that he could go out and capture the old elephant--he knew he would
find it! When at last he slept he sank into a world of white churches
that waved their steeples like vast trunks, and danced with elephants
that had bellies full of fire and hidden bells that clanged impetuously
to a courageous pull of each tail. He did not wake again until morning
was bright and birds were singing. It was early, but it was his
birthday. There were no noises in the street yet, and he could not
hear his father or mother moving about. He crawled silently from his
bed and dressed himself. The coloured windows in the little white fane
gleamed still but it looked a little dull now. He took the cake that
mother always left at his bedside and crept down the stairs. There he
put on his shoes and, munching the cake, tiptoed to the front door. It
was not bolted, but it was difficult for him to slip back the latch
quietly, and when at last it was done and he stood upon the step he was
doubly startled to hear a loud rapping on the knocker of a house a few
doors away. He sidled quickly but warily to the corner of the street,
crushing the cake into his pocket, and then peeped back. It was more
terrible than he had anticipated! A tall policeman stood outside that
house, bawling to a woman with her hair in curl papers who was lifting
the sash of an upper window. Felix turned and ran through the gap in
the hedge and onwards up the hill. He did not wait; he thought he heard
the policeman calling out "Tincler!" and he ran faster and faster, then
slower and more slow as the down steepened, until he was able to sink
down breathless behind a clump of the furze, out of sight and out of
hearing. The policeman did not appear to be following him; he moved on
up the hill and through the soft smooth alleys of the furze until he
reached the top of the down, searching always for the white elephant
which he knew must be hidden close there and nowhere else, although
he had no clear idea in his mind of the appearance of his mysterious
quarry. Vain search, the elephant was shy or cunning and eluded him.
Hungry at last and tired he sat down and leaned against a large ant
hill close beside the thick and perfumed furze. Here he ate his cake
and then lolled, a little drowsy, looking at the few clouds in the
sky and listening to birds. A flock of rooks was moving in straggling
flight towards him, a wide flat changing skein, like a curtain of crape
that was being pulled and stretched delicately by invisible fingers.
One of the rooks flapped just over him; it had a small round hole
right through the feathers of one wing--what was that for? Felix was
just falling to sleep, it was so soft and comfortable there, when a
tiny noise, very tiny but sharp and mysterious, went "Ping!" just by
his ear, and something stung him lightly in the neck. He knelt up, a
little startled, but he peered steadily under the furze. "Ping!" went
something again and stung him in the ball of the eye. It made him
blink. He drew back; after staring silently at the furze he said very
softly, "Come out!" Nothing came; he beckoned with his forefinger and
called aloud with friendliness, "come on, come out!" At that moment
his nose was almost touching a brown dry sheath of the furze bloom,
and right before his eyes the dried flower burst with the faint noise
of "Ping!" and he felt the shower of tiny black seeds shooting against
his cheek. At once he comprehended the charming mystery of the furze's
dispersal of its seeds, and he submitted himself to the fairylike
bombardment with great glee, forgetting even the elephant until in one
of the furze alleys he came in sight of a heap of paper that fluttered
a little heavily. He went towards it; it was so large that he could
not make out its shape or meaning. It was a great white bag made of
paper, all crumpled and damp, with an arrangement of wire where the
hole was, and some burned tow fixed in it. But at last he was able to
perceive the green trunk, and it also had pink eyes! He had found it
and he was triumphant! There were words in large black letters painted
upon it which he could not read, except one word which was CURE. It
was an advertisement fire-balloon relating to a specific for catarrh.
He rolled the elephant together carefully, and carrying the mass of
it clasped in his two arms he ran back along the hill chuckling to
himself, "I'm carrying the ole elephant." Advancing down the hill to
his home he was precariously swathed in a drapery of balloon paper. The
door stood open; he walked into the kitchen. No one was in the kitchen,
but there were sharp straight voices speaking in the room above. He
thought he must have come into the wrong house, but the strange noises
frightened him into silence; he stood quite still listening to them.
