MISCELLANY
It has struck me often enough of late that, for an artistic and literary
colony, ours is not very acute. For it is a sad and undeniable fact
that, now the Carvilles are gone away to live on Staten Island, they
seem to have ceased to exist as far as Netley is concerned. We alone
seem to have attained to some small knowledge of Mr. Carville's peculiar
record and essentially individual philosophy. We alone know the
relationship with the celebrated and unfortunate Icarus who achieved
international fame by crossing the Atlantic, only to crash to earth, as
so often happens, in a comparatively trivial enterprise. Mr. Carville
and his family never became the talk of the country club. They roused no
interest at the soda-counter of Pakenham's drug-store or in the room
behind the bar of Slovitzsky's Hotel on Chestnut Street. Our literary
club makes no mention in its List of Authors who have lived in Netley,
of Mr. Carville and his _Cameos of the Sea_. Happy the nations who have
no history, they say, and no doubt the aphorism may be applied to
families as well. Certainly, if Mr. Carville proposed, as no doubt he
did, that his family should attain to felicity by a profound obscurity,
he has attained his desire. It is left for Time to show whether
Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini, when they grow up, will emerge
from that obscurity and astonish the world with some novel
manifestations of the family genius.
But this is to anticipate. The immediate point is that none of our
neighbours--not even our own friends, like Williams nor Eckhardt, nor
Wederslen nor Confield, which last has a sort of vested interest in
Europe which is attested by his much-travelled bag--had any inkling of
the story to which they saw us listening as they passed our porch on
certain afternoons that fall. How little does Mrs. Wederslen think, for
example, that her surmise about the burnt aeroplane was grotesquely
wrong! How little does Williams, when he brings us his water-colours,
done in that fall-vacation at Bar Harbor, appreciate at its real value
our etching of an aeroplane lying across an English hedgerow! Even Miss
Fraenkel, I think, has no clear knowledge of Mrs. Carville's part in the
tragedy of that New Year's Night. I remarked early in this narrative
that Miss Fraenkel's importance in it was of the slightest. Her charming
enthusiasm was ever an ignis fatuus leading her into unprofitable
bye-ways of conjecture. We have, therefore, the superior position as
regards the vanished family who lived next door. We know, as I have
said, where they are gone; but we do not tell. It gives us a certain
rare aesthetic pleasure to keep our own counsel.
And I think I may say we are qualified, after New Year's Day, to keep
any secret, for we kept it from the Metropolitan Press when they invaded
us, a dozen strong, to "take our statements." We laugh over it now, that
sudden descent of New York "leg-men," breezy, businesslike,
well-dressed young gentlemen of the "clean-cut" type; but we were glad
enough when they were through asking for facts and photographs and
impressions, and had gone, leaving the porch rather mussed-up and the
snow in front as though a herd of buffaloes had trampled it. But even
this is to anticipate a little.
I have mentioned, somewhere, that our devotion to the purer and less
remunerative branches of our respective arts led us occasionally to take
a holiday. With a subconscious deference to the advice of our local
doctor, that "sedentary folks should sell their automobiles and take
long walks," our day's vacation sometimes took us into the country. We
had no automobile to sell, unfortunately; but otherwise we carried out
the venerable gentleman's instructions by starting early and returning
home late in a condition approaching collapse. We thus came to know
certain tracts of Passaic and Bergen Counties in a manner quite
impossible to the motorist. We struck off roads and took to the wooded
hills of the Deer Foot Range. We spent forenoons losing ourselves and
then, having eaten our sandwiches and drained our flasks, would pass the
rest of the day trying for a predetermined point, but generally emerging
into some unknown and delightfully unsuspected valleys of quietness;
Sleepy Hollows down which no headless horsemen had ever thundered to
startle the wild-fowl sailing low in the evening twilight, and over
which the moon would later pour her serene, unearthly radiance; while
we, footsore, hungry, thirsty, and quite absurdly elated at our
success, would press on towards some twinkle of light in the distance,
which told us of refreshment, and possibly a welcome railroad journey
home.
