convalescents balanced themselves on the rail, shivering in their
pajamas, and pointed one way. The transport was moving swiftly and
smoothly through water as flat as a lake, and making a great noise
with her steam-whistle. The noise was echoed by many more
steam-whistles; and the ghosts of out-bound ships and tugs and
excursion steamers ran past her out of the mist and disappeared,
saluting joyously. All of the excursion steamers had a heavy list to
the side nearest the transport, and the ghosts on them crowded to that
rail and waved handkerchiefs and cheered. The fog lifted suddenly, and
between the iron rails the Lieutenant saw high green hills on either
side of a great harbor. Houses and trees and thousands of masts swept
past like a panorama; and beyond was a mirage of three cities, with
curling smoke-wreaths and sky-reaching buildings, and a great swinging
bridge, and a giant statue of a woman waving a welcome home.
The Lieutenant surveyed the spectacle with cynical disbelief. He was
far too wise and far too cunning to be bewitched by it. In his heart
he pitied the men about him, who laughed wildly, and shouted, and
climbed recklessly to the rails and ratlines. He had been deceived too
often not to know that it was not real. He knew from cruel experience
that in a few moments the tall buildings would crumble away, the
thousands of columns of white smoke that flashed like snow in the sun,
the busy, shrieking tug-boats, and the great statue would vanish into
the sea, leaving it gray and bare. He closed his eyes and shut the
vision out. It was so beautiful that it tempted him; but he would not
be mocked, and he buried his face in his hands. They were carrying the
farce too far, he thought. It was really too absurd; for now they were
at a wharf which was so real that, had he not known by previous
suffering, he would have been utterly deceived by it. And there were
great crowds of smiling, cheering people, and a waiting guard of honor
in fresh uniforms, and rows of police pushing the people this way and
that; and these men about him were taking it all quite seriously, and
making ready to disembark, carrying their blanket-rolls and rifles
with them.
A band was playing joyously, and the man in the next cot, who was
being lifted to a stretcher, said, "There's the Governor and his
staff; that's him in the high hat." It was really very well done. The
Custom-House and the Elevated Railroad and Castle Garden were as like
to life as a photograph, and the crowd was as well handled as a mob in
a play. His heart ached for it so that he could not bear the pain, and
he turned his back on it. It was cruel to keep it up so long. His
keeper lifted him in his arms, and pulled him into a dirty uniform
which had belonged, apparently, to a much larger man--a man who had
been killed probably, for there were dark brown marks of blood on the
tunic and breeches. When he tried to stand on his feet, Castle Garden
and the Battery disappeared in a black cloud of night, just as he knew
they would; but when he opened his eyes from the stretcher, they had
returned again. It was a most remarkably vivid vision. They kept it up
so well. Now the young Doctor and the hospital steward were pretending
to carry him down a gangplank and into an open space; and he saw quite
close to him a long line policemen, and behind them thousands of
faces, some of them women's faces--women who pointed at him and then
shook their heads and cried, and pressed their hands to their cheeks,
still looking at him. He wondered why they cried. He did not know
them, nor did they know him. No one knew him; these people were only
ghosts.
There was a quick parting in the crowd. A man he had once known shoved
two of the policemen to one side, and he heard a girl's voice speaking
his name, like a sob; and She came running out across the open space
and fell on her knees beside the stretcher, and bent down over him,
and he was clasped in two young, firm arms.
"Of course it is not real, of course it is not She," he assured
himself. "Because She would not do such a thing. Before all these
people She would not do it."
But he trembled and his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could not
bear the pain.
She was pretending to cry.
"They wired us you had started for Tampa on the hospital ship," She
was saying, "and Aunt and I went all the way there before we heard you
had been sent North. We have been on the cars a week. That is why I
missed you. Do you understand? It was not my fault. I tried to come.
Indeed, I tried to come."
She turned her head and looked up fearfully at the young Doctor.
"Tell me, why does he look at me like that?" she asked. "He doesn't
know me. Is he very ill? Tell me the truth." She drew in her breath
quickly. "Of course you will tell me the truth."
