PART IV

PARIS

I

The noise of Paris came to him through the open windows, a confusion

of trivial sounds utterly different from the solid, strong note that

London gave forth. It was the noise of a nursery of children playing

with toys--he heard the continuous jingle of bells round the necks of

the horses that drew the cabs, the shouts of men crying newspapers, the

squeaking horns of motor-cars, and, every afternoon, at this hour, the

sound of some pedlar calling attention to his wares, with a trumpet

that had a tinny sound.

At intervals the voice of Paris, modified by the height at which he

lived and the distance he was from the Grands Boulevards, sent a shout

to him that reminded him of London. That was when a heavy rumbling

shook the narrow street which was one of the tributaries of the

Boulevards, as a monstrous, unwieldy omnibus, drawn by three horses

abreast, rolled upwards on its passage to the Gare du Nord. The horses'

hoofs slapped the street with the clatter of iron on stone, and the

passing of the omnibus drowned every other sound with its thunder, so

that when it had gone, and the echoes of its passage had died away, the

voice of Paris seemed more mincing and playful than before.

Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression

that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.

At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and

the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the

centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did

not know, and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat

neglected education--the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the

Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the

world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris,

not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily

lives of the people.

And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold,

bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had

dragged him and his fellows--Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards,

and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine--across the black

country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of

the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with

their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday,

to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and

panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to

gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."

To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the

low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters,

helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It

seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were

inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional

politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector

snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the

last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint,

possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was

bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and

hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the

arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their

shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling with one another, their

voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.

He was required to explain and explain again to three or four

officials; something of a minor, technical point, he gathered, was

barring him from his baggage. His French was not quite adequate to the

occasion; but it was maddening to see them shrug their shoulders with

a movement that suggested that they rejoiced in his discomfiture....

It was all straightened out, somehow, by a uniformed interpreter, a

friendly man who came into Humphrey's existence for a moment, and

passed out of it in a casual way, a professional dispenser of sympathy

and help, expecting no more reward than a franc or so for services that

deserved a life-long gratitude.

But when the cabman had shouted at him, and the blue-bloused porters

(one had attached himself to each of his four pieces of baggage) had

insisted on their full payment, and after there had been an exchange

of abuse between the cabman and an itinerant seller of violets, whose

barrow had nearly been run down, Humphrey looked out of the window and

caught his first glimpses of Paris ... of the light that suggested

warmth and laughter.

He saw great splashes of light, and through the broad glass windows of

the cafés a vision of cosy rooms, bustling with the business of eating,

of white tables at which men and women sat--ordinary middle-class

people. The movement of their arms and shoulders and heads showed that

conversation was brisk during their meal; they smiled at one another.

As the cab sped softly along on its pneumatic tyres, he saw picture

after picture of this kind, set in its frame of light. "I shall like

living here," he thought. Chance decreed that the Rue le Peletier was

being repaired, and the cab swung out of the narrower streets into the

vivid and wonderful brilliance of the Boulevard des Italiens.

The street throbbed with light and life. He was in a broad avenue

with windows that blazed with splendid colour in the night. The faces

of the clocks in the middle of the avenue were lit up; the lamps of

the flower and newspaper kiosks made pools of shining yellow on the

pavement; and above him the red and golden and green of the illuminated

advertisements came and went, sending their iridescence into the night.

It was not one unbearable glare that startled the eyes, but a blend of

many delicate and fine luminous tints: one café was lit with electric

lights that gave out a soft pale rose colour, another was of the

faintest blue, and a third a delicate yellow, and all these different

notes of light rushed together in a lucent harmony.

Music floated to him as he passed slowly in the stream of bleating and

jingling and hooting traffic. He saw the people sitting outside the

cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids,

as though there were no such thing as work in the world.

And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of

Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was

something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at

being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game),

an _agent_ held up a little white baton to stop the traffic--playing at

being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. He wondered whether this

sort of thing went on always, with an absurd thought of the Paris he

had seen at a London exhibition.

The cab veered out of the traffic down a side-street between two cafés

larger than the rest, and, at the last glimpse of people sitting in

overcoats and furs by the braziers, he laughed in the delight of it.

"Why, they're playing at it being summer," he said to himself.

Six months had passed since that day, and he had seen Paris in many

aspects, yet nothing could alter his first impression. The whole city

was built as a temple of pleasure, a feminine city, with all the shops

in the Rue Royale or the Avenue de l'Opera decked with fine jewels and

sables. Huge emporiums everywhere, crowded with silks and ribbons and

lace; wonderful restaurants, with soft rose-shaded lights and mauve

and grey tapestries, as dainty as a lady's boudoir. Somewhere, very

discreetly kept in the background, men and women toiled behind the

scenes of luxury and pleasure ... those markets in the bleak morning,

and the factories on the outskirts of the city, and along the outer

Boulevards one saw great-chested men and narrow-chested girls walking

homewards from their day's work. But there was pleasure, even for these

people: the material pleasure of life, and the spiritual pleasure of

art and beauty. The first they could satisfy with a jolly meal in the

little bright restaurants of their quarter with red wine and cognac;

and of the second they could take their fill for nothing, if they were

so minded, for it surrounded them in a scattered profusion everywhere.