He had dropped the balloon and it unfolded upon the floor, partly
revealing the astounding advertisement of
PEASEGOOD'S PODOPHYLLIN.
The voices above were unravelling horror upon horror. He knew by some
divining instinct that tragedy was happening to him, had indeed
already enveloped and crushed him. A mortar had exploded at the
fireworks display, killing and wounding people that he knew.
"She had a great hole of a wound in the soft part of her thigh as you
could put a cokernut in...."
"God a'mighty...."
"Died in five minutes, poor thing."
"And the husband ... they couldn't....?"
"No, couldn't identify ... they could not identify him only by some
papers in his pocket."
"And he'd got a little bagpipe done up in a package ... for their
little boy...."
"Never spoke a word...."
"Never a word, poor creature."
"May Christ be good to 'em."
"Yes, yes," they all said softly.
The child walked quietly up the stairs to his mother's bedroom. Two
policemen were there making notes in their pocket books, their helmets
lying on the unused bed. There were also three or four friendly women
neighbours. As he entered the room the gossip ceased abruptly. One of
the women gasped "O Jesus!" and they seemed to huddle together eyeing
him as if he had stricken them with terror. With his fingers still upon
the handle of the door he looked up at the tallest policeman and said:
"What's the matter?"
The policeman did not reply immediately; he folded up his notebook, but
the woman who had gasped came to him with a yearning cry and wrapped
him in her protesting arms with a thousand kisses.
"Ye poor lamb, ye poor little orphan, whatever 'ull become of ye!"
At that moment the bell of the Orphanage burst into a peal of harsh
impetuous clangour and the policemen picked up their helmets from the
bed.
CRAVEN ARMS
CRAVEN ARMS
All schools since the beginning of time have been modern at some period
of their existence, but this one was modern, so the vicar declared,
because it was so blessedly hygienic; the townspeople were perhaps
proudest of its evening classes, very advanced they were--languages,
sciences, arts--and very popular. The school was built upon a high
tree-arboured slope overlooking the snug small town and on its western
side stared ambiguously at a free upland country that was neither
small nor snug. The seventeen young women and the nine young men
who comprised the evening sketching class were definitely, indeed
articulately, inartistic; they were as unæsthetic as pork pies, all
except Julia Tern, a golden-haired pure-complexioned fawn of a girl
whose talent was already beyond the reach of any instruction the
teacher could give. He could not understand why she continued to attend
his classes.
One evening she brought for his criticism a portrait sketch of himself.
"This is extraordinarily beautiful," he murmured.
"Yes," said Julia.
"I mean the execution, the presentation and so on."
Julia did not reply. He stared at her picture of him, a delicately
modelled face with a suggestion of nobility, an air that was kind as it
was grave. The gravity and nobility which so pleased him were perhaps
the effect of a high brow from which the long brown hair flowed thinly
back to curve in a tidy cluster at his neck. Kindness beamed in the
eyes and played around the thin mouth, sharp nose and positive chin.
What could have inspired her to make this idealisation of himself,
for it was idealisation in spite of its fidelity and likeness? He
knew he had little enough nobility of character--too little to show
so finely--and as for that calm gravity of aspect, why gravity simply
was not in him. But there it was on paper, deliberate and authentic,
inscribed with his name--_David Masterman_ 1912.
"When, how did you come to do it?"
"I just wanted it, you were a nice piece, I watched you a good deal,
and there you are!" She said it jauntily, but there was a pink flush in
her cheeks.
"It's delicious," he mused, "I envy you. I can't touch a decent
head--not even yours. But why have you idealised me so?" He twitted her
lightly about the gravity and nobility.
"But you are like that, you are. That's how I see you at this moment."
She did not give him the drawing as he hoped she would. He did not care
to ask her for it--there was delicious flattery in the thought that she
treasured it so much.