When she asked the question he felt her arms draw tight about his
shoulders. It was as though she was holding him to herself, and from
some one who had reached out for him. In his trouble he turned to his
old friend and keeper. His voice was hoarse and very low.
"Is this the same young lady who was on the transport--the one you
used to drive away?"
In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan, and
stammered.
"Of course it's the same young lady," the Doctor answered, briskly.
"And I won't let them drive her away." He turned to her, smiling
gravely. "I think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, madam," he
said.
People who in a former existence had been his friends, and Her
brother, gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd
and lifted him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he
sank lower and lower. Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her
brother say to the coachman, "Home, and drive slowly and keep on the
asphalt."
The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him, and his
head fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The vision had
lasted so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it
might be real. But he could not bear the awakening if it were not, so
he raised his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful eyes
above him. His brows were knit, and he struggled with a great doubt
and an awful joy.
"Dearest," he said, "is it real?"
"Is it real?" she repeated.
Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied
if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.
"Do you think," he begged again, trembling, "that it is going to last
much longer?"
She smiled, and, bending her head slowly, kissed him.
"It is going to last--always," she said.
THE LION AND THE UNICORN
Prentiss had a long lease on the house, and because it stood in Jermyn
Street the upper floors were, as a matter of course, turned into
lodgings for single gentlemen; and because Prentiss was a Florist to
the Queen, he placed a lion and unicorn over his flower-shop, just in
front of the middle window on the first floor. By stretching a little,
each of them could see into the window just beyond him, and could hear
all that was said inside; and such things as they saw and heard during
the reign of Captain Carrington, who moved in at the same time they
did! By day the table in the centre of the room was covered with maps,
and the Captain sat with a box of pins, with different-colored flags
wrapped around them, and amused himself by sticking them in the maps
and measuring the spaces in between, swearing meanwhile to himself. It
was a selfish amusement, but it appeared to be the Captain's only
intellectual pursuit, for at night the maps were rolled up, and a
green cloth was spread across the table, and there was much company
and popping of soda-bottles, and little heaps of gold and silver were
moved this way and that across the cloth. The smoke drifted out of the
open windows, and the laughter of the Captain's guests rang out loudly
in the empty street, so that the policeman halted and raised his eyes
reprovingly to the lighted windows, and cabmen drew up beneath them
and lay in wait, dozing on their folded arms, for the Captain's guests
to depart. The Lion and the Unicorn were rather ashamed of the scandal
of it, and they were glad when, one day, the Captain went away with
his tin boxes and gun-cases piled high on a four-wheeler.
Prentiss stood on the sidewalk and said, "I wish you good luck, sir."
And the Captain said, "I'm coming back a Major, Prentiss." But he
never came back. And one day--the Lion remembered the day very well,
for on that same day the newsboys ran up and down Jermyn Street
shouting out the news of "a 'orrible disaster" to the British arms. It
was then that a young lady came to the door in a hansom, and Prentiss
went out to meet her and led her up-stairs. They heard him unlock the
Captain's door and say, "This is his room, miss," and after he had
gone they watched her standing quite still by the centre-table. She
stood there a very long time looking slowly about her, and then she
took a photograph of the Captain from the frame on the mantel and
slipped it into her pocket, and when she went out again her veil was
down, and she was crying. She must have given Prentiss as much as a
sovereign, for he called her "Your ladyship," which he never did under
a sovereign.
And she drove off, and they never saw her again either, nor could they
hear the address she gave the cabman. But it was somewhere up St.
John's Wood way.
After that the rooms were empty for some months, and the Lion and the
Unicorn were forced to amuse themselves with the beautiful ladies and
smart-looking men who came to Prentiss to buy flowers-and
"buttonholes," and the little round baskets of strawberries, and even
the peaches at three shillings each, which looked so tempting as they
lay in the window, wrapped up in cotton-wool, like jewels of great
price.
Then Philip Carroll, the American gentleman, came, and they heard
Prentiss telling him that those rooms had always let for five guineas
a week, which they knew was not true; but they also knew that in the
economy of nations there must always be a higher price for the rich
American, or else why was he given that strange accent, except to
betray him into the hands of the London shopkeeper, and the London
cabby?
