw him take hold of her waist. She
was hampered by the tray, and he was pulling her down on his knee.
"I don't think it was all gallantry that made me do what I did. I'd
never been a whale on that sort of thing. I'm not built on those lines.
I think it was a feeling that has always possessed me very strongly when
I see an old man with a young woman--disgust. To me it is a horrible
sight, the lust of an old man. You can argue as long as you like, but
that is one of my fixed eternal prejudices. I feel sick when I see an
old man giving way to it. I feel that somehow or other he is debasing
humanity. That was the real reason why I jumped up and went over to
Croasan.
"He looked up at me as I stood over the table. I could see the crease in
his cheeks, the sag under his eyes, and the grey roots of his dyed
moustache. He looked up at me as I raised my hand. 'Let her go,' I said,
shouting at him above the jangle of the piano, 'let her go, Mr.
Croasan.' He was holding her down on his knee.
"'Mind your own affairs!' he says to me, showing his teeth, great dirty
yellow fangs; 'Is she yours?' he says. The Belgian engineer sitting near
him laughed at this and looked up sneering at me. 'Let her go,' I said
again. 'Rosa's a friend of mine,' says he, still holding her. Just then
I saw Rebecca's head over the piano, and as I looked down again I saw a
peculiar expression on Rosa's face. Her eyes were on me and she seemed
to be thinking 'What are you waiting for?' It all happened, you know,
in two or three seconds. I waited no more. I put the flat of my hand
across Croasan's mouth, hard. He jerked back to avoid it, and the tray
that Rosa was trying to set down on the table, so that she could get at
him with her nails, went all over him. The old woman came round the
piano and saw him. Croasan started up and I hit him again, and he fell
over the Belgian.
"At first I thought I was in for a big row. But Croasan had more
experience than I had. He'd been in rows before. When he started up it
was not to hit me, but to get out. He crawled under the table between
the Belgian's legs and ran to the door. The others were crowding all
round me, arguing and shouting. The young chap at the piano was standing
up and looking over the top, and Rebecca was trying to calm them. 'Easy,
gentlemen!' she kept on calling. Rosa had disappeared. Then the Belgian
jumped up and shouted, 'Ee interfere wis my frien'!' pointing at me, and
marching out.
"When we got quiet again I began to explain to Rebecca what had
happened. Do you know, I thought that was the real danger. I thought she
would be the one to get on to me for interfering. Rebecca was a woman
who looked more evil than she really was. She sat down at my table, and
while I told her and the piano jangled away again, she kept patting my
arm and saying, 'Yes, yes, I know.' What did she know? Why, the simple
fact that Rosa was no longer a little girl to be petted, but a grown-up
girl to be insulted. I learned a similar thing had happened once or
twice in the last few months. You see, the girl was neither in one class
nor the other. A young Genoese will not look at a girl who lives in
those houses along the Front. He thinks they are all rotten bad. As for
the foreigners she met in the 'Isle o' Man,' I needn't tell you what an
average Englishman thinks of foreign women.
"I told the Chief about it next day, and he looked up sharp from his
plate when I mentioned Croasan. He said hard things of Croasan. 'Think
of that?' says he. 'An old chap wi' married daughters!' 'Huh!' says the
Second. 'They're aye the wurrs't. But I'm glad ye punched him, mister,'
he says. 'Many a time I'd ha' done the same, only we were on articles.
Rosa, too!'
"'Ay,' says the Chief, 'but Rosa'll have to put up with men clawin' her
now.'
"It was my intention, to avoid trouble and talk, to keep away from the
'Isle o' Man' for the future, but it turned out otherwise. I'd got leave
from the Chief on Thursday afternoon to go up to the Cathedral of San
Lorenzo to see the Holy Grail. They keep it in the Treasury there and
show it on Thursdays for a franc. Most Englishmen laugh at these tales
of the Church, and even Catholics I have met tell me they don't believe
in miracles. I don't know why; I'm interested in them. Sometimes I get a
glimpse of the state of mind in which they are reasonable and necessary
things. The more we learn the less we know. They say that saints,
because they led good lives and kept away from evil, were able to
perform miracles. Why should a statement like that annoy anybody? Good
is a power and evil is a power. Why deny it? I read a book the other day
in which the author, a German with a name like a lady's sneeze, denies
the existence of good and evil. Humph! It's a long time since I read
Hegel, but I don't think he was ever as mad as that!
"I was coming through the church after quitting the sacristan, when I
caught sight of a girl kneeling on the steps of the Chapel of St. John.
I suppose you know that the Precursor is buried in this church? They
show you a silver box with a chain round it, the chain that bound him in
prison. There were other women in the church, but this girl was not in
the chapel, only kneeling on the step outside. Women, you see, are not
allowed to enter that chapel; on account of Salome, I suppose. I saw
this girl kneeling on the step and crossed over to see what she was
doing. It was Rosa, saying her prayers. There is a difference between a
Catholic and a Protestant praying. You may have noticed it. A Protestant
shuts his eyes and thinks hard about the money he's making or the
automobile he's going to buy. A Catholic plays about with his beads and
chatters all the time while he's thinking of religion. Protestants are
scandalized when they see how Catholics make a sort of rough-house
playground of their churches--children playing on the floor during
service even. They can't understand how Catholics manage to reverence a
thing and yet not hate it. Englishmen always draw wrong conclusions
about an Italian's relations with God. You see, most Englishmen feel
about God as they used to feel about Queen Victoria. They respected her
and felt she was necessary, but all the same they felt exasperated with
her for being so particular at times! Humph!