Masterman was a rather solitary man of about thirty. He lived alone
in a bungalow away out of the town and painted numbers of landscapes,
rather lifeless imitations, as he knew, of other men's masterpieces.
They were frequently sold.
Sometimes on summer afternoons he would go into woods or fields with
a few of his pupils to sketch or paint farmhouses, trees, clouds,
stacks, and other rural furniture. He was always hoping to sit alone
with Julia Tern; but there were other loyal pupils who never missed
these occasions, among them the two Forrest girls, Ianthe, the younger,
and Katherine, daughters of a thriving contractor. Julia remained
inscrutable, she gave him no opportunities at all: he could never
divine her feelings or gather any response to his own, but there could
be no doubt of the feelings of the Forrest girls--they quite certainly
liked him, liked him enormously, and indeed could have had no other
reason for continuing in his classes, both being as devoid of artistic
grace as an inkstand. They brought fruit or chocolate to the classes
and shared them with him. Their attentions, their mutual attentions,
were manifested in many ways, small but significant and kind. On such
occasions Julia's eyes seemed to rest upon him with an ironical gaze.
It was absurd. He liked them well enough, and sometimes from his shy
wooing of the adorable but enigmatic Julia he would turn for solace to
Ianthe. Yet strangely enough it was Kate, the least alluring to him of
the three girls, who took him to her melancholy heart.
Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed,
dressed in cream-coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight,
without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But
she had an extraordinary vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that
exacerbated him, and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did
not linger; she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting
staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair,
her dusky face, her creamy clothes and her delightful rotundities. She
had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a
tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.
One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch
trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been
naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then
thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of helleborine growing
in the dimness under the closely planted saplings.
"Don't! don't!" he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt
down together to admire the white virginal flower. His arm fell
around Ianthe's waist in a light casual way. He scarcely realised its
presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that went he did
not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was. Ianthe took no
notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not retreat until
they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his side until his
arm once more stole round her.
"Heavens above," she said, "you do get away with it quick!"
"Life's short, there's no time to lose, I do as I'd be done by."
"And there are so many of us! But glory," said the jolly girl, taking
him to her bosom, "in for a penny, in for a pound."
She did not pick any more flowers, and soon they were out of the wood
decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia's gaze was full
of irony, the timid wonder in Kate's eyes moved him uncomfortably,
there was something idiotic in the whole affair.
Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little
town or in the city three miles further off. Her uncouthness still
repelled him and sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was
always happy to be with him, fond and gay with all the endearing
alertness of a pert bird.
Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once
sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences
stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the
brink of her emotions, and they, unhappily for her, were often not
transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark
beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his
attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to
say, she seemed to stand and wait.
One autumn night after the pupils had gone home from school he walked
into the dim lobby for his hat and coat. Kate Forrest was there. She
stood with her back to him adjusting her hat. She did not say a word
nor did he address her. They were almost touching each other, there was
a pleasant scent about her. In the class-room behind the caretaker was
walking about the hollow sounding floor, humming loudly as he clapped
down windows and mounted the six chairs to turn out the six gas lamps.
When the last light through the glazed door was gone and the lobby was
completely dark Kate all at once turned to him, folded him in her arms,
and held him to her breast for one startling moment, then let him go,
murmuring "O ... O." It made him strangely happy. He pulled her back in
the gloom, whispering tender words. They walked out of the hall into
the dark road and stopped to confront each other. The road was empty
and dark except for a line of gas lamps that gleamed piercingly bright
in the sharp air and in the polished surface of the road that led
back from the hill down past her father's villa. There were no lamps
in the opposite direction and the road groped its way out into the
dark country where he lived, a mile beyond the town. It was windy and
some unseen trees behind a wall near them swung and tossed with many
pleasant sounds.
"I will come a little way with you," Kate said.
"Yes, come a little way," he whispered, pressing her arm, "I'll come
back with you."