The American walked to the window toward the west, which was the
window nearest the Lion, and looked out into the graveyard of St.
James's Church, that stretched between their street and Piccadilly.
"You're lucky in having a bit of green to look out on," he said to
Prentiss. "I'll take these rooms--at five guineas. That's more than
they're worth, you know, but as I know it, too, your conscience
needn't trouble you."
Then his eyes fell on the Lion, and he nodded to him gravely. "How do
you do?" he said. "I'm coming to live with you for a little time. I
have read about you and your friends over there. It is a hazard of new
fortunes with me, your Majesty, so be kind to me, and if I win, I will
put a new coat of paint on your shield and gild you all over again."
Prentiss smiled obsequiously at the American's pleasantry, but the new
lodger only stared at him.
"He seemed a social gentleman," said the Unicorn, that night, when the
Lion and he were talking it over. "Now the Captain, the whole time he
was here, never gave us so much as a look. This one says he has read
of us."
"And why not?" growled the Lion. "I hope Prentiss heard what he said
of our needing a new layer of gilt. It's disgraceful. You can see that
Lion over Scarlett's, the butcher, as far as Regent Street, and
Scarlett is only one of Salisbury's creations. He received his
Letters-Patent only two years back. We date from Palmerston."
The lodger came up the street just at that moment, and stopped and
looked up at the Lion and the Unicorn from the sidewalk, before he
opened the door with his night-key. They heard him enter the room and
feel on the mantel for his pipe, and a moment later he appeared at the
Lion's window and leaned on the sill, looking down into the street
below and blowing whiffs of smoke up into the warm night-air.
It was a night in June, and the pavements were dry under foot and the
streets were filled with well-dressed people, going home from the
play, and with groups of men in black and white, making their way to
supper at the clubs. Hansoms of inky-black, with shining lamps inside
and out, dashed noiselessly past on mysterious errands, chasing close
on each other's heels on a mad race, each to its separate goal. From
the cross streets rose the noises of early night, the rumble of the
'buses, the creaking of their brakes as they unlocked, the cries of
the "extras," and the merging of thousands of human voices in a dull
murmur. The great world of London was closing its shutters for the
night and putting out the lights; and the new lodger from across the
sea listened to it with his heart beating quickly, and laughed to
stifle the touch of fear and homesickness that rose in him.
"I have seen a great play to-night," he said to the Lion, "nobly
played by great players. What will they care for my poor wares? I see
that I have been over-bold. But we cannot go back now--not yet."
He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and nodded "good-night" to the
great world beyond his window. "What fortunes lie with ye, ye lights
of London town?" he quoted, smiling. And they heard him close the door
of his bedroom, and lock it for the night.
The next morning he bought many geraniums from Prentiss and placed
them along the broad cornice that stretched across the front of the
house over the shop-window. The flowers made a band of scarlet on
either side of the Lion as brilliant as a Tommy's jacket.
"I am trying to propitiate the British Lion by placing flowers before
his altar," the American said that morning to a visitor.
"The British public, you mean," said the visitor; "they are each
likely to tear you to pieces."
"Yes, I have heard that the pit on the first night of a bad play is
something awful," hazarded the American.
"Wait and see," said the visitor.
"Thank you," said the American, meekly.
Every one who came to the first floor front talked about a play. It
seemed to be something of great moment to the American. It was only a
bundle of leaves printed in red and black inks and bound in brown
paper covers. There were two of them, and the American called them by
different names: one was his comedy and one was his tragedy.
"They are both likely to be tragedies," the Lion heard one of the
visitors say to another, as they drove away together. "Our young
friend takes it too seriously."
The American spent most of his time by his desk at the window writing
on little blue pads and tearing up what he wrote, or in reading over
one of the plays to himself in a loud voice. In time the number of his
visitors increased, and to some of these he would read his play; and
after they had left him he was either depressed and silent or excited
and jubilant. The Lion could always tell when he was happy because
then he would go to the side table and pour himself out a drink and
say, "Here's to me," but when he was depressed he would stand holding
the glass in his hand, and finally pour the liquor back into the
bottle again and say, "What's the use of that?"