It was only natural that, on those rambles which we took after Mr.
Carville had begun his story and while he himself was rambling more
extensively about the Western Ocean, my friend and I would discuss him
and the highly stimulating outlook upon life which his original mind
working in a novel medium had engendered. Indeed, it would not be too
much to say that he monopolized our interest to the exclusion of Art. Or
rather he, as a living and concrete example, became a kind of test, to
which we brought a great deal we had thought and seen and read. To me he
became significant of even more, for he contravened, in his own life and
philosophy, so much that is generally taken for granted in fiction, that
I grew doubtful both of him and the conventions he flouted. It had been
obvious to me for some years that any advance in imaginative work seemed
impossible inasmuch as the most advanced men had found nothing ahead but
a stone wall, against which they advanced in vain. The theory that there
was a hole in this wall somewhere, through which we could get into a
freer air and less trammelled conditions, was attractive enough. We were
all looking for this hole, but somehow it had eluded us. I, in my humble
way, had groped and analyzed and plotted to find it, but without
success, when suddenly it seemed to me I heard a voice from the other
side, Mr. Carville's voice, telling us not only what the world looked
like out there, but also how he got there. This is no doubt a fanciful
picture; but one of Mr. Carville's salient points was the way he, the
least fanciful of men, appealed to the fancy of others and painted
pictures without the use of violent colours and futile superlatives. And
the impersonal note which he maintained did really give to his story the
effect of a voice coming over a wall.
So I looked at the matter, and so I explained it on our long walks
through Pompton and on to Greenwood Lake. But my friend, though he
accepted much of my theorizing as interesting, was struck most
powerfully by Mr. Carville's strange attitude towards his native land.
It was all very well, Mac urged, to get through a hole in the wall and
show the way to freedom from conventions in art, though (to his mind)
conventions were all right if you found the market--but to say that
England was "on the crumble" was silly. And to harp on gentility ... Mac
shook his head.
"But that is one of the stones he had to remove to make his hole in the
wall," I argued.
"Then your wonderful hole in the wall is only our old friend the Door of
Unconventionality," he retorted.
"By no means. He's the most conventional chap we have met since we left
the Chelsea Arts Club. What singles him out from so many others is that
he saw where he fitted. And it so happened that he fitted somewhere
below that to which he would supposedly climb. Consider! Most of us
never attain to the position to which we imagine it has pleased God to
call us. We are perpetually struggling to succeed. We 'get on in the
world,' it is true, but only comparatively. To hear some of us talk,
you'd think the world itself wasn't made sufficiently large and
well-furnished to supply us with the position we are designed to fill.
But Mr. Carville looks, not higher, but lower. He espies the particular
niche which suits him perfectly, and he calmly descends a few rungs of
the ladder and steps off into oblivion. Not the niche, mind you, that
the world might estimate as his, and which would procure for him the
guerdon of wealth and fame and posthumous biographies; but the niche
which he conceives to contain for him all that he, according to some
highly original conception of ultimate justice, deserves. As for England
being 'on the crumble,' I consider it a conservative description of what
has been going on in that country for years. In most departments of life
England has crumbled, literally crumbled away. What Mr. Carville omits
is the emergence of the new England, an England he doesn't like, an
England we shall probably find hard to assimilate and which may quite
conceivably drive us to do what Mr. Carville has sagely done
already--come back here and stop for good!"