"Well, Rosa looked up and recognized me, smiled and went on praying as
fast as she could. I bowed. Of course I had my hat in my hand, so I had
to bow. I saw her go red, and I thought I'd done something she
disapproved of. I stood there hardly knowing what to do, and she bent
her head to finish her prayer. She told me afterwards that it was the
first time anyone had ever bowed to her. She turned red because she
thought I was mocking her, and then, I suppose, with pleasure. That was
the beginning of our courtship.
"Of course, in one sense, it was an unusual courtship. It happened to
come about by a number of accidents. If I hadn't hit old Croasan she
would never have looked at me, for I'm not a very conspicuous figure at
any time. If I hadn't met her in the church just as she was praying for
my soul, because I'd acted kindly towards her, I might never have seen
her again. And so on, if--if--if. It was in that sense unusual. But in
another sense I don't suppose there was ever a more commonplace affair
than this of Rosa and me. If we'd lived in Brixton we couldn't have been
more respectable!
"For some mysterious reason or other Rebecca took a fancy to me. Mind,
I was only third engineer of the oldest tramp in Genoa. If I'd been
Chief, then I could have understood her making a fuss of me. But I was
Third. I have an idea Rebecca had seen better days. Now and again she
dropped hints that pointed that way. She had a manner too, when she was
sober, and had been cleaned up. The men who drank in her bar little knew
how she was transformed when she dressed herself to go up town. They
little knew, either, how very like the house upstairs was to houses in
Brixton or Hartlepool or the Paisley Road. Middle-class people are the
same all the world over. I expect they have fringes on their curtains
even in Honolulu! Rebecca had, anyhow.
"The news made a bit of stir among the ships for a while as might be
expected, and gradually spread right through the Merchant Service. 'Rosa
of Rebecca's was engaged to the Third of the _Corydon_!' By George, that
_was_ a morsel of gossip. Miss Bevan had heard about it in Barry; Polly
Loo in Singapore heard it, the girls in the Little Wooden Hut at Las
Palmas heard it. It went round the world, that Rosa of Rebecca's was
engaged.
"For three years we traded as regularly as a mail boat to Genoa with
coal, then across to Cartagena in Spain for iron ore and back to the
Tyne. I was Second, of course, and I passed for Chief when my time was
all in, just taking a few days off to go to Shields for the examination.
I might have got another ship, but I was pretty comfortable by now, I
knew my Chief and my engines, and I naturally wanted to keep on the
Genoa trade as long as I could. In those days they took weeks to
discharge, and so I used to have quite a spell with Rosa. She was never
bothered with 'men clawin' her,' as the Chief expressed it. I used to
take her up to the Giardino D'Italia to listen to the band and to see
the movies, or we'd take the Funicular up to Castellaccio and have a bit
of dinner at a little trattoria near the Righi, where you can look out
across the sea, I learned to speak the language pretty well, and it was
my intention at first to settle in Italy. But Rosa would not hear of it.
She wanted to get away from the associations of her childhood.
"Perhaps it was because of this desire of hers that we so often went up
and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea.
And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in
my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and
it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out
of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging
gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit
glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think
that the romantic surroundings had inflamed my imagination, and that I
was apprehensive of a lurid story. Not at all. I had turned the matter
over, in my prosaic way, for several voyages, and I put the question to
Rosa in a direct and simple form. I asked her who she was. It is all
very well, in novels, for shy damsels to run into the arms of some
casual Prince Charming, or for heroic clean-cut young college-men with
over-developed jaw-bones to marry strange girls for, I suppose, heroic
reasons. All very well in novels. But you try that sort of thing in real
life, and see where you land. I don't mean externals--parents, social
sets or legal tarradiddles. Such things are very slight obstacles. I
mean the tremendous obstacles inside you: the mass of your inherited
shrinkings and shynesses and delicacy; a whole quickset hedge of
brambles and nettles and thistles, behind which your naked soul is
hiding in a sort of terror; and you can't do it! I was in that position,
because, so far, Rosa had made no reference to her birth except to say
that, although Rebecca wasn't her mother, she was as good as one.
"And Rebecca, when I had mentioned the matter to her one day, had said,
with her chin resting on her knuckles, 'Ask Rosa.' I said.
"'Ask her what?'
"'Ask her if she wants you to know all about it.'
"'Why,' I said, 'is there so much to know?'
"'Little enough,' said she, 'but Rosa made Oscar and me promise to say
nothing unless she gave us the word.'
"'So Oscar knows it as well,' I said. Oscar was the steward Rebecca had
married a few years before, a Dutchman, who was nearly always at sea
when I was in Genoa, so I saw very little of him.
"'Of course, Oscar knows,' said Rebecca. 'He knows a good deal of it
first hand.'
"'All right, I'll speak to Rosa,' I said.
"And I did, as I was telling you. I asked her who she was.