After he had been in London a month he wrote less and was more
frequently abroad, sallying forth in beautiful raiment, and coming
home by daylight.
And he gave suppers, too, but they were less noisy than the Captain's
had been, and the women who came to them were much more beautiful, and
their voices when they spoke were sweet and low. Sometimes one of the
women sang, and the men sat in silence while the people in the street
below stopped to listen, and would say, "Why, that is So-and-So
singing," and the Lion and the Unicorn wondered how they could know
who it was when they could not see her.
The lodger's visitors came to see him at all hours. They seemed to
regard his rooms as a club, where they could always come for a bite to
eat or to write notes; and others treated it like a lawyer's office
and asked advice on all manner of strange subjects. Sometimes the
visitor wanted to know whether the American thought she ought to take
£10 a week and go on tour, or stay in town and try to live on £8; or
whether she should paint landscapes that would not sell, or
race-horses that would; or whether Reggie really loved her and whether
she really loved Reggie; or whether the new part in the piece at the
Court was better than the old part at Terry's, and wasn't she getting
too old to play "ingenues" anyway.
The lodger seemed to be a general adviser, and smoked and listened
with grave consideration, and the Unicorn thought his judgment was
most sympathetic and sensible.
Of all the beautiful ladies who came to call on the lodger the one the
Unicorn liked the best was the one who wanted to know whether she
loved Reggie and whether Reggie loved her. She discussed this so
interestingly while she consumed tea and thin slices of bread that the
Unicorn almost lost his balance in leaning forward to listen. Her name
was Marion Cavendish, and it was written over many photographs which
stood in silver frames in the lodger's rooms. She used to make the tea
herself, while the lodger sat and smoked; and she had a fascinating
way of doubling the thin slices of bread into long strips and nibbling
at them like a mouse at a piece of cheese. She had wonderful little
teeth and Cupid's-bow lips, and she had a fashion of lifting her veil
only high enough for one to see the two Cupid's-bow lips. When she did
that the American used to laugh, at nothing apparently, and say, "Oh,
I guess Reggie loves you well enough."
"But do I love Reggie?" she would ask, sadly, with her teacup held
poised in air.
[Illustration: Consumed tea and thin slices of bread.]
"I am sure I hope not," the lodger would reply, and she would put down
the veil quickly, as one would drop a curtain over a beautiful
picture, and rise with great dignity and say, "If you talk like that I
shall not come again."
She was sure that if she could only get some work to do her head would
be filled with more important matters than whether Reggie loved her or
not.
"But the managers seem inclined to cut their cavendish very fine just
at present," she said. "If I don't get a part soon," she announced, "I
shall ask Mitchell to put me down on the list for recitations at
evening parties."
"That seems a desperate revenge," said the American; "and besides, I
don't want you to get a part, because some one might be idiotic enough
to take my comedy, and if he should, you must play _Nancy_."
"I would not ask for any salary if I could play _Nancy_," Miss
Cavendish answered.
They spoke of a great many things, but their talk always ended by her
saying that there must be some one with sufficient sense to see that
his play was a great play, and by his saying that none but she must
play _Nancy_.
The Lion preferred the tall girl with masses and folds of brown hair,
who came from America to paint miniatures of the British aristocracy.
Her name was Helen Cabot, and he liked her because she was so brave
and fearless, and so determined to be independent of every one, even
of the lodger--especially of the lodger, who, it appeared, had known
her very well at home. The lodger, they gathered, did not wish her to
be independent of him, and the two Americans had many arguments and
disputes about it, but she always said, "It does no good, Philip; it
only hurts us both when you talk so. I care for nothing, and for no
one but my art, and, poor as it is, it means everything to me, and you
do not, and, of course, the man I am to marry must." Then Carroll
would talk, walking up and down, and looking very fierce and
determined, and telling her how he loved her in such a way that it
made her look even more proud and beautiful. And she would say more
gently, "It is very fine to think that any one can care for me like
that, and very helpful. But unless I cared in the same way it would be
wicked of me to marry you, and besides--" She would add very quickly
to prevent his speaking again--"I don't want to marry you or anybody,
and I never shall. I want to be free and to succeed in my work, just
as you want to succeed in your work. So please never speak of this
again." When she went away the lodger used to sit smoking in the big
arm-chair and beat the arms with his hands, and he would pace up and
down the room, while his work would lie untouched and his engagements
pass forgotten.
