PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART I

I

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the

Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme

intimacy—or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet

as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain

and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet,

in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe,

a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today,

when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew

nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and,

certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had

known the shallows.

I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English

people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we

perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we

were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer

English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and

Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always

received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement

that one of us had, as the saying is, a "heart", and, from the statement

that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so

at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the

twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep poor

Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was,

approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The

reason for poor Florence's broken years was a storm at sea upon our

first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment

in that continent were doctor's orders. They said that even the short

Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an

India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham

—Leonora—was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus

today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham forty-

two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive,

therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair,

since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams

being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call "quite

good people".

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham

who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect

with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it. Mrs

Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford,

Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even

the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a

Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there are

more old English families than you would find in any six English

counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed—as if it were the

only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe—the

title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks between

Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the grant

of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in

company with William Penn. Florence's people, as is so often the case

with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the neighbourhood of

Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams' place is. From there, at this

moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it

is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or

the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have

witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely

remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole

sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of

our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event.

Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the

little tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking

tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said

that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We

were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a

blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of

all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men

to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?

Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's gone. I can't believe that

that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in

four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word,

yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible

occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where

to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and

go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to

the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if

it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't

kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the

harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white

satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but

surely the minuet—the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the

furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be

stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful

dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any

Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen

into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and

everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a

prison—a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they

might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along

the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It

was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from

the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the

same tastes, with the same desires, acting—or, no, not acting—sitting

here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I

have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover

its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't

it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may

well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear

Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that

the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square house

never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It

doesn't so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead.

I don't know....

I know nothing—nothing in the world—of the hearts of men. I only know

that I am alone—horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness,

for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than

peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet, in the

name of God, what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth

and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those

places? The warm hearthside!—Well, there was Florence: I believe that

for the twelve years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed

irretrievably to have weakened her heart—I don't believe that for one

minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in

bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other in

some lounge or smoking-room or taking my final turn with a cigar before

going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence. But how can she

have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it? To know it

so fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been the actual time. It

must have been when I was taking my baths, and my Swedish exercises,

being manicured. Leading the life I did, of the sedulous, strained

nurse, I had to do something to keep myself fit. It must have been then!

Yet even that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long

conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to me

since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our

prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found time to

carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on between

Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible that during all

that time Edward and Leonora never spoke a word to each other in

private? What is one to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted as

it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up, with

such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm

goodheartedness! And she—so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair!

Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real

thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don't, I mean, as a rule,

get it all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look

the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be

so perfect in manner—even just to the saving touch of insolence that

seems to be necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was

too good to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the

whole matter she said to me: "Once I tried to have a lover but I was so

sick at the heart, so utterly worn out that I had to send him away."

That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She said "I

was actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such a dear fellow! And

I was saying to myself, fiercely, hissing it between my teeth, as they

say in novels—and really clenching them together: I was saying to

myself: 'Now, I'm in for it and I'll really have a good time for once in

my life—for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming

back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly

the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting—it fell on

me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had

been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying

and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me

crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like

that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now?"

I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark of a

harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county

family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for

the matter of that? Who knows?

Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of

civilization to which we have attained, after all the preachings of all

the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the

daughters in saecula saeculorum... but perhaps that is what all mothers

teach all daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or with heart

whispering to heart. And, if one doesn't know as much as that about the

first thing in the world, what does one know and why is one here?

I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what

Florence had said and she answered:—"Florence didn't offer any comment

at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said. With the

grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the

way the poverty came about—you know what I mean—any woman would have

been justified in taking a lover and presents too. Florence once said

about a very similar position—she was a little too well-bred, too

American, to talk about mine—that it was a case of perfectly open riding

and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said it in

American of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her actual

words were: 'That it was up to her to take it or leave it....'"

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a

brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that.

For as I've said what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fellows come

in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories—so gross that they

will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you

suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife

alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended—that is if

you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow

obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross

stories—more delight than in anything else in the world. They'll hunt

languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without

enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation

about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation

begins, they'll laugh and wake up and throw themselves about in their

chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible

that they can be offended—and properly offended—at the suggestion that

they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again: Edward

Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;—an excellent

magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they

said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I

myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never

told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the Field more

than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't

even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a

cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just

exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And

I trusted mine and it was madness.

And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was dangerous because of the

chastity of his expressions—and they say that is always the hall-mark of

a libertine—what about myself? For I solemnly avow that not only have I

never so much as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in the

whole of my days; and more than that, I will vouch for the cleanness of

my thoughts and the absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does it

all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better

than a eunuch or is the proper man—the man with the right to existence—a

raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is so

nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is

there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal

contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on

impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

II

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be

better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a

story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached

me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the

fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And

I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the

distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright

stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out

at the great moon and say: "Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!"

And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a

sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories

are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago

Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black

Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense

pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles—Las Tours, the Towers. And

the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from France

into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like hair

flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron rocks

that they might not be torn up by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las Tours. You

are to imagine that, however much her bright personality came from

Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never

could imagine how she did it—the queer, chattery person that she was.

With the far-away look in her eyes—which wasn't, however, in the least

romantic—I mean that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic

dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at

you!—holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection—or

any comment for the matter of that—she would talk. She would talk about

William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks,

about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the

Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe, about whether it would be worth

while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept suspension-

bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course—beautiful

Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as thin as

a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and

Broadway—Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle

surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of

the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine is!...

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin,

not to Verona, not to Mont Majour—not so much as to Carcassonne itself.

We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out

of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I

want to return—towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines

against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted

with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little

saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or

so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.

Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for

me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't

so I should have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,

the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell me

anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life

it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was

bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles

and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modistes and over

the plages of the Riviera—like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from

water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright

thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch

with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in

Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the New

England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me when I

called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial, wooden house

beneath the high, thin-leaved elms—the first question they asked me was

not how I did but what did I do. And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to

have done something, but I didn't see any call to do it. Why does one do

things? I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on

Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth

Street, which was then still residential. I don't know why I had gone to

New York; I don't know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why

Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the

place at which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate.

I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and

did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that

was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more

elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her lecture

Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between a Franz Hals and

a Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs

on the top. I wonder what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole

endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds

at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep

her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed

that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really

stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to

watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had

to head it off what the English call "things"—off love, poverty, crime,

religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she

was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done.

Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a

freemasonry between all of them from end to end of the earth?... That is

what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her towards

culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh,

and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love. Do you know

the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche

Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of commendation, La Louve—the

She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to La Louve. And

she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So, out of compliment to

her—the things people do when they're in love!—he dressed himself up in

wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains. And the shepherds of the

Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn

with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried him back to Las

Tours and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They polished him up and her

husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you see, a great

poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet with indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere and

the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve

wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to

redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a rock somewhere, and, at

great expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him

back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the Lady's bed while the husband,

who was a most ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the

courtesy that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more

ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a

story?

You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's

aunts—the Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily

lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and with a "heart" that made

his life very much what Florence's afterwards became. He didn't reside

at Stamford; his home was in Waterbury where the watches come from. He

had a factory there which, in our queer American way, would change its

functions almost from year to year. For nine months or so it would

manufacture buttons out of bone. Then it would suddenly produce brass

buttons for coachmen's liveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed

tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman, with

his weak and fluttering heart, didn't want his factory to manufacture

anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was

seventy. But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town

point after him and exclaim: "There goes the laziest man in Waterbury!"

that he tried taking a tour round the world. And Florence and a young

man called Jimmy went with him. It appears from what Florence told me

that Jimmy's function with Mr Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for

him. He had to keep him, for instance, out of political discussions. For

the poor old man was a violent Democrat in days when you might travel

the world over without finding anything but a Republican. Anyhow, they

went round the world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what

the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that you should

know what the old gentleman was; he had a great deal of influence in

forming the character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old Mr

Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little presents to

people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the things to take

for that purpose were oranges—because California is the orange

country—and comfortable folding chairs. So he bought I don't know how

many cases of oranges—the great cool California oranges, and half-a-

dozen folding chairs in a special case that he always kept in his cabin.

There must have been half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they employed—to

every person with whom he had so much as a nodding acquaintance, he gave

an orange every morning. And they lasted him right round the girdle of

this mighty globe of ours. When they were at North Cape, even, he saw on

the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a lighthouse. "Hello," says

he to himself, "these fellows must be very lonely. Let's take them some

oranges." So he had a boatload of his fruit out and had himself rowed to

the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chairs he lent to any lady

that he came across and liked or who seemed tired and invalidish on the

ship. And so, guarded against his heart and, having his niece with him,

he went round the world....

He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn't have known he had one.

He only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the benefit

of science, since he considered it to be quite an extraordinary kind of

heart. And the joke of the matter was that, when, at the age of eighty-

four, just five days before poor Florence, he died of bronchitis there

was found to be absolutely nothing the matter with that organ. It had

certainly jumped or squeaked or something just sufficiently to take in

the doctors, but it appears that that was because of an odd formation of

the lungs. I don't much understand about these matters.

I inherited his money because Florence died five days after him. I wish

I hadn't. It was a great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury just after

Florence's death because the poor dear old fellow had left a good many

charitable bequests and I had to appoint trustees. I didn't like the

idea of their not being properly handled.

