“But, my dear, I don’t think the greengrocer has called.”

“You’ll find a bagful of white-hearts in the locker of the boat.”

He brought them to her; firm hard cherries, cold and fresh to the lips

as the dew stabbing its little balls of light from every grass-blade.

Presently she joined him in the hall; a grandfather clock groaned three

sepulchral strokes as she descended the wooden stairway.

“Don’t believe it,” Stuart warned her; “just hold tight to the fact

that before last night was yesterday, and after next night will be

to-morrow; no more is necessary. Come for a walk.”

They rattled back the heavy door-bolts, and wandered for what seemed

a long space of time along unfamiliar paths and across drenching

grass, without meeting anything more awake to its responsibilities

than a slowly creaking windmill. Then returned to the inn. Still no

movement of life. The door stood ajar as they had left it. The hands

of the grandfather clock were dallying eccentrically in the regions of

half-past eleven.

“This is getting serious,” Stuart complained, rousing terrific thunders

upon the gong. “Where is the traditional tiller of the soil? Where

is the buxom hostess astir before cockcrow? Where, principally, is

cockcrow?”

“The cocks of the neighbourhood have been warned that a superhuman

crower of crows has come to dwell among them. Therefore they are silent

and abashed.”

“I’d be ashamed, if I were a cock, not to put up a little competition.

All hail! here’s what was once a waiter!”

The half-dressed, yawning apparition that, mop and bucket in hand,

uprose from the lower regions, stared aghast at the mention of

breakfast; muttered “Not for an hour or two, anyways”; and began

without enthusiasm to sweep the dining-room.

“We’d better go for another walk,” suggested Peter; “something tells me

we have got up too early.”

Lying in a burning field of rye and poppies, he held her hands, and

said: “It seems the most natural of all things that we should be here

together and alone.”

“I know,” disappointedly. “I don’t feel a bit as wicked as I should.

But you _do_ think I’m bold and bad, don’t you, Stuart?”

“I think you’re just most awfully bold and bad,” heartily.

“And--and--of course I can’t expect you to feel the same respect for me

as before,” wistfully seeking reassurance.

“Well, of course, naturally, a fellow never looks on a girl quite

like before, after--I mean, well--there’s always something gone,

isn’t there? I mean, a fellow wouldn’t like his sister to meet a girl

who--hang it, Peter, you know quite well what I mean!”

Then he laughed, and moved closer, among the stiff yellow stalks broken

by their intrusion. “It’s tremendously all right, isn’t it, dear?”

“I’m afraid so,” she confessed. “I’ve been waiting all the time for the

sudden misgiving that tells me I should not have stayed. But it hasn’t

come.”

Stuart sympathized over the nuisance of an essential mood missing. “It

spoils the set, and one can’t play demon patience any longer, and--come

home to breakfast!” suddenly springing up. His nerves, though the girl

was not aware of it, had been playing demon patience on their own all

through the night, and were in consequence rather jumpy.

By dint of sitting like two mutes in the dining-room, and looking

steadily reproachful while the waiter continued to sweep it out, they

at last goaded him into serving them with breakfast.

“And now,” striding across the garden towards ‘Faustina,’ “now we’ll

get under way. A long day, and a strong day, and a day spent together.”

Stuart broke into rollicking song:

“The sail’s aloft, the wind’s awake,

The anchor streams the bow,

The stays are trim, the guns are grim--

O Captain, where art thou?”

It was late afternoon when the wind, for the first time since their

stay in Norfolk, really found itself; and Peter became of a sudden

definitely aware of Sailing. Beating up Bure to Acles, the sheet fairly

taut in her one hand and the tiller somewhat restive in the other, she

grew to joy in the swish of the reeds against the bows, as she swung

the boat round, and let the boom lurch over; in the jerk of the rope,

as she controlled its rattling passage through the blocks, with already

her eye straining forward for the crucial moment at the further bank.

She did not notice, in this new intoxication of pace and mastery, that

Stuart had ceased to give directions ... when suddenly, gripped by a

strong puff of wind, the sail leapt sideways, the water sang up over

the lee rail; and Peter, taken by surprise, would have been hurled to

the floor of the boat, had she not just in time flung up her heels and

braced them against the opposite scuppers; nor did she let go of the

sheet, which tore like some live thing at her palms.

“All right,” said Stuart calmly. “Blowing up a bit fresh. Shall I take

her?”

“No.” And now she understood sailing right enough: this thing which

demanded of her every atom and particle of strength she possessed,

and some she did not consciously possess until that time. A darkness

crept across the sky, and the wind’s whistle had an ominous note. More

and more the boat heeled to meet its own disappearing shadow; till it

seemed as if one could not for an instant longer retain that tilted

position in the lifting scuppers.

--“We’ve got to beat it,” cried Stuart; “don’t let ’em get to windward

of you!” And then only she saw that they were being furiously raced by

another craft, with larger canvas than their own, and a shouting crew

of men. Stuart was excited--a race always brought out all the child in

him.

“You can make the next corner if you’re careful, and then she’ll run!”

The ‘Tyke,’ emphatically now the ‘Tyke’ and not ‘Faustina,’ did

indeed luff the corner, and scudded ahead straight and clean with the

galloping motion of a greyhound. Peter’s blood was romping; her hand

felt as though cut in two where sawn by the rope; shoulders and knees

and wrists, no part of her that did not throb and ache and cry aloud

for release from this straining torture--torture that she would not

have forgone for a lifetime of ease and pettiness and mild enjoyment.

For she was conquering the wind, and gaining on the other boat, and

never before had water been so near or the world so far.

“We ought to reef, but we won’t!” Stuart’s voice sang in triumphantly

with the roar and whip of the waves. “More sheet, Peter, or she’ll

carry away. Not much--no, none at all, and chance it! By Heaven, it’s

great!”

Peter’s entire soul and body were bracing themselves in resistance

against the push of the tiller. Her teeth fastened firmly into her

lower lip. She had not known one could so hate an inanimate bar.

Inanimate? possessed rather of seven kicking devils.... And then she

saw the bridge ahead; and Stuart announced with gentle pleasure: “We’ve

won,” and slipped into her place, and turned the ‘Tyke’ downstream. The

defeated crew called out a hearty word of appreciation; Peter smiled at

them; lit a cigarette; and, soaked by the churned-up spray, her hands

stiff and bleeding, subsided on to the floor of their vessel, whereof

she watched in passive admiration Stuart’s perfect handling.

“I now propose,” he said, “that we should feast our victory while

under way, which in itself is a battle of some stubbornness. In other

words, Peter, you shall collect what there is of lunch from among the

tarpaulins and suit-cases littering this most disorderly tub, and

minister to my needs while I cling to my post at the wheel:

“An’ I never left my post, sir, for the cappen ’e bid me stay,

Tho’ me ’ands were frozen an’ cut, sir, an’ me face was stiff

wi’ the spray;

But me thirteen children are dead, sir--an’ there’s nobody left

to care,

So I stayed, like Casabianca, on the fighting ‘Téméraire’!”

It was no easy matter, with the deck tilted at an angle of 30°, to find

the requisite bread and meat and ale, plates and forks and bottles. It

struck Peter that sunset was a curious hour for lunch; as still more

curious that the sun should set at all on this day which had begun so

long ago. It was a lurid and tempestuous sky, jagged across by untidy

streaks of black, the whole swimming canopy overhead as it were being

sucked and drawn by red relentless fingers into the very heart of the

western turmoil.

“Stuart, there’s no glass.”

“Must be.”

“_Isn’t_,” crossly.

“A tin mug, then?”

“Nothing but a flower-pot--will that do? Why do you keep flower-pots on

board? Is it that you may grow nasturtiums while becalmed?”

“A flower-pot will hold the beer all right, if you keep your thumb in

the hole at the bottom, all the while I drink.”

Peter refused. “I’m not your squaw.” And Stuart related with

reproachful emphasis the story of the little boy in Holland who had not

minded plugging a hole with his thumb all through the weary night, to

save his country from inundation. Nevertheless, Peter was not incited

to emulation.

All this while they were running before a powerful wind, sail and water

ablaze with crimson, the same red glow splashing their faces and their

hands, and touching with magic all the level shores. A bottle was

hurled into the scuppers, crashed into fragments; and triumphantly the

breeze hummed through the straining cordage.

It struck Peter that sunset was a good time for lunch.

“Hullo! here are the mortal remains of the wild-duck paste.” And they

both laughed, thinking of the immortal remains, bearing fruit in

Aureole’s heart.

“Not that I think wild ducks do bear fruit as a rule; too reminiscent

of a hen laying a melon. Peter, unless you are playing at Tantalus, or

rather the gods who tantalized Tantalus, you might hold the bread a few

inches nearer my lips.”

Passing St. Bennetts, the wind dropped somewhat, the clouds piled

themselves out of sight, and the sky paled to a lake of clear light

green wherein the round red ball of the sun hung motionless, striped by

the darkening reeds.

Stuart hailed a cabin-boat with seven men on board, all lustily singing.

“Hi! what’s the time?--excuse me, Peter, but it had to be done.”

“Half-past six,” they wove their reply into the strains of ‘John Peel.’

“We shall make it, easily, and with half an hour to spare, wind or no

wind.”

Peter looked enquiring.

“The eight-forty-one. You wanted to get home to-night, didn’t you?”

All day long a glittering mist had lain lightly as forgetfulness on

speech and memory. The reminder dropped mournfully as a premonition.

The sun sank yet lower, staining the very roots of the tall green

spears fringeing the waters. And the boatload ahead ceased from their

jovial ditty, gripped by the conventional melancholy of evening.

“Wait a minute,” prophesied Peter; “they’ll sing--what do you bet,

Stuart? I say: ‘Swanee River.’”

She was very near the mark in her guess. As the last ruddy segment

dipped under the horizon, a haunting haunted melody floated backwards

upon the sighing day:

“Look out, for the Goblin Man,

That Ragtime Goblin Man!

Run, run, just as fast as you can....”

“The darlings!” murmured Peter. “They’ll repeat it eight times, and

then the ass of the party will start for the ninth time, and John will

tell him to shut up.”

John was a Voice from the Cabin, and evidently the strong man of the

party, as one could hear him being constantly consulted, in tones both

supplicating and respectful.

But the plaintive tune, drawn out thinner and ever thinner as the

larger boat drew away, was working potent havoc upon Peter’s carefully

guarded Marshes of Cheap Sentiment. Noting this, Stuart summoned her

to the helm: “Come and take her. We shall probably jibe round the next

bend,” and buried his head in the locker.

Peter wondered rather irritably if he did this on purpose whenever a

jibe loomed ahead. She had no affection for the jibe. It held for her

an agonizing moment, after she had hauled in the sheet, when she became

a blank as to which way the tiller should be rammed, in squaring the

sail anew. Up till now, Heaven had been with her, but this time Heaven

looked unpropitious--perhaps because the sun had set.

Heaven elected at the critical moment to send her a strong gust of

wind, the last they had in stock that day. It spun the boom crashing

to leeward, before Peter had time to do anything at all. Followed

a delirious instant when it struck her she ought to manipulate the

tiller--and did it, with dire effect. She was aware that Stuart had

come out of the locker, that the water was rushing up from behind to

meet her, and that the boat was evilly tilting her downwards to meet

the water with an evident after-intention of turning turtle over her

drowning body. She did not call to Stuart, even then, instinctively

certain that he was doing something useful in emergencies, and might

be trusted to save her afterwards. All this in the space of time it

takes a boat to turn over upon its side and drift at right angles to

the river, the sail sagging flatly upon the surface of the stream.

An invisible weight to balance Peter’s, was obviously preventing

‘Faustina’ from accomplishing a complete somersault.... Stuart had

scrambled like lightning over the rail and flung himself upon the keel.

Then he looked around for Peter, and was relieved to find her clinging

with both hands to the opposite side of their improvised see-saw.

“Can you hang on?” he queried cheerfully.

She replied in like tones, “How long?”--and suppressed her inner doubts.

“Till we float ashore. I can’t do anything while I’m on the keel, and

mustn’t move off it. How much of you is immersed?”

“Up to the knees.”

The boat hovered about uncertainly in midstream. There was no one in

sight, and no sound but the breeze shivering the rushes. A fish leapt

shining from the water, and plunged again into a circle of ripples.

From round the next bend still drifted snatches of the ‘Ragtime

Goblin Man’; evidently John had not yet spoken. Some distance over

the land, yet not so far but that they should distinctly have heard

the throb and clangour, a train passed in a linked blur of lights;

passed noiselessly, like a phantom train. Peter, watching it, wished

passionately that she might hear it whistle, as reassurance that she

herself was real, and not a pictured castaway upon a badly drawn bit of

wreckage.