* * * * *

Humphrey, in the Paris office of _The Day_, on the fourth floor of an

apartment building in the Rue le Peletier, sat dreaming of all that had

happened in the past six months. Wonderful months had they been to him!

They had altered his whole perception of things. Here, in a new world

and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion.

Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small

and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and

petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day

demanded.

Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how

broad the world was, that it was finer to deal with nations than

individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same

relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London.

The clock struck five. Rivers and Neckinger and Selsey would be going

into the conference now in Ferrol's room to discuss the contents of the

paper.

"Anything big from Paris?" some one would be asking, or "What about

Berlin?"... And he knew that every night they looked towards Paris,

where amazing things happened, and he, Humphrey Quain, was Paris. That

splendid thought thrilled him to the greatest endeavour. He was _The

Day's_ watchman in Paris, not only of all the news that happened in the

capital, but of all the happenings in the whole territory of France.

A pile of cuttings from the morning's papers were on his desk. Here

was a leading article on the Franco-German relations from the _Echo

de Paris_--an important leading article, obviously inspired by the

Quai D'Orsay. There was a two-column account of the Hanon case--an

extraordinary murder in Lyons which English readers were following with

great interest. There was a budget of "fait-divers," those astonishing

events in which the fertility of the Paris journalist's imagination

rises to its highest point. They supplied the "human interest." He had

received a wire from London to interview a famous French actress, who

was going to play in a London theatre, and that had kept him busy for

the afternoon. The morning had been devoted to reading every Paris

paper.

At five o'clock Dagneau arrived with the evening papers, bought from

the fat old woman who kept the kiosk outside the Café Riche. He let

himself into the flat with a latch-key, and appeared before Humphrey,

a young man, immaculately dressed, with a light beard fringing his fat

cheeks. Humphrey could never quite overcome the oddness of having a

bearded man as his junior. Dagneau was only twenty-two, but he had

grown a beard since he was twenty; that was how youths played at being

men. Humphrey called Dagneau "the lamb."

"Hullo," he said. "Anything special?"

Dagneau's pronunciation of English was as bad as Humphrey's

pronunciation of French, but in both cases the vocabulary was immense.

"They're crying 'Death of the President' on the Boulevards," said

Dagneau.

Humphrey leapt up. "Great Heavens! You don't say so!" he shouted, going

to the telephone.

"Be not in a hurry, _mon vieux_." (Though Dagneau was his assistant,

they dropped all formalities between themselves.) "It is in _La

Presse_."

"But--"

"Calm yourself. _La Presse_ is selling in thousands. The news is

printed in great black letters across the front page."

"Is it true?" gasped Humphrey.

"It is true that the President is dead--but it is the President of

Montemujo or something like that in South America, and not M. Loubet."

Dagneau laughed merrily and slapped the papers on the table. He took

Humphrey by the shoulders and shook him playfully.

"I--would I let my old and faithful Englishman down?" he asked. The

newspaper phrase spoken as Dagneau spoke it sounded delightful.

"By George, you gave me a shock," Humphrey laughed. "I thought I'd been

dozing for an hour with the President dead. Dagneau, you are an _espèce

de_--anything you like."

"Any telegrams from London?"

"One to interview Jeanne Granier. I've done it Will you go through

the evening papers? Look out for the _Temps_ comments on the Persian

railway ... they're running that in London. And the latest stuff about

the Hanon case. I'll run round to _Le Parisien_ and see what they've

got."

He went down the winding staircase, past the red-faced concierge and

his enormous wife, who knitted perpetually by the door ("_Pas des

lettres, m'sieu_," she said, in answer to his inquiring look), and so

into the street. A passing cabman held up his whip in appeal, and, as

moments were precious now, Humphrey engaged him. They bowled along

through the side-streets, and at the end of each he saw, repeated, the

glorious opal and orange sunset over Paris: those magnificent sunsets

that left the sky in a smother of golden and purple and dark clouds

edged with livid light behind the steeple of St Augustine. They came to

the building of _Le Parisien_, with whom _The Day_ had an arrangement

by which Humphrey could see their proofs evening and night, in exchange

for extending the same privilege to the London Correspondent of _Le

Parisien_ at the offices of _The Day_.

He crossed the threshold into the familiar atmosphere of Fleet Street.

Hurry and activity: young Frenchmen writing rapidly in room after room.

Some of them knew him, looked up from their work and nodded to him.

From below the printing-machines sent tremors through the building, as

they rolled off the first edition for the distant provinces of France,

and for the night trains to every capital of Europe. The same old work

was going on here: the same incessant quest and record of news.