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had got things roughly settled

I received the extraordinary cable from Ashburnham begging me to come

back and have a talk with him. And immediately afterwards came one from

Leonora saying, "Yes, please do come. You could be so helpful." It was

as if he had sent the cable without consulting her and had afterwards

told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened, except that he

had told the girl and the girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too

late to be of any good if I could have been of any good. And then I had

my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I

never shall forget the polished cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the

animal's action, its high-stepping, its skin that was like satin. And

the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful, beautiful old house.

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we descended on it from the high,

clear, windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell you it was amazing to

arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my head—for Teddy

Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me to "come and have a talk"

with him—that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous

could happen to that place and those people. I tell you it was the very

spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of

yellow hair, stood on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a

maid or so behind her. And she just said: "So glad you've come," as if

I'd run down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having come

half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think. And that poor devil beside me

was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the mind

of man to imagine.

III

IT was a very hot summer, in August, 1904; and Florence had already been

taking the baths for a month. I don't know how it feels to be a patient

at one of those places. I never was a patient anywhere. I daresay the

patients get a home feeling and some sort of anchorage in the spot. They

seem to like the bath attendants, with their cheerful faces, their air

of authority, their white linen. But, for myself, to be at Nauheim gave

me a sense—what shall I say?—a sense almost of nakedness—the nakedness

that one feels on the sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no

attachments, no accumulations. In one's own home it is as if little,

innate sympathies draw one to particular chairs that seem to enfold one

in an embrace, or take one along particular streets that seem friendly

when others may be hostile. And, believe me, that feeling is a very

important part of life. I know it well, that have been for so long a

wanderer upon the face of public resorts. And one is too polished up.

Heaven knows I was never an untidy man. But the feeling that I had when,

whilst poor Florence was taking her morning bath, I stood upon the

carefully swept steps of the Englischer Hof, looking at the carefully

arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully arranged gravel whilst

carefully arranged people walked past in carefully calculated gaiety, at

the carefully calculated hour, the tall trees of the public gardens,

going up to the right; the reddish stone of the baths—or were they white

half-timber châlets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I who was there so

often. That will give you the measure of how much I was in the

landscape. I could find my way blindfolded to the hot rooms, to the

douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of the quadrangle where the

rusty water gushes out. Yes, I could find my way blindfolded. I know the

exact distances. From the Hotel Regina you took one hundred and eighty-

seven paces, then, turning sharp, left-handed, four hundred and twenty

took you straight down to the fountain. From the Englischer Hof,

starting on the sidewalk, it was ninety-seven paces and the same four

hundred and twenty, but turning lefthanded this time.

And now you understand that, having nothing in the world to do—but

nothing whatever! I fell into the habit of counting my footsteps. I

would walk with Florence to the baths. And, of course, she entertained

me with her conversation. It was, as I have said, wonderful what she

could make conversation out of. She walked very lightly, and her hair

was very nicely done, and she dressed beautifully and very expensively.

Of course she had money of her own, but I shouldn't have minded. And yet

you know I can't remember a single one of her dresses. Or I can remember

just one, a very simple one of blue figured silk—a Chinese pattern—very

full in the skirts and broadening out over the shoulders. And her hair

was copper-coloured, and the heels of her shoes were exceedingly high,

so that she tripped upon the points of her toes. And when she came to

the door of the bathing place, and when it opened to receive her, she

would look back at me with a little coquettish smile, so that her cheek

appeared to be caressing her shoulder.

I seem to remember that, with that dress, she wore an immensely broad

Leghorn hat—like the Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only very white. The

hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of the same stuff as her

dress. She knew how to give value to her blue eyes. And round her neck

would be some simple pink, coral beads. And her complexion had a perfect

clearness, a perfect smoothness...

Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her, in that dress, in that

hat, looking over her shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very

blue—dark pebble blue...

And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she do it? For that of the

bath attendant? of the passers-by? I don't know. Anyhow, it can't have

been for me, for never, in all the years of her life, never on any

possible occasion, or in any other place did she so smile to me,

mockingly, invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then, all other women

are riddles. And it occurs to me that some way back I began a sentence

that I have never finished... It was about the feeling that I had when I

stood on the steps of my hotel every morning before starting out to

fetch Florence back from the bath. Natty, precise, well-brushed,

conscious of being rather small amongst the long English, the lank

Americans, the rotund Germans, and the obese Russian Jewesses, I should

stand there, tapping a cigarette on the outside of my case, surveying

for a moment the world in the sunlight. But a day was to come when I was

never to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore, what the coming

of the Ashburnhams meant to me. I have forgotten the aspect of many

things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the

Hotel Excelsior on that evening—and on so many other evenings. Whole

castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never

visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits

and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round

the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm-

tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter's feet; the cold

expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every

evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal

prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they

must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not

easily forget. And then, one evening, in the twilight, I saw Edward

Ashburnham lounge round the screen into the room. The head waiter, a man

with a face all grey—in what subterranean nooks or corners do people

cultivate those absolutely grey complexions?—went with the timorous

patronage of these creatures towards him and held out a grey ear to be

whispered into. It was generally a disagreeable ordeal for newcomers but

Edward Ashburnham bore it like an Englishman and a gentleman. I could

see his lips form a word of three syllables—remember I had nothing in

the world to do but to notice these niceties—and immediately I knew that

he must be Edward Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of Branshaw

House, Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it because every evening just before

dinner, whilst I waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of Monsieur

Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the little police reports that each

guest was expected to sign upon taking a room.

The head waiter piloted him immediately to a vacant table, three away

from my own—the table that the Grenfalls of Falls River, N.J., had just

vacated. It struck me that that was not a very nice table for the

newcomers, since the sunlight, low though it was, shone straight down

upon it, and the same idea seemed to come at the same moment into

Captain Ashburnham's head. His face hitherto had, in the wonderful

English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it

neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor

satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he

might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect

expression before and I never shall again. It was insolence and not

insolence; it was modesty and not modesty. His hair was fair,

extraordinarily ordered in a wave, running from the left temple to the

right; his face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in tint up to

the roots of the hair itself; his yellow moustache was as stiff as a

toothbrush and I verily believe that he had his black smoking jacket

thickened a little over the shoulder-blades so as to give himself the

air of the slightest possible stoop. It would be like him to do that;

that was the sort of thing he thought about. Martingales, Chiffney bits,

boots; where you got the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the

chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the spreading power of

number three shot before a charge of number four powder... by heavens, I

hardly ever heard him talk of anything else. Not in all the years that I

knew him did I hear him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh, yes,

once he told me that I could buy my special shade of blue ties cheaper

from a firm in Burlington Arcade than from my own people in New York.

And I have bought my ties from that firm ever since. Otherwise I should

not remember the name of the Burlington Arcade. I wonder what it looks

like. I have never seen it. I imagine it to be two immense rows of

pillars, like those of the Forum at Rome, with Edward Ashburnham

striding down between them. But it probably isn't—the least like that.

Once also he advised me to buy Caledonian Deferred, since they were due

to rise. And I did buy them and they did rise. But of how he got the

knowledge I haven't the faintest idea. It seemed to drop out of the blue

sky.

And that was absolutely all that I knew of him until a month ago—that

and the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and stamped with his

initials, E. F. A. There were gun cases, and collar cases, and shirt

cases, and letter cases and cases each containing four bottles of

medicine; and hat cases and helmet cases. It must have needed a whole

herd of the Gadarene swine to make up his outfit. And, if I ever

penetrated into his private room it would be to see him standing, with

his coat and waistcoat off and the immensely long line of his perfectly

elegant trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly

reflective air and he would be just opening one kind of case and just

closing another.

Good God, what did they all see in him? for I swear there was all there

was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet,

Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an agony, and hated him

with an agony that was as bitter as the sea. How could he arouse

anything like a sentiment, in anybody?

What did he even talk to them about—when they were under four eyes?—Ah,

well, suddenly, as if by a flash of inspiration, I know. For all good

soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers of that type. Their

profession, for one thing, is full of the big words, courage, loyalty,

honour, constancy. And I have given a wrong impression of Edward

Ashburnham if I have made you think that literally never in the course

of our nine years of intimacy did he discuss what he would have called

"the graver things." Even before his final outburst to me, at times,

very late at night, say, he has blurted out something that gave an

insight into the sentimental view of the cosmos that was his. He would

say how much the society of a good woman could do towards redeeming you,

and he would say that constancy was the finest of the virtues. He said

it very stiffly, of course, but still as if the statement admitted of no

doubt.

Constancy! Isn't that the queer thought? And yet, I must add that poor

dear Edward was a great reader—he would pass hours lost in novels of a

sentimental type—novels in which typewriter girls married Marquises and

governesses Earls. And in his books, as a rule, the course of true love

ran as smooth as buttered honey. And he was fond of poetry, of a certain

type—and he could even read a perfectly sad love story. I have seen his

eyes filled with tears at reading of a hopeless parting. And he loved,

with a sentimental yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble

generally... .

So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle about to a woman—with that

and his sound common sense about martingales and his—still

sentimental—experiences as a county magistrate; and with his intense,

optimistic belief that the woman he was making love to at the moment was

the one he was destined, at last, to be eternally constant to.... Well,

I fancy he could put up a pretty good deal of talk when there was no man

around to make him feel shy. And I was quite astonished, during his

final burst out to me—at the very end of things, when the poor girl was

on her way to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself

and me that he had never really cared for her—I was quite astonished to

observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked like

quite a good book—a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see,

I suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded as a

woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it burst out of him on that horrible

night. And then, next morning, he took me over to the Assizes and I saw

how, in a perfectly calm and business-like way, he set to work to secure

a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his

tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two

hundred pounds on her defence... Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a

certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully you

saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward,

perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion,

running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eyelids, gave

them a curious, sinister expression—like a mosaic of blue porcelain set

in pink china. And that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of

every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.