She took his arm and they turned towards the country. He could think of
nothing to say, he was utterly subdued by his surprise: Kate was sad,
even moody; but at last she said slowly: "I am unlucky. I always fall
in love with men who can't love me."
"O but I can and do, dear Kate," he cried lightly, "love me, Kate, go
on loving me, I'm not, well, I'm not very wicked."
"No, no, you do not." She shook her head mournfully; after a few
moments she added: "It's Julia Tern."
That astonished him too. How could she have known it! How could anyone
have known--even Julia herself. It was queer that she did not refer to
his friendship with Ianthe; he thought that was much more obvious than
his love for Julia. In a mood that he only half understood he began
to deny her reproachful charge. "Why, you must think me very fickle
indeed. I really love you, dear Kate, really you."
His arm was around her neck, he smoothed her cheek fondly against his
own. She returned his caresses, but he could glimpse the melancholy
doubt in her averted eyes.
"We often talk of you, we often talk of you at night in bed, often."
"What do you say about me--in bed? Who?"
"Ianthe and me. She likes you."
"She likes me! What do you say about me--in bed?"
He hoped Ianthe had not been indiscreet, but Kate only said: "She
doesn't like you as I do--not like this."
Soon they began to walk back towards the town. He smiled once when, as
their footsteps clattered irregularly upon the hard clean road, she
skipped to adjust the fall of her steps to his.
"Do not come any further," she begged, as they neared the street lamps.
"It doesn't matter, not at all, what I've said to you. It will be all
right. I shall see you again."
Once more she put her arms around his neck, murmuring "Good-night,
good-night, good-night."
He watched her go quietly away. When he turned homeward his mind was
full of thoughts that were only dubiously pleasant. It was all right,
surprisingly sweet, but it left him uneasy. He managed to light a
cigarette, but the wind blew smoke into his eyes, tore the charred end
into fiery rags, and tossed the sparkles across his shoulder. If it
had only been Julia Tern!--or even Ianthe!--he would have been wholly
happy. Kate was good-looking, but these quietly passionate advances
disturbed him. Why had he been so responsive to her? He excused
himself, it was quite simple; you could not let a woman down, a loving
woman like that, not at once, a man should be kind. But what did she
mean when she spoke of always falling in love with men who did not like
her?
He tossed the cigarette away and turned up the collar of his coat,
for the faintest fall of warm rain blew against his face like a soft
beautiful net. He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked sharply
and forgettingly home.
2
Three miles away from the little town was the big city with tramways,
electric light, factories, canals, and tens of thousands of people,
and there a few nights later he met Ianthe. Walking around and away
from the happy lighted streets they came out upon the bank of a canal
where darkness and loneliness were intensified by the silent passage
of black water whose current they could define but not see. As they
stepped warily along the unguarded bank he embraced her. Even as he did
so he cursed himself for a fool to be so fond of this wretched imp of a
girl. In his heart he believed he disliked her, but he was not sure.
She was childish, artful, luscious, stupid--this was no gesture for a
man with any standards. Silently clutching each other they approached
an iron bridge with lamps upon it and a lighted factory beyond it. The
softly-moving water could now be seen; the lamps on the bridge let down
thick rods of light into its quiet depths, and beyond the arch the
windows of the factory, inverted in the stream, bloomed like baskets of
fire with flaming fringes. A boy shuffled across the bridge whistling a
tune; there was the distant rumble and trot of a cab. Then all sounds
melted into quiet without one wave of air. Ianthe was replying to him:
"No, no, I like it, I like you." She put her brow against his breast:
"I like you, I like you."
His embracing hand could feel the emotion streaming within the girl.
"Do you like me better than her?"
"Than whom," he asked.
Ianthe was coy. "You know, you know."
Masterman's feelings were a mixture of perturbation and delight,
delight at this manifestation of jealousy of her sister which was an
agreeable thing, anyway, for it implied a real depth of regard for
him; but he was perturbed, for he did not know what Kate had told this
sister of their last strange meeting.