He went to the room of Barboux, the foreign editor.

"Good-evening," said Barboux, black-bearded, fat and bald-headed. He

pronounced "evening" as though it were a French word, and it came out

"événandje."

Barboux offered Humphrey a cigarette he had just rolled with black

tobacco, and asked him most intimate questions of his doings in Paris,

so that Humphrey had either to acknowledge himself a prude or a

Parisian.

"All the same," said Barboux, "Paris is a wonderful city, _hein_?"

"It is," said Humphrey.

Barboux continued: "Is it not the most beautiful, the most wonderful,

the most entrancing city in the world, young Englishman?"

"All except London," replied Humphrey.

"Rosbif--Goddam--I box your nose," laughed Barboux.

It was a set form of dialogue that took place every night between them,

without variation, a joke invented by Barboux.

A man in an apron--a French version of the type in _The Day's_

printing-office--brought in a budget of proofs.

"There is nothing that is happening, ain't it?" remarked Barboux, who

always rendered _n'est ce pas_ in this literal fashion.

"Apparently not," Humphrey agreed, glancing through the proofs. "When

do they expect the verdict in the Hanon case?"

Barboux touched a bell. A young man appeared. His hair was fair and

long, his clothes were faultless to the crease in the trousers turned

up in the English style over patent-leather shoes with the laces tied

in big bows. Barboux introduced him: "M. Charnac will tell you about

the Hanon case."

The young man bowed in a charming manner, and spoke in a soft,

delicious French, with a voice that was charged with courtesy and

kindness.

"They do not expect a verdict to-night, m'sieu. The court has

adjourned. I've just had the finish of our correspondent's message."

"_Merci_," said Humphrey.

"_Pas de quoi_," said Charnac, bowing.

Humphrey rose and bowed with the ultra politeness that was now part of

his daily life. They shook hands.

"_Enchanté d'avoir fait votre connaissance_," and Charnac bowed once

more.

"_Enchanté_," mumbled Humphrey.

Barboux was at the telephone, saying impatiently, "Ah-lo.... Ah ...

lo." Humphrey put on his hat, Barboux extended his left hand--the

greatest sign of friendship that a Frenchman can give, since it implies

that he knows you too well for you to take offence at it.

"_À demain_," said Humphrey, as he went away.

When he came back to the office, work began in earnest. First of all

he had to select from the budget of news on his table those items

that would be most acceptable to English readers. That was no small

matter on days when there were many things happening. It required sound

judgment and a knowledge of what was best in news. Then there was

always the question of the other correspondents of London newspapers:

what were the other fellows sending?

He and Dagneau talked things over, and, finally, when they had decided

what to transmit to London, the work of compiling the stories began. It

was necessary to build up a coherent, comprehensive story out of the

cuttings before him, in which all the points of the different papers

should be mentioned. Dagneau helped him, making illiterate translations

of leading articles, that needed revising and knocking into shape.

Perhaps, even at the eleventh hour, a telegram might arrive from the

London headquarters, setting them a new task, rendering void all the

work they might have done.

After two hours' writing Humphrey laid down his pen. "Come along, my

lamb," he said to Dagneau; "let us go to dinner."

Then they put on their hats and coats and went to Boisson's, a few

doors away in the Rue le Peletier, where Père Boisson presided over

a pewter counter, spread with glasses and bottles, and Mère Boisson

superintended the kitchen, and Henri, the waiter, with a desperate

squint, ran to and fro with his burden of plates, covering many miles

every night by passing and repassing from the restaurant tables to the

steamy recesses behind the door.

This was the part of Paris life that pleased Humphrey most.

They received him with cheery _Bons soirs_, and Henri paused in his

race to set the chairs for them, and arrange their table. Yards of

crisp bread were brought to them, and a _carafon_ of the red wine from

Touraine, whither M. Boisson went on a pilgrimage once a year to sample

and buy for himself.

Little French olives and _filet d'hareng saur_; soup with sorrel

floating in it; fish with black butter sauce; a _contre-filet_ or a

_vol au vent_ deliciously cooked; Roquefort cheese, and, to wind up

with, what M. Boisson called magnificently _Une Belle Poire_--this

was the little dinner they had for something under three francs, and,

of course, there was special coffee to follow, and, as a piece of

extravagance, a liqueur of _mandarin_ or _noyeau_.

"This is better than Fleet Street," said Humphrey, inhaling his

cigarette and sipping at the excellent coffee. Boisson in his

shirt-sleeves and apron came over to them and spoke to them with light

banter. He also had a joke of his own: he conceived it to be the

highest form of humour to interject "Aoh--yes--olright," several times

during the conversation.

Madame Boisson waddled towards them, with an overflowing figure,

and said, as if her future happiness depended on an answer in the

affirmative, "_Vous avez bien diné, m'sieu_."