It was most amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen

balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his

shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he stands

perfectly still and does nothing. Well, it was like that. He had rather

a rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him, with my

back to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions flicker

across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it, those

unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes themselves

never moved, gazing over my shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze

was perfectly level and perfectly direct and perfectly unchanging. I

suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little and

perhaps the lips moved a little too, as if he should be saying: "There

you are, my dear." At any rate, the expression was that of pride, of

satisfaction, of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment,

gaze upon the sunny fields of Branshaw and say: "All this is my land!"

And then again, the gaze was perhaps more direct, harder if

possible—hardy too. It was a measuring look; a challenging look. Once

when we were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo match against the

Bonner Hussaren I saw the same look come into his eyes, balancing the

possibilities, looking over the ground. The German Captain, Count Baron

Idigon von Lelöffel, was right up by their goal posts, coming with the

ball in an easy canter in that tricky German fashion. The rest of the

field were just anywhere. It was only a scratch sort of affair.

Ashburnham was quite close to the rails not five yards from us and I

heard him saying to himself: "Might just be done!" And he did it.

Goodness! he swung that pony round with all its four legs spread out,

like a cat dropping off a roof....

Well, it was just that look that I noticed in his eyes: "It might," I

seem even now to hear him muttering to himself, "just be done."

I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall, smiling brilliantly and

buoyant—Leonora. And, little and fair, and as radiant as the track of

sunlight along the sea—my wife.

That poor wretch! to think that he was at that moment in a perfect devil

of a fix, and there he was, saying at the back of his mind: "It might

just be done." It was like a chap in the middle of the eruption of a

volcano, saying that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult and

set fire to a haystack. Madness? Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more gaiety than I have ever

since known her to show. There are certain classes of English people—the

nicer ones when they have been to many spas, who seem to make a point of

becoming much more than usually animated when they are introduced to my

compatriots. I have noticed this often. Of course, they must first have

accepted the Americans. But that once done, they seem to say to

themselves: "Hallo, these women are so bright. We aren't going to be

outdone in brightness." And for the time being they certainly aren't.

But it wears off. So it was with Leonora—at least until she noticed me.

She began, Leonora did—and perhaps it was that that gave me the idea of

a touch of insolence in her character, for she never afterwards did any

one single thing like it—she began by saying in quite a loud voice and

from quite a distance:

"Don't stop over by that stuffy old table, Teddy. Come and sit by these

nice people!"

And that was an extraordinary thing to say. Quite extraordinary. I

couldn't for the life of me refer to total strangers as nice people.

But, of course, she was taking a line of her own in which I at any

rate—and no one else in the room, for she too had taken the trouble to

read through the list of guests—counted any more than so many clean,

bull terriers. And she sat down rather brilliantly at a vacant table,

beside ours—one that was reserved for the Guggenheimers. And she just

sat absolutely deaf to the remonstrances of the head waiter with his

face like a grey ram's. That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too.

He knew that the Guggenheimers of Chicago, after they had stayed there a

month and had worried the poor life out of him, would give him two

dollars fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he knew that Teddy

Ashburnham and his wife would give him no trouble whatever except what

the smiles of Leonora might cause in his apparently unimpressionable

bosom—though you never can tell what may go on behind even a not quite

spotless plastron!—And every week Edward Ashburnham would give him a

solid, sound, golden English sovereign. Yet this stout fellow was intent

on saving that table for the Guggenheimers of Chicago. It ended in

Florence saying:

"Why shouldn't we all eat out of the same trough?—that's a nasty New

York saying. But I'm sure we're all nice quiet people and there can be

four seats at our table. It's round."

Then came, as it were, an appreciative gurgle from the Captain and I was

perfectly aware of a slight hesitation—a quick sharp motion in Mrs

Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she put it at the fence all

right, rising from the seat she had taken and sitting down opposite me,

as it were, all in one motion. I never thought that Leonora looked her

best in evening dress. She seemed to get it too clearly cut, there was

no ruffling. She always affected black and her shoulders were too

classical. She seemed to stand out of her corsage as a white marble bust

might out of a black Wedgwood vase. I don't know.

I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very cheerfully lay down my

life, what is left of it, in her service. But I am sure I never had the

beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex instinct towards her.

And I suppose—no I am certain that she never had it towards me. As far

as I am concerned I think it was those white shoulders that did it. I

seemed to feel when I looked at them that, if ever I should press my

lips upon them that they would be slightly cold—not icily, not without a

touch of human heat, but, as they say of baths, with the chill off. I

seemed to feel chilled at the end of my lips when I looked at her...

No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best in a blue tailor-made.

Then her glorious hair wasn't deadened by her white shoulders. Certain

women's lines guide your eyes to their necks, their eyelashes, their

lips, their breasts. But Leonora's seemed to conduct your gaze always to

her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a black or a dog-skin glove

and there was always a gold circlet with a little chain supporting a

very small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it was that in which

she locked up her heart and her feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for the first time, she paid

any attention to my existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet deliberately,

one long stare. Her eyes too were blue and dark and the eyelids were so

arched that they gave you the whole round of the irises. And it was a

most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse

had looked at me. I seemed to perceive the swift questions chasing each

other through the brain that was behind them. I seemed to hear the brain

ask and the eyes answer with all the simpleness of a woman who was a

good hand at taking in qualities of a horse—as indeed she was. "Stands

well; has plenty of room for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in

the way of shoulders," and so on. And so her eyes asked: "Is this man

trustworthy in money matters; is he likely to try to play the lover; is

he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he, above all, likely to

babble about my affairs?"

And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly defiant, almost defensive china

blue orbs, there came a warmth, a tenderness, a friendly recognition...

oh, it was very charming and very touching—and quite mortifying. It was

the look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her brother. It implied

trust; it implied the want of any necessity for barriers. By God, she

looked at me as if I were an invalid—as any kind woman may look at a

poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes, from that day forward she always

treated me and not Florence as if I were the invalid. Why, she would run

after me with a rug upon chilly days. I suppose, therefore, that her

eyes had made a favourable answer. Or, perhaps, it wasn't a favourable

answer. And then Florence said: "And so the whole round table is begun."

Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his throat; but Leonora

shivered a little, as if a goose had walked over her grave. And I was

passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls. Avanti!...

IV

So began those nine years of uninterrupted tranquillity. They were

characterized by an extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the

part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part, replied by leaving out

quite as extraordinarily, and nearly as completely, the personal note.

Indeed, you may take it that what characterized our relationship was an

atmosphere of taking everything for granted. The given proposition was,

that we were all "good people." We took for granted that we all liked

beef underdone but not too underdone; that both men preferred a good

liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women drank a very light Rhine

wine qualified with Fachingen water—that sort of thing. It was also

taken for granted that we were both sufficiently well off to afford

anything that we could reasonably want in the way of amusements fitting

to our station—that we could take motor cars and carriages by the day;

that we could give each other dinners and dine our friends and we could

indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence was in the habit of

having the Daily Telegraph sent to her every day from London. She was

always an Anglo-maniac, was Florence; the Paris edition of the New York

Herald was always good enough for me. But when we discovered that the

Ashburnhams' copy of the London paper followed them from England,

Leonora and Florence decided between them to suppress one subscription

one year and the other the next. Similarly it was the habit of the Grand

Duke of Nassau Schwerin, who came yearly to the baths, to dine once with

about eighteen families of regular Kur guests. In return he would give a

dinner of all the eighteen at once. And, since these dinners were rather

expensive (you had to take the Grand Duke and a good many of his suite

and any members of the diplomatic bodies that might be there)—Florence

and Leonora, putting their heads together, didn't see why we shouldn't

give the Grand Duke his dinner together. And so we did. I don't suppose

the Serenity minded that economy, or even noticed it. At any rate, our

joint dinner to the Royal Personage gradually assumed the aspect of a

yearly function. Indeed, it grew larger and larger, until it became a

sort of closing function for the season, at any rate as far as we were

concerned. I don't in the least mean to say that we were the sort of

persons who aspired to mix "with royalty." We didn't; we hadn't any

claims; we were just "good people." But the Grand Duke was a pleasant,

affable sort of royalty, like the late King Edward VII, and it was

pleasant to hear him talk about the races and, very occasionally, as a

bonne bouche, about his nephew, the Emperor; or to have him pause for a

moment in his walk to ask after the progress of our cures or to be

benignantly interested in the amount of money we had put on Lelöffel's

hunter for the Frankfurt Welter Stakes.

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in our time. How does one put

in one's time? How is it possible to have achieved nine years and to

have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing whatever, you understand.

Not so much as a bone penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with

a hole in the top through which you could see four views of Nauheim.

And, as for experience, as for knowledge of one's fellow beings—nothing

either. Upon my word, I couldn't tell you offhand whether the lady who

sold the so expensive violets at the bottom of the road that leads to

the station, was cheating me or no; I can't say whether the porter who

carried our traps across the station at Leghorn was a thief or no when

he said that the regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The instances of

honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the

instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's

kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know

something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't.

I think the modern civilized habit—the modern English habit of taking

every one for granted—is a good deal to blame for this. I have observed

this matter long enough to know the queer, subtle thing that it is; to

know how the faculty, for what it is worth, never lets you down.