"'You have a good right to know,' she said, looking up to where a
sentry's head and bayonet were sliding to and fro above the wall. 'I
have meant to tell you, but I know very little. So little!'
"I said I left the matter in her hands entirely.
"The sentry stopped above us, presented arms, grounded, looked round,
and then took a peep at us over the corner. A pair of lovers! His
yellow, livid face cracked a smile as I caught his eye. For another
second or so we grinned at each other, and then he put on his
professional mask again, as though he had drawn down a vizor, shouldered
his rifle and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had
passed the further turret and then turned to me.
"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little
baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before
that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier
like him'--she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and
forwards--'in Abyssinia, you know.'
"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your----' Rosa interrupted
me.
"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all
about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know.
Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'
"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide
some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue
running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply
hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I
own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very
much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go
along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms,
and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know
with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to
a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that
language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But
just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life,
something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and
see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't
often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one.
Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen.
Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.
"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's ship, the
_Prinz Karl_, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her
two big yellow funnels and top-heavy passenger decks blocking the view
of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man who
had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall,
spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an
ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had
prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows in his
cheeks, and a sharp, thin nose jutted out over one of those heavy grey
moustaches that get into the soup and make the owner look like a hungry
walrus. He might have been rich, as they said he was, and he might have
been clever in days gone by; but as I knew him he was a faded, soiled
ghost of a man, a man preoccupied with the dirty pickings of life, just
as his wife, strong character as I knew her to be, was only a drunken
parody of her real self, a shrewd, calculating, good-hearted,
bad-principled old failure.
"Mr. Hank sat in his cabin, talking to a young fellow in American
clothes and French boots, who was, I could see, one of those shady
characters who tout for ship-chandlers, whose business makes them
toadies, sycophants and pandars. There is something detestable about the
ship-chandlering trade, somehow. You see them lick-spittling the old
man, taking him ashore if he is a stranger, bringing boxes of candy for
his wife if he has her on board, sending a boat every day, for his
convenience, and so on, and then, when the ship's stores are rushed on
board at the last moment, and you put to sea, the stuff turns out to be
bad or short. The flour is damp and won't rise, the potatoes are a
scratch lot, the meat poor and the fruit rotten. And the Old Man says
nothing, the steward says nothing, because they've been squared, and
after all it's only the crew who really suffer, because the captain has
his own private stock, which Mister steward shares, you may be sure. It
is a dirty business and the sight of those sleek, cunning, pimple-faced
young men, in their fancy vests and dirty cuffs, always sickens me,
because I know the knavery in their hearts.
"'Come in, come in,' said Mr. Hank, as I turned away from his door.
"'No,' I said. 'I'll wait till you are through, Mr. Hank.'
"'Nonsense, come in,' said he. 'This is only Mr. Sachs, representing
Babbolini's. He won't eat you,' he said.
"I came back at this, and stood at the door to let a crowd of bedroom
stewards with sheets go by. 'It would take a better man than him to eat
me, Mr. Hank.'
"Mr. Sachs smiled politely and made room for me on the settee, evidently
having no cannibal intentions at the time, or at any rate disguising
them. Offered me a cigarette, which I never smoke. Said it was a fine
day.
"'It was a private matter I wanted to speak about,' I said to Hank, who
looked at me with an expression of eternal anxiety in his prominent
eyes.
"'I know,' he said. 'I know. I was ashore this morning.'
"'We won't discuss it here, Mr. Hank,' I said, hastily. 'If you don't
mind, I'll see you ashore, since you're busy.'
"Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man I would never be very intimate
with, however well I knew him. I'm not saying he was so bad, or that I
was so virtuous myself, at all. It was simply, I suppose, a matter of
temperament. To me it always seemed as though he had so many mysterious
things in his mind that he was borne down by them; that the outward and
visible world, in which I saw him and spoke to him, was only a thin mask
behind which his real existence was concealed. I may have been wrong. It
doesn't matter, for _Signore_ Hank is dead now, his long life of
ingenious peculation is over, and the good and the ill of it, we'll
hope, have balanced, anyway. But I couldn't possibly discuss Rosa with
_him_, let alone have that smooth, dissipated little bounder of a Sachs
sit by and hear it all. I had to call a halt. I was making up my mind to
leave the mud alone and not stir it up at all, when Mr. Hank, sitting
asprawl in his swivel chair at his roll-top desk, his big chin and nose
and moustache buried in his hand, and staring at me with his hard-boiled
eyes, remarked abruptly:
"'Do you know the Hotel Robinson?'
"'Certainly,' I said. 'What about it?'
"'What you want to do is to go to the Hotel Robinson and ask for Doctor
West. He's the man. He'll tell you all about it. You know Doctor West?
Tall, big black beard, pale face. Flag's letter P. You know him?'
"'I've seen him some time or other, I dare say,' I said. 'Hotel
Robinson, you say. All right and thank you.'
"'Just a minute,' sang out little Sachs as I made to go. 'I'll go with
you. I know Doctor West. I'll introduce you.' And he went on discussing
a paper he had, with Mr. Hank.