The smell of food was pleasant here: there was no hurry; men and women

concentrated all their attention on eating and enjoying their meal. The

light shone on the glasses of red and white wine. It was a picture that

delighted Humphrey.

And Dagneau was telling him of his adventures on the previous night

with a little girl, the dearest little girl he had ever met, kissing

the tips of his fingers to the air, whenever his emotions overcame

him ... and Humphrey smiled. This was a side of Paris of which he

knew nothing. His thoughts went back to London where Elizabeth lived,

beautiful and austere. "I must write to Elizabeth to-night," he thought.

At nine-twenty Dagneau caught the eye of Henri and made an imaginary

gesture of writing on the palm of his left hand. "That's the way to get

a perfect French accent," he said to Humphrey. Henri nodded in swift

comprehension and appeared with a piece of paper on which illegible

figures were scrawled. They paid and went away, with the Boissons and

Henri calling farewells to them. Happy little restaurant in the Rue le

Peletier!

They got back to the office just as the telephone bell was making a

rattling din. Humphrey sat down and adjusted over his head the steel

band that held the receivers close to his ears. Then, pulling the

telephone closer to him, and spreading out before him all that he had

written, he waited.

And, presently, sometimes receding and sometimes coming nearer above

the hum and buzz that sounded like the wind and the waves roaring

about the deep-sea cables, he heard the voice of Westgate coming from

England. "Hallo ... hallo ... hallo.... That you, Quain.... Can't hear

you.... Get another line ... buzz--zz--zz ... oooo. Ah! that's better."

Westgate's voice became suddenly clear and vibrating as though he were

speaking from the next room. But Humphrey could see the little box in

the sub-editors' room, where all the men were working round Selsey, and

the messenger-boys coming and going with their flimsy envelopes; he

could see the strained, eager face of Westgate, as he waited, pencil in

hand ... and he began.

He shouted the news of Paris for fifteen minutes, and at the end the

perspiration wetted his forehead, and Westgate's good-night left him

exhausted. Sometimes, when the wires were interfered with by a gale,

the fifteen minutes were wasted in futile shouting and endeavour to be

heard in London; sometimes Westgate would say bluntly: "Selsey says he

doesn't want any of that story," when he began to read his carefully

prepared notes. Those were desperate minutes, shouting to London

against time.

"All well?" asked Dagneau, when he finished.

"I suppose so," Humphrey answered. "Westgate was in great form

to-night--he was taking down at the rate of a hundred and twenty words

a minute...." He rose and stretched himself. "Will you pay the late

call at the newspaper offices? I'll be at Constans in case anything

happens."

Out again into the bright glamour of the Boulevards to Constans at the

corner of the Place de l'Opera, in the shadow of the opera-house, to

meet the other correspondents, and wait on the events of Europe, and

drink brandy and soda or the light lager-beer that was sold at Constans.

It was a place where most of the Paris correspondents gathered, and,

sometimes, the "Special Correspondents" came also. They were lofty

people, who had long since left the routine of Fleet Street; the

princes of journalism, who passed through Paris on their way to St

Petersburg, to Madrid--to any part of Europe or the world where there

was unrest; war correspondents, and special commissioners; men who had

letters of introduction from diplomat to diplomat, who talked with

kings and chancellors, and interviewed sultans. They flitted through

Paris whenever any big news happened, in twos and threes, only staying

for a few hours at Constans to meet friends, and then on again by the

midnight expresses....

They were a jolly lot of fellows who met in those days at Constans:

O'Malley of _The Sentinel_, the fair-haired scholar who spoke of style

in writing, and could speak French with an Irish accent and knew how

to ask the waiter to "Apporthez des p'hommes de therrey"; Punter, who

represented the Kelmscotts' papers, talked French politics late into

the night, and wore a monocle that never dropped from his eye--not even

in those exciting moments when Michael, his coal-black eyes and hair

betraying his ancestry, crossed his path in argument.

At midnight Dagneau came in with word from the outside world. All was

quiet. So Humphrey went back to the hotel in the Rue d'Antin, where

he rented a room on the fifth floor by the month for eighty francs,

including the morning roll and bowl of coffee. He wrote his letter to

Elizabeth: he wanted her to come to Paris and share his life with him.

II

He wanted her very much to share in the delight of those days. It

was all so new and beautiful to him, so different from London. He

went about the city, sometimes alone, sometimes with Dagneau for a

companion, to the Louvre, where the Venus de Milo filled him with awe

and wonder, or to the Luxembourg, with its statuary set among the green

trees. In the afternoons, when he had any spare time, he would take a

book and read in the Tuileries, or on one of the seats in the Champs

Elysées, where the fat Norman and Breton nurses, with their broad

coloured ribbons floating from their _coifs_, wheeled perambulators

up and down, or took the children to the Punch and Judy shows. And on

Sundays in the season, there were the races at Longchamps, with a drive

homewards in the cool of the evening, through the Bois, where his cab

was one of a long line of vehicles making a moving pageant of the human

comedy, with laughing bourgeois families riding five and six in a cab,

and aristocracy and opulent beauty, artificial and real, rolling by in

victorias and electric broughams.