Mind, I am not saying that this is not the most desirable type of life

in the world; that it is not an almost unreasonably high standard. For

it is really nauseating, when you detest it, to have to eat every day

several slices of thin, tepid, pink india rubber, and it is disagreeable

to have to drink brandy when you would prefer to be cheered up by warm,

sweet Kümmel. And it is nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning

when what you want is really a hot one at night. And it stirs a little

of the faith of your fathers that is deep down within you to have to

have it taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian when really you

are an old-fashioned Philadelphia Quaker.

But these things have to be done; it is the cock that the whole of this

society owes to Æsculapius.

And the odd, queer thing is that the whole collection of rules applies

to anybody—to the anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway trains,

to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers, but even, in the end, upon

steamers. You meet a man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds,

from the slightest of movements, you know at once whether you are

concerned with good people or with those who won't do. You know, this is

to say, whether they will go rigidly through with the whole programme

from the underdone beef to the Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they

be short or tall; whether the voice squeak like a marionette or rumble

like a town bull's; it won't matter whether they are Germans, Austrians,

French, Spanish, or even Brazilians—they will be the Germans or

Brazilians who take a cold bath every morning and who move, roughly

speaking, in diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient—well, hang it all, I will say it—the damnable

nuisance of the whole thing is, that with all the taking for granted,

you never really get an inch deeper than the things I have catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance of this. I can't remember

whether it was in our first year—the first year of us four at Nauheim,

because, of course, it would have been the fourth year of Florence and

myself—but it must have been in the first or second year. And that gives

the measure at once of the extraordinariness of our discussion and of

the swiftness with which intimacy had grown up between us. On the one

hand we seemed to start out on the expedition so naturally and with so

little preparation, that it was as if we must have made many such

excursions before; and our intimacy seemed so deep....

Yet the place to which we went was obviously one to which Florence at

least would have wanted to take us quite early, so that you would almost

think we should have gone there together at the beginning of our

intimacy. Florence was singularly expert as a guide to archaeological

expeditions and there was nothing she liked so much as taking people

round ruins and showing you the window from which some one looked down

upon the murder of some one else. She only did it once; but she did it

quite magnificently. She could find her way, with the sole help of

Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she could about any

American city where the blocks are all square and the streets all

numbered, so that you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to

Thirtieth.

Now it happens that fifty minutes away from Nauheim, by a good train, is

the ancient city of M——, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with a

triple road running sideways up its shoulder like a scarf. And at the

top there is a castle—not a square castle like Windsor, but a castle all

slate gables and high peaks with gilt weathercocks flashing bravely—the

castle of St Elizabeth of Hungary. It has the disadvantage of being in

Prussia; and it is always disagreeable to go into that country; but it

is very old and there are many double-spired churches and it stands up

like a pyramid out of the green valley of the Lahn. I don't suppose the

Ashburnhams wanted especially to go there and I didn't especially want

to go there myself. But, you understand, there was no objection. It was

part of the cure to make an excursion three or four times a week. So

that we were all quite unanimous in being grateful to Florence for

providing the motive power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her

own. She was at that time engaged in educating Captain Ashburnham—oh, of

course, quite pour le bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I simply

can't understand how you can let him live by your side and be so

ignorant!" Leonora herself always struck me as being remarkably well

educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all that Florence had to tell

her. Perhaps she got it up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in the

morning. I don't mean to say that you would ever have known that Leonora

knew anything, but if Florence started to tell us how Ludwig the

Courageous wanted to have three wives at once—in which he differed from

Henry VIII, who wanted them one after the other, and this caused a good

deal of trouble—if Florence started to tell us this, Leonora would just

nod her head in a way that quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife.

She used to exclaim: "Well, if you knew it, why haven't you told it all

already to Captain Ashburnham? I'm sure he finds it interesting!" And

Leonora would look reflectively at her husband and say: "I have an idea

that it might injure his hand—the hand, you know, used in connection

with horses' mouths...." And poor Ashburnham would blush and mutter and

would say: "That's all right. Don't you bother about me."

I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor Teddy; because one evening

he asked me seriously in the smoking-room if I thought that having too

much in one's head would really interfere with one's quickness in polo.

It struck him, he said, that brainy Johnnies generally were rather muffs

when they got on to four legs. I reassured him as best I could. I told

him that he wasn't likely to take in enough to upset his balance. At

that time the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being educated by

Florence. She used to do it about three or four times a week under the

approving eyes of Leonora and myself. It wasn't, you understand,

systematic. It came in bursts. It was Florence clearing up one of the

dark places of the earth, leaving the world a little lighter than she

had found it. She would tell him the story of Hamlet; explain the form

of a symphony, humming the first and second subjects to him, and so on;

she would explain to him the difference between Arminians and Erastians;

or she would give him a short lecture on the early history of the United

States. And it was done in a way well calculated to arrest a young

attention. Did you ever read Mrs Markham? Well, it was like that... .

But our excursion to M—— was a much larger, a much more full dress

affair. You see, in the archives of the Schloss in that city there was a

document which Florence thought would finally give her the chance to

educate the whole lot of us together. It really worried poor Florence

that she couldn't, in matters of culture, ever get the better of

Leonora. I don't know what Leonora knew or what she didn't know, but

certainly she was always there whenever Florence brought out any

information. And she gave, somehow, the impression of really knowing

what poor Florence gave the impression of having only picked up. I can't

exactly define it. It was almost something physical. Have you ever seen

a retriever dashing in play after a greyhound? You see the two running

over a green field, almost side by side, and suddenly the retriever

makes a friendly snap at the other. And the greyhound simply isn't

there. You haven't observed it quicken its speed or strain a limb; but

there it is, just two yards in front of the retriever's outstretched

muzzle. So it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of culture.

But on this occasion I knew that something was up. I found Florence some

days before, reading books like Ranke's History of the Popes, Symonds'

Renaissance, Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic and Luther's Table

Talk.

I must say that, until the astonishment came, I got nothing but pleasure

out of the little expedition. I like catching the two-forty; I like the

slow, smooth roll of the great big trains—and they are the best trains

in the world! I like being drawn through the green country and looking

at it through the clear glass of the great windows. Though, of course,

the country isn't really green. The sun shines, the earth is blood red

and purple and red and green and red. And the oxen in the ploughlands

are bright varnished brown and black and blackish purple; and the

peasants are dressed in the black and white of magpies; and there are

great flocks of magpies too. Or the peasants' dresses in another field

where there are little mounds of hay that will be grey-green on the

sunny side and purple in the shadows—the peasants' dresses are vermilion

with emerald green ribbons and purple skirts and white shirts and black

velvet stomachers. Still, the impression is that you are drawn through

brilliant green meadows that run away on each side to the dark purple

fir-woods; the basalt pinnacles; the immense forests. And there is

meadowsweet at the edge of the streams, and cattle. Why, I remember on

that afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its horns under the stomach of a

black and white animal and the black and white one was thrown right into

the middle of a narrow stream. I burst out laughing. But Florence was

imparting information so hard and Leonora was listening so intently that

no one noticed me. As for me, I was pleased to be off duty; I was

pleased to think that Florence for the moment was indubitably out of

mischief—because she was talking about Ludwig the Courageous (I think it

was Ludwig the Courageous but I am not an historian) about Ludwig the

Courageous of Hessen who wanted to have three wives at once and

patronized Luther—something like that!—I was so relieved to be off duty,

because she couldn't possibly be doing anything to excite herself or set

her poor heart a-fluttering—that the incident of the cow was a real joy

to me. I chuckled over it from time to time for the whole rest of the

day. Because it does look very funny, you know, to see a black and white

cow land on its back in the middle of a stream. It is so just exactly

what one doesn't expect of a cow.

I suppose I ought to have pitied the poor animal; but I just didn't. I

was out for enjoyment. And I just enjoyed myself. It is so pleasant to

be drawn along in front of the spectacular towns with the peaked castles

and the many double spires. In the sunlight gleams come from the

city—gleams from the glass of windows; from the gilt signs of

apothecaries; from the ensigns of the student corps high up in the

mountains; from the helmets of the funny little soldiers moving their

stiff little legs in white linen trousers. And it was pleasant to get

out in the great big spectacular Prussian station with the hammered

bronze ornaments and the paintings of peasants and flowers and cows; and

to hear Florence bargain energetically with the driver of an ancient

droschka drawn by two lean horses. Of course, I spoke German much more

correctly than Florence, though I never could rid myself quite of the

accent of the Pennsylvania Duitsch of my childhood. Anyhow, we were

drawn in a sort of triumph, for five marks without any trinkgeld, right

up to the castle. And we were taken through the museum and saw the fire-

backs, the old glass, the old swords and the antique contraptions. And

we went up winding corkscrew staircases and through the Rittersaal, the

great painted hall where the Reformer and his friends met for the first

time under the protection of the gentleman that had three wives at once

and formed an alliance with the gentleman that had six wives, one after

the other (I'm not really interested in these facts but they have a

bearing on my story). And we went through chapels, and music rooms,

right up immensely high in the air to a large old chamber, full of

presses, with heavily-shuttered windows all round. And Florence became

positively electric. She told the tired, bored custodian what shutters

to open; so that the bright sunlight streamed in palpable shafts into

the dim old chamber. She explained that this was Luther's bedroom and

that just where the sunlight fell had stood his bed. As a matter of

fact, I believe that she was wrong and that Luther only stopped, as it

were, for lunch, in order to evade pursuit. But, no doubt, it would have

been his bedroom if he could have been persuaded to stop the night. And

then, in spite of the protest of the custodian, she threw open another

shutter and came tripping back to a large glass case.