At last they floated into a mud-bank; and were able thence to wade

ashore.

Peter waited for Stuart to display extreme anxiety as to her degree of

wetness, to burst into pæans of praise on her bravery and calmness in

the face of danger, and finally to mutter with white young jaws, “I

shall never forgive myself--never!”

Stuart said curtly: “Shivery? No? That’s all right; d’you feel equal to

giving me a hand with the sail? We must lug it up somehow,”--happily

convinced that by thus increasing the wind to the shorn lamb, he was

treating the lamb in the spirit it most desired.

And as they tugged and hauled in the dim light at that most obstinate

of all foes, a water-logged sail, Peter played up gallantly to his call

upon that other Peter; the one she had carefully cut according to his

measurements. Round her lips hovered a rather tremulous smile at the

manner in which she was thus for a second time required to pay for her

audacity in playing at God.

--And yet, was it payment, after all? With a little thrill of exultant

surprise, Peter realized that the Peter of her disguises could not be

a mere lay figure, since she had not discarded them in actual moment

of peril and when thrown completely off her guard. Why then, they had

become in very truth a part of her being; she was indeed Stuart’s

Portrait-of-a-Lady, complete in all its essentials; she had stood the

test....

There was far more actual fun to be had from standing ankle-deep in

mud, with a spectral wind flapping her wet skirt against her knees,

while she pitted her strength viciously against a tangle of wet rope,

than from the use of her feminine privileges--Was there?... The old

Peter hollowed into the mist a momentary fancy of a warm glowing

interior--soft colours--soft cushions--warmth and ease and the dry

slippery touch of silk upon her flesh--the abandoning of all effort to

the stronger male who realized and joyed in her greater fragility....

“Peter, I want you! Hold this”--Stuart’s voice, confident and

imperative. And the mist curled itself greyly over her pictured fancy

of chintz and rugs and warming-pans, of sentiment beside red caves of

firelight, and withal of a lover who was not a leprechaun.

--“Coming!” for a while they worked grimly, neither speaking.

Stuart paused in his labours, threw a tarpaulin on the bank, seated

himself thereon, and invited Peter to do likewise. Then, in a sudden

access of chivalry, he wrapped around her his own oilskins, thereby

giving her more than ever the appearance of a battered stowaway, and

consented for a moment to dwell on their quondam peril. Nay, he even

came to her to be fed, in an engaging manner all his own:

“It was a long way from the locker to the keel,” reminiscently.

She said not a word.

“I was fairly quick, I think. Didn’t fumble, did I?”

Still no reply.

“Peter,” imploringly.

Then she gave in, and was bad for him: “You were magnificent, Stuart.”

His crow was fervent but subdued. The atmosphere not being conducive to

any sound above a whisper.

“Now we’ll just bale out the tub, set it on its hind legs, hoist sail,

and be off. She didn’t ship much water; dryest capsize I’ve ever done.

A beautiful capsize, really; Peter, I’m glad we capsized; it will have

a pleasant look, viewed from to-day a year hence.”

“Pleasant, but passing strange,” she murmured, gazing on the gaunt

ribbed outline of their marooned vessel. “‘It was the Schooner

“Hesperus,” that all on the shore lay wrecked----’”

“‘The skipper’s daughter had hold of the tiller. So what could you

expect?’” finished Stuart.

She surveyed him reproachfully. “Is that--generous?”

“Do you want me to be generous?--Good Lord,” with sudden heat, “do you

think I’d pay any other girl on earth the compliment of not fussing

round her wet feet ... especially when I so much want to,” he added

under his breath. Then returned quickly to his labours on the boat.

Peter was glad that she had not hearkened to the insistent pratings

of the other Peter. Glad that Stuart guessed nothing of their

existence.... The pictured fire-red interior had acquired a sudden

cheapness, viewed in the light of his last speech. Her face burnt at

the idea that he should ever know that these easy longings had even for

a moment found their entrance. After all, and undoubtedly, this, her

present plight, was far more fun; though she was cold beyond all hope

of warmth, and tired past all desire for rest,--far more fun ... lean

restless ways of fun that he had taught her; strange, slippery ways as

the way to the moon, and as unprofitable.

--“Peter! Quick--here!”

CHAPTER VI

THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE ORANGE

It was not long before the well had been baled, the gaff run up, and a

very wet mainsail flapped in mournful abandon against the mast. Then

Stuart pushed off with the quant-pole, while Peter curled herself

among the regions of his feet; from the general ooziness she suspected

she was sitting in about two inches of water, but by now it seemed

more natural to be wet than dry, and she made no efforts towards the

latter state. The mists brushed her cheek with clammy fingers; naught

of clothing but was damp and cumbersome to the body; the water had

insinuated itself into matches and cigarettes, had gurgled into the

locker, and soaked into the comestibles. Water-logged, they crept on

and on with the tide through the murky twilight, a faint saffron stain

in the west betokening where once had rioted the banners of the setting

sun. From time to time a light flashed warmly from a house-boat on the

banks, or cheery but muffled voices told of sails being laboriously

tucked away for the night, masts lowered, clinking crockery washed

up for a late meal. Theirs was the only vessel still adrift. Huddled

in her big cloak, Peter watched the darkness eating up either shore,

while the river took on unfamiliar curves and windings, seemed to

branch off into two--ten rivers, all beckoning different ways. And once

she called out sharply, “Look ahead!” that Stuart should swing the

‘Tyke’ clear of a gigantic looming ship, three tiers of sails, and a

ghostly figurehead. “Why?” And he steered straight through the ship

with its three tiers of sails. Peter said no more, not quite trusting

what further tricks her sight might choose to play. She crouched still

further into the well, content to see naught but the edge of sail

against the dense pall of sky, and dimly, where Stuart sat, an outline

of bare neck and slouched hat and lean nervous hand upon the tiller. It

all went to make perfection: the timeless blue day spent in big spaces,

limbs stiff from their perilous tussle, and now the sodden boat, and

the shadows, and Stuart beside her. She put out a chill hand to feel if

he were indeed solid substance; touched his knee, felt him start and

tingle--she could not see the hot rush of blood into his face.

Suddenly he swerved the bows towards a forest of pale reeds; they bent

apart to the sliding passage of the boat, then closed up in its wake.

The keel ran aground. Stuart let drop the mainsheet; it rattled lazily

along its blocks, and was still. The sail drooped forward, fell back

again.

... She lay suffocated in a darkness of kisses, that stole her breath

away, and her powers of resistance; robbed her of all knowledge save of

desire beating itself out upon her lips and her throat and her eyes;

upon the lids she drooped for evasion, upon the hands she put up to

protect her, upon the hair she tumbled forward, and upon her neck when

she turned her head. And then again fiercely upon her mouth, compelling

her to be passive, compelling her to response. And through the pain

and through her weariness, sang a strain of rejoicing that he should

treat her thus; that their brains and their mockery and their intellect

should yet have been all blotted to naught in a whirling storm of

passion.

... He had drawn a little away. She raised herself; pushed back her

hair with the bewildered gesture of a child. Her throat ached as if

someone had attempted to strangle her, and her mouth felt stung and

bruised. Then Stuart bent towards her, took her in his arms: “Lie

still, dear” ... and for the first time Peter lay still; mind and body

and soul, still.

It was over, the endless strain of winning and keeping the man; the

endless effort of playing-up. He loved her with a great finality of

love. She could--lie still.

* * * * *

A shaft of blackness pierced light. And Peter became aware that this

very moment which had brought her belief in the endurance of his love,

was the moment long foretold when they must consent to end it. Love’s

consummation--both had agreed that nothing less must follow.

Did Stuart know?... And suddenly his hands slackened completely their

hold on her--then tightened again to an almost intolerable grip. He too

had realized the door of exit.

But it was absurd, for an elusive unproven theory, to renounce a

thing at its perfection; Peter had doubted always if she would be big

enough for that. And now love had proven so much bigger than she had

anticipated.

She would risk the descent on the further side. Though the Hairpin

Vision shone full and steady as limelight upon the future, she was yet

willing to take all the hazard of lessening love, so she might keep

love. Keep it in whatsoever form he wished, free or bound. Stuart would

not employ the shears alone, without her co-operation. If she willed,

she might use the moment to entangle him with a thousand threads,

beyond all hope of breaking away. Why shouldn’t she? Since he had made

her need of him so great, he must pay his share. And of what avail to

set aside the temptation, since then he would never know it had existed?

With a great stirring of anger, Peter looked up at him. His face was

turned away, still set in desire, but now not for her. It was the

supremest desire of a man whose star had granted him his every wish;

desire for renunciation. Young Fortunatus pursuing the winds of sorrow.

Her anger waned and died to tenderness. This was not the ruthless

orange-sucker of her first imaginings. She alone knew how rigidly and

untiringly his asceticism had striven to keep its leanness against that

terrible perversity of ease which threatened to engulf him. And she

could help him. By her and because of her had actually come his chance

of a sacrifice worth while--oh, yes, she understood; and she could, if

she chose, be sufficiently big to allow it him. Came a rush of pride

like a sonorous North-Easter humming through the shrouds: No other girl

could have kept up with him as far--she was not going to fail at the

last ... he had once called her a genius of life.

His eyes met hers, a question in them. And she laughed. “We’ve had a

good run before the wind, Stuart.” Heard the triumphant fling of his

reply, “And we’re not going aground in the putty now.”

He unlinked his arms; took up the quant-pole; pushed back to

mid-stream. Within a few minutes they were at the landing-stage; a

sharp walk brought them to the station platform: Eight thirty-six--and

the train left at eight forty-eight. “Not bad,” remarked Stuart;

“considering our day of uncounted hours.”

There was just time for Peter to send off a wire to her cousins in

Turnham Green, bidding them reserve her a room that night; she would

arrive in London too late for the further journey to Thatch Lane.

Then, with a shaking roar, the train plunged into the station, barely

waited to gulp its few passengers, and thundered southwards. Peter

found that her fellow-travellers regarded her with astonished eyes, and

departed to view herself. The results of sun and wind, of immersement

in the water, and those few after-moments among the reeds, exceeded her

wildest expectations. It took half an hour’s unsteady labour before

looking-glass and washstand-basin, before she might lay the least

claim to respectability. She was relieved to find, however, that her

flaming cheeks and lit eyes and lips dark as wine were not at all

reminiscent of the girl about to be forsaken by her lover. She was

tremendously exultant that her body should have stood the strain of

the day, as her soul had stood its close. And she had never walked so

lightly as up the crowded dining-car to rejoin Stuart at its far end.

“Metamorphosis?”

“Only from the waist upwards,” she displayed her boots, still caked

with a large portion of Bure’s shores.

They were both in brilliant form, bandying their shafts to and fro over

that jolted meal. Liverpool Street came as a shock. They continued

to jest in the taxi which bore them with uncanny rapidity to the

boarding-house in Merton Crescent. The chauffeur mistook the number;

halted with a jerk several houses before the squat complacent little

red-brick building where Peter was to pass the night. They alighted,

and Stuart paid and dismissed the man. They waited, listening, as if

it were of importance that not a throb of the vanishing wheels should

elude their concentration. Then in silence they walked up to the iron

gate of number seventy-four, stood stock-still facing one another.

There was a sickly dazzle of light behind the Venetian blinds of the

window level with the street; somebody was watching them through the

chinks. Not that it mattered in the slightest degree. Peter’s head was

tilted well up, and she was smiling. Far away, that old discarded Peter

clung tightly to her lover, pleaded with him not to go; Peter eyed the

shadow in contempt--she had no more use for it.

“We won’t meet again.”

“No.”

As they had planned it, without lingering or reproach.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” said Stuart. He did not even touch her;

yet she winced and braced herself beneath his look as she had done

perforce when his actual grip had tightened.

--“Hullo!”

The front door of the house was suddenly flung wide open, and Peter’s

flapper cousin Jinny, flanked by a whole bevy of young people, flocked

through the aperture, bore down upon her with boisterous greeting.

And now steps and doorway and silent street were a-swarm with

marionette-shapes, whose shrill cries and exclamations drowned the beat

of Stuart’s retreating steps....

Peter was hauled indoors--she could almost hear her face click as she

adjusted it to the suddenly altered conditions.

“Come along in, do; we’re kicking up no end of a shindy! I say, won’t

your friend join as well?”