He saluted her again, exclaiming:
"Never mind her. This our outing, isn't it?"
"I don't like her," Ianthe added naively, "she is so awfully fond of
you."
"O confound her," he cried; and then: "You mustn't mind me saying that
so, so sharply; you don't mind, do you?"
Ianthe's lips were soft and sweet. Sisters were quite unscrupulous,
Masterman had heard of such cases before, but he had tenderness and a
reluctance to wound anybody's susceptibility, let alone the feelings of
a woman who loved. He was an artist not only in paint but in sentiment,
and it is possible that he excelled in the less tangible medium.
"It's a little awkward," he ventured. Ianthe didn't understand, she
didn't understand that at all.
"The difficulty, you see," he said, with the air of one handling
whimsically a question of perplexity that yet yielded its amusement,
"is ... is Kate."
"Kate?" said Ianthe.
"She is so--so gone, so absolutely gone."
"Gone?"
"Well, she's really, really in love, deeply, deeply," looking away
anywhere but at her sister's eyes.
"With Chris Halton, do you mean?"
"Ho, ho!" he laughed. "Chris who? Lord, no! With me, with me, isn't
she?"
"With you!"
But Ianthe was quite positive, even a little ironical, about that. "She
is not. She rather dislikes you, Mr. Prince Charming, so there! We
speak of you sometimes at night, in bed--we sleep together. She knows
what I think of you. But she's quite, well, she doesn't like you at
all--she acts the heavy sister."
"O!" said Masterman, groping as it were for some light in his darkness.
"She--what do you think?--she warns me against you," Ianthe continued.
"Against me?"
"As if I care. Do you?"
"No, no! I don't care."
They left the dark bank where they had been standing and walked along
to the bridge. Halfway up its steps to the road he paused, and asked:
"Then who is it that is so fond of me?"
"O, you know, you know." Ianthe nestled blissfully in his arm again.
"No, but who is it; I may be making another howler, I thought you meant
Kate; what did she warn you of, I mean against me?"
They were now in the streets again, walking towards the tram centre.
The shops were darkened and closed, but the cinemas lavished their
unwanted illuminations on the street. There were no hurrying people,
there was just strolling ease; the policemen at corners were chatting
to other policemen now in private clothes. The brilliant trams rumbled
and clanged and stopped, the saloons were full and musical.
"What did she warn you against?" he repeated.
"You," chuckled Ianthe.
"But what about? What has she got against me?"
"Everything. You know. You know you do." The archness of Ianthe was
objectively baffling, but under it all he read the significance, its
invitation.
He waited beside her for a tram, but when it came he pleaded a further
engagement in the city and left her rather crest-fallen to her journey.
He had no other engagement, he only wanted to be alone to sort out the
things she had dangled before his mind, so he boarded the next car and
walked from the Tutsan terminus to his cottage. Both girls were fond
of him, then--Ianthe's candour left him no room for doubt--and they
were both lying to each other about him. Well, he didn't mind that, he
lied himself whenever it was necessary or suited him. Not often, but
when truth was inappropriate to a sensitive-minded man, this was his
protective colouring. Why after all should sympathetic mendacity be a
monopoly of polite society?
"But it's also the trick of thieves and seducers," he muttered to
himself. "I'm not a thief, no, I'm not a thief. As for the other thing,
well, what is there against me--nothing, nothing at all." But a strange
voiceless sigh seemed to echo from the trees along the dark road; he
walked on more rapidly.
Three women! There was no doubt either about the third, Ianthe had
thought of Julia, too, just as Kate had. What a fate for a misogamist!