"And there," she exclaimed with an accent of gaiety, of triumph, and of

audacity. She was pointing at a piece of paper, like the half-sheet of a

letter with some faint pencil scrawls that might have been a jotting of

the amounts we were spending during the day. And I was extremely happy

at her gaiety, in her triumph, in her audacity. Captain Ashburnham had

his hands upon the glass case. "There it is—the Protest." And then, as

we all properly stage-managed our bewilderment, she continued: "Don't

you know that is why we were all called Protestants? That is the pencil

draft of the Protest they drew up. You can see the signatures of Martin

Luther, and Martin Bucer, and Zwingli, and Ludwig the Courageous...."

I may have got some of the names wrong, but I know that Luther and Bucer

were there. And her animation continued and I was glad. She was better

and she was out of mischief. She continued, looking up into Captain

Ashburnham's eyes: "It's because of that piece of paper that you're

honest, sober, industrious, provident, and clean-lived. If it weren't

for that piece of paper you'd be like the Irish or the Italians or the

Poles, but particularly the Irish...."

And she laid one finger upon Captain Ashburnham's wrist.

I was aware of something treacherous, something frightful, something

evil in the day. I can't define it and can't find a simile for it. It

wasn't as if a snake had looked out of a hole. No, it was as if my heart

had missed a beat. It was as if we were going to run and cry out; all

four of us in separate directions, averting our heads. In Ashburnham's

face I know that there was absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and

then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist was caused by Leonora's

clutching it:

"I can't stand this," she said with a most extraordinary passion; "I

must get out of this."

I was horribly frightened. It came to me for a moment, though I hadn't

time to think it, that she must be a madly jealous woman—jealous of

Florence and Captain Ashburnham, of all people in the world! And it was

a panic in which we fled! We went right down the winding stairs, across

the immense Rittersaal to a little terrace that overlooks the Lahn, the

broad valley and the immense plain into which it opens out.

"Don't you see?" she said, "don't you see what's going on?" The panic

again stopped my heart. I muttered, I stuttered—I don't know how I got

the words out:

"No! What's the matter? Whatever's the matter?"

She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a moment I had the feeling

that those two blue discs were immense, were overwhelming, were like a

wall of blue that shut me off from the rest of the world. I know it

sounds absurd; but that is what it did feel like.

"Don't you see," she said, with a really horrible bitterness, with a

really horrible lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see that that's the

cause of the whole miserable affair; of the whole sorrow of the world?

And of the eternal damnation of you and me and them... ."

I don't remember how she went on; I was too frightened; I was too

amazed. I think I was thinking of running to fetch assistance—a doctor,

perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she needed Florence's tender

care, though, of course, it would have been very bad for Florence's

heart. But I know that when I came out of it she was saying: "Oh, where

are all the bright, happy, innocent beings in the world? Where's

happiness? One reads of it in books!"

She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion upwards over her

forehead. Her eyes were enormously distended; her face was exactly that

of a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing horrors there. And

then suddenly she stopped. She was, most amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham

again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and defined; her hair was

glorious in its golden coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort of

contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a gypsy caravan that was

coming over a little bridge far below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her clear hard voice, "don't you know

that I'm an Irish Catholic?"

V

THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I have ever had in my life.

They told me, I think, almost more than I have ever gathered at any one

moment—about myself. I don't think that before that day I had ever

wanted anything very much except Florence. I have, of course, had

appetites, impatiences... Why, sometimes at a table d'hôte, when there

would be, say, caviare handed round, I have been absolutely full of

impatience for fear that when the dish came to me there should not be a

satisfying portion left over by the other guests. I have been

exceedingly impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State Railway has a

trick of letting the French trains miss their connections at Brussels.

That has always infuriated me.

I have written about it letters to The Times that The Times never

printed; those that I wrote to the Paris edition of the New York Herald

were always printed, but they never seemed to satisfy me when I saw

them. Well, that was a sort of frenzy with me.

It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize. I can understand it

intellectually. You see, in those days I was interested in people with

"hearts." There was Florence, there was Edward Ashburnham—or, perhaps,

it was Leonora that I was more interested in. I don't mean in the way of

love. But, you see, we were both of the same profession—at any rate as I

saw it. And the profession was that of keeping heart patients alive.

You have no idea how engrossing such a profession may become. Just as

the blacksmith says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth stand," just as

the baker thinks that all the solar system revolves around his morning

delivery of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that he alone is

the preserver of society—and surely, surely, these delusions are

necessary to keep us going—so did I and, as I believed, Leonora, imagine

that the whole world ought to be arranged so as to ensure the keeping

alive of heart patients. You have no idea how engrossing such a

profession may become—how imbecile, in view of that engrossment, appear

the ways of princes, of republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of

road beneath the motor tyres, a couple of succeeding "thank'ee-marms"

with their quick jolts would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora

against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free City through whose

territory we might be passing. I would grumble like a stockbroker whose

conversations over the telephone are incommoded by the ringing of bells

from a city church. I would talk about medieval survivals, about the

taxes being surely high enough. The point, by the way, about the missing

of the connections of the Calais boat trains at Brussels was that the

shortest possible sea journey is frequently of great importance to

sufferers from the heart. Now, on the Continent, there are two special

heart cure places, Nauheim and Spa, and to reach both of these baths

from England if in order to ensure a short sea passage, you come by

Calais—you have to make the connection at Brussels. And the Belgian

train never waits by so much the shade of a second for the one coming

from Calais or from Paris. And even if the French train, are just on

time, you have to run—imagine a heart patient running!—along the

unfamiliar ways of the Brussels station and to scramble up the high

steps of the moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you have to wait

five or six hours.... I used to keep awake whole nights cursing that

abuse. My wife used to run—she never, in whatever else she may have

misled me, tried to give me the impression that she was not a gallant

soul. But, once in the German Express, she would lean back, with one

hand to her side and her eyes closed. Well, she was a good actress. And

I would be in hell. In hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had at once a

wife and an unattained mistress—that is what it comes to—and in the

retaining of her in this world I had my occupation, my career, my

ambition. It is not often that these things are united in one body.

Leonora was a good actress too. By Jove she was good! I tell you, she

would listen to me by the hour, evolving my plans for a shock-proof

world. It is true that, at times, I used to notice about her an air of

inattention as if she were listening, a mother, to the child at her

knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the patient.

You understand that there was nothing the matter with Edward

Ashburnham's heart—that he had thrown up his commission and had left

India and come half the world over in order to follow a woman who had

really had a "heart" to Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental ass he

was. For, you understand, too, that they really needed to live in India,

to economize, to let the house at Branshaw Teleragh.

Of course, at that date, I had never heard of the Kilsyte case.

Ashburnham had, you know, kissed a servant girl in a railway train, and

it was only the grace of God, the prompt functioning of the

communication cord and the ready sympathy of what I believe you call the

Hampshire Bench, that kept the poor devil out of Winchester Gaol for

years and years. I never heard of that case until the final stages of

Leonora's revelations....

But just think of that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the right, beg

you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless

devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there

is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since

for years he was my wife's lover, since he killed her, since he broke up

all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest

that has the right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him, from

you, silent listener beyond the hearth-stone, from the world, or from

the God who created in him those desires, those madnesses....

Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte case. I knew none of their

friends; they were for me just good people—fortunate people with broad

and sunny acres in a southern county. Just good people! By heavens, I

sometimes think that it would have been better for him, poor dear, if

the case had been such a one that I must needs have heard of it—such a

one as maids and couriers and other Kur guests whisper about for years

after, until gradually it dies away in the pity that there is knocking

about here and there in the world. Supposing he had spent his seven

years in Winchester Gaol or whatever it is that inscrutable and blind

justice allots to you for following your natural but ill-timed

inclinations—there would have arrived a stage when nodding gossips on

the Kursaal terrace would have said, "Poor fellow," thinking of his

ruined career. He would have been the fine soldier with his back now

bent.... Better for him, poor devil, if his back had been prematurely

bent.

Why, it would have been a thousand times better.... For, of course, the

Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his finding Leonora

cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He left servants alone

after that.

It turned him, naturally, all the more loose amongst women of his own

class. Why, Leonora told me that Mrs Maidan—the woman he followed from

Burma to Nauheim—assured her he awakened her attention by swearing that

when he kissed the servant in the train he was driven to it. I daresay

he was driven to it, by the mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying

woman. I daresay he was sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he was

sincere enough in his love for Mrs Maidan. She was a nice little thing,

a dear little dark woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew quite

fond. She had a lisp and a happy smile. We saw plenty of her for the

first month of our acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly—of heart

trouble.

But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan—she was so gentle, so young. She

cannot have been more than twenty-three and she had a boy husband out in

Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe. Such young things ought to

have been left alone. Of course Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I

do not believe that he could. Why, even I, at this distance of time am

aware that I am a little in love with her memory. I can't help smiling

when I think suddenly of her—as you might at the thought of something

wrapped carefully away in lavender, in some drawer, in some old house

that you have long left. She was so—so submissive. Why, even to me she

had the air of being submissive—to me that not the youngest child will

ever pay heed to. Yes, this is the saddest story...