And then the red-plush drawing-room, with red-plush music tinkling

from a cheap piano, and air thick with gas and seed-cake, and Cousin

Constance, Jinny’s mother, saying with interpolation of stuffy and

affectionate kisses: “These young folk are behaving disgracefully, my

dear; but there, it’s Saturday evening, and I hope you ain’t too tired

to join them.”

On Peter’s other side, a frivolous girl of thirty-six waggled a plump

forefinger, “I saw you saying good-bye to your young man! I believe you

must have quarrelled--he didn’t even kiss you good night.”

Next, she was introduced to the mild gentleman whom she had met there

before--“So don’t you pretend to be hoity-toity, Miss Peter,”--and to

the irresistibly humorous Tommy Cox, whom she hadn’t met there before,

and who said straight away, “Now tell me this, if you can: could

you make a Maltese Cross?”--and to Luke Johnson, the boy from next

door,--while the landlady, who was also a friend of Cousin Constance,

kept up a running fire of questions connected somehow with coffee:

“Some people like it better with milk, and some people like it without;

some people take two lumps of sugar, and some like one, so all you’ve

got to do, Peter, dear, is to tell me how you like it best. Some

people....” The saga began all over again.

It seemed to Peter that this final necessity for playing-up was rather

in the nature of an extra on the bill. But that strange new part of her

for which Stuart was responsible, could not cease abruptly with his

exit, but went on a little while mechanically rotating in obedience

to the hand that had set it in motion. So she skilfully dodged her

cousin’s kisses; accepted the thick cup of muddy lukewarm coffee;

answered the riddle about the Maltese Cross; gaily averred that she was

not a bit tired, and quite ready for “high jinks”; and allowed herself

to be drawn into a rowdy game of musical chairs.

Crushing memory below the surface, she sprang to the head of the

scuffling line awaiting the music’s signal to start--

“You made me love you,

I didn’t want to do it,

I didn’t want to do it,”

round and round the empty line of chairs--then a cry, and a mix-up, and

shouts of “He’s out!” A chair removed from the row. The music started

once more.

Only eight combatants left--seven--six--Peter could not contrive to

get left out; a chair seemed ever ready to embrace her, as the jovial

pianist ceased from play. She felt the urgent need of sleep leaking

noiselessly into her being. Her limbs refused any more to obey the

call upon them. Almost she abandoned the struggle, beat an ignominious

retreat in the middle of the game. An echo of Stuart spurred her on as

with whips: “It’s a glorious stunt, Peter! don’t give in before the

end.”--Yes, but need she listen, since he was not to count any more?

Willy-nilly, his training outlasted him; she made a forward dash for a

seat, this time out of reach, determined she would be in at the death,

as a votive offering to the lord of all stunts, great and small.

And now there were only three jigging round to the endless tune.

“And all the time you knew it,

I guess you always knew it,

You made me----”

Silence, then a noisy outburst from the spectators lining the walls:

“You’re out, Miss Tomkyns! his lap don’t count as a seat, you know.”

Giggling, Miss Tomkyns withdrew from the contest. Remained Peter and

the objectionable Tommy.

“Now then, Peter, beat him. It’s up to you--show old Tommy what girls

are made of!” Jinny literally danced with excitement. And Cousin

Constance at the piano started once more to strum, with the evident

intention of prolonging the agony.

Ah! that renewal of the chorus was too vigorous to be genuine. The end

was at hand. Peter, on the back side of the chair, turned suddenly

and faced Tommy, who was so amazed at this change of tactics that

he facetiously flung out one leg after another along the ground,

Russian-ballet fashion. At this juncture, as anticipated, the tune

halted abruptly in the middle of a bar--and with a slight movement

Peter had occupied her throne before he could recover his balance.

And she smiled, a provocative ‘there-you-are’ smile, not intended for

her clapping enthusiastic spectators.

“Bravo, Peter! you’re a sport! Shame, Tommy, to be beaten by a girl!”

“And now to bed, every man Jack of you,” cried Mrs. Thorpe, who since

five minutes had been listening with dread to the impatient tip-tap on

the ceiling, of a best-bedroom boarder afflicted with insomnia.

“She cheated, twisting round like that, instead of goin’ straight on,”

grumbled Tommy, in the hall. Like a great many humorous gentlemen, he

could not take a beating.

And Peter turned on the stairs to remark tauntingly, “There, there,

Master Tommy, never mind. We’ll say that you won, shall we?”

“I’ll make you pay for that, young lady!” Only half in earnest, but

stung nevertheless by the laughter of his friends, he made a rush for

his tormentor. She broke away from him, ran with dangerous swiftness

to the room she usually occupied. She could hear Tommy panting at her

heels; his breath, stale with cheap tobacco, on the back of her neck.

“Go it, Tommy boy!” urged his companions from below. Peter clenched her

hands; ‘pay for that’--she had a very clear idea how the Tommies of

this world exact payment. She would _not_ be kissed to-night, not ...

again.

Putting on a spurt, she gained her room, crashed the door in his

face, and turned the key in the lock. Tommy called through one or two

witticisms, and strolled away to be consoled by his pals. Then Jinny

knocked a final ‘good night’ and did Peter want anything? Peter wanted

nothing. So Jinny too departed. A whispered exchange of banter on the

landings; a loud guffaw; a flurry of feet.... Silence now in the house.

Peter’s day was over, grey and white and pallor of gold. It had been a

very long day. She was logged with sleep, as a water-logged boat that

can no longer crawl for heaviness. Eyelids tumbling, fingers purely

mechanical. Nothing was remembered, nothing existed save her longing

for bed. Bed was a tangible thing and mattered very much. She was just

aware, through formless drifting clouds whirling her mind to stupor,

that it was just as well she should be physically so dead beat.

Light turned out, and head plunged among the pillows. It was sand that

was weighing her down; heavy yellow sand; she could hear it trickling

into the crevices and chinks and joints of her body; hear it like

water among the reeds ... hear herself falling asleep.

And knew that before dawn she would awake, purged of her merciful

weariness. Wake to the knowledge of a world without Stuart.

CHAPTER VII

FORTUNATUS

If Stuart had been a poor man, and forced to continue drudgery whatever

his troubles of love, he would have wrested a certain comfort from

the obligatory effort. But placed as he was, it would have been mere

childishness to deceive himself with an assumption that he was not

perfectly free to absent himself from Holborn for as long a period

as he pleased. Derwent had taken a needed holiday in May, directly

following the prick of Gobert’s balloon, and was now back again at his

post. Baldwin ran up most days from Sonning, except when solemnities

of regatta nailed him to the spot. Business was at its slackest; and

Stuart could no more persuade himself that he was morally necessary,

than that his attendance was compulsory.

In no mood for make-believe, beset by a bitter craving for what he had

denied himself, by a still more bitter doubt as to whether his had not

been a fool’s action, he set out for the Haven, where he could at least

be sure of solitude while he fought the matter through.

The Haven is marked somewhere in the neighbourhood of Poole. Actually,

it is in the neighbourhood of nowhere. A man walks into the Haven

perhaps at set of sun, finding it always a little beyond the point

where he is desirous the walk be ended, so that he walks into the

Haven tired and with lagging step. On one side of him the sea shines

a ghostly grey; not breaking in waves, nor tossing in a glitter of

foam, nor making any sound whatever; but flowing, flowing, in slantwise

ripples towards the land. And when he is accustomed to the sight of

it on his one side, he is gradually aware of a stealthy lapping on

his other side, beyond the sand-banks sown with coarse grass. There

also is the sea, flowing in slantwise ripples towards the land, so

that he loses all sense of east or west. For his further confusion,

either horizon is bestrewn with hazy tongues of land, floating strips

of island; and on either horizon, tumbling silent seas lick their way

among the nebulous shores. The sun dips red and round, and the moon

rises round and red; so that for an instant of bewilderment the sun

might be the moon and the moon might be the sun; and both sun and moon

hang loosely, midway between sky and ocean, having no link with either.

The only thing permanent is an old hulk embedded in the stretches of

flat white sand; and thither the traveller is impelled to climb; for

the sand has an untrodden look; and there lies a strange fascination,

when leaning against the slimy sides of the wreck, in gazing backwards

at his solitary footprints marking the way he came.

On the extreme edge of the Haven, men have built an hotel, thinking

thereby to give the spot a prosperous and populated appearance.

And thrice a week a creaking motor-bus deposits there its load of

sightseers, who drink a lot of tea on the blank terrace, and swarm over

the waste of garden, and onto the primitive wooden jetty, whence boats

are supposed to start for a tour of the islands lightly pencilled in

the haze. But the boats are never visible; and presently the sightseers

depart in their bus; and the Haven continues to take no interest either

in the barren grey hotel nor yet in the babbling tea-drinkers.

In the surrounding oozes of dark green, are rooted shapeless forms,

that might be whales, but are mostly bungalows. One of these was

presented to Stuart by his brother-in-law Ralph Orson, on the occasion

of the latter’s marriage. “Might come in useful when you are sailing

in these parts,” quoth Orson, apologizing for the poorness of the gift.

There was very little of sailing in its more graceful phases round

about the Haven. Occasionally the tide brought up slow-moving barges,

piled high with wood or coal or bricks; these surmounted by the tiny

dark figures of men hoisting a clumsy bulk of canvas against the sky,

pushing frantically at giant pole or tiller, which by comparison

reduced the human to ant-size. The white skimming sail would have

been here a strange anomaly, and the supple curve of pleasure boat.

With grimness tempered to mystery by their flying streamers of smoke,

the black trading-vessels alone ruffled the even slant of the water,

flowing, rippling, landwards to the Haven.

Here then, Stuart passed the days following his renunciation of

Peter. He was disappointed that the detached exultation of spirit was

absent, that should have rewarded the man with will strong enough to

perpetrate a theory. Exultation?--so far was it removed, that at first

he had to summon every atom of force he possessed, to prevent himself

from dashing theory onto the rubbish-heap, and setting it alight,

burnt-offering to the common human love of a man for a maid. Just at

the moment when all his powers of reasoning and thought and logic were

most desperately needed, they turned traitor; ran away; returned to

mock him: “Prig! pedant! cad!” No end to the insulting epithets they

volleyed at the stunned and cowering leprechaun; and then ran again,

too fast for pursuit or argument.

“If that’s all you have to give me, then, curse you, I might have taken

the warmer thing!” thus leprechaun, from the depths of want, to the

hiding metaphysician.

Stuart waited, just holding in check the suffering which cried out

for some alleviating action on his part ... (he might so soon be in

town--at Euston--Thatch Lane--“Come out, Peter”--and in the crushed

sweet smell of bracken on the Weald, laugh, and kiss her mouth, and

kiss again; and laughing, damn the Hairpin Vision to beyond eternity,

where it rightly belonged--all this, so soon) ... Stuart waited. He

would at least give metaphysics a chance.

He strove to collect his ideas of yore; but they rattled about in his

head like dried peas in a box, implements wherewith stageland strives

to imitate a rainfall. Meanwhile, round the shadow-side of the embedded

hulk, he stumbled one night upon a pair of lovers clinging silently

together, symbol of unthinking passion, utterly happy in the belief

that their momentary divinity was immortal. Ordinary lovers--Stuart

turned sharply away, across the tract of dead white sand, cursing

as he ran; cursing his destructive brain and his vision and his

asceticism,--all that had been given him unasked, to set him apart from

those shapes--_from that shape_ on the shadow-side of the hulk. Damn

it! yes, damn it! One paid for too godlike a use of the shears. Damn it

... he threw himself face downwards on the sand.

The metaphysician stirred from lethargy, and spoke; reminding him that

he had seen the sequel to the idyll in the shadow-shape of the hulk;

reminding him of a certain dingy group round a perambulator: “They had

hung on, and lost the vision.”

Stuart retorted: “They had also forgotten the vision, so what did it

matter?”

“Would you wish to forget?”

“Yes,” desperately. Any sort of rest rather than for ever be

self-tormented as now.

And then there was the thought of what Peter might be enduring. The

orange-sucker had never before stayed to consider the orange. When

Merle had dropped from the trio, though perfectly aware of what

was impending during that last supper-party, Stuart had made no

after-movement in any way to help her. The trio had inexorably to come

to an end. The one left over must butt through her crisis without

whining. Male or female, it was all the same. When a like hour visited

him, he would require neither sympathy nor yet props; certainly not

mercy.