"I felt a little indignant and walked off, walked in the wrong
direction, of course, and lost myself in interminable alleyways of
passenger-cabins, hustled by stewards and stewardesses who were
polishing brass-work, rolling up carpets, washing floors and so on. All
about was that curious odour that seems inseparable from the corridors
of steamers, hospitals, workhouses and the like--an odour which is a
compound of cleanliness, antiseptic and cold enamelled iron. Such
surroundings depressed me. I felt, more acutely than ever before, the
distance between Rosa's environment and what I would have had it. I felt
dissatisfied with _Signore_ Hank, and with myself too, if the truth be
told. I had not taken hold of the situation. I had allowed him to impose
on me. I suppose you have had the experience, when someone for whom you
have no esteem, imposes his pinchbeck personality upon you. Save for the
story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would
have gone back to the _Corydon_ and forgotten it. I wandered about a
good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was
Mister Sachs at the gangway, looking about for me.
"'Why, where 'ave you been?' he asked. 'I thought you'd gone.'
"'Well, you needn't bother to wait if you're in a hurry,' I answered,
testily, going down the shrouded gangway.
"Oh, that's not what I meant,' he said, coming after me smartly,
buttoning up his coat and taking out his gloves. 'Fact is, Mister,' he
went on, 'I'd take it as a favour--this is the quickest way up to Hotel
Robinson--if you'd give me an introduction to your captain.'
"I looked at him astounded, all at sea.
"'Representing Babbolini's,' he added, feeling in his pocket for a card.
'Course, any business done's between ourselves. We have a big connection
and can always give satisfaction.'
"So you see how the mere contact of these people contaminates. He was
trying to make me his tout to the _Corydon_, me, the once future Prime
Minister of England, the child of many prayers! You may say, how were
the mighty fallen! Indeed, I was ashamed. I said nothing.
"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close
to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the
Chief Steward....'
"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana,
and I halted there and said to him:
"'Look here, don't you worry to come any farther with me. You've got
business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it.
Good morning.'
"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the
Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and
as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say
people take a man at his own valuation. People don't. They average their
own experience, and the answer is never very high.
"The Hotel Robinson was one of those rather shabby, half-hotel,
half-pension affairs which seem to hang on year after year with any
visible means of support. I say 'seem.' As a matter of fact it was a
steady, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection.
It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything,
as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don't know who
owned it--Robinson perhaps--whether it was a company, or anything else
about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a
sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn't step
on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and
moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. _You_
would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would
be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above
the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of
Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean,
cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in
the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have
become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the
station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!
"A woman came out of a little glazed office, a woman dressed in black
plush, as it seemed to me, with list slippers on her feet and a mangy
old fur wrap over her arms and across the small of her back. Perhaps it
was the unusual state of mind I was in; but to me she had the appearance
of a discontented Sibyl, a Sibyl who had been waiting for years for
somebody to make an offer for her books. Nobody, apparently, had ever
come, and she had to put up with me, who only wanted Doctor West. I was
just asking about him when we tumbled back into the Twentieth Century.
The telephone bell rang in the office.
"The Hotel Robinson had once been a palace, a marble palace with marble
walls a couple of feet thick and staircases like a stonecutter's
nightmare. The place was feudal. A coat-of-arms and a hat, in marble,
still balanced themselves over the portico--Robinson's perhaps. I
suppose the little glazed office was the sentry-box in the old days,
where mendicants got their doles and tall freelances from Germany
applied for a situation. May be. I looked through the glass partition
and saw the woman bending forward, the telephone to her ear, her hand
held out over a little charcoal brazier, her lips moving inaudibly, her
eyes nearly closed, as though she were weaving a spell.
"I was beginning to feel cold when she rang off and came out again.
'Doctor West? I've just spoken to him,' she said. 'He is at his office
in the harbour. He returns at eleven.'
"'I want to see him on a private matter,' I said.
"'To consult him?' she queried.
"'Not professionally, you understand, _signora_, but on a personal
affair.'
"'Then come in the evening. He dines at seven. He is always in until
ten. Will you leave your name?'
"I left my card and wrote on the back of it that I wished to see him
about the relatives of Signorina Rosa Cairola. The woman read it, looked
at me, shivered, murmured 'All right,' and went back to her brazier in
the office.
"It was more cheerful in that marble tunnel in the evening. There were
lights and people about. Not many, but enough to make the place less
like a tomb. Perhaps the gloom of the morning was in myself. The Sibyl
had put a flower in her hair by way of evening dress and was ordering
servants about. I have often wondered who exactly she was. It is the
fate of us who wander over the earth to leave so many by-ways
unexplored. We can only glimpse and conjecture and, generally, forget.
Life for us is like a walk along the broad, modern streets of an Italian
city. Every little while we pass narrow alleys, mere slots in the mass
of marble architecture, which dive down into darkness and mystery. Every
little while we pass low-lying ramps and odd little causeways, where
lighted windows give one sudden vivid pictures of heads and faces and
arms, sudden snatches of gesture and conversation flung out at us as we
pass. We want--I want--to investigate them all, to see what's round the
corner, as they say. And we can't. We've got to go on to our
destinations, and try and find our fun when we get there. But it wasn't
just the vague, generalized appetite for odd characters which made me
contemplate that fusty manageress with interest. It was the sudden
fleeting reflection that, but for me, but for a chance accident, there
was Rosa in years to come, faded, obscure, efficient, querulous and a
failure. And in Hank I saw myself in years to come, only not so
successful, not so rich, not quite so shady, I hope. I watched her
moving about in her funereal draperies, the flower flopping as she
shuffled and gesticulated. Presently she saw me and beckoned, and then I
was shown up those ponderous stone stairs, the marble balustrade covered
with red-baize for fear people might be frozen to it on the way, no
doubt. A pair of vast double doors bore a microscopic inscription of the
Doctor's name, together with an almost invisible pimple that was the
bell, and before those sombre and enigmatic portals I was left to my
fate. For once in a way, I was going to see what was round the corner.