So we talked! At least, I talked and my friend concurred, or demurred,
or very often digested my wisdom in silence--the silence that, betwixt
friends, means as much or even more than speech. And I remember, one
still evening, the patches of dry snow lying on the grass of the
sidewalk and the lawns, as we came wearily up Van Diemen's Avenue after
a tramp to Echo Lake, there had been a long silence after I had been
theorizing on the subject of Mrs. Carville. I am always listened to
indulgently on the subject of women! It is tacitly taken for granted
that my knowledge of the subject is exclusively theoretical. I do not
contest this, because the converse of the proposition, that all married
men are practical experts, is so absurd that nobody ventures to state
it. I had been discussing Mrs. Carville and the probable effect of
American life upon her when she should have more leisure to cultivate
herself. My point was that she might possibly have some influence upon
her husband. And this was followed, as I have said, by a long silence.
"No," said Mac, at length, "I don't think so." I had almost forgotten
what we were talking about, for I could already see that the lamps in
the dining-room were lighted and shadows moving on the blind.
"Oh!" I said. "Why not?"
"Well," he answered. "Of course, we don't know her very well, but we do
know him. And I should say that the woman doesn't live who could shift
him from what he proposed to do. You may not see it in the same way, but
it is plain enough. His brother," went on my friend with a laugh,
"hasn't all the devil in the family, and don't you think it."
And we came up to the door and sat down in the porch to take off our
boots. I confess this view was to me entirely novel. I felt chagrined
that I had been so lacking in intelligence as to miss so obvious a
possibility. I had a faint, uneasy suspicion that my friend was laughing
at me. But the idea was so pregnant with interest that I soon forgot my
mortification. Before I had got my boots completely off I was away on a
tour of this new and fascinating region. I leaned back in my chair and
gazed pensively towards the faint glare of New York City. It was true, I
reflected, that we had at the very first postulated a certain friction
between our neighbour and his wife. But then we had not listened to the
love story of our neighbour and his wife. I thought, as I sat there,
that I saw the point I had missed. Mr. Carville, supposing he had what
my friend called the devil in the family, would not exploit it while
telling us the story of his life. And so I, who had abandoned myself to
the enjoyment of his peculiar mentality, had forgotten that he might
have, all the time, some of the "devil" after all, that he might, in
short, be difficult to live with. I hesitated to use the word "faults."
Mr. Carville himself had seemed to imply that the ordinary matrimonial
disagreements were as inevitable and as fundamental as cosmic
disturbances. Perhaps they were. "Devil," however, was another matter.
"I wonder who's indoors," said Mac, getting up. Thus roused, I heard
voices inside, with laughter from Bill. The next moment the door opened
and Benvenuto Cellini and Giuseppe Mazzini were discovered behind it.
"What, visitors?" said Mac, touching the dimples in their cheeks; and
they nodded and looked at each other in a very taking way they had. Bill
came in hastily. "They came in this afternoon," she explained, "and
asked most solemnly if they might have some tea. Ma was gone to New
York, they said, and she might be late."
"'That so?" said Mac. "Well, we'll have 'em to dinner as well. What
'say, you chaps? Will you have dinner with us?"
Again they nodded and looked at each other, and Ben remarked gravely
that they were hungry.
We went off to have a wash and a change.
They certainly were two pretty little men as they stood there in red
jerseys and blue corduroy knickers. My friend's custom of snatching open
the piano and heralding dinner with a furious tornado of chords pleased
them vastly.
"What's that for?" Beppo inquired expectantly.
"Chop," said Mac, rumpling their hair. "Pipe all hands to the galley.
Here comes the salt horse and the hard tack."
"Their father isn't a deck-swab," I remarked mildly.
"Perhaps not," he retorted, "but pipe all hands etcetera is in that
comic opera I'm illustrating and doing the costumes for, and I've got it
on the brain. Have you noticed," he went on, "that Carville seems to
have no professional slang?"
"He's not typical of his class," I admitted. "Any more than his wife is
of her's, I suppose. Moreover, he knows we know nothing of his work and
explains it in simple language. Does it not occur to you," I inquired,
"that his avoidance of slang and dialect and foreign words and profanity
is part of the freedom of the other side of the wall? Think of what we
have lived through in the last twenty years! We have listened to a tale
of the ends of the earth and the teller of it neither foams at the mouth
nor talks in a strange technical jargon nobody ever spoke and nobody can
understand. Without naming any names, isn't it a relief? Isn't it
refreshing? After the terrible experiences we have had in the past!"