All very well, these relentless standards, applied to Merle. But they

refused to apply themselves with like success to Peter. Stuart did

not know why. But he told himself that he had behaved like a cad to

Peter, anyone would say so. For the next space of time, his strongest

temptation was to take refuge in the outward appearance of his

conduct--certainly caddish in the extreme--and behind this fence, skulk

backwards to his desire: “And make the only amends a gentleman can,

considering how he has treated the girl.”

But that wouldn’t do. He knew, and Peter knew, that what had prompted

him to break with her was very far removed from mere caddishness; and

he couldn’t now with any consistency start regulating his conduct with

an eye to the world’s approval.

A prig, then? a fanatic?--Let him but vilify in some recognized term

of opprobrium what he had done, and he must perforce find himself

an excuse to retract. Would a prig have set a girl to care for him,

and then desert her for the sake of a vision which in turn deserted

him? Prigs do not stand upon their heads, but levelly and beautifully

upon their feet. He was too bad and too mad to merit the epithet of

prig. Fanatic, certainly. And what was fanatic, closely examined,

but word-covering for anyone sufficiently clear in belief to prove

his theory by deed instead of mouthing it abroad for others so to

do? Theory would be a mere word, cold and empty of significance, if

the discoverer thereof were not willing to apply it as touchstone to

matters vitally concerning himself.

No escape then, by road of cad, prig, or fanatic. Had Peter been

sufficiently unattainable in worldly status, he could have spent a

lifetime striving to win her, without any self-reproach whatsoever to

mar his ultimate victory. But Fortunatus might claim his princess when

he willed.... So no princess for Fortunatus....

--“They wrought a deeper treason,

Led seas who served my needs;

They sold Diego Valdez

To bondage of great deeds....”

What a fool, what a fool he had been to imagine he could elude his

bondage by merely choosing an inglorious profession! This then was how

they had at last contrived to outwit him: giving him, in addition to

all worldly advantages, clarity of vision and power of brain; letting

him build up from these a working ideal,--and then trapping him in a

situation where he must in the very use of it forfeit all happiness.

Because he saw ahead, because he gloried in the seeing,--oh, they had

wrought their treason cunningly, “led seas who served my needs”; the

two in the shadow-side of the hulk were kept in no such bondage. Stuart

was a genius of life--he might not go back to Peter. He had lashed

Peter to be a genius of life--she might not call to him. They could

both see their vision of love dimmed by time--so they might not pursue

it to the dimming. And meanwhile the two in the shadow-side of the hulk

lay lip to lip, bodies crushed together, believing their little moment

immortal. “They sold Diego Valdez....”

And here the stuntorian, up till now silent, gave a sudden leap, and

flung out a hand to pull Stuart from the mire: “Just go back to her.

Get above your own theory, and kick it out of the way. What a stunt--if

you are big enough!”

“If you are big enough,” insinuated the stuntorian.

Metaphysician silenced him with a laconic “Cheat.”

No escape for Fortunatus. He knew, if for one moment he ceased

battling, how contentment would lap him round, and smooth him, and oil

him, and blur his vision of mist to a thickness of mutton-fat. He knew.

And must practise knowledge on a flesh-and-blood love, not cherish it

as a dry-as-dust theory. No escape for Stuart. The lovers, still locked

into one shape, still murmuring brokenly to each other, passed in the

dark so close that they brushed against him where he lay; where he lay

and in biting scorn challenged God for once to take the initiative, not

make him do it _all_ himself, always.

No rest for Fortunatus. Leprechaun was now active enough; squibbing and

somersaulting to impress the metaphysician, who with brilliant argument

upheld the ascetic, who alternately cursed and wrestled with the man.

The man had but a poor chance; though he still continued to argue, as

thus:

If he and Peter had indeed thrust forwards and on, in the mortal

blindness unmercifully denied to them, could the gradual transformation

of magic to disappointment, thence to habit, slacking into uninspired

content,--all that he and she had visioned, sitting on a luggage-truck

at Euston; could these things be indeed worse than his present turmoil

of longing?

Yes! all three shouting now in chorus, leprechaun and metaphysician and

ascetic. Yes! For this was sharp and keen--and quick. Even though each

second weighed an eternity, he was yet conscious that, viewed from the

distance of years, the time would seem a short black tunnel cutting

through into the day. While to lose the pulsing sense of her walk, her

voice, her touch; to drop instinctive knowledge of her pleasure or her

sorrow; to cease from battling with her, for the joy of the after-rest;

to exchange passionate uncertainty for placid possession; to happen

no more on moments of chance magic, and not to miss them; for strain

to depart, and youth, and memory of youth and strain, and then envy

of youth, so that ashore on the putty they should not even begrudge

fiercely the exhilaration of a run before the wind--

A thousand times rather lie as now, with body writhing into the dry

white sand, and every nerve craving for love lost. A thousand times

rather fling “Peter!” into the unresponsive silence, and blaspheme at

her steady defiance in not calling him back; defiance he, not God, but

he again had put into her. A thousand times rather be stabbed through

and through by single recollections. Yes, a thousand times rather Hell

than Heaven, since from Hell one still could rise, but from Heaven

there was no more ascent to the heavens.

END OF PART II

PART III

CHAPTER I

“FOR HE HAD GREAT POSSESSIONS”

Thus, gradually, belief was restored to Stuart, and faith in the

vision, and the vision itself. And then came a quickening pride in the

thought of Peter, battling through to the same issue; Peter, erect and

balanced, with that half-smile of scorn upon her lips; more his mate

than ever now, since with equal strength and without bitterness, they

could each stand alone, walk alone, guarding strange memories.

Twenty-four hours of squally weather tempted him to put out to sea in

his racing yacht. Blown half across the Channel, he met with terrific

resistance beating back through a flying scud of wind and spray, all

reefs in, and rail deep under water. Nor did he for one second think

of relinquishing his hold upon life, nor of adjuring the ocean, in

approved fashion, to let him seek oblivion in its coolness.

Reaching home, he slept, and did not dream. Slept sound and hard.

The next night he again saw the lovers wandering amid that renewed

tranquillity which succeeds tempest. Though the sight of them still

stirred him to pain, the taint of envy had departed; and he smiled, as,

passing, he caught the inevitable question whispered:

“And when did you first begin to love me, Letty?”

Stuart reflected with amused contempt that the answer could not fail to

be: “I think I must have loved you always, dear heart....” He wondered

what would happen if he followed the impulse to warn them whither they

were straying in their blindness, tell them the use of the shears--then

laughed, imagining the reception his harangue would receive: the

male muttering: “Some crazy loon!” and drawing closer the girl, who

would murmur, her lips against his neck: “He doesn’t _know_, does he,

dearest?”

But though the notion called forth a healthy self-ridicule in the man

who didn’t know, a throb within him of common humanity, which he had

hitherto believed dormant, was queerly uneasy for all the sightless

lovers of all the world, stumbling on towards disillusion. He felt like

a diver who from drowning depths had rescued a pearl, brought it up

in his hand--“And was looking about for the swine,” finished Stuart’s

sense of humour, also reawakened.

Nevertheless, the uneasiness dogged him, and the impatience. The

philosophy of the shears was now indisputably his; not from the far-off

speculations of a dreamer, but by claim of pain and payment. He had

animated theory with blood-sacrifice, so that theory had become a live

thing, a truth which he had no right to retain, which must be flung

to the world. After that, let the world take it or leave it, as they

willed; his part would be done. They would probably leave it.... And

again he burnt with a fiery impatience somehow to pierce that thick

denseness of spirit overlying mankind like a pall; so that nine-tenths

have lost grip of their own lives, and the remaining tenth have too

firm a grip on other people’s; and most are unseeingly miserable, but

some benumbed in happiness; and all without wings.

Stuart did not feel any vocation for the platform nor the pulpit;

neither had he any desire to throw his theories on to paper and thus

propagate them among the unenlightened. It struck him that what he

needed was a disciple; some young enthusiast who, believing in him

devoutly and to the extent of imitation in all things, would also

zealously spread his creed by eloquent tongue and by diligent pen. All

prophets had their disciples; a disciple was a necessary adjunct to the

master. Stuart was inclined to think himself modest in only seeking one

fervent youth to squat at his feet. Most of the old Greek philosophers

had founded a whole school. Perhaps that would follow in time.

Meanwhile, let him but find some intelligent lad, tumultuously unhappy,

restless and miserable and knowing not what he craved, and it ought to

be a matter of ease to convert him to the Hairpin Vision, the Essential

Renunciation, the Necessity of Conflict, and the Art of Ceasing to Suck

the Orange before the Orange Runs Dry of Juice.

--From the shadow-side of the hulk against which Stuart leant,

enumerating his ethics to the stars, a long-drawn-out sigh quivered

through the air; then a low and satisfied grunt; both sounds expressive

of the mood in man, when, having reached a fatuity of content too great

for words, he has to resort to animal noises in which to relieve his

feelings. Stuart strolled round, and stood gazing down at a reclining

figure upon the sand, figure which he recognized as one-half of the

lovers who had so often shattered his evening calm.

“Where’s Letty?”

“Hullo!” in languorous slumberous surprise. Then, raising a thatch of

ruffled auburn hair and an exceedingly flushed face, the young man

enquired: “I say, have you got a match on you? I was just thinking

there was nothing on earth left for me to want, when I discovered that

I couldn’t light up.”

Stuart looked disgusted: was this a thing for a fellow’s star to send

a fellow, in answer to fellow’s wish for a disciple? this creature who

had nothing left on earth to desire except a match. In silence he

proffered his box; it was not worth while to withhold it.

“Letty’s mother had a sick headache to-night,” gurgled Sebastian Levi,

in answer to the query first spoken. He was not so richly communicative

as a rule; but to-night he was rather beyond himself with a father’s

consent just won to his engagement, and several glasses of wine tossed

down in celebration thereof; followed by one ecstatic embrace of his

betrothed, a rush at fifty miles an hour through the warm sea-scented

air, and much solitary starlight imbibed from the dim flat shores

of the Haven. So, from drowsy oblivion of his fellow-man, he became

suddenly eager and willing to talk:

“We’ve often run out here before, Letty and I. It’s quiet. And it’s

only twenty minutes by car. I say, how did you know about Letty? I

suppose you must have seen us.”

“I have occasionally noticed an indistinguishable blur or two,” replied

Stuart, sitting down upon a black and moss-grown spar, and lighting

his own cigarette. “The blur being to-day shrunken to half its size,

I subtracted one from two, and asked you where she was. And thus the

mystery is explained.”

“That’s a pity. Mishtries should never be explained. Who would have the

veil lifted from the immortal mishtry of love? Or would I seek now to

know intimately why the gods are so good to me, in giving me my heart’s

desire, and all my other desires, and a match for my cigarette into

the bargain? Unquestioningly I accept their--benign--partiality----”

Sebastian lingered slowly and carefully over the last words, and,

safely completed, stretched grateful arms towards the heavens. Then,

looking at these same arms rather amazedly, as if in doubt as to what

they were doing in that eccentric position, let them drop again.

“I love you, Letty!” he murmured to some vision of his radiant

imaginings; then brought his gaze earthwards, back to Stuart: “Thanks

for the match,” pleasantly.

Stuart shrugged his shoulders: “Lacking the match, there might have

been some hope for you; as it is,” he turned away, “--good night.”

“Don’t go,” pleaded Sebastian, unruffled by the other’s abrupt censure.

“It was only my nonsense just now; I was working off steam. But I can

talk quite soberly if you’ll stop to hear me.”

“You’re not in a fit state to talk at all. You’re thick; plastered with

honey and treacle. Your grin is seraphic; your rhapsodies are fatuous.

You don’t even resent my abominable rudeness. Why don’t you?”

“Why should I? I like you tremendously. And of course I’m s’raphic.

‘There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest but in his motion

like an angel sings still choiring to the young-eyed cherubims!’ That’s

what my father was to-night--a young-eyed cherubim. So was her father.

So was Letty. She’s accepted me. Her father has accepted me. My father

has accepted her. Everybody has accepted everybody, and everybody has

gulped down an enormous amount of champagne. Hence Mrs. Johnson’s

headache. But I’m glad Letty couldn’t come out to-night--I’ve had too

much--I couldn’t stand any more--I’m dizzy. When I say I couldn’t stand

any more, I mean it meta--meta----” Sebastian lost the thread of his

discourse, repeated solemnly “meta----” ... and then re-found it in a

different but equally satisfactory direction: “I met her on the hill

between Boscombe and Bournemouth. Our fathers had been neighbours years

ago, and fell into each other’s arms. So there’s no family opposition;

we needn’t wait interminably for the wedding. My father,--he’s Levi,

the big Universal Stores in Holborn--you know--he’s taking me into

partnership with a tremendous screw. Which will leave me plenty of time

for writing----”

“Writing?”