"One leaf of the door opened and remained so for a second before a head
appeared, a head of grey, upstanding hair and a dark, bushy beard. You
don't often meet with doors that open in that fashion at home. You know
the English fashion--six inches and a face peering at you suspiciously,
or a wide fling open and the servant standing right up to you and
blocking the way with a paralyzing stare. On the continent there is the
porter below and the door opens to let you in, not just to see what you
want. So in I walked, the door closed and I found myself in the
ante-room of Doctor West's apartment, faced by Doctor West himself, and
watched by a mummy-case standing close to the wall, a mummy-case painted
with a strange, anxious face. Its gold eyes had luminous whites and
strong black brows. That bizarre curiosity was the key of the Doctor's
furnishing scheme, and it had for me another significance. I knew then
that I had heard of him with some certainty. I connected him at last
with various stories I had vaguely picked up, snatches of conversation
on the bridge-deck or in the mess-room. I recalled the Chief telling me
once of some doctor who had come, years ago, to stay at some hotel and
who had never left it since except to spend a month every year in Egypt.
Great student of mummies, the Chief said. Yes, I remembered it all.
Perhaps, if I had not had Rosa, I might have fastened more securely to
the story in the first place. Now Rosa had brought me to him. I told him
who I was. He nodded and showed me into his front room.
"It is difficult to convey the sense of overwhelming vastness which
oppresses men in such chambers. You might not feel it so. My quarters
are limited, as you may imagine. Even a millionaire-passenger gets no
more than a cottager ashore. And Rebecca's place had small rooms full of
plush furniture and ship-models in bottles and catamarans in
glass-cases, assegais and Japanese junk. Ugly and comfortable. But this
room of Doctor West's was terrifying to me. I couldn't see the ceiling
at all save that, just above where his reading lamp glowed green on an
immense table, there floated some far-off drapery and a plunging knee--a
fresco lost in the gloom. The walls were painted, on stucco, into panels
and each panel had a bunch of flowers tied with interminable ribbons in
the centre. You don't like that sort of thing? Well, it is indigenous
there, anyway, and you can't put shiny dadoes and humorous borders on a
forty-foot wall, can you?
"And yet, you know, I saw in a moment, before I had opened my mouth,
what lay at the back of all this. I could see that was only a variation
of the traditional hermit's cave, a modern hole in a marble cliff. This
tall, high-shouldered man with his spade-shaped beard and ragged smoking
jacket, the cotton wool oozing from the quilting and the pockets burst
at the corners, had recluse written all over him. He walked over the
half dozen rugs that lay between the door and his encampment behind the
table and left me forlorn, twiddling my hat and pulling at my coat,
somewhere in outer darkness. He was nervous, yet anxious to show he was
at ease. I had disturbed him. Once he looked behind him at a door with a
black curtain before it, as though he contemplated flight to his
bedroom. Suddenly he started off on a journey into the darkness and
returned with a chair, a gilt thing with a rounded knob of upholstery
for a seat. And he asked me gently to sit down.
"A recluse! I had that idea in my mind all the time I was telling him my
story, as I am telling it to you, as far as it concerned my girl, and I
watched him with a certain abstract curiosity, as well as a very lively
anxiety. For I couldn't think how he came into it. In rapid succession I
thought of the possibilities. In a novel, no doubt, he would be her
father or a wicked uncle. Or perhaps he had, in a professional capacity,
we may say, concocted some villainy! But then his flag wouldn't be P or
any other letter. Villains don't carry on the humdrum business of
attending ships in port for a lump sum down. Yes, as I told him my story
I was wondering what his was. And I was conscious also that I was
increasing my experience. Here was a recluse. They do not grow on
bushes. It stands to reason a young man will not come across many. A
young man grows so accustomed to reading about things nowadays that he
may quite possibly never miss the actual experience. I could not do
that. I have always had some sort of touchstone by which I could keep a
hold on the difference between reality and mere imagination. There were
many things, common things if you like, which I had never experienced,
and I meant to experience them. Nothing dismayed me. I had in me at that
time a singular passion for life. No doubt this showed in my face, as I
have seen it in others--a thirsty look, with a rather over-confident
manner. And Doctor West seemed almost to draw back from me as though I
were dangerous, explosive. I dare say I was to him. He had left all
that, had sunk into a sort of intellectual torpor, insulated, as one may
say, from the great dynamos of human life.
"'But why,' he repeated, after looking at me nervously for a long time
and listening to my words. 'Why do you wish to marry her?'
"'Well,' I said, 'I suppose it's because we are in love.'