No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had left her alone—with her

playing with adultery. I suppose it was; though she was such a child

that one has the impression that she would hardly have known how to

spell such a word. No, it was just submissiveness—to the importunities,

to the tempestuous forces that pushed that miserable fellow on to ruin.

And I do not suppose that Florence really made much difference. If it

had not been for her that Ashburnham left his allegiance for Mrs Maidan,

then it would have been some other woman. But still, I do not know.

Perhaps the poor young thing would have died—she was bound to die,

anyhow, quite soon—but she would have died without having to soak her

noonday pillow with tears whilst Florence, below the window, talked to

Captain Ashburnham about the Constitution of the United States.... Yes,

it would have left a better taste in the mouth if Florence had let her

die in peace....

Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just boxed Mrs Maidan's ears—yes,

she hit her, in an uncontrollable access of rage, a hard blow on the

side of the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel, outside Edward's rooms.

It was that, you know, that accounted for the sudden, odd intimacy that

sprang up between Florence and Mrs Ashburnham.

Because it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If you look at it from the

outside nothing could have been more unlikely than that Leonora, who is

the proudest creature on God's earth, would have struck up an

acquaintanceship with two casual Yankees whom she could not really have

regarded as being much more than a carpet beneath her feet. You may ask

what she had to be proud of. Well, she was a Powys married to an

Ashburnham—I suppose that gave her the right to despise casual Americans

as long as she did it unostentatiously. I don't know what anyone has to

be proud of. She might have taken pride in her patience, in her keeping

her husband out of the bankruptcy court. Perhaps she did.

At any rate that was how Florence got to know her. She came round a

screen at the corner of the hotel corridor and found Leonora with the

gold key that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs Maidan's hair just

before dinner. There was not a single word spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was

very pale, with a red mark down her left cheek, and the key would not

come out of her black hair. It was Florence who had to disentangle it,

for Leonora was in such a state that she could not have brought herself

to touch Mrs Maidan without growing sick.

And there was not a word spoken. You see, under those four eyes—her own

and Mrs Maidan's—Leonora could just let herself go as far as to box Mrs

Maidan's ears. But the moment a stranger came along she pulled herself

wonderfully up. She was at first silent and then, the moment the key was

disengaged by Florence she was in a state to say: "So awkward of me... I

was just trying to put the comb straight in Mrs Maidan's hair...."

Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to an Ashburnham; she was a

poor little O'Flaherty whose husband was a boy of country parsonage

origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let go as she went

desolately away along the corridor. But Leonora was still going to play

up. She opened the door of Ashburnham's room quite ostentatiously, so

that Florence should hear her address Edward in terms of intimacy and

liking. "Edward," she called. But there was no Edward there.

You understand that there was no Edward there. It was then, for the only

time of her career, that Leonora really compromised herself—She

exclaimed.... "How frightful!... Poor little Maisie!..."

She caught herself up at that, but of course it was too late. It was a

queer sort of affair....

I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her very dearly for one thing

and in this matter, which was certainly the ruin of my small household

cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not believe—and Leonora

herself does not believe—that poor little Maisie Maidan was ever

Edward's mistress. Her heart was really so bad that she would have

succumbed to anything like an impassioned embrace. That is the plain

English of it, and I suppose plain English is best. She was really what

the other two, for reasons of their own, just pretended to be. Queer,

isn't it? Like one of those sinister jokes that Providence plays upon

one. Add to this that I do not suppose that Leonora would much have

minded, at any other moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's

mistress. It might have been a relief from Edward's sentimental

gurglings over the lady and from the lady's submissive acceptance of

those sounds. No, she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was just striking the face of

an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a frightfully

painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when she

chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's affairs were

in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that she claimed the

privilege of having his secrets at her disposal. There was not, indeed,

any other way, for the poor fool was too ashamed of his lapses ever to

make a clean breast of anything. She had to drag these things out of

him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,

Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the Kur

authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come from a

Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in Linlithgowshire for

the month of September and she did not know whether the date fixed would

be the eleventh or the eighteenth. The address on this letter was, in

handwriting, as like Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like

another. So she had at the moment no idea of spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham was

paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like three

hundred pounds a year... It was a devil of a blow; it was like death;

for she imagined that by that time she had really got to the bottom of

her husband's liabilities. You see, they were pretty heavy. What had

really smashed them up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte

Carlo—an affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress of

a Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara

from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It would have

pipped him a good deal to have found so much, and he was not in the

ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty

thousand and the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair

creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred thousand

dollars and a little over.

Well, he must needs go to the tables and lose forty thousand pounds....

Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even after that

he must—it was an imperative passion—enjoy the favours of the lady. He

got them, of course, when it was a matter of solid bargaining, for far

less than twenty thousand, as he might, no doubt, have done from the

first. I daresay ten thousand dollars covered the bill.

Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a fortune of a hundred thousand

pounds or so. And Leonora had to fix things up; he would have run from

money-lender to money-lender. And that was quite in the early days of

her discovery of his infidelities—if you like to call them infidelities.

And she discovered that one from public sources. God knows what would

have happened if she had not discovered it from public sources. I

suppose he would have concealed it from her until they were penniless.

But she was able, by the grace of God, to get hold of the actual lenders

of the money, to learn the exact sums that were needed. And she went off

to England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her attorney and his while he was

still in the arms of his Circe—at Antibes, to which place they had

retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly, but not before Leonora

had had such lessons in the art of business from her attorney that she

had her plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that of General Trochu for

keeping the Prussians out of Paris in 1870. It was about as effectual at

first, or it seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about nine years before the

date of which I am talking—the date of Florence's getting her hold over

Leonora; for that was what it amounted to.... Well, Mrs Ashburnham had

simply forced Edward to settle all his property upon her. She could

force him to do anything; in his clumsy, good-natured, inarticulate way

he was as frightened of her as of the devil. And he admired her

enormously, and he was as fond of her as any man could be of any woman.

She took advantage of it to treat him as if he had been a person whose

estates are being managed by the Court of Bankruptcy. I suppose it was

the best thing for him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first three years or so.

Unexpected liabilities kept on cropping up—and that afflicted fool did

not make it any easier. You see, along with the passion of the chase

went a frame of mind that made him be extraordinarily ashamed of

himself. You may not believe it, but he really had such a sort of

respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination that he hated—he was

positively revolted at the thought that she should know that the sort of

thing that he did existed in the world. So he would stick out in an

agitated way against the accusation of ever having done anything. He

wanted to preserve the virginity of his wife's thoughts. He told me that

himself during the long walks we had at the last—while the girl was on

the way to Brindisi.

So, of course, for those three years or so, Leonora had many agitations.

And it was then that they really quarrelled.

Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems rather extravagant. You might

have thought that Leonora would be just calmly loathing and he

lachrymosely contrite. But that was not it a bit... Along with Edward's

passions and his shame for them went the violent conviction of the

duties of his station—a conviction that was quite unreasonably

expensive. I trust I have not, in talking of his liabilities, given the

impression that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine. He was not; he

was a sentimentalist. The servant girl in the Kilsyte case had been

pretty, but mournful of appearance. I think that, when he had kissed

her, he had desired rather to comfort her. And, if she had succumbed to

his blandishments I daresay he would have set her up in a little house

in Portsmouth or Winchester and would have been faithful to her for four

or five years. He was quite capable of that.

No, the only two of his affairs of the heart that cost him money were

that of the Grand Duke's mistress and that which was the subject of the

blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had been a quite

passionate affair with quite a nice woman. It had succeeded the one with

the Grand Ducal lady. The lady was the wife of a brother officer and

Leonora had known all about the passion, which had been quite a real

passion and had lasted for several years. You see, poor Edward's

passions were quite logical in their progression upwards. They began

with a servant, went on to a courtesan and then to a quite nice woman,

very unsuitably mated. For she had a quite nasty husband who, by means

of letters and things, went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of

three or four hundred a year—with threats of the Divorce Court. And

after this lady came Maisie Maidan, and after poor Maisie only one more

affair and then—the real passion of his life. His marriage with Leonora

had been arranged by his parents and, though he always admired her

immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to be much more than tender to

her, though he desperately needed her moral support, too....

But his really trying liabilities were mostly in the nature of

generosities proper to his station. He was, according to Leonora, always

remitting his tenants' rents and giving the tenants to understand that

the reduction would be permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards who

came before his magisterial bench; he was always trying to put

prostitutes into respectable places—and he was a perfect maniac about

children. I don't know how many ill-used people he did not pick up and

provide with careers—Leonora has told me, but I daresay she exaggerated

and the figure seems so preposterous that I will not put it down. All

these things, and the continuance of them seemed to him to be his

duty—along with impossible subscriptions to hospitals and Boy Scouts and

to provide prizes at cattle shows and antivivisection societies....

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these things were not continued.

They could not possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that rate after the

money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress. She put the rents back at

their old figures; discharged the drunkards from their homes, and sent

all the societies notice that they were to expect no more subscriptions.

To the children, she was more tender; nearly all of them she supported

till the age of apprenticeship or domestic service. You see, she was

childless herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered herself to be to blame.