“I’m a poet,” modestly.

“And what thin trickle of curds-and-whey verse do you imagine can be

born in leisure hours, while in unctuous enjoyment of a tremendous

screw?”

“Better verse than if I were a starving rhymester, peddling my sweated

wares, with chilblains on all my toes. I don’t believe in the uses of

adversity?”

“No?”

--“And to-morrow,” spouted Sebastian, unheeding the ironic syllable,

“to-morrow I buy her the most wonderful ermine in all the regions

of snow, to wrap round her throat when I whirl her by night to this

desolate shore. That’s poetry, isn’t it?--when I whirl her by night to

this desolate shore!--Lord, man! her throat is softer and whiter than

foam ... when she lifts her head to the moonlight--when she lifts her

head to look at me--she’s such a little wee thing--then the curve of

it makes me delirious ... as perfect as the curve of that wave--look!

before it breaks. Her throat----”

“Would you mind,” broke in Stuart very politely, “not talking about

throats?”

The lad glanced at him--then quickly away. “I’m sorry,” he jerked out.

“And as for what you are pleased to consider the partiality of the

gods towards you,” continued Stuart, goaded to an inexplicable heat of

anger; “let me tell you that you merely figure as their sport. I can’t

conceive of a greater sign of disfavour than to be thus loaded with

gifts. In time you will come to regard the love which has been yours

so easily, as a matter of course, as something which has always been

there. The wealth that you have gained without effort, will cause you

presently to fold fat podgy hands over your smug waistcoat, too richly

embroidered for good taste, and give thanks that you are not as other

men----”

“You’re wrong there,” interrupted Sebastian, even his placidity giving

way beneath this unforeseen attack; “I mean to do a lot of good with my

money----”

“And what can be more unpardonably priggish than to do anybody good

without doing yourself any harm thereby? It’s like Father Xmas; I never

believed in the bountiful generosity of Father Xmas; his sacks were

too swollen, and his coat too heavily trimmed--like the waistcoat of

your future obesity. Oh, yes, you will be a good man, and a generous

man, and a prig, and probably an alderman, and certainly Lord Mayor,

and perhaps also High Admiral of Spain. And you’ll forget that Letty’s

throat was white as foam, and curved like the curve of a wave,--because

Letty will be yours, throat and all, whenever you want her. You’ll

never know fun, hard perilous fun, because you’ll never seek peril;

you’ll say that you have too many responsibilities, as a husband and

a citizen and a philanthropist, to expose yourself unnecessarily.

You’ll never be splendidly weary with battle, nor yet know the leanness

of spirit which comes from desire unfulfilled, nor will you grow

breathless with the exhilaration of a race against your own luck. The

best things you are bound to miss forever, my fortunate young friend,

because the gods have thought them beyond you--and have sent you

instead prosperity, domestic happiness, the course of true love running

indecently smooth. And therefore it is that I regard you as damned,

body and soul, and you regard me as a lunatic----”

“Not at all, confound your insolence!” Sebastian had sprung to his

feet during the tirade. From somnolence to loquacity, and thence to

truculence, were easy transitions in his present mood; and not once did

the absurdity strike him of this sudden quarrel with a total stranger,

on the dim moon-washed sands of the Haven: “not a bit of it. I look

upon you merely as one of those meddlesome people who have become

embittered by poverty and frustration, and can’t see other people

happy. The fox, you’ll remember, said the grapes were sour.”

“Your shot is wide of the mark; as it happens, I’ve only just succeeded

in quenching my star, which was most obstreperously luminous. And for

the Lord’s sake, spare me fable in argument----”

And thereupon, something queer happened ... Sebastian stepped forward,

and seized Stuart in a wrestler’s grip, and attempted to throw him

down. In and out of a clear patch of moonlight they swayed, in and out

of the black shadow of the hulk, silently, like clockwork marionettes.

Their build and strength were about equal, but Stuart was the cooler

of the twain, and just held his own, wondering the while what was the

exact remark of his that had so infuriated his young opponent. To

and fro, in and out of the sharp white moonrays--till, by a slippery

dexterous movement, Stuart succeeded in flinging aside Sebastian, who

stumbled, and fell, and rose again, covered with a glittering powder of

sand, and stood uncertain whether or not to renew the bout. And then

it would seem that he saw the other’s features clearly, for the first

time; for he exclaimed in quite a different tone from what he had yet

used:

“Why, it’s Heron of Balliol, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But how----?” Stuart found it disconcerting, having met and

insulted a nameless spirit in ghostland, to be suddenly, and by this

same spirit, accosted as Heron of Balliol.

“They pointed you out to me last year, when you came up for the Greek

plays. You were the big classical man of your time, weren’t you? They

still talk about your double first.”

Stuart looked pleased. “Which was your college?”

“Magdalen. I’m only just down. I say, may I run over again one evening

for a talk? My name’s Levi, Sebastian Levi. I’m staying at the Boscombe

Hotel.”

“Certainly; delighted; perhaps you’ll introduce your fiancée.” And it

was a pity that no one was by to twinkle amusement at the well-bred

decorum which had descended upon the antagonists.

“That’s my bungalow, the one that looks like an inverted whale.”

“Don’t you find it dull?”

“Passably. I sail a good bit. Care to join me next time the wind’s foul

enough?”

“I’ve never done any sailing; but if I shan’t be in the way----”

“Not at all; you shall be passenger.” Carefully ignoring their

fantastic behaviour of a few moments back, they strolled together

across the shore, and over the sand-dunes, to where the lamps of

Sebastian’s two-seater trembled athwart the road.

“Feel equal to taking the wheel? because if not----”

Sebastian laughed rather shamefacedly. “Oh, I’m not as bad as that.

Would you mind starting her?” he climbed to his seat.

Stuart swung the crank. “Here, you’d better take my matches; I’m nearer

home than you,” he tossed the box into the moving car.

“Thanks awfully. Good night!”

“Good night.”

As he listened to the dwindling hum of the engine, Stuart let his

thoughts wander again to the matter of discipleship. He had marked

how swiftly the boy’s sleepy content had been stung to passionate

retort; he was responsive, then; and evidently not lacking in brains;

altogether of the right stuff. Stuart reflected further that it would

be a far more creditable job to drag a convert from a bed of roses than

from a ditch of nettles.

And Sebastian, crashing homewards along silent unwinding roads,

was conscious of a beating excitement, totally unlike his lulled

lotus-dream of the past summer nights. Strange phrases had Heron spoken

to him ... “I’ve only just succeeded in quenching my star.” “You

will never know the best things of all--the gods thought them beyond

you.”... Strange phrases--and no one to warn a lover on the danger of

having his brain massaged.

CHAPTER II

FOLLOW-MY-LEADER!

All the next day, Sebastian Levi walked about with a throbbing head,

and could not decide if he were suffering from the after-affects of

ecstasy, wine, or metaphysics. Certainly his thoughts dwelt most

persistently on the third of these, and this even while Letty’s

petal-soft lips were quivering, half-shyly, in expectation of his eager

kisses. Now he was swept by a flood of rage, recollecting Heron’s

contempt of him; now he hated himself for his own Bacchic confidences;

then again and yet again he revolved in his mind those few dropped

sentences which hinted so arrestingly at a new way of thought--a new

way of life. What did the fellow mean by his remark to the effect that

he had quenched his star, which was too luminous? Did one then quench a

star instead of following it? And why? Why? What result could possible

ensue from such an act of madness?...

* * * * *

Sebastian’s father, Ned Levi, was of that species known as the

strictly agnostic Jew. He neither went to Synagogue, nor did he keep

the picturesque Jewish holidays. He did not tactlessly allude to

himself, in company, as “the Chosen of the Lord.” He did not wear

enormous flashing diamonds in his shirt-front, nor yet gesticulate

over-violently, nor control, spider-fashion, the entire financial

affairs of Great Britain. Likewise he ate ham with relish; and so

naturally did bacon and eggs form the staple breakfast dish, that

the partaking of them was not in the least degree a daily defiance.

He was a little unostentatious man, with light-red hair and moustache

grizzling untidily to grey, a quiet taste in clothes, and nothing to

stamp him Israelite save a slight lift at the bridge of the nose, a

kindly concern for the fortunes of even his most distant cousins, and a

keenness of business acumen which had led him from a small grocery shop

in the East End, to the massive and celebrated stores in High Holborn.

He had married, when his success was already established, a wife

very much his superior in birth; a quiet sensible girl, with

poverty-stricken parents,--strictly agnostic Christians. The two had

vied generously in their readiness to embrace the other’s faith; and

ended by leaving the matter for ever unsettled, and marrying at the

registrar’s.

Sebastian was brought up very successfully to no religion at all, and

an open mind that accepted with equal tolerance his Christian relations

of gentle birth, and his more vivid and less reputable Jewish kindred.

He was a good-looking lad,--or would have been, had not his auburn

hair and dark eyes given him an aspect curiously flamboyant; and

amusing,--or would have been, save for what seemed in him a tendency to

show off, but was in reality a lack of confidence, an inability to get

both feet planted firmly on the ground.

Also, ineradicable result of mixed caste and class, Sebastian held

very few neat safely-rooted opinions of his own, and was liable to be

dangerously fascinated by daring ideas; especially by ideas that were

rather too far off for his attainment, but which held him by a certain

remote splendour. He was all response and no initiative. He never

got near enough to an idea to perceive its flaws; he never got right

through an idea, and beyond it, and so free of it. He strained upwards,

and clung on,--or let go, and thudded to the ground. Sometimes,

accidentally, he broke things in his fall; and then he sorrowed over

them exceedingly; and sickening of his intellectual scrapes, would

steep himself in aught that required no assistance of the brain. It was

one of these reactions that sent him spinning into the arms of Letty

Johnson.

Letty--well, what was Letty? Letty had soft brown hair, which on

Sundays was crowned by a hat of one feather. Thus she knew her Sundays.

And thus her mother knew how costerdom was differentiated from the rich

good taste of prosperous folk who lived in a nice house with a bedroom

more than they needed, down Turnham Green way. One feather, and no

more. And a velveteen costume in winter. And thin low-necked blouses,

winter and summer. And shoes with big pom-poms. And, perhaps, little

gilt side-combs, studded with blue stones, perfectly unobtrusive. Thus

the outward and visible Letty,--on Sundays. Week-days hardly mattered.

On the table beside Letty’s bed, might be found the Sir Walter Scott

birthday-book, a paper novelette, and “Indian Love-lyrics,” by Laurence

Hope. Inside Letty’s head existed a quantity of far-fetched romance,

the jumbled remnants of a High School education, and an uncertain sort

of liking for the company of one Balaam Atkins, bank-clerk, who came

very often to Turnham Green for supper.

Round and about Letty, Mrs. Johnson maintained an atmosphere of careful

and deliberate laxity. Often the good lady was heard to declare that

if Letty cared to go on the stage, no objections would be raised.

Letty’s correspondence was always blandly ignored. Letty might spend

whole days on the river at Richmond with a ‘jolly party,’ and if she

came home after ten o’clock with all of the party dispersed except her

immediate companion,--that was only to be expected of twentieth-century

youth, remarked Mrs. Johnson to her husband. Indeed, Letty was given

far more latitude than she needed, and walked quite placidly in a

small area of liberty, wasteful of the wider spaces thrown open by her

twentieth-century parents. Just occasionally, when his wife’s vigilance

relaxed, Mr. Johnson would forget how tolerant he was, and break out in

a row most refreshingly in the style of old-fashioned paterfamilias.

But he was always made to atone afterwards for these aberrations,

by taking his daughter to a play emphatically ‘for the adult mind

only.’ Such performances bored Letty and bewildered her father; but

Mrs. Johnson had given forth the watchword of the household: Be

Broad-minded! and hers was the ruling spirit.

Therefore, also, Letty took lessons in fencing. “Though I don’t see

what she’s to _do_ with it?” said Mrs. Baker doubtfully to Mrs. Johnson.

Letty owned for live stock, a girl-friend, Violet Baker, who had been

engaged to a fellow since two-and-a-half years; a Persian kitten;

and a younger brother, Luke; she also occasionally remembered a God,

imploringly or in gratitude, when the world went very wrong with her,

or else very right.

And Letty was exceedingly pretty.