"'But do you realize the risks?' he asked gently, moving his papers and
books about. 'I'm assuming, of course, that you are a gentleman,' he
went on. 'Always best to marry in one's own class, don't you think?' He
studied my card for a while and looked up suddenly.
"'But suppose I've considered all that,' I suggested. 'Suppose it isn't
so easy to know one's class, as you call it.'
"'Oh,' said he, getting up and walking off into the darkness. 'Oh, if
one is a gentleman ...' His voice tailed off.
"'But,' I persisted, 'I'm not sure I _am_ a gentleman. Really I'm not.'
"'What!' The solitary word came to me out of the shadows with startling
distinctness. I nodded. I sat there on that spindley, gim-crack chair
and stared contemptuously at the paraphernalia of learning and
refinement on the great table, at the silver cigarette box, the bronze
inkstand, the sphinxes and scarabs and cenotaphs, the bits of papyrus
under glass, the books and magnifying glasses. Stared at them and defied
them. I nodded.
"'It is a fact,' I said. 'I have been brought up in a genteel position
and I don't consider the whole business to amount to a heap of beans.'
"I could hear him walking to and fro, and presently, as my eyes grew
accustomed, I made him out, a tall phantom moving in front of other
motionless phantoms. I became aware, too, of a warmth coming from that
quarter and saw him stoop and open the damper of a closed stove, a
studio stove, I think it was.
"'Then what can it matter to you what her parents were?' he demanded,
straightening up and coming into the light.
"'I didn't say I wasn't respectable,' I told him, 'as well as curious.
Anybody would be that.'
"He admitted that was so, and came and sat down.
"'The girl was born at sea, on a ship,' he observed slowly.
"'Well,' I said, 'what of that? So was I.'
"'Oh, is that so?' He looked at me again in his nervous way. Lit a
cigarette and contemplated the smoke.
"'Born at sea, on a ship,' he repeated. 'Her mother came from somewhere
up the Adriatic coast, Loreto, if I remember rightly. A lady's maid. She
and her mistress joined the mail-boat at Port Said. They had been living
at Cairo. On the voyage she died in giving birth to a child. There was
some trouble, which I never fathomed, about the mistress, the Honourable
Mrs. James. She did not know her maid was married when she engaged her
at Venice. Letters were found in her pockets from a Sergeant Cairola.
Just about this time the Italian Army was severely defeated in
Abyssinia, and as far as could be ascertained the sergeant, who had
married the girl at Ancona on the very point of embarking, was killed.
Mrs. James was not in a condition, nor was she, I imagine, of a
temperament to interest herself in the case. The girl, of course, was
buried at sea, several days before we arrived here. As the vessel was
British, the disposal of an Italian child was complicated. Not born on
Italian soil, she was not eligible for the state institutions for
orphans. I really forget the details. I had to make a declaration, of
course, being the surgeon, but the captain and purser saw the
authorities. On our return voyage we learned that they had found foster
parents for the child, who received a grant out of the pension due to
the widow had she lived. Since then, on only one occasion, a very
painful one for me, I may say, have I had anything to do with the case.'
"So that I was really no forrader than before, you see. Rosa herself had
told me about all of importance that was known. She had been a baby at
Rebecca's, then a little girl and then a big girl. And the story, though
Rosa had no part in it, the story spread. I had seen around the corner,
and there were so many things I wanted to know! Things I had no right to
know, come to that, if I was a gentleman. No right to ask anyway. I got
up to go.
"'Thank you, doctor,' I said. 'I suppose I'll have to be satisfied with
what you've given me. It won't make any difference to us, I'm glad to
say. But I should have thought you would have been interested in the
case, even if Mrs. James wasn't.' He shrugged his shoulders and moved
his papers about, plainly anxious for me to be gone.
"'Remember, I did not settle here until some time had elapsed. I should
have forgotten the whole affair but for the occasion I spoke of.'
"'I see,' I said. 'Well, good-night and thank you.'
"'Good-night,' he said nervously. 'Excuse me if I don't go down with
you. I am rather busy.'
"'Literary work, I presume?' I said politely, and he nodded.
"'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt
every year--next month, in fact--and I am behind in my notes.'
"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and
saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All
around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like
sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes.
On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated attitudes, mere yellow
bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a
long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here,
no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had
shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling
teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment
of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his
head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the
Dead.
"Curious, wasn't it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed
one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into
the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the
Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated,
well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be
absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable
creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an
orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had
perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all
impossible. Rich people--I mean the rich who are forever rushing about
the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the
Dalmatian coast--are very curious people. The very nature of their mode
of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical
outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which
we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I
think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over
the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air,
their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their
progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was
curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings,
growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed
among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious,
too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life.
Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied
life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared
of it.
"But we weren't. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not
afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the
experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to
shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the
world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly
normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long
probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious
existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by
something in a book. Nobody could love literature more than I; but I am
sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature,
literature is not life. It can't be. There was the doctor with his Book
of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who
will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere
annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his
mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a
modern effete civilization. I don't know. I never took the trouble to
find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a
name, tall, pale and with a black beard, passing in his little launch,
at the call of the code-flag P.
"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many
others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if
it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me
would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of
it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their
steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and
the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of
their posthumous fame, and I--I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality
about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to
copy their example, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own
experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the
answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren't _like_ that. Love
isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in
the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and
indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of
ambition does. We grope.