She had come of a penniless branch of the Powys family, and they had

forced upon her poor dear Edward without making the stipulation that the

children should be brought up as Catholics. And that, of course, was

spiritual death to Leonora. I have given you a wrong impression if I

have not made you see that Leonora was a woman of a strong, cold

conscience, like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself, help

disliking this religion; there is always, at the bottom of my mind, in

spite of Leonora, the feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that

filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the little old Friends'

Meeting House in Arch Street, Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good

deal of Leonora's mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case to the

peculiarly English form of her religion. Because, of course, the only

thing to have done for Edward would have been to let him sink down until

he became a tramp of gentlemanly address, having, maybe, chance love

affairs upon the highways. He would have done so much less harm; he

would have been much less agonized too. At any rate, he would have had

fewer chances of ruining and of remorse. For Edward was great at

remorse.

But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her rigid principles, her

coldness, even her very patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all

wrong in this special case. She quite seriously and naïvely imagined

that the Church of Rome disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and

naïvely believed that her church could be such a monstrous and imbecile

institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making

Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as the English would say,

the Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we

call it the New England conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind

has been driven in on the English Catholics. The centuries that they

have gone through—centuries of blind and malignant oppression, of

ostracism from public employment, of being, as it were, a small

beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and therefore having to act

with great formality—all these things have combined to perform that

conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in England are even

technically Nonconformists.

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and unscrupulous crew. But that,

at least, lets them be opportunists. They would have fixed poor dear

Edward up all right. (Forgive my writing of these monstrous things in

this frivolous manner. If I did not I should break down and cry.) In

Milan, say, or in Paris, Leonora would have had her marriage dissolved

in six months for two hundred dollars paid in the right quarter. And

Edward would have drifted about until he became a tramp of the kind I

have suggested. Or he would have married a barmaid who would have made

him such frightful scenes in public places and would so have torn out

his moustache and left visible signs upon his face that he would have

been faithful to her for the rest of his days. That was what he wanted

to redeem him....

For, along with his passions and his shames there went the dread of

scenes in public places, of outcry, of excited physical violence; of

publicity, in short. Yes, the barmaid would have cured him. And it would

have been all the better if she drank; he would have been kept busy

looking after her.

I know that I am right in this. I know it because of the Kilsyte case.

You see, the servant girl that he then kissed was nurse in the family of

the Nonconformist head of the county—whatever that post may be called.

And that gentleman was so determined to ruin Edward, who was the

chairman of the Tory caucus, or whatever it is—that the poor dear

sufferer had the very devil of a time. They asked questions about it in

the House of Commons; they tried to get the Hampshire magistrates

degraded; they suggested to the War Ministry that Edward was not the

proper person to hold the King's commission. Yes, he got it hot and

strong.

The result you have heard. He was completely cured of philandering

amongst the lower classes. And that seemed a real blessing to Leonora.

It did not revolt her so much to be connected—it is a sort of

connection—with people like Mrs Maidan, instead of with a little

kitchenmaid.

In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost contented when she arrived at

Nauheim, that evening....

She had got things nearly straight by the long years of scraping in

little stations in Chitral and Burma—stations where living is cheap in

comparison with the life of a county magnate, and where, moreover,

liaisons of one sort or another are normal and inexpensive too. So that,

when Mrs Maidan came along—and the Maidan affair might have caused

trouble out there because of the youth of the husband—Leonora had just

resigned herself to coming home. With pushing and scraping and with

letting Branshaw Teleragh, and with selling a picture and a relic of

Charles I or so, she had got—and, poor dear, she had never had a really

decent dress to her back in all those years and years—she had got, as

she imagined, her poor dear husband back into much the same financial

position as had been his before the mistress of the Grand Duke had

happened along. And, of course, Edward himself had helped her a little

on the financial side. He was a fellow that many men liked. He was so

presentable and quite ready to lend you his cigar puncher—that sort of

thing. So, every now and then some financier whom he met about would

give him a good, sound, profitable tip. And Leonora was never afraid of

a bit of a gamble—English Papists seldom are, I do not know why.

So nearly all her investment turned up trumps, and Edward was really in

fit case to reopen Branshaw Manor and once more to assume his position

in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted Maisie Maidan almost with

resignation—almost with a sigh of relief. She really liked the poor

child—she had to like somebody. And, at any rate, she felt she could

trust Maisie—she could trust her not to rook Edward for several

thousands a week, for Maisie had refused to accept so much as a trinket

ring from him. It is true that Edward gurgled and raved about the girl

in a way that she had never yet experienced. But that, too, was almost a

relief. I think she would really have welcomed it if he could have come

across the love of his life. It would have given her a rest.

And there could not have been anyone better than poor little Mrs Maidan;

she was so ill she could not want to be taken on expensive jaunts.... It

was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's expenses to Nauheim. She handed

over the money to the boy husband, for Maisie would never have allowed

it; but the husband was in agonies of fear. Poor devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora was as happy as ever she

had been in her life. Edward was wrapped up, completely, in his girl—he

was almost like a father with a child, trotting about with rugs and

physic and things, from deck to deck. He behaved, however, with great

circumspection, so that nothing leaked through to the other passengers.

And Leonora had almost attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs

Maidan. So it had looked very well—the benevolent, wealthy couple of

good people, acting as saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young

thing. And that attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs Maidan no doubt partly

accounted for the smack in the face. She was hitting a naughty child who

had been stealing chocolates at an inopportune moment.

It was certainly an inopportune moment. For, with the opening of that

blackmailing letter from that injured brother officer, all the old

terrors had redescended upon Leonora. Her road had again seemed to

stretch out endless; she imagined that there might be hundreds and

hundreds of such things that Edward was concealing from her—that they

might necessitate more mortgagings, more pawnings of bracelets, more and

always more horrors. She had spent an excruciating afternoon. The matter

was one of a divorce case, of course, and she wanted to avoid publicity

as much as Edward did, so that she saw the necessity of continuing the

payments. And she did not so much mind that. They could find three

hundred a year. But it was the horror of there being more such

obligations.

She had had no conversation with Edward for many years—none that went

beyond the mere arrangements for taking trains or engaging servants. But

that afternoon she had to let him have it. And he had been just the same

as ever. It was like opening a book after a decade to find the words the

same. He had the same motives. He had not wished to tell her about the

case because he had not wished her to sully her mind with the idea that

there was such a thing as a brother officer who could be a

blackmailer—and he had wanted to protect the credit of his old light of

love. That lady was certainly not concerned with her husband. And he

swore, and swore, and swore, that there was nothing else in the world

against him. She did not believe him.

He had done it once too often—and she was wrong for the first time, so

that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he went right

straight out to the post-office and spent several hours in coding a

telegram to his solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man to threaten to

take out at once a warrant against the fellow who was on his track. He

said afterwards that it was a bit too thick on poor old Leonora to be

ballyragged any more. That was really the last of his outstanding

accounts, and he was ready to take his personal chance of the Divorce

Court if the blackmailer turned nasty. He would face it out—the

publicity, the papers, the whole bally show. Those were his simple

words....

He had made, however, the mistake of not telling Leonora where he was

going, so that, having seen him go to his room to fetch the code for the

telegram, and seeing, two hours later, Maisie Maidan come out of his

room, Leonora imagined that the two hours she had spent in silent agony

Edward had spent with Maisie Maidan in his arms. That seemed to her to

be too much.

As a matter of fact, Maisie's being in Edward's room had been the

result, partly of poverty, partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence.

She could not, in the first place, afford a maid; she refrained as much

as possible from sending the hotel servants on errands, since every

penny was of importance to her, and she feared to have to pay high tips

at the end of her stay. Edward had lent her one of his fascinating cases

containing fifteen different sizes of scissors, and, having seen from

her window, his departure for the post-office, she had taken the

opportunity of returning the case. She could not see why she should not,

though she felt a certain remorse at the thought that she had kissed the

pillows of his bed. That was the way it took her.

But Leonora could see that, without the shadow of a doubt, the incident

gave Florence a hold over her. It let Florence into things and Florence

was the only created being who had any idea that the Ashburnhams were

not just good people with nothing to their tails. She determined at

once, not so much to give Florence the privilege of her intimacy—which

would have been the payment of a kind of blackmail—as to keep Florence

under observation until she could have demonstrated to Florence that she

was not in the least jealous of poor Maisie. So that was why she had

entered the dining-room arm in arm with my wife, and why she had so

markedly planted herself at our table. She never left us, indeed, for a

minute that night, except just to run up to Mrs Maidan's room to beg her

pardon and to beg her also to let Edward take her very markedly out into

the gardens that night. She said herself, when Mrs Maidan came rather

wistfully down into the lounge where we were all sitting: "Now, Edward,

get up and take Maisie to the Casino. I want Mrs Dowell to tell me all

about the families in Connecticut who came from Fordingbridge." For it

had been discovered that Florence came of a line that had actually owned

Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries before the Ashburnhams came there.

And there she sat with me in that hall, long after Florence had gone to

bed, so that I might witness her gay reception of that pair. She could

play up.

And that enables me to fix exactly the day of our going to the town of

M——. For it was the very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found her dead

when we got back—pretty awful, that, when you come to figure out what it

all means....

At any rate the measure of my relief when Leonora said that she was an

Irish Catholic gives you the measure of my affection for that couple. It

was an affection so intense that even to this day I cannot think of

Edward without sighing. I do not believe that I could have gone on any

more with them. I was getting too tired. And I verily believe, too, if

my suspicion that Leonora was jealous of Florence had been the reason

she gave for her outburst I should have turned upon Florence with the

maddest kind of rage. Jealousy would have been incurable. But Florence's

mere silly jibes at the Irish and at the Catholics could be apologized

out of existence. And that I appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.

She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly and queerly while I was

doing it. And at last I worked myself up to saying:

"Do accept the situation. I confess that I do not like your religion.