And thus are comprised her total assets. Till, on a summer holiday at

Bournemouth, Sebastian Levi came along. Whereat she surrendered to him

her all, including the one feather of which he disapproved, including

her faint liking for the bank-clerk, and very certainly including her

girl-friend’s fellow, who, on Letty’s return to Turnham Green, was to

suffer fatally by comparison with the tall pale-faced auburn-haired

Sebastian; suffer even unto extinction.

* * * * *

“... Because a man’s star leads him eventually to places too

comfortable for the lean spirit to rejoice in....” Sebastian’s musings

on metaphysics were interrupted by Letty, as she swung beside him,

where he sat upon the garden-roller. None of the other boarders at the

Farme would venture near that especial portion of the grounds; it was

known as the “little lovers’ solitude.” “Little lovers” the pair had

been nicknamed for their apple-green youth. Twenty-two and nineteen;

a swing and a garden-roller; blue sky patching the thick green shade;

a girl’s voice, hushed for the very breathlessness of love, speaking

of white satin ... myrtle-leaves ... Sebastian ought to have been very

happy. Yet for him perfection was already chilled to something less of

permanence than yesterday’s warm eternities; and:

“Surely, Letty,” he broke in, “you won’t want all that display and fuss

when we marry?”

Her head drooped. It was when Sebastian spoke thus loftily, that her

father’s favourite remark: “We’re as good as other folk, my girl,

if we like to consider other folk as good as us. And that’s logic,”

seemed somehow inadequate. She felt that her lover stooped to her with

ineffable condescension, and she hastened to sacrifice to him:

“Would you rather I didn’t wear a white frock, Sebastian? Would

you rather I wore pink, or--or something quieter?” and she bade a

mute farewell to all pretty silent dreams of herself looking like a

picture in the “Lady’s Pictorial”; of the gleaming elaborate gown,

to be worn afterwards, shorn of its train, at subscription dances

and private parties; then dyed black for more matronly whist-drives;

filmy veil that should be lain aside and cherished in lavender and

memories, perhaps one day shown to her daughter ... Letty sighed, and

swung herself faster and faster yet, breaking through the slanting

sun-shafts, that slipped together again in her wake, and were broken

anew as the board flew back.

“Would you prefer us to have a quiet wedding, Sebastian? with no

presents or bridesmaids or cake? Father said something about grand

doings and not minding the expense, but----”

He pulled her from the advancing swing into his arms; the narrow seat

dangled back empty of occupant.

“Never mind your father, Letty; he doesn’t understand. Our wedding

shall be such a tiny one that there will be only just room in it for

you and me and the parson; it shall happen in some grey country church,

the sun streaming through its windows like youth reviving in an old

heart----”

“I call that beautiful,” interrupted Letty softly.

“And you shall wear just whatever you like best. But to me you

are prettiest in a certain grass-green cotton frock, and a

floppety light-blue hat, because then you look like bluebells in a

larch-wood”--thus he caressed her, and teased her, and spoke the

romantic nonsense her soul delighted in. And thus she was blissfully

content--till Willy Percival rolled his ball into their Paradise zone,

and came to fetch it, his mother in apologetic pursuit: “Willy doesn’t

know yet where he isn’t wanted,” archly; involving much blushing and

dimpling and deprecation on the part of Letty, and a rigid “Not at all”

from Sebastian, mightily displeased.

“Can’t you stop these people from buzzing and chaffing?” he demanded

irritably, when Mrs. Percival had withdrawn her offspring.

And again Letty beat back a wistful impulse to confide in him how all

this was really and truly an essential part of the rose-coloured thrill

of “being engaged”; how immensely she gloried in the questions and

chaff; how any mention of his name, coupled meaningly with hers, caused

her to hold her blossom head inches higher with pride; how like music

were her father’s jokes on the subject; how she had been overwhelmed in

delicious confusion when the blotting-pad, which was common property at

the Farme, was discovered scribbled over and over with the mysterious

names: Mrs. S. Levi; Letty Levi; and then, unaccountably: Letty Lovell.

And remembering this, Letty resolved now to unburden herself of

a weighty proposition that hitherto she had not dared lay before

Sebastian, lest it might rub against an unknown rawness in him. She

could never quite disabuse herself of the notion that all Jews, even

her splendid lover, are necessarily over-sensitive and forever on the

wince. “Because I don’t see how they can ever quite forget that they

are Jews,” would have been word-translation of her subconscious thought.

“Sebastian,” she caught hold of a lapel of his coat, and snuggled

nearer to him, while the garden-roller gave an ominous lurch, “what do

you think about changing your name before we get married? would you

mind very much?”

“Rather a bother for nothing,” he rejoined lazily. “But if you’re set

on it, darling,--what aristocratic title have you prepared for me?”

“Lovell!” ... breathlessly she hung on his decision, blue-grey eyes

fixed attentively on his face. “Sebastian Lovell!” she repeated,

dangling the combined effect in front of him, as a child might dangle a

toy.

“Think I could live up to it?”

“Now you’re being a naughty boy, and teasing me.--But really,

Sebastian, I’ve thought it all over seriously, and I chose ‘Lovell’

because it also begins with an ‘L.’ Of course, they say: change the

name and not the letter, change for the worse and not for the better;

but I believe that’s only for a girl marrying a man. And, anyhow,

superstition is only ignorance. And perhaps--no, let me finish,

Sebastian, because I’m awfully in earnest about this,--perhaps your

father won’t mind, because Lovell is very like Levi, really; it has the

‘v’ in the middle, and all!”

“I’ll place the consideration of the v-in-the-middle before my

venerable parent this very night,” laughed Sebastian. And: “I love

you!” he whispered, into the sun-warmed web of her hair. “Letty,

you’re adorable; I love you!” seeking by these means to stifle within

him a certain sense of disloyalty; which increased, when, on the

morning after, she deplored almost tearfully the break-up of the fine

weather: “It’s _our_ weather, Sebastian; the weather you told me you

loved me in; and it’s got no right to finish so quickly, before you’ve

finished telling me.”--But Sebastian was glad of the tempestuous

change.... “Care to join me next time the wind’s foul enough?”... He

and Stuart set sail together that very afternoon.

They were away for three days. Sebastian had anticipated much

stimulating discussion while sailing; his host holding forth, one

hand idly resting upon the tiller; himself, the passenger, listening,

stretched full length in the lazy sunlight, his pipe in his mouth,

the waves lapping gentle accompaniment against the bows of the boat.

But Stuart talked very little upon the voyage, and that mostly in

curt vigorous language concerning canvas and harbours, and the evil

behaviours of the same. He was quite a different being to the eccentric

metaphysician of the Haven. Also, though he treated his guest with

excellent politeness for the first few hours of companionship, he

accepted heartily the boy’s embarrassed offer to “be of assistance”

in the management of the boat; and thenceforward plunged him into an

existence resembling equally a monkey’s and a cabin-boy’s; involving

much perilous swarming, and unknotting, and a process known as

‘reefing’; much battling with drenched ropes and stubborn tiller

against obstinate and treacherous winds. A persistently clouded sky

overhead; very little to eat, and that uneatable; hard salt breathless

days; evenings spent in small water-side inns; Heron exchanging

bewildering technicalities with others just arrived in port. Then an

uncomfortable lumpy bed, smelling inexplicably of seaweed, and offering

but little rest to a stiff and aching body;--“Glad to turn in, eh,

Levi?”--decidedly Sebastian was disappointed of the long intimate

conversations, explaining riddles which had haunted him ever since his

first fantastic meeting with Stuart Heron.

He brought back with him to Bournemouth a great astonishment at being

yet alive, hope which he had forfeited many times in each single hour.

Also, acute memory of an instant when presence of mind had prompted him

to haul at the right sheet in an emergency, and Stuart had favoured

him with a sudden curly smile, peculiarly his own, and a brief word of

approval. And now Sebastian underwent sensations of weary flatness and

depression, inhabiting once more the luxurious suite of rooms engaged

by his father at the Boscombe Hotel. He debated all the while what

thing he could do to win again that quick smile from Stuart. He wanted

that man’s approval--more than aught else he wanted it--would force it

somehow, no matter by what extravagance of action. He believed Stuart

despised him, and the thought cut like rain-rods in a north-easterly.

“If he doesn’t despise me, then why won’t he tell me more about

his--his ideas?”

But on no subsequent visit to the Haven, was Stuart to be drawn. “My

creed is the wrong sort for an engaged young man; better leave it

alone. By the way, you promised that I should see your fiancée.”

“You’ll see her to-morrow, if you’re anywhere about. The whole

Menagerie are swarming over in the excursion bus, to view this

interesting spot. Letty and her mother and father will be with

them. No, not me, thanks; I couldn’t stand three solid hours of the

Earwig and the Cabbage-rose.” Sitting on the window-sill of the

bungalow, mournfully jabbing tobacco into his pipe, he favoured Stuart

with a vivid account of the ‘Menagerie,’ as he chose to term the

boarding-house wherein his beloved dwelt.

“It’s a ramshackle building stuck among pine-trees, a mile or two out

of Bournemouth; and the proprietress--landlady--hostess--whatever you

call her, has no more idea than Adam of management. She advertised in

the papers, by way of an original start: ‘Charming home-like residence

for the summer months; croquet, tennis, and private bathing-hut; terms

moderate; run on Bohemian lines!’ That last statement fetched the

victims. Such a crew!”

“Which of your prospective family-in-law was attracted by the Bohemian

lines?” queried Stuart, enjoying the recital.

It transpired that Mrs. Johnson had caught sight of the advertisement,

and had remarked to her husband, one breakfast time, “Matthew, we are

getting into a Groove. What we want, what Letty wants, is Bohemian

society. The best Bohemians, naturally. Here’s our chance. I’ve heard

they take liqueur in their morning tea, instead of milk and sugar, like

Christians!” Mr. Johnson had here stated firmly that nothing would

induce him to do that; and Letty had further propounded: “whether

they’ll like the sort of people _we_ are?” And her father had replied

with his favourite remark: “We’re as good as other folks, my girl, if

we like to consider other folks as good as us. And that’s logic!”

“So they all came; except the young brother, Luke, who went off on his

own,” finished Sebastian, somewhat sulkily. He resented being made

to talk, when he so itched to hear what the other had to say. And he

believed Stuart was being purposely provoking and reticent.

“And what about the Earwig and the Cabbage-rose?”

“It’s a General and his wife. He’s brown, and about eighty; hobbles and

shakes; a shrivelled little chap with beady eyes. She’s enormous and

pink, with bulging petals, as if she’d been left out too long in the

rain; some of the petals have fallen, and the rest are loose. She skits

and sirens, and wears her evening-gowns too low. Now I ask you, Heron,

don’t you consider she’s a bad influence for Letty? I do.”

Stuart pondered the matter: “I don’t think you can call a woman a bad

influence because her outside petals are falling from her shoulders.

However, I’ll have a look to-morrow, and judge for myself.”

But by the morrow he had forgotten the impending intrusion; and it

was a mere accident that when the Menagerie trooped noisily on to the

little wood and iron jetty, Stuart should just have been at its foot;

unroping his skiff from among a welter of palings and steps, anchors

and chains and beams, rust-eaten and weed-green. His trousers were

rolled thigh-high over his bare legs; he wore an old blue sweater, and

a sou’wester protected the back of his neck from the sun. Standing up

to his knees in water, he glanced up in some curiosity, mingled in

equal proportions with indifference. The various members of the party

were easily enough distinguishable by Sebastian’s word-pictures: Here

the Earwig and the Cabbage-rose; she in a large leghorn hat, waving a

sunshade, and calling to Stuart in shrill tones: “Ferry! Hi, Ferry!”

There, Archie Mowbray, the very spit of a Kipling subaltern; avowing,

when questioned on the subject, that he ‘had no patience with Kipling.’

Besides him, the untidy girl of his adoration, Ethel Wynne, her blouse

agape where it lacked buttons, her fingers stained with nicotine.

And--yes, that must be ‘Maddermerzell,’ disturbingly piquante French

governess of a small boy, who, Stuart surmised impartially, would

in five seconds be headlong in the water, and require saving. And

there Mrs. Percival, for eleven months of the year most respectable

of British matrons that ever wore a hair-net, now, by some strange

seizure of rejuvenescence, making a giggling fool of herself with the

doggish husband of another matron, not rejuvenated, and therefore icy

of eye. That pretty little maiden in white, with soft hair shadowed to

brown beneath her big burnt-straw sun-hat, Stuart had no difficulty in

recognizing as Letty, the other ‘little lover’ from the shadow-side of

the hulk; Letty, looking demure, as she hugged the secret of how well

_she_ knew these shores--by moonlight.