"Did mother tell you to come in?" he asked the children after nodding to
me.
"Yes," said Beppo, thrusting out his chin and working his neck slowly as
Bill tied a napkin round it. And he went on in a thin, clear, little
voice: "We ha'nt any help in our house, an' Ma she had to go to the
stores, so we said we'd like comin' in here to see you till she comes
back."
"Well, that's awfully nice of you, old chap. Next time you'll bring
mother too, eh?"
They looked at each other at this, and then at their spoons as they
leaned over the soup.
"Anyhow, you'll ask her, won't you?" coaxed Bill. "Say, how pleased we
shall be if she comes in some evening."
They smiled, and Beppo said, "Sure, we'll ask her," and then we all
laughed. I suppose we were a trifle fatuous about them and treated them
more as delicious playthings than as human beings. They bore it very
well, however, and after dinner, when my friend, in spite of his long
tramp and a "job" half done upstairs in the studio, played the piano,
and did conjuring tricks with a handkerchief and a glass of water, and
then got out a concertina which had often wakened the echoes of King's
Road, Chelsea, in the small hours, they were in raptures. The concertina
certainly impressed them as "a divine box of sounds." After "Church
Bells in the Distance" they jumped and clapped their hands and said
"Bully!" A new and appreciative audience is always stimulating to an
artist. My friend surpassed himself. He told them about the London
costers, how they had hundreds of pearl buttons and velvet collared
coats and wide bell-mouthed trousers, how they played the concertina so
beautifully that the policemen in the streets wept into their helmets
and the King came out of his palace and danced a jig with the Lord Mayor
outside the Mansion House. And he told them how it sometimes chanced the
coster got drunk on his way home, and this made him play very
pathetically indeed like this ... and then the broken strains of "Two
Lovely Black Eyes" came forth, but ended abruptly in a squeak. That,
they were told, was his wife, Eliza, who had come out and slapped him.
Eliza had joined the Salvation Army and sang only hymns. This was the
prelude to "Where is My Wandering Boy To-night?" rendered in a way, Bill
remarked _sotto voce_, calculated to keep him wandering. But Beppo and
Ben sat on the edge of their chairs, entranced. It was evidently a novel
evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board
with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to
draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so
embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in
their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the
best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw
anything at all with his eyes open should be able to draw a pig
blindfold. Tired of this, Mac put on a pair of castanets and danced a
Spanish fandango. He hung up a sheet in front of his studio lamp and
performed an amazing series of shadow-pictures representing the "Hunting
of the Snark." When our small visitors saw the Tub-Tub, "that terrible
bird," flapping horribly about with his three-cornered eyes glaring at
them, they grasped our hands and shouted with the most exquisite
mingling of horror and delight. They were consoled with a wrestling
match to which my versatile friend challenged himself. Having shaken
hands with himself, he then grasped himself in the most approved
catch-as-catch-can manner, struggled desperately to throw himself and
finally triumphed by flinging himself in the air, turning a somersault
and coming down on the carpet with a bump. Getting up and falling
exhausted into a chair, he was greeted with loud cries to "do it again."
"No, indeed, you won't," said Bill emphatically. "You must be crazy to
do it at all after walking I don't know how many miles. Children, do you
want to kill my husband?"