Summer came and London was deserted, dull, and dusty, but the lodger
stayed on in Jermyn Street. Helen Cabot had departed on a round of
visits to country-houses in Scotland, where, as she wrote him, she was
painting miniatures of her hosts and studying the game of golf. Miss
Cavendish divided her days between the river and one of the West End
theatres. She was playing a small part in a farce-comedy.
One day she came up from Cookham earlier than usual, looking very
beautiful in a white boating-frock and a straw hat with a Leander
ribbon. Her hands and arms were hard with dragging a punting-hole, and
she was sunburnt and happy, and hungry for tea.
"Why don't you come down to Cookham and get out of this heat?" Miss
Cavendish asked. "You need it; you look ill."
"I'd like to, but I can't," said Carroll. "The fact is, I paid in
advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I'd be losing
five guineas a week on them."
Miss Cavendish regarded him severely. She had never quite mastered his
American humor.
"But--five guineas--why, that's nothing to you," she said. Something
in the lodger's face made her pause. "You don't mean--"
"Yes, I do," said the lodger, smiling. "You see, I started in to lay
siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large town,
and it didn't fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am
economizing. Mr. Lockhart's Coffee Rooms and I are no longer
strangers."
Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him.
"Are you in earnest?" she asked. "For how long?"
"Oh, for the last month," replied the lodger; "they are not at all
bad--clean and wholesome and all that."
"But the suppers you gave us, and this," she cried, suddenly, waving
her hands over the pretty tea-things, "and the cake and muffins?"
"My friends, at least," said Carroll, "need not go to Lockhart's."
"And the Savoy?" asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head. "A
dream of the past," said Carroll, waving his pipe through the smoke.
"Gatti's? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity the
Chancellor's, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old
England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence--a pot of bitter
twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It's most amusing on
the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about
myself. They are both most interesting subjects."
"Well, I don't like it," Miss Cavendish declared, helplessly. "When I
think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel--I feel like a robber."
"Don't," begged Carroll. "I am really the most happy of men--that is,
as the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn't so damned
miserable. But I owe no man a penny and I have assets--I have £80 to
last me through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next
to yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That's enough."
"But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?" asked Miss
Cavendish.
"I do--that is, I could," answered Carroll, "if I wrote the things
that sell; but I keep on writing plays that won't."
"And such plays!" exclaimed Marion, warmly; "and to think that they
are going begging!" She continued, indignantly, "I can't imagine what
the managers do want."
"I know what they don't want," said the American. Miss Cavendish
drummed impatiently on the tea-tray.
"I wish you wouldn't be so abject about it," she said. "If I were a
man I'd make them take those plays."
"How?" asked the American; "with a gun?"
"Well, I'd keep at it until they read them," declared Marion. "I'd sit
on their front steps all night and I'd follow them in cabs, and I'd
lie in wait for them at the stage-door. I'd just make them take them."
Carroll sighed and stared at the ceiling. "I guess I'll give up and go
home," he said.
"Oh, yes, do, run away before you are beaten," said Miss Cavendish,
scornfully. "Why, you can't go now. Everybody will be back in town
soon, and there are a lot of new plays coming on, and some of them are
sure to be failures, and that's our chance. You rush in with your
piece, and somebody may take it sooner than close the theatre."
"I'm thinking of closing the theatre myself," said Carroll. "What's
the use of my hanging on here?" he exclaimed. "It distresses Helen to
know I am in London, feeling about her as I do--and the Lord only
knows how it distresses me. And, maybe, if I went away," he said,
consciously, "she might miss me. She might see the difference."