Stuart pushed off vigorously; then, leaning on his oars, looked up

again to see if he could pick out Mr. Johnson from among the chattering

gesticulating crowd. The Cabbage-rose was still desperately hailing the

boat: “Hi! Boy! Ferry! we’re coming with you!”

“Not if I know it,” muttered Stuart; quite determined that the Haven

should not see him again till cleared of the Menagerie. Then a graceful

figure, auburn-haired and supple, thrust a way to the front of the

jetty, and cried, in tones sufficiently supplicating to melt glaciers

into torrents:

“Mr. Heron! Oh, Mr. Heron!”

“Aureole Strachey!” With a few powerful strokes, he brought the boat

back to the palings, roped it securely, then plunged again into the

water, and waded ashore. Aureole flew down the jetty, and met him on

the sand:

“Oh, I’m so glad to see you; of all people in the world, you! you who

awoke my sleeping--but let’s get away from these gorillas!” indicating

with distaste the Cabbage-rose, who was approaching with the evident

fell intent of an introduction. “How I hate them all, directly I come

again in contact with someone from the old life.” Then, as Stuart drew

her hastily in an opposite direction, “Have you--do you know where

Oliver can be?” sinking her voice to a whisper.

“Oliver is in America, looking for you.”

“But how silly of him. Why is he looking for me in America? It’s such

a big place--it would take him years to find me, even if I were there.

And I’m not. I wouldn’t have gone to a place where it would be so

difficult to be found.”

Stuart looked puzzled: “But he wrote to me a few days after

the--um--episode on the Broads, saying he had returned to the house in

Chelsea, hoping you were there; that you had been, and gone again, with

all your luggage, and left a note for him----”

“‘Good-bye; I am a pilgrim for the land of freedom!’” quoted Aureole

readily. “You told me, don’t you remember, that he would certainly

follow me, and that we’d have a perfectly lovely scene together, and

that he’d never neglect my individual femininity again. And if he has

deserted me, and gone to America, then it’s your fault.” She drooped

her full crimson lips reproachfully at Stuart; who, disliking this

reminder of his disgraceful machinations, made heated reply:

“He _did_ follow you. If you say you are bound for the Land of Freedom,

and then come to Bournemouth, I can hardly be blamed, can I?”

“I--I meant freedom of the soul,” murmured Aureole, and her eyes filled

slowly with tears. It had been a shock to hear that her husband was so

far away.

Then Stuart began to laugh: “If you _will_ be subtle with Nigger, and

talk about Pilgrims and Lands of Freedom, naturally his thoughts lumber

off on a wild-goose chase in the direction of the ‘Mayflower’ and ‘Hail

Columbia.’” Mentally he substituted ‘wild-duck chase,’ but refrained

from being unkind aloud, because Aureole was weeping unrestrainedly

now, and he felt compelled to cheer her to the best of his ability.

“Never mind. I’ll write to him directly he sends some address, and

tell him to come home. Meanwhile, you’re quite comfortable in the

menag----at the boarding-house, aren’t you? Or why not move to the

hotel? you can use me as Oliver’s banker, till he turns up, you know.”

“I can’t move to any hotel,” she flared at him. “It’s _my_

boarding-house. Mine. And it’s in such a horrid m-m-muddle!”

Stuart sat down on a hillock of sand: “D’you mean to tell me that you

were responsible for that advertisement?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to earn his respect; show that I could stand by myself, be

free of him and the world and everybody--except Nature. I’m a Pagan.”

“But, my dear child,--no, don’t cry!--Pagans don’t run boarding-houses.”

“It’s a private hotel.”

“Well, even private hotels. Not usually.”

But Aureole felt she had been censured sufficiently by this young man,

who had taken such a vivid interest in her wayward personality, when,

in London, he had urged her to Norfolk, by a vision of her swaying

form: ‘always among reeds’.... And then again had urged her away from

Norfolk by much adroit talk on the subject of Ibsen, and pampered

souls, and earthquakes. So that from him she had hoped for more

sympathetic understanding of her movements and motives:

“I wish you had let us alone. People shouldn’t interfere between a

husband and wife. Oliver and I were in perfect harmony before you

meddled and sent him to America. And, anyway, what I do now is no

business of yours. I’m surrounded by adventurers and harpies, and

losing hundreds of pounds a week, if you want to know. And when Oliver

arrives, you can tell him of my ruin and misery, and how you gibed at

it all; you, whom he thought a staunch and faithful friend!” After

which passionate denunciation, which scorched the tears in her eyes

to brown points of flame, she walked swiftly away from him, in the

direction of the adventurers and harpies awaiting her upon the jetty.

“I believe she’s right,” murmured Stuart. Perhaps he ought not to have

tampered with matrimony as he had done. But he was so truly convinced

that every married couple ought to be well stirred up at least once a

year, to prevent them from setting into a mould. And what is the good

of conscientious convictions unless you conscientiously induce others

to act up to them?

And anyway, he was hardly to be blamed if Nigger so absurdly misread a

cryptic allusion to the land of freedom!

* * * * *

It was the after-dinner hour at the Boscombe Hotel; and Sebastian

Levi, pacing up and down the thickly carpeted lounge, listening to

the tinkle and silken swish all about him, watching the waiters move

to and fro with the coffee-services, threading a deft way between the

visitors in evening-dress, felt impatiently that this was all an unreal

stage set, as: ‘Curtain rises on hotel lounge, luxuriously furnished;

guests grouped about, with natural appearance of animated talk.’ Felt

that the only realities lay with a solitary figure, black and wiry

against the pale shadow-land of his chosen retreat; Stuart Heron,

probably at that moment pacing the ghostly wind-blown shores of the

Haven, even as he, Sebastian, now paced in the hot artificial glare of

his prison-house--so he termed it!--and wished, in a tumult of divine

discontent, that he were now beside Stuart, re-living in talk one of

their strenuous battling hours at sea, when every nerve was strained

taut to catch the racing tide into harbour.

Sebastian wondered if he wanted to order the car, and drive over to The

Farme--and Letty?... Not just yet.... Something trembled on the verge

of decisive action....

Suddenly he went quickly from the lounge into the smoking-room:

“Can I speak to you privately, father?”

Mr. Levi, senior, looked his surprise. He was enjoying a late whisky

and soda, and a mild political chat with some middle-aged cronies, and

rather regretted leaving these amusements.

“Why, yes, my boy,--if it won’t keep till the morning.”

“No, it won’t keep.” Sebastian spoke breathlessly; his hair was ruffled

as by many winds; his dark eyes flamed with strange fires, as he

noted the numerous podgy somnolent figures showing dimly a-sprawl in

the thick smoky atmosphere; ten-thousand-a-year figures!--Sebastian

attempted to express his attitude towards them by violently slamming

the smoking-room door behind him ... but it was padded, and refused

to close otherwise than in a fashion both hushed and respectful;

respectful to ten-thousand-a-year within.

“Well, Sebastian, and what is this very important matter that won’t

keep? Anything connected with your poor mother’s pearls for Letty? Is

that it, you grasping rogue? And what will your sisters say to that,

when they are grown-up enough to know that pearls are pearls? hey?” Mr.

Levi switched on the lights of their private sitting-room, and took up

his stand in front of the empty fireplace. “Hey?” he repeated, quite

prepared to yield the pearls. He was fond of little Letty.

Sebastian moved restlessly up and down the room; crossed abruptly to

the window and flung it open, knocking over a tall palm on its stand as

he did so. The breeze flapped the curtains far out into space. This was

better....

“I just wanted to tell you, sir, that your offer of a junior

partnership in the business, and fifteen hundred a year to begin with,

is an extremely generous one----”

“Go on,” said Mr. Levi, frowning a little. How much more did the young

beggar expect, at twenty-two?

“But I don’t want it. I don’t want any allowance. I’d rather be

without.”

His father surveyed him during an instant of blank astonishment. The

waiter entered with the whisky-and-soda Levi had ordered to be sent up

after him, from the smoking-room. He tossed off the remainder of the

glassful, and offered his son a drink.

“No, thanks,” coldly. He was anxious for the storm to break upon him,

anxious to begin suffering his martyrdom. This dalliance with whisky,

therefore, struck him as a needless compromise.

“And what does Miss Letty say to this, hey?” Levi had no idea what was

at the bottom of the boy’s startling renunciation of ease and luxury;

but he had been warned that young men sometimes pick up odd phases at

Oxford--debts or old editions or Hedonism. Sebastian had always been

of an excitable and impulsive temperament; a _liquid_ temperament.

This phase, whatever it was, would not last long. Mr. Levi twinkled

indulgently from the hearthrug:

“What does little Miss Letty say to it all?”

“I--I haven’t told Letty yet.”... What would Stuart say, how would

Stuart look, when told of this shattering tribute to his influence?...

“You can’t marry on nothing a year, you know that, don’t you? pretty

little Letty-birds need pretty little warm nests built for them.”

“Oh”--the lad twitched impatient shoulders. Stuart had not mentioned

how asceticism could be made to work in with love. He must be

questioned presently on the subject.

“Don’t be a fool, Sebastian,” advised his father suddenly; “Come,

what’s it all about?”

The quick change from levity to kindliness, touched the boy almost to

the point of explaining what were the ideals that had induced him

to strip himself so dramatically of the world’s goods. And yet--how

to put into words that uncomfortable stinging creed which he hated,

and which yet held his brain as in a sort of vice, fascinated his

thoughts to the exclusion even of Letty? And then that weak longing

to impress Heron, prove that he understood his doctrines to the point

of sacrifice--damn Heron! perhaps now he would condescend to talk

to his disciple, instead of making polite enquiries _re_ Letty’s

health. And, finally, that glimpse of an after-dinner hour in the

well-furnished, well-warmed, well-appointed smoking-room--conflict of

winds carefully shut out--doors that would not bang--waiters who walked

noiselessly--conversation on stocks and shares and politics, carefully

calculated not to excite the torpid brain.... Oh, Lord! would he grow,

or rather dwindle, thus, if he went into his father’s business and

accepted chunks of his father’s income? Was he started on that way, the

night he had prattled so absurdly of his happiness to Stuart?... _Damn_

Stuart! always the point swung back to that imperturbable gentleman.

And how could a fellow explain to Levi, of The Stores, High Holborn,

the bewildering and topsy-turvy morality of the shears? Sebastian

plunged--fatally:

“It’s just because of myself, father. It isn’t that I feel in the least

that I oughtn’t to be enjoying my income because other people have

less. But I think--I know I’m better without your money.”

The effect of his speech was electrical. Quite suddenly, Ned Levi began

to bellow.

“So that’s it, is it? And I’m to sit here and thank you for the honour,

am I? Well, you can go--anywhere; do anything; I don’t care. I’ve done

with you. If my money isn’t good enough, you needn’t touch it. Want

a purer sort of gold, do you? I knew this was bound to happen some

day. That’s what one has a son for.” And still muttering incoherent

commands to Sebastian to get out of his sight, the agitated old man

himself lumbered from the room, his hand trembling, his grey eyelashes

stiff with rage. Sebastian’s unfortunate phrasing had hit his father

on a dread quite unsuspected; dread that one day his only son, born to

the best of everything, would be ashamed of the way the Levi wealth had

been amassed; ashamed of trade; ashamed of his humble parentage.

--“But it seemed to me the boy was all right, when he got engaged

to Johnson’s girl. No la-di-da notions about him then. And now he’d

rather do without money, than touch mine that was made in honest

trade. Suppose he thinks I cheated it out of people’s pockets; sold

inferior stuff, and got swollen on it. Well, it don’t matter--it don’t

matter...” brooding on to-night’s culmination of all his fears. If his

wife had been alive--he could have had it all out with her, all his

bitterness and disappointment; and she would have said in her sensible

way: “Never mind, Ned; the boy doesn’t know what he’s talking about;

he’ll come round all right,--he’s a good lad, really.”... But his wife

was dead. And his two daughters--he had heard them flippantly remarking

to visitors that they were “bringing up dad in the way all parents

should go!”--not much consolation to be had from Editha and Ivy. Ned

Levi, in his loneliness, wondered if it ever struck the strange hard

young people of modern times, how very little fun it was to be a parent.

* * * * *

Sebastian had no idea that his thrice-twisted motives could have been

misconstrued by his father to aught so simple as a shrinking from

wealth earned in trade. He was even unaware that he had hurt his

father--thought he had merely made him angry. He determined, standing

on the hotel steps, and letting great gusts of clean air lift the hair

from his heated forehead, that both Letty and her father were entitled

to hear without delay what he had done. Then, and then only, would he

allow himself to tell Stuart--and his heart raced madly for an instant,

as it struck him he might still have time to get over to the Haven this

very night.