They shook their heads solemnly. At that moment they evidently thought
him quite the most wonderful person in the world. I often think so
myself and I know his wife holds that view always. So I at once
inaugurated a story-telling competition. I told them of an extraordinary
affair that had once happened in England, where I was eking out a
wretched existence as a hunter of buried treasure. I had received
information about a tomato-can full of diamonds hidden in a beef-steak
pie which would be served at a certain old inn on the shores of a lake
far away towards the North Sea, and I was just packing up my patent
can-opener, a box of candy and a packet of gum for refreshment on the
way, and a pair of silver-mounted pistols like those in the studio
upstairs, when an old woman with bright red hair tapped at the door ...
tap-tap! Ben and Beppo both looked at the door, and Bill said in a low
voice, "Don't frighten them; you'll make them dream." But they were
watching me once more with their round, expectant eyes, and I was
racking my brains to discover the purport of the old woman with the
bright red hair--for I am always inventing fascinating characters about
which I know nothing!--when the brass Canterbury Pilgrim was lifted
twice and we heard a real knock on a real door ... tap-tap!
It was Mrs. Carville. She stepped quickly into the room so that the door
might be closed on the cold night air, and looked round with an unwonted
gaiety in her mien. As her gaze fell upon the two little boys, who stood
close to my knee and hampered my rising, I fancied the expression of
her fine dark eyes hardened a little. It may have been only fancy, but
it made me wonder if the cause of her elation lay beyond the family
circle. At first I had a twinge, for when a woman, whose husband is in
some Mediterranean port, is elated by something beyond her front door,
the world (and I belonged to the world, after all) looks grave. I
suppose I myself looked grave as I bowed, for she regarded me--her eyes
coming back to my face for a moment--with a certain gallant challenge,
as though she read my shadowy thought and defied it. And then, sitting
back in my chair again and watching her respond to the charm of my
friend's manner, I could not help wishing that Mr. Carville had seen fit
to give us a little more of his wife's character in his narrative. It
seemed to me that the dry, clear light of his recondite mind would have
thrown into admirable gleams and shadows, gleams of humour and shadows
of blind fate, the brilliant creature who sat before us. There was
nothing material in her manner as she let her glance fall again upon the
children. The gaiety super-imposed upon her customary staid gravity
seemed to have made her, not younger or less mature, but less domestic,
more complex and mystifying. And I found myself recalling Mr. Carville's
contemptuous moralizings upon the illusory nature of love. I tried,
foolish as it may seem, to place myself intellectually in the place of a
woman like Mrs. Carville, to conceive her probable fundamental attitude
towards her offspring, trodden smooth and firm by the daily round of
chores, an active, vigorous mind in an active, vigorous body.... Well,
this was journeyman's work, I suppose, for a novelist; yet for me it had
a freshness and spice that led me on until I pulled up sharply and felt
the pang of shame. I am continually torn in the conflict between realism
and what are called "unworthy thoughts." If it were not for a fear of
traducing my own character by an ambiguous phrase, I would confess to
many "unworthy thoughts" of many worthy people. I suppress them, of
course, as I suppressed these concerning Mrs. Carville's trip to New
York and the secular gaiety that now sat like a diadem on Mrs.
Carville's forehead; but I have them all the same.
I was roused by Mrs. Carville's rising and saying that the children must
go to bed.
"Let them come in again soon," said Mac. "We would like to say 'any
time,' you know, but we're like parsons and doctors, we work at home and
we can't have holidays every day."
"I am glad they have been no trouble," she replied, regarding them with
a preoccupied approval.
"Trouble!" My friend was indignant. "We haven't enjoyed ourselves so
much in years, I assure you, Mrs. Carville. You've had a good time, you
chaps, eh?" he asked them and they nodded with reminiscent delight
shining in their eyes. "Bully!" said Beppo, and Ben, more taciturn,
added an expressive glance at his brother that signified profound
assent. I found their scarlet woolen caps while my friend expatiated
upon the delightful privilege of having two such fine little chaps.
Mrs. Carville at first sought, by a quick glance at her hostess, some
sympathy for her own soberer feelings in the matter. But Bill, though
not caring for children to madness, had fallen in love with these two,
and gave to them much of the credit for their pretty ways and well-bred
habits that by right belonged to their mother. And so Mrs. Carville,
seeing only corroborative enthusiasm in Bill's expression, turned to me.