But I like you so intensely. I don't mind saying that I have never had

anyone to be really fond of, and I do not believe that anyone has ever

been fond of me, as I believe you really to be."

"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she said. "Fond enough to say that I wish

every man was like you. But there are others to be considered." She was

thinking, as a matter of fact, of poor Maisie. She picked a little piece

of pellitory out of the breast-high wall in front of us. She chafed it

for a long minute between her finger and thumb, then she threw it over

the coping.

"Oh, I accept the situation," she said at last, "if you can."

VI

I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept the situation", which she

seemed to repeat with a gravity too intense. I said to her something

like:

"It's hardly as much as that. I mean, that I must claim the liberty of a

free American citizen to think what I please about your co-religionists.

And I suppose that Florence must have liberty to think what she pleases

and to say what politeness allows her to say."

"She had better," Leonora answered, "not say one single word against my

people or my faith."

It struck me at the time, that there was an unusual, an almost

threatening, hardness in her voice. It was almost as if she were trying

to convey to Florence, through me, that she would seriously harm my wife

if Florence went to something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember

thinking at the time that it was almost as if Leonora were saying,

through me to Florence:

"You may outrage me as you will; you may take all that I personally

possess, but do not you care to say one single thing in view of the

situation that that will set up—against the faith that makes me become

the doormat for your feet."

But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be her meaning. Good people,

be they ever so diverse in creed, do not threaten each other. So that I

read Leonora's words to mean just no more than:

"It would be better if Florence said nothing at all against my co-

religionists, because it is a point that I am touchy about."

That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed to Florence when,

shortly afterwards, she and Edward came down from the tower. And I want

you to understand that, from that moment until after Edward and the girl

and Florence were all dead together, I had never the remotest glimpse,

not the shadow of a suspicion, that there was anything wrong, as the

saying is. For five minutes, then, I entertained the possibility that

Leonora might be jealous; but there was never another flicker in that

flame-like personality. How in the world should I get it?

For, all that time, I was just a male sick nurse. And what chance had I

against those three hardened gamblers, who were all in league to conceal

their hands from me? What earthly chance? They were three to one—and

they made me happy. Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even

paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal wrongs, shall ever give me

the like. And what could they have done better, or what could they have

done that could have been worse? I don't know....

I suppose that, during all that time I was a deceived husband and that

Leonora was pimping for Edward. That was the cross that she had to take

up during her long Calvary of a life....

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband. Just Heavens, I do not

know. It feels just nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is not

necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the intermediate stage. What do

they call it? Limbo. No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are

dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I hope, will open to them

the springs of His compassion. It is not my business to think about it.

It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's people say: "Requiem

aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria

aeterna erit...." But what were they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I

think that the pair of them were only poor wretches, creeping over this

earth in the shadow of an eternal wrath. It is very terrible....

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that judgement, as it appears

to me sometimes, at nights. It is probably the suggestion of some

picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an immense plain, suspended

in mid-air, I seem to see three figures, two of them clasped close in an

intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. It is in black and white,

my picture of that judgement, an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell an

etching from a photographic reproduction. And the immense plain is the

hand of God, stretching out for miles and miles, with great spaces above

it and below it. And they are in the sight of God, and it is Florence

that is alone....

And, do you know, at the thought of that intense solitude I feel an

overwhelming desire to rush forward and comfort her. You cannot, you

see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve years without wishing to

go on nursing them, even though you hate them with the hatred of the

adder, and even in the palm of God. But, in the nights, with that vision

of judgement before me, I know that I hold myself back. For I hate

Florence. I hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not spare her

an eternity of loneliness. She need not have done what she did. She was

an American, a New Englander. She had not the hot passions of these

Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile of an Edward—and I pray God

that he is really at peace, clasped close in the arms of that poor, poor

girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find her young husband again,

and Leonora will burn, clear and serene, a northern light and one of the

archangels of God. And me.... Well, perhaps, they will find me an

elevator to run.... But Florence... .

She should not have done it. She should not have done it. It was playing

it too low down. She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity; she

meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer, imbecile spirit of

district visiting. Do you understand that, whilst she was Edward's

mistress, she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his wife? She

would gabble on to Leonora about forgiveness—treating the subject from

the bright, American point of view. And Leonora would treat her like the

whore she was. Once she said to Florence in the early morning:

"You come to me straight out of his bed to tell me that that is my

proper place. I know it, thank you."

But even that could not stop Florence. She went on saying that it was

her ambition to leave this world a little brighter by the passage of her

brief life, and how thankfully she would leave Edward, whom she thought

she had brought to a right frame of mind, if Leonora would only give him

a chance. He needed, she said, tenderness beyond anything.

And Leonora would answer—for she put up with this outrage for

years—Leonora, as I understand, would answer something like:

"Yes, you would give him up. And you would go on writing to each other

in secret, and committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the pair of

you, you know. No. I prefer the situation as it is."

Half the time Florence would ignore Leonora's remarks. She would think

they were not quite ladylike. The other half of the time she would try

to persuade Leonora that her love for Edward was quite spiritual—on

account of her heart. Once she said:

"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan, as you say you do, why cannot

you believe it of me?"

Leonora was, I understand, doing her hair at that time in front of the

mirror in her bedroom. And she looked round at Florence, to whom she did

not usually vouchsafe a glance,—she looked round coolly and calmly, and

said:

"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's name again. You murdered her.

You and I murdered her between us. I am as much a scoundrel as you. I

don't like to be reminded of it."

Florence went off at once into a babble of how could she have hurt a

person whom she hardly knew, a person whom with the best intentions, in

pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a little brighter, she had

tried to save from Edward. That was how she figured it out to herself.

She really thought that.... So Leonora said patiently:

"Very well, just put it that I killed her and that it's a painful

subject. One does not like to think that one had killed someone.

Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her from India."

And that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked at it. It is stated a

little baldly, but Leonora was always a great one for bald statements.

What had happened on the day of our jaunt to the ancient city of M—— had

been this:

Leonora, who had been even then filled with pity and contrition for the

poor child, on returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs Maidan's

room. She had wanted just to pet her. And she had perceived at first

only, on the clear, round table covered with red velvet, a letter

addressed to her. It ran something like:

"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have done it? I trusted you so. You

never talked to me about me and Edward, but I trusted you. How could you

buy me from my husband? I have just heard how you have—in the hall they

were talking about it, Edward and the American lady. You paid the money

for me to come here. Oh, how could you? How could you? I am going

straight back to Bunny...."

Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.

And Leonora said that, as she went on reading the letter, she had,

without looking round her, a sense that that hotel room was cleared,

that there were no papers on the table, that there were no clothes on

the hooks, and that there was a strained silence—a silence, she said, as

if there were something in the room that drank up such sounds as there

were. She had to fight against that feeling, whilst she read the

postscript of the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an adulteress," the postscript began.

The poor child was hardly literate. "It was surely not right of you and

I never wanted to be one. And I heard Edward call me a poor little rat

to the American lady. He always called me a little rat in private, and I

did not mind. But, if he called me it to her, I think he does not love

me any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew the world and I knew nothing.

I thought it would be all right if you thought it could, and I thought

you would not have brought me if you did not, too. You should not have

done it, and we out of the same convent...."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all packed, and she began a

search for Mrs Maidan herself—all over the hotel. The manager said that

Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up to the station to ask the

Reiseverkehrsbureau to make her out a plan for her immediate return to

Chitral. He imagined that he had seen her come back, but he was not

quite certain. No one in the large hotel had bothered his head about the

child. And she, wandering solitarily in the hall, had no doubt sat down

beside a screen that had Edward and Florence on the other side. I never

heard then or after what had passed between that precious couple. I

fancy Florence was just about beginning her cutting out of poor dear

Edward by addressing to him some words of friendly warning as to the

ravages he might be making in the girl's heart. That would be the sort

of way she would begin. And Edward would have sentimentally assured her

that there was nothing in it; that Maisie was just a poor little rat

whose passage to Nauheim his wife had paid out of her own pocket. That

would have been enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done. Leonora, with panic growing

and with contrition very large in her heart, visited every one of the

public rooms of the hotel—the dining-room, the lounge, the

schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God knows what they wanted with a

winter garden in an hotel that is only open from May till October. But

there it was. And then Leonora ran—yes, she ran up the stairs—to see if

Maisie had not returned to her rooms. She had determined to take that

child right away from that hideous place. It seemed to her to be all

unspeakable. I do not mean to say that she was not quite cool about it.

Leonora was always Leonora. But the cold justice of the thing demanded

that she should play the part of mother to this child who had come from

the same convent. She figured it out to amount to that. She would leave

Edward to Florence and to me—and she would devote all her time to

providing that child with an atmosphere of love until she could be

returned to her poor young husband. It was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as soon as

she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of

feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a

great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had

fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws

of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her dark hair, like

the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up—she was the merest featherweight—and laid her on

the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had just

scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had not committed

suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long lashes on

the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with the flowers all about

her. The stem of a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike of

flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like a bride in the sunlight

of the mortuary candles that were all about her, and the white coifs of

the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their faces hidden might have

been two swans that were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or

wherever it is. Leonora showed her to me. She would not let either of

the others see her. She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's

feelings. He never could bear the sight of a corpse. And, since she

never gave him an idea that Maisie had written to her, he imagined that

the death had been the most natural thing in the world. He soon got over

it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his about which he never felt much

remorse.