He felt like a mouse being taken for a ride in a bath chair. He had
an invincible prejudice against marriage, not as an institution but
because he was perfectly aware of his incapacity for faithfulness. His
emotions were deep but unprolonged, they were fickle. Love was love,
but marriage turned love into the stone of Sisyphus. At the sound of
the marriage bell--a passing bell--earth at his feet would burst into
flame and the sky above would pour upon him an unquenching profusion
of tears. Love was a fine ennobling thing, but though he had the will
to love he knew beyond the possibility of doubt that his capacity for
love was a meandering strengthless thing. Even his loyalty to Julia
Tern--and that had the strongest flavour of any such emotion that had
ever beset him, no matter how brief its term--even that was a deviating
zig-zag loyalty. For he wanted to go on being jolly and friendly with
Ianthe if only Julia did not get to know. With Kate, too, that tender
melancholy woman. She would be vastly unhappy. Who was this Christopher
whom Ianthe fondly imagined her sister to favour? Whoever he was, poor
devil, he would not thank D. M. for his intervention. But he would drop
all this; however had he, of all men, come to be plumped so suddenly
into a state of things for which he had shown so little fancy in the
past? Julia would despise him, she would be sure to despise him, sure
to; and yet if he could only believe she would not it would be pleasant
to go on being friendly with Ianthe pending ... pending what?
Masterman was a very pliant man; but as things shaped themselves for
him he did not go a step further with Ianthe, and it was not to Julia
at all that he made love.
3
The amour, if it may be described as such, of David Masterman and
Kate Forrest took a course that was devoid of ecstasy, whatever other
qualities may have illuminated their desires. It was an affair in which
the human intentions, which are intellectual, were on both sides strong
enough to subdue the efforts of passion, which are instinctive, to rid
itself of the customary curbs, and to turn the clash of inhibitions
wherein the man proposes and the woman rejects into a conflict not
of ideal but of mere propriety. They were like two negative atoms
swinging in a medium from which the positive flux was withdrawn; for
them the nebulæ did not 'cohere into an orb.'
Kate's fine figure was not so fine as Julia Tern's; her dusky charms
were excelled by those of Ianthe; but her melancholy immobility,
superficial as it was, had a suggestive emotional appeal that won
Masterman away from her rivals. Those sad eyes had but to rest on
his and their depths submerged him. Her black hair had no special
luxuriance, her stature no unusual grace; the eyes were almost blue and
the thin oval face had always the flush of fine weather in it; but her
strong hands, though not as white as snow, were paler than milk, their
pallor was unnatural. Almost without an effort she drew him away from
the entangling Ianthe, and even the image of Julia became but a fair
cloud seen in moonlight, delicate and desirable but very far away; it
would never return. Julia had observed the relations between them--no
discerning eye could misread Kate's passion--and she gave up her class,
a secession that had a deep significance for him, and a grief that he
could not conceal from Kate though she was too wise to speak of it.
But in spite of her poignant aspect--for it was in that appearance
she made such a powerful appeal to Masterman; the way she would wait
silently for him on the outside of a crowd of the laughing chattering
students was touching--she was an egotist of extraordinary type. She
believed in herself and in her virtue more strongly than she believed
in him or their mutual love. By midsummer, after months of wooing, she
knew that the man who so passionately moved her and whose own love she
no less powerfully engaged was a man who would never marry, who had a
morbid preposterous horror of the domesticity and devotion that was her
conception of living bliss. "The hand that rocks the cradle rocks the
world," he said. He, too, knew that the adored woman, for her part,
could not dream of a concession beyond the limits her virginal modesty
prescribed. He had argued and stormed, sworn that baffled love turns
irrevocably to hatred. She did not believe him, she even smiled, but
he had behaved grossly towards her, terrified her, and they parted in
anger.
He did not see her for many weeks. He was surprised and dismayed, his
misery was so profound. He knew he had loved her; he had not doubted
its sincerity, but he had doubted its depth. Then one September evening
she had come back to the class and afterwards she had walked along the
road with him towards his home.
"Come to my house," he said, "you have never been to see it."