“Do you want the small car, sir?” queried the liveried porter

respectfully.

“Yes--no----” Sebastian remembered that a too frequent use of his

father’s automobile was hardly compatible with his recent hotly spoken

resolutions. He walked a few quick steps along the sea-front ... then

returned, and ordered the two-seater. There would be no possibility of

reaching the Haven unless he drove. And, after all, “once more doesn’t

count.”

--“We needn’t ask who _that_ is!” chirped the Cabbage-rose, when the

throbbing of an engine was heard outside the Farme. “I don’t suppose

it’s a visitor for _us_, do you, Mrs. Strachey?”

Letty blushed, and ran to meet Sebastian. A few moments later, with

a puzzled air, she fetched in her father from the garden. Sebastian

wanted to speak to him. “No, Pups, I don’t a bit know why.” Mrs.

Johnson, from a deep-rooted conviction that men could not be trusted

to be broad-minded without a woman to guide them, joined the conclave

unasked. The quartette had the dining-room to themselves.

... “Decided not to accept your father’s allowance?” repeated Mr.

Johnson incredulously. “Why ever not?”

And again the disciple was confronted by the difficulty of explaining

the creed of the master, to apparently unsympathetic listeners. He

stole a glance at Letty, and felt braced by her answering smile. Her

blue eyes were no longer bewildered--they shone at him like stars.

“It’s a man I know,” Sebastian started rather lamely, “who has put me

in the way of--well--of thinking rather differently about life. About

wealth that isn’t striven for, and--and things one gets too easily.”

“I like argerment,” Mat Johnson put in briskly. “I’m quite a good one

for argerment. Now what I say about what you say he says, is this:

unless we don’t mind taking things easily from other folk, other folk

will take them easily enough from us. And that’s logic.”

“But that would be nothing to do with me; that would be their concern,

and their loss of the--oh, of the fun of striving, don’t you see, sir?”

Sebastian was afraid he was making out rather a poor case for the

defence. “It’s with the effect of easy achievement on me personally

that my friend is concerned. He says I’m in danger of growing fat.”

Matthew Johnson, himself inclined to corpulence, took the allusion as a

personal affront, and was coldly silent, while Mrs. Johnson interrupted

indignantly: “I’m sure you have an elegant figure, Sebastian; hasn’t

he, Letty?”

Letty said nothing; only smiled softly, as at some misty golden thought.

“You introduce me to this pal of yours, Levi,” continued Mr. Johnson,

recovering his good-humour, and tilting back his chair at the ceiling;

“and we’ll tackle the matter together. I daresay he’s young, and maybe

I can put him right on one or two bits. And as for you, run back to

your dad and tell him you’ve thought better of that fifteen hundred

quid a year, and that you’ll pocket it with many thanks. See?” and the

note of rising authority on the last syllable drew from Sebastian a

quick:

“Yes, I see. But I won’t. That would be rather stupid and inconsistent,

wouldn’t it? After I had so definitely refused either to go into the

business or accept the cash.”

“Oho! you’ve refused the partnership in the business as well, have

you? And how, may I ask, d’you mean to support my daughter when you’re

married? Or is your Mightiness going to refuse her too?”

Sebastian held his head very high, as he replied that nothing in the

world would induce him to give up Letty.

“And how d’you mean to keep her, eh?” repeated his future

father-in-law, stubbornly.

Mrs. Johnson detected trouble brewing; and clinched matters, so she

thought, by a brilliant compromise:

“Couldn’t you take half of what your father offers you, Sebastian? I’m

sure seven hundred and fifty pounds a year is quite as much as any wife

needs to start on. Isn’t it, Letty?”

“Taking half would be exactly the same as taking all,” retorted

Sebastian, desperate now of forcing understanding.

“You’re wrong there, my lad. It ’ud be just less than fifteen hundred

quid by one half of fifteen hundred quid, which is seven fifty. But

there’s to be no halves about this business, mother; d’you mark me,

Letty? Are you attendin’, Sebastian Levi? I’m not going to have my girl

waitin’ about the best years of her life for a young fool who didn’t

know when he was well off. I like your father; we were neighbours once,

he and I; and I liked you well enough till now, though not a patch

on him. But unless you come to me in a week or two with all these

taradiddles biffed out of your head--then biff goes the wedding!” Mr.

Johnson rose to his feet, and in time-honoured fashion whacked at the

table with his clenched fist. “And meantime you’re not to see so much

of her, either. Come along, mother; come along, Letty”; summoning his

women-folk from the room, he marched forth. Mrs. Johnson followed

meekly; her laborious tolerance shrivelled to nothing at this first hot

blast from the actual furnace of ‘advanced ideas.’

Sebastian caught at Letty’s hands, as she passed him--

“Letty?”

“It’s all right, dear; I do understand.”

“Really?” he was surprised at her emphasis.

“Really and truly. Good night ... darling,” scarcely breathing the last

word, she slipped out of his arms and vanished. Left him, marvelling....

* * * * *

The car and the road again, and the buffeting masses of wind.

Sebastian’s exhilaration, dashed somewhat by his two recent interviews

with unresponsive middle-age, whipped itself anew to a tremendous

height. For now he was clear of worldly burdens; stripped like a

runner for the great race; and with the discovery new upon him of

just how easy of accomplishment were the things that had never before

entered into the range of normal possibility. The quest of spiritual

adventure.... And the Haven rushing nearer and nearer, as sombre

patches of pine-gloom, spectral open spaces, tore helter-skelter in

the opposite direction. Soon he would be telling Heron--and the older

man would flash him that quick curly grin of approval.... Now the flat

oozing stretches of mud, and the glimmer of a sluggish tide, far out

towards the horizon.--And now all brakes jammed on--the car ceased to

hum, and stood immovable, but still vibrating from the reckless pace at

which it had been driven.

Sebastian leapt down the sand-banks, on to the beach; found Stuart

musing, bare-headed, at the door of the bungalow; evidently quite

oblivious of wind and tempest. And now, in actual presence of his

idol, a sudden diffidence swept over the boy. This Stuart Heron, while

stimulating the most fanatical exploits in others, yet contrived

himself to retain an atmosphere entirely ordinary. Flushing scarlet,

and rather breathless, Sebastian dashed into his recital:

“I’ve been wanting to tell you, Heron, how immensely I admired

your ideas--about renunciation--and all that; how they struck me

as fine--and clean ... like star-spaces ... when everybody else

is so beastly, and grabs at things, money and--and furniture, the

heavy tangible articles that block out the view and the air.... I’m

expressing myself horribly badly, I know, but you’ve rather knocked

the stuffing out of me lately; just lately, when I was smuggest. And

anyway, I don’t want only to jaw; anybody can do that. So I turned it

about--your philosophy, creed, religion, whatever you like to call

it,--chewed it, and worried over it, and cursed you up and down....

And to-night I chucked up my whole future as it was mapped out for

me; told the Guv’nor that I wouldn’t take his fifteen hundred a year;

take it, and loll on it as if it were a sofa of cushions. Chucked

up my partnership in the business; and, I suppose, all chances of a

comfortable marriage just yet. Chucked it all up....”

He stopped. The impetus which had carried him so far, gave out

suddenly. He was still a bit dazed as to the actual reasons which had

inspired his recent startling performances; was just conscious of a

mighty upheaval in his affairs, overwhelming changes starting on the

morrow. For the present, tired out, he craved only to hear the surge of

praise due to him--

“Chucked it all up,” he pleaded....

Stuart shifted his pipe into the corner of his mouth. His gaze was

still bent outwards to the sluggish line of tide on the horizon.

“Rather a theatrical proceeding, surely?”

CHAPTER III

“RUN ON BOHEMIAN LINES!”

Sebastian owned a hundred pounds per annum, bequeathed him by legacy;

which sum Stuart had induced him to retain:

“I agree with you it would be far more effective to renounce that as

well, and confront the world as the penniless son of the rich Ned

Levi. But it isn’t done, my lad; if it were, I shouldn’t be trading in

diamonds. Theatricality is only a species of fat. If you strip yourself

because it gives opportunity for your dramatic faculties, you’re

feeding hard, all the time; feeding on the astounded faces of your

friends, on your own ringing accents, on the picturesque contrast of

your life as it was yesterday to what it will be to-morrow. You mustn’t

be picturesque, Levi, your tawny locks are against you as it is. Your

forty bob a week will ensure you a pleasantly mediocre existence in a

furnished bed-sitting-room.”

Sebastian looked worried; he wished Stuart would not exhibit so many

mental acrobatics. Last week he could have sworn the man was preaching

total renunciation of all worldly goods, in order to make the struggle

as strenuous as possible. Now he had doubled and twisted again to

something entirely different. And beyond all the inconsistencies,

Sebastian glimpsed a splendid consistency, a paramount truth, but,

as usual, too high up for him to do aught but cling to it by the

finger-tips. And seemingly he had blundered already.

“I’ve given up my room at the hotel, and I think I’ll go to the Farme

for the rest of August and September,” he announced tentatively; “it’s

not expensive, and I shall be near Letty.” He might have added: “and

near you.”

--“And it will be quiet for writing,” he continued.

“What do you intend to write?”

“I want to throw your theory of the shears into a book; in fact, all

your theories.” Sebastian tried to make the announcement without

blushing, and failed miserably.

“Volume of ethical essays? Treatise on metaphysics?--Good Lord,

man,”--a horrible thought struck Stuart--“surely you’re not going to

butcher me to make a book of minor verse?”

“No, I hardly regard you as a lyrical subject,” retorted Sebastian,

with some show of spirit,--he wasn’t always going to let himself be

badgered by Heron! “The novel is the best form of literature for

wide circulation,--and, after all, we do want the truth to reach the

masses. I’ve got the title fixed already: ‘Shears,’ by Sebastian Levi,

dedicated to Stuart Heron,--if I may?” with a return to the old shyness.

Stuart offered no active opposition, but he felt doubtful. Perversely,

ever since the advent of his keen young disciple, he himself had been

less keen. He was not sure now if indeed he wanted a disciple?...

It was agony to watch Sebastian doing _his_ stunts--and doing them

badly! This Jewish boy was too responsive, too enthusiastic, too

flexible altogether; he tempted Stuart to do his worst--and Stuart was

uncomfortably aware of just how bad his worst could be. He longed for

firmer material against which to pit himself.... And this sent his

thoughts flying to Oliver Strachey in America--and to Oliver’s wife

in Bournemouth. He felt more guilty over that affair than he cared to

acknowledge; and wondered once or twice if he ought not himself to

take in hand the muddle at the Menagerie, pending Nigger’s return.

So now he enjoined Sebastian to let him know just how chaotic were

Aureole’s affairs, morally and financially.

Sebastian had decided to ignore Mr. Johnson’s commands to see less of

his daughter. Without previous word to Letty, he arrived at the Farme,

in quest of a room, late the following afternoon; and found the place

deserted, save in the square-flagged hall, a couple of rather forlorn

persons standing beside a pile of dusty luggage.

“We’ve been waiting over half an hour,” explained the plain prim female

of the pair; “I sent Mrs. Strachey a card when to expect us, but I

suppose it got mislaid in the post. There are no servants anywhere. And

Bertie gets such cold feet, travelling,” indicating her pallid young

companion. “When I pulled the bell-rope, it came off in my hands. Do

you suppose she will charge much for the damage? Is she like that?”

Sebastian’s reassurances were drowned in the hoot of a motor-horn, and

a chorus of laughing chatter. Through the wide windows and through the

open door, a miscellaneous crowd swarmed into the hall, and paused

abruptly at sight of the strangers.

“Aureole, forward please, and serve,” remarked somebody flippant. And

Aureole stepped apologetically from the throng, striving to smooth her

tawny hair, loosened under the motor-veil.

“You must forgive me; of course I’ve muddled dates again. It’s Mrs.

Gilchrist and her husband, isn’t it?”

“No,” contradicted the prim girl, “it’s Miss Fortescue and her brother.

I wrote you were to expect us this evening. You are Mrs. Strachey, I

suppose?”

“Yes,--but--but you said you couldn’t come till the end of September,”

stammered their hostess. Whereupon Miss Fortescue produced Mrs.

Strachey’s own letter, bidding them welcome on the fifteenth of

August; damning evidence before which the culprit remained merrily

unabashed.