"You may imagine that I was not justified in saying in so many words
that I was no gentleman, that I was prejudicing myself in that man's
eyes, wantonly. I don't defend it altogether, I was eager at the time,
full of the radical philosophy of the period, anxious to stand on my own
feet. I saw men in the flat, so to speak. Men _and_ women. They were
decorative forms rather than souls like myself. My girl had been like
that, too, when I first saw her, a decorative form, exquisite, pathetic,
entrancing. But the magic of the business was that slowly she was
emerging from among those figures of two dimensions and coming to sit
beside me, a companion. I had never had one before. There might never
have been such a thing happen before to anybody, it seemed so strange
and so astonishingly fortunate! For years I didn't get used to it. And
if I am, in a way, accustomed to the idea now, it is only the occasional
veiling of a vision, a breathing on the glass, as it were. At sea it
will come upon me like a dream of misfortune--if we had never met,
if--if--if! Who can tell?
"Mr. Hank and Rebecca were sitting in the little room upstairs one
evening when I came in for Rosa and I told them my adventures at the
Hotel Robinson. They were drinking whisky, I remember, and talking
together in a low tone, like conspirators. Rebecca laughed.
"'Ah!' said she. 'I scared him that time, eh, Oscar?'
"'You!' he answered in good-humoured contempt. 'You made a big mistake
there, my dear.'
"'Well,' she retorted. 'And who was it gave me the tip? Who was it said
that English doctor was worth trying, eh?'
"'I did,' said Oscar, looking at me and winking, 'but I didn't tell you
to go and make a fool of yourself and spoil the game.'
"'Easy to say that after,' she grumbled, and became aware of me looking
at both of them in great perplexity.
"'_Non capisce_', she added to her husband.
"'The doctor mentioned a painful incident,' I remarked.
"'The devil he did!' they ejaculated, looking at me in astonishment, and
Rebecca went on. 'It was nothing at all, you know. I thought he was a
man. There was me sitting in the tramcar with Rosa on my lap, three or
four years old, and he comes in by-and-bye and sits down opposite. And
Rosetta--you know how little girls will take a fancy to a
gentleman--Rosetta holds out her hands and smiles at him like a little
angel. He was leaning his hands on his stick and she reached out and
took hold of it and says 'la-la!' And I says 'see the nice gentleman's
stick,' and she gurgles 'la-la!' again. Cunning! What a bird she was!
And you'd think any human-made man 'ud give the duck a penny and say how
pretty she was. Not he. He sat there like a stone until I caught his eye
and bowed to him.'
"'Fancy that!' said Mr. Hank in some contempt. 'Because I told her he
was the doctor of the ship when Rosa was born, she thinks he's the
father and goes up to the Hotel Robinson and wants money. Clever woman!'
"'Well,' said Rebecca, 'you didn't have any more luck with your Mrs.
James. You got a flea in your ear there, didn't you? You had a great
idea _she_ was Rosa's mother.'
"'If you'd listened to what I told you, you'd never have run away with
the idea there was any money in the doctor for you. There was some sense
in what I did, because it would have cut both ways. But you would
interfere. You look surprised, Mister,' he said to me, chuckling.
"Of course, I was surprised. I sat there open-mouthed. It is
extraordinary how a man may become suddenly aware of unsuspected heights
and depths in human life. It may be that I have always been less
sophisticated than most. I am continually overlooking the shabbiness and
rascality of the world, I find, in spite of the early apprenticeship
which I served among business friends. I have often envied men this
alertness of mind, this ever-present consciousness of the obliquity of
human nature. And yet, I am not certain it is an enviable quality. I
have a suspicion that those who have it envy us who lack it. They seem
to have for us a half-contemptuous, half-respectful liking. So with
Rebecca. She patted my arm and said to her husband:
"'Let him alone. He's all right, is Rosa's sweetheart.'
"At that moment Rosa came in dressed to go out with me. She had a white
boa, I remember, and a white felt hat with a broad brim. She looked from
one to the other and then back at me. 'What's the matter?' she said.
"'Nothing; only saying we ought to think about getting settled soon,' I
said, laughing, and we all laughed. And then, as we two passed into the
narrow, twisted staircase to go down to the street, I heard Rebecca say
quietly, 'Did you hear what he said, Oscar? Did you, eh?'
"But, you know, I wanted to get clear of it all. I was more than ever
set upon it. I understood better than ever Rosa's vague dislike of a
life spent among the people she had known. It was nothing to me that
Rebecca and her husband were potential blackmailers or that little Mr.
Sachs, 'representing Babbolini's,' also represented a possible life-long
neighbour if we lived at Sampierdarena. It was Rosa who felt the
impossibility of it, and the subtle antagonisms of her environment. She
knew, though she had no words for it, that there was a fuller life for
us somewhere else. She would read an Italian translation of some English
book, _Barnaby Rudge_ or _The Old Curiosity Shop_, and when I came back
to her she would ask me about my country. I was often astonished to
find how little I knew about it! What I did know was out of books.
Humph!