Those rides down the Avenue du Bois to the Arc de Triomphe made him

feel very poor: the women, lolling back in silken comfort, seemed

lifted above the everyday world, away from all thought of squalor and

sordidness. They were the rare hot-house flowers of society; the cold

wind of life's reality would wither them in a day. So they passed

before him, exquisitely beautiful and remote, looking with languid

interest at the rest of the people in the incomparable vanity of their

silk and lace and diamonds....

Yet again, his work took him behind the scenes of Parisian life, into

places that are not familiar to the casual visitor to Paris. He would

sit in the Chamber of Deputies to make notes of an important debate,

or to watch the rigid semicircle of French legislators break up into

riotous factions, with the tintinnabulation of the President's bell

adding to the din. This would appear in _The Day_ with the head-line,

"Pandemonium in the French Chamber." Perhaps it was necessary to

interview a _juge d'instruction_ in his private room at the Palais

de Justice, or to pass through the corridors of the Surété--France's

Scotland Yard--to inquire into a sensational murder mystery.

And he found, too, that in Paris he had a certain standing as a

journalist that was denied him in London. He was registered in

books, and the seal of approval was given to him in the shape of a

_coupe-fil_, which was a card of identity, with his portrait and the

name of _The Day_ on it--a magic card that enabled him to do miraculous

things with policemen and officials; it was a passport to the front

row in the drama of life. There was no need in Paris to haggle with

policemen, to wink at them, and win a passage through the crowd by

subterfuge as in London: this card divided a way for him through the

multitude.

So that now, when he felt that he had established himself in his

career, when his salary was more than adequate for the needs of two,

the strong need of Elizabeth came to him. The brilliant gaiety of Paris

swirled about him, and tried to entice him into its joyous whirlpool.

He knew the dangers that beset him: he knew the stories of men who had

been dragged into the whirlpool, down into the waters that closed over

their heads, bringing oblivion.

And he looked towards the ideal of Elizabeth, as he had always looked

towards the ideal of the love which she personified, to save him from

the evil things that are bred by loneliness and despair.

III

One Saturday night, when there was nothing else to do, he went up

to Montmartre, and walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, past the

grotesque absurdities of the _cabarets_ that are set there for the

delectation of foreign and provincial strangers: _cabarets_ that mock

at death and heaven and hell with all the vulgarity and coarseness that

exists side by side with the love of beauty, art and culture in Paris.

For a franc you could watch the old illusion of a shrouded man turning

to a grisly skeleton in his narrow coffin; or you could see a diverting

burlesque of the celestial realms, and observe how sinners were burnt

in a canvas hell with artificial flames. Humphrey had seen all these

during his first week in Paris: he had laughed, but afterwards he had

been ashamed of his laughter. They were a little degrading....

He passed them by to-night, in spite of the enticing blandishments of

the mock mute, the angel and the devil by the doors of their haunts. He

wandered aimlessly along this Boulevard, where women crossed his path,

looking very picturesque, without any covering to their heads, shawls

across their shoulders and red aprons down to the fringe of their short

skirts. There was something savage and primitive about these women:

they lacked the frankness and gaiety of the coster-girl in London; they

were beautiful, with an evil and cruel beauty. Vicious-looking men

slouched from the shadows. Their looks could not conceal the knives in

their pockets. They were as rats in the night, creeping from pavement

to pavement, preying on humanity.

The door of a café chantant opened, as Humphrey came abreast with it,

and the sound of a jingling chorus, played on a discordant piano,

arrested his steps. The man who was coming out, thinking that Humphrey

was about to enter, held the door open for him politely. Something

impelled Humphrey forward.

He went inside.

The room was heavy with tobacco smoke; it floated in thin clouds about

the lights and drifted here and there in pale spirals as it was blown

from the lips of the smokers. His vision was blurred by the smoke at

first, and, as he stood there blinking and self-conscious, it was as

though he had intruded into some private and intimate gathering. It

seemed that every one in the room was staring at him. The impression

only lasted a moment. He perceived a vacant chair by a table and sat

down, with the bearing of one to whom the place was familiar.

All around him the men and women were sitting. There was an air of

sex-comradeship that, in spite of its frankness, was neither indecent

nor blatant. The people were behaving in the most natural way in

the world. Sometimes a woman nestled close to a man and their hands

interlaced; sometimes a man sat with his arm round the waist of a girl.

Mild liquids were before them--the light beer of France, little glasses

of cherries soaked in brandy, glasses of white and red wine. Their

eyes were set towards the small stage at the end of the room, a narrow

platform framed in crudely-painted canvas, representing trees and

foliage; while at the back there was a drop-scene that showed a forest

as an early Japanese artist might have drawn it, with vast distances

and a nursery contempt for perspective.