"To us they are angels," I explained, laughing, "and you must permit us
to love them in our own way. It is so easy to love without
responsibility, you know."
She pondered this an instant, looking at me sombrely the while and then
illumination came, and she flashed a glance of vivid answering
intelligence and nodded.
"Yes," she said, turning to the door, and lifting the latch. "Yes," she
repeated, opening the door and looking out into the night. "It is very
easy."
And the next moment they were gone and we were alone once more.
"Gee!" said my friend, yawning. "If I'm not all in!"
"You've both got to go straight to bed," said his wife briskly. "You
won't be worthy thirty cents in the morning, and you'll just loaf round
and ..."
The telephone bell whirred and Mac closed his mouth abruptly on his
third consecutive yawn and sprang to the instrument. We sat and watched.
There was some little trouble on the line at first, common in party
lines where outside bells sometimes ring and the owners have to be
pacified. Then "Oh yes"----"Yes, I hear you----Yes" and a long
unintelligible series of affirmatives in different keys. My friend's
face and figure gradually lost all appearance of fatigue. His eyes
sharpened and glared at us over the receiver as he listened and said
"yes" with exasperating reiteration. His wife signalled dolefully to me
that it was probably a bird's-eye view, and she'd never get him up in
the morning to catch the seven o'clock. It occurred to me at the time
that bird's-eye views are not usually ordered at ten o'clock at night;
but I was too absorbed in watching my friend's expression of
bewilderment, doubt, delight and anticipation in rapid succession, and I
did no more than shrug. At length he smiled broadly, remarked, "Right.
I'll get busy. See you later, Jimmy. G'bye," and rang off. And then, to
my amazement and his wife's indignation, he threw his heels in the air
and walked across the room on his hands!
"What's the matter with you?" she asked severely. Assuming a
conventional position again, and walking up and down with his hands in
his pockets, he told us the cause of his excitement.
"It's Jimmy Larkin in the _News_ Building. He's got a big job on. Got to
go south and wait for orders. He's got a pal in the Navy at Norfolk, and
he's phoned that they'd just received a wireless from a cruiser in the
West Indies somewhere to say she'd spoken an aeroplane going north-west.
They think it's that chap--you know?--and Lord Cholme of the _Morning's_
springing something on us. Anyhow, Jimmy's got the assignment and he's
put me in too, to do some hurry-up sketches on the spot if we're lucky."
"Not to-night!" said Bill, aghast.
"Sure, to-night. I'll have to take the trolley into Newark and join
Jimmy on the New Orleans Limited there."
"Then," I said, "this is a wild-goose chase after our neighbour's
brother?"
Mac is an extremely practical man, and he merely shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe, old man. Whether it's him or somebody else, the story has to be
covered, and we're away to cover it. It might mean a staff job later for
the _News_, eh?"
"It's quite a romance," I remarked.
"Romance nothing--it's bread and butter, man! Where's my grip? Oh yes, I
remember." And he pranced away upstairs to the studio to pack the tools
of his craft. His wife, who was looking out linen and hosiery and all
the things a woman firmly believes a man can never remember for himself,
and without which he is a mere shivering forked radish, found time to
order me to bed, but was drawn away immediately into an argument
concerning the climate in the south. My friend, evidently viewing
underwear, remarked that he was going south, not north to Labrador, and
where was his seersucker suit. He was informed that his seersucker suit
had been in the rag-basket for years, and, anyway, her husband wasn't
going on a trip without adequate clothing. I reached for my boots and
put them on. It seemed to me it was my duty to see him safely into his
berth on the Limited. After some ten minutes of vigorous packing and
debate, they came down, and found me ready.
"You aren't going too?" cried Bill.
"To the train," I said. "He might fall asleep on the road."