"And what little I had known was fading voyage by voyage. Only rarely
was there time to go from the Tyne or the Wear or the Clyde to my home
in London. Coal is shipped and ore discharged in the North. But even the
North meant little to me beyond the staiths where the coal came down
from the pits, and the dirty, rain-swept back streets where the
shipping-offices were. Once or twice I tried to get quit of the ship and
went inland by rail. I saw cathedrals and castles and temperance hotels.
A bleak and unfriendly land! Somehow I could not find the key of it all.
Those sullen people living in the quaint streets round a superb
cathedral--_they_ were no kin of the men who built it or the men who
prayed and worshipped in it either. Indeed, you can often find the
cathedral empty and a sheet-iron shack round the corner near the
railroad full of men and women shouting their heads off. And the rich
people who lived in the castles had not much in common with the men who
built them. It wasn't, mind you, that I was envying these people or even
quarrelling with them. It wasn't that they were not orderly and
hard-working and conscientious. They were all that. No, it was a curious
impression they gave me of being only half alive. I used to watch them
in church, in saloons, in theatres, and they seemed oppressed by some
malign invisible fate standing over them and taking much of the sparkle
out of their souls. I was oppressed, too, by the same influence. I used
to wonder what it was. Only at the football matches did it seem to lift
at all. I always enjoyed the football. It was there you could catch in
their faces the light of battle and the lust of conflict. There their
features were sharpened to the tenseness you find hardened into a type
here in America, men who are alive! But most of the time each class was
oppressed by the one above it. Away at the top was the great shipowning
peer, the colossus of that particular part of the country, an ominous
and omnipotent figure. Below him were other shipowners, smaller fry,
living in fine houses where they had made their money, connected by
marriage with the next below, still smaller shipowners and men who had
built up successful repair-shops and ship-stores. Next came the retired
ship-masters, living in villas named after their last commands, and
skippers still at sea, their wives watching each other like cats at
church on Sunday. Then, in tiny semi-detached brick boxes up narrow
streets behind all these you would find mates and engineers packed like
sardines. Their families, I mean. I often used to think of the abstract
folly of these men calling such places 'home' when they sometimes were
away years on end. Our chief mate took pity on me one week-end and
invited me over to his house at Hartlepool. I forget which Hartlepool it
was, it doesn't matter now. I remember, however, that we had to make
several connections on branch lines to get there, and it was a
continuous stampede from saloon to junction and from junction to saloon.
I couldn't understand it at first, for the mate was a decent, wide-open
sort of chap, and fairly sober considering he had once been master and
so had an inducement to drown dull care. But I discovered that his wife
wouldn't have it in the house, and he was fortifying himself against a
'dry week-end.' It certainly was dry to me. The house, partly paid for
when he had a collision and lost his job in the Fort Line, was still
called _Fort William_ after his ship, and I could see that the
name-plate had been carved out of teak by the carpenter to please 'the
old man.' How were the mighty fallen! You know, there was something
pathetic to me in that man's drop from master to mate. To him it was
more than pathetic, it was the next thing to the end of the world. He
was just an average seaman. He had no culture, no art, no religion, no
philosophy to support him or act as a substitute in such a misfortune.
Even his children did not seem to compensate him. Rather they aggravated
the case. They could no longer be referred to as Captain Tateham's
children. He was only plain Mr. Tateham now, Fred to us; and when the
_Corydon_ was going out through the dock-gates to make the tide, anybody
who wanted might see Mr. Tateham on her forecastle head, standing glumly
in the rain amid a tangle of ropes and half-boozed sailors and wisps of
steam from the windlass. Here was the same thing over again as occurred
in our own case. The root of it all was pride, the cursed pride that
makes each class ape and envy the one above it, and stamp on the faces
of the one below. Here it was, and it was England. This man had a grand
little wife and three beautiful clever children winning scholarships at
the grammar-school. He had a microscopic home partly paid for and a
safe-enough competency. Yet, because he had slipped a cog he was
damnably unhappy. His pride was bruised. Fate had given him a nasty
knock. He shook his head when I spoke hopefully of him getting a command
in our company. His wife said nothing. Of course, although I didn't know
it then, for, as I have said, I do not naturally suspect men, the fact
was she knew and the owners knew and the underwriters knew why he had
had a collision. She had her reasons for keeping liquor out of the
house. It was not a very happy week-end for me, for the sight of those
two straight, intelligent lads and their charming, golden-haired sister
turning and turning inside that tiny house just because it was Sunday
and a visitor was present, got on my mind. I saw away ahead, and
wondered if they would have any luck in their fight with gentility!
Humph!
"No, I was not enamoured of what I saw of England. And I found I was
reluctant to go to my own home. I suppose it had so many regrettable
memories. Anyhow, voyage after voyage I put off my visit, and so one
trip, coming home to Tyne Dock, I found I had put it off once too often.
My mother, who had been living at Brighton, was dead. It is curious how
the sea seems to sterilize the emotions in some natures. Perhaps I am
wrong, and judge the general from the particular. Perhaps we are
deficient in power to express grief. Perhaps we don't feel it. I don't
know. I have known men at sea who raved about their parents'
perfections and I was unable to sympathize and regale them with
anecdotes about my 'old lady.' I couldn't. I don't remember ever talking
to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant,
however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit
into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of
cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match
with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging
sea.