His eye wandered to the walls painted with scroll-work and deformed

cupids and panels of nude women, so badly done that they appealed more

to the sense of humour than to the sexual. The pictures on the walls

seemed to leave the men and women untouched; they concentrated all

their attention on the entertainment. The only person in the place who

showed any sign of boredom was the gendarme who sat by the door, the

State's hostage to its conscience. Nothing, said the State, in effect,

can be indecent if one of our gendarmes is there. This was not one

of the _cabarets_ where the poet-singers of Montmartre chant, with

melancholy face, their witty doggerel or their fragrant pastorals;

where people came to hear the veiled obscenities of political satire

or allusions to passing events; this was a second-rate affair, a

_tingel-tangel_--a species of family music-hall.

A waiter in an alpaca jacket, a stained apron wound skirt-wise round

his trousers, approached Humphrey with an inquiring lift of his

eyebrows. He removed empty glasses dexterously with one hand and

slopped a cloth over the table with the other.

"M'sieu, desire...?"

"_Un fin_," answered Humphrey.

The waiter emitted an explosive _Bon_ and threaded his way through

the labyrinth of chairs to a high wooden counter, where a fat man,

with his shirt-sleeves rolled back to his elbow, stood sentinel over

rows of coloured bottles. The light shone on green and red liqueurs,

on pale amber and dark brown bottles placed on glass shelves against

a looking-glass background, that reflected the bullet shape of the

_patron's_ close-cropped head.

Meanwhile the pianist had finished his interlude, and there was a burst

of applause as a woman appeared on the stage. She wore an amazing hat

of orange and white silk, in which feathers were the most insistent

feature. There was something extraordinarily bold and flaunting in

her presence. Her neck and shoulders and bosom were bare to the low

cut of her bodice, and the cruel light showed the powder that she

had scattered over her throat and shoulders to make them white and

enticing; it showed the red paint on the lips and the rouge on the

cheeks, and the black on her eyelashes and eyebrows. The crude touches

of obvious artifice destroyed her beauty. Her waist was compressed into

a painful smallness, and her skirt was flounced and reached only to the

knees.

She sang a song that had something to do with a soldier's life. "Tell

me, soldier," she sang, "what do you think of in battle? Do you think

of the glory of the Fatherland and the splendour of dying for France?"

And the soldier answers: "I think only of a farm in Avignon, and a

maiden whose lips I used to kiss on the old bridge; I think only of my

old mother and how she will embrace me when I come home."

When she sang the simple song, though her voice was false, and her

gestures stereotyped, the rouge and the powder and the paint were

forgotten for a moment. She was one of those unconscious artists

belonging to a people who have art woven into the warp and woof of

their daily life.

The audience took up the chorus. She nodded to them with an audacious

smile. The pianist, with his cigarette stub hanging from his lips,

under cover of the volume of voices, forsook the treble for a moment,

and reached out with his hand for a glass of beer that rested above the

piano.

It was the strange, fumbling motion of his hand that caught Humphrey's

eye, trained to observe such details. He looked closer, and saw that

the pianist's eyes were closed, and the lashes were withered where they

met the cheek. He was blind; he never saw the faces and figures of the

women who sang, he only heard the voices; he could see nothing that was

harsh and cruel. And the picture of the blind pianist at the side of

the garish stage, improvising little runs and trills and spinning a

web of melody night after night, stirred Humphrey with an odd emotion.

There was a pause. The door opened and closed as people came and

went. Humphrey sipped at the brandy; the fiery taste of it made his

palate and throat smart. The price of the entertainment was one franc,

including a drink.

Suddenly the pianist struck up a well-known air. A slim girl, in

the costume of the district, slouched on to the stage, her hands

thrust into the pockets of her apron. Her hair was bundled together

in careless heaps of yellow, her eyes were pale blue and almost

almond-shaped, her features finely moulded, with a queer distinction

of their own. And when she took one hand out of her apron pocket, he

saw that the fingers were long and exquisitely tapered, and tipped

with pink, beautiful nails that shone in the light. Those finger-nails

betrayed her. They were not in keeping with the part.

She started singing, walking the small stage with a swaying motion of

her body; her young form was lithe and graceful; her movements tigrine.

And as she sang her lilting chorus, her pale eyes gazed from their

narrow slits at Humphrey, not boldly or coquettishly, but with an

indeterminate appeal, as though she felt ashamed of her song.

"Quand je danse avec mon grand frisé

Il a l'air de m'enlacer

Je perds la tête

'Suis comme une bête!

'Y a pas chose--'suis sa chose à lui

'Y a pas mal--Quoi? C'est mon mari

Car moi, je l'aime

J'aime mon grand frisé."