If I had hoped to get much more information out of him by going into
Newark, I was disappointed. The question of the Carvilles and their
adventures had been wiped clean from his mind by the more immediate and
personal affair of an assignment. I am afraid that even if I had had a
part in this amusing attempt to forestall the other papers I would still
have been more interested in the airman than in the astonishing
enterprise on which he was engaged. I could not bring myself to gape at
scientific marvels. As I have said before, let Science do her worst:
humanity remains the same fascinating enigma.
And yet, as we sat in the empty, rattling car, our feet crunching the
pea-nut shells and chicle coverings of some Passaic joy-riders, and my
friend discussed with enthusiasm the probable outcome of the expedition,
I realized that, after all, I could not expect him to share my burden.
For good or ill the writer must carry with him for ever the problem of
the human soul. The plastic artist has his own problems of light, and
mass, and the like. And from this I came back circuitously to Mr.
Carville. I was puzzled to find a name for the deliberate rejection of
his responsibilities as an artist. One could not call him a renegade or
a coward, for he was neither. And yet his acceptance of an obscure
destiny had in it nothing of the sacredness of renunciation. It was
almost as though he were hoarding his soul's wealth, and adroitly
avoiding any of the pangs and labours of the spiritual life. Because it
seemed to me that, for a man of his receptivity, the normal bovine
existence of the humble folk among whom he lived was out of the
question. He knew too much, was too alive to the shifting lights and
shadows of life, to sit, like grey-haired Saturn, "quiet as a stone."
Perhaps he had some unknown ulterior ambition on which he was brooding
through the years. I had read of such cases, though I confess I always
suspect the biographer of a picturesque imagination. He sees too
clearly. He is wise after the event. It seems that the roots of a man's
virtue are hidden, after all.
We had not long to wait when we reached the station. The long, black,
heavy train rolled in and we climbed into a Pullman. A broad, red face,
with upstanding Irish hair above it, was thrust through a pair of lower
berth curtains. Mr. Larkin was known to me slightly as a "live-wire." I
explained why I had come to the opposite berth which was reserved. While
my friend was settling with the conductor, I took the opportunity to
sound Mr. Larkin, who was offering me a cigar. He nodded vigorously.
"Sure. It's that whats-his-name guy--Frank Lord he calls himself. I've
been covering all that flyin' dope in England since 'way back, and I
knew Lord Cholme had some stunt coming. Ah, that's it--Carville. Yep.
His stage name's Lord. No, he can't come all the way at one lap. You
must be crazy. He'd want a ship load of gasoline. We had it all planned
years ago. North or south he must go. Barometer's been steady now all
over the Atlantic, so he's gone south--Madeira, Azores, Barbados and so
on. Hits America in Florida maybe, where it's easy landin' among all
them bayous and swamps. Oh we'll get him all right, don't you worry."
"And where do you stop?" I asked.
"Rocky Mount, if we get no news beforehand."
I got out, and the train moved off on the ninety-mile spin to
Philadelphia. I wondered if I had displayed a genuine sporting interest.
I was very tired, and the four-mile journey in the trolley-car was
tedious. As I passed the dark house next door, Mrs. Carville's voice
came back to me as she caught the meaning of my words that evening. I
had said it was easy to love without responsibility, and she had
answered with an eagerness of assent that I could not forget. I had at
times experienced the evanescent and perilous temptations of that love
that needs no understanding, the love that lights no torch, and is but a
vagrom fancy crossing the beaten tracks of life ... for an instant I
stood, with the key in my hand, and pondered the next house and the
sombre secret of which it was the symbol. On the horizon the great light
on the Metropolitan Tower flashed the hour of midnight.
As I let myself in, it occurred to me that Mr. Carville would be
walking to and fro, smoking a meditative pipe beneath the stars, his
thoughts, no doubt, flying westward like enigmatic night-birds, and
hovering above the home towards which he was speeding.