The audience sang the swinging chorus, and she moved sinuously to and

fro with the rhythm of it. Humphrey sat there, and he seemed to lose

consciousness of all the other people in the room--the smell of the

smoke, and the jingle of the piano, and the ill-painted pictures on

the walls faded away from him; all his senses seemed to merge and

concentrate on the enjoyment of this moment. She was singing on the

stage for him, her narrow eyes never left him.

And her song was a pæan in praise of the brute in man.

She acted her song. Her face was radiant with the joy of being

possessed, and her eyes shone as she abandoned herself to the words:

"Quand je danse avec le grand frisé

Il a l'air de m'enlacer...."

Then her wonderful hands with their glinting finger-nails went up to

her head, and she half-closed her eyes, as though she were swooning:

"Je perds la tête...."

Now her eyes were opened, and they glared wildly, and her lips

trembled, and her slim body quivered with animal hunger:

"'Suis comme une bête."

And now, she smiled, and pride was on her face; one hand rested on

her hip, and she swaggered up the stage, as the words fitted into the

opening lilt:

"'Y pas chose--suis sa chose à lui

'Y pas mal--Quoi? C'est mon mari...."

Her face became at once miraculously tender. She expressed great

and overpowering love--a love so strong that it swept everything

before it--a love that was without restraint, passionate, fierce and

unquenchable. Her arms were outstretched. Her dark blouse, opened at

the neck, revealed her white throat throbbing with her song:

"Car moi, je l'aime

J'aime mon grand frisé."

And when she sang "_Je l'aime_," she invested the words with passion

and renunciation.

They clamoured for another verse, crying "_Bis ... Bis_," in throaty

tones, but she only came on to bow to them, and walk off again with

that swaying stride.

"_Eh, bien!_" said a voice at Humphrey's elbow, "she is very good, our

little Desirée, _hein_?"

He turned half round in his chair. At first he did not recognize the

immaculately clothed young man, with the fair, long hair, who smiled

at him, and then he recollected that they had met in the office of _Le

Parisien_.

"M. Charnac, isn't it?" Humphrey asked. "I didn't know you at once....

Yes, she's very good. What's her name?"

"Desirée Lebeau," Charnac answered. He looked at Humphrey again, still

smiling.

"Do you often come here?" he asked.

"This is the first time.... I was wandering about.... I just dropped

in."

Humphrey noticed that Charnac was not alone. A pretty girl dressed

becomingly in black, with a touch of red about her neck, sat by his

side.

"Allow me to present a friend, Margot," Charnac said to the girl. "He

is an Englishman--a journalist," he added. And to Humphrey he said:

"Mlle. Margot Lebeau. She is the sister of our little Desirée."

"_M'sieu est Anglais_," said the dark-haired girl in a piping voice.

"_Ah! que ça doit être interessant d'être Anglais._"

IV

The entertainment was near its end. A dainty figure came from the

heavy curtains that hung from each side of the proscenium and hid the

entertainers from the audience. Humphrey recognised Desirée, though she

had forsaken her stage-costume and wore a simple dark-blue dress, with

a black fur boa held carelessly about her shoulders. She came towards

them with a smile, stopping on the way, as one or two men, of a better

class than the bulk of the audience, hailed her. She bent down to them,

and whispered conversations followed. She laughed and slapped the face

of one man--an elderly man with a red ribbon in his button-hole. It was

a playful slap, just the movement that a kitten makes with its paw when

it is playing with long hanging curtains.

Charnac pushed out a chair for her invitingly. She came to them with

a smile hovering about her lips, and a look of curious interest in

her pale eyes as she saw Humphrey. She shook hands with Charnac, and

kissed her sister Margot, and then, with a frank gesture, without any

embarrassment, she held out her hand to Humphrey and said:

"_Bon soir, p'tit homme._"

There was a quality of friendship in her voice; her whole manner

suggested a desire to be amiable; she accepted Humphrey as a friend

without question, and, as for Charnac, she treated him as if he were

one of the family, as a brother. The women in the room stared at the

party every few moments, absorbed in the details of Desirée's dress,

and the men glanced at her with smiles that irritated Humphrey.

"It is a little friend of mine--an Englishman," Charnac said to Desirée.

"An Englishman!" said Desirée, in a way that seemed to be the echo

of her sister's remark a few minutes earlier. "I have a friend in

England." She spoke French in a clipped manner, abbreviating her words,

and scattering fragments of slang through her phrases.

"Is that so?" Humphrey said. "What part of England?"

"Manchestaire," she replied. "His name was Mr Smith. You know him?"

Humphrey laughed. "I'm afraid I don't--Manchester's a big place, you

know."

"Is it as big as London?"

"Oh no. Not as big as London."

"I should like to go to London. I have a friend there--a girl friend."

"Oh! where does she live?"

"I forget the name of the street--somewhere near Charing Cross--that's

a railway station, isn't it?"

"Yes."

Silence fell between them while a comedian, dressed as a comic

soldier, sang a song that made them all laugh; though Humphrey could

not understand the _argot_, he caught something of the innuendo of

the song. Strange, that in France and Germany, in countries where

patriotism and militarism are at their highest, the army should be held

up to ridicule, and burlesqued in the coarsest fashion. The song gave

Humphrey an opportunity of studying Desirée's face. He saw that the

yellow hair was silky and natural; her eyebrows were as pale as her

hair, and when she laughed, her red lips parted to show small white

teeth that looked incredibly sharp. She was not beautiful, but she held

some mysterious attraction for him. She was of a type that differed

from all the women he had met. Though her face and figure showed that

she was little more than twenty, her bearing was that of a woman who

had lived and learnt all there was to know of the world. One slim,

ungloved hand rested on the table, and he noted the beauty of it, its

slender, delicate fingers, and the perfect shape of her pink, shining

nails. In the making of her, Nature seemed to have concentrated in her

hands all her power of creating beauty.

The song finished to a round of applause.

"_Il est joliment drôle_," said Desirée to Charnac. "Ah! zut ... I

could do with a drink."

"We won't have anything here," Charnac said. "They only sell species of

poisons. Let's go and have supper at the Chariot d'Or.... Will you join

us, Mr Quain?"

Why not? It was a perfectly harmless idea. Every experience added

something to his knowledge. And yet, he hesitated. Somewhere, at the

back of his mind, a feeling of uneasiness awoke in him. Charnac would

pair off with Margot, and he would have to sit with Desirée during

the meal. The thought carried with it a picture of forbidden things.

Conscience argued with him: "You really oughtn't to, you know." "Why

not? What harm will it do?" he urged. Conscience was relentless. "You

forget you have a duty to some one." "Nonsense," he said, "let's look

at the thing in a broad-minded way. It won't hurt me to have supper

with them, surely."

Desirée laid a hand upon his sleeve gently.

"_Tu viens--oui_," she asked, in a low, caressing voice. Their eyes

met. He saw the pupils of her narrow eyes grow larger for a second,

as though they were striving to express unspoken thoughts. Then they

receded and contracted to little, dark, twinkling beads set in their

centre of pale blue circles.

"_Oui_," he said, with a sigh.

* * * * *

They came out into the noisy night of the Boulevard. They walked

together, Charnac and Margot with linked arms. The lower floors of the

night restaurants were blazing with light, but in the upper rooms the

drawn blinds subdued the glare, and transformed it into a warm glow.

Cabs and motor-cars came up the steep hill from the Grands Boulevards

below for the revelry of supper after the theatre. The great doors of

the Chariot d'Or were continually moving, and the uniformed doorkeeper

seemed to enjoy the exercise of pulling the door open every second, as

women in wraps, accompanied by men, crossed the threshold.

They went upstairs into a long brilliant room, all gold and glass and

red plush, with white tablecloths shining in the strong light. In the

corner a group of musicians, dressed in a picturesque costume--it

might have been taken from any of the Balkan States, or from

imagination--played a dragging waltz melody.

A dark woman sat by them, wearing a Spanish dress, orange and spangled,

the bodice low-cut, and the skirt fanciful and short, showing her thin

legs clad in black open-work stockings. She regarded the room with an

air of detached interest, unanswering the glances of the men. She was

the wife of the first violinist.

Charnac led the way to a table; he placed himself next to Margot on

the red plush sofa-cushions, and Humphrey sat with Desirée. While

Charnac was ordering the supper and consulting their individual tastes,

Humphrey glanced round the room at the men who sat at the little tables

with glasses of sparkling amber wine before them, some of them in

evening-dress, with crumpled, soft shirt-fronts, others in lounge suits

or morning-coats. Not all had women with them, but the women that he

saw were luxurious, beautiful creatures, with indolent eyes and faces

of strange beauty.

The lights gleamed under rose-coloured shades on the table, on the

silver dishes piled high with splendid fruits, on bottles swathed

tenderly with napkins, set in silver ice-pails, on tumblers of coloured

wines and liqueurs.

"It's pretty here, eh?" said Desirée.

"It's not so bad. I've never been here before. Do you come often?"

"Oh no! not often: only when Margot brings Gustave to come and fetch me

after I've been singing."

She clapped her hands gaily as the waiter set a steaming dish of

mussels before them. The house was famed for its _moules marinières_.

"I adore them," she said, unfolding her serviette, and tucking it under

her chin. Charnac ladled out the mussels into soup-plates. Their blue

iridescent shells shone in an opal-coloured gravy where tiny slices of

onion floated on the surface. Her dainty fingers dipped into the plate,

and she fed herself with the mussels, biting them from the shells with

her sharp white teeth. She ate with an extraordinary rapidity, breaking

off generous pieces from the long, crisp roll of bread before her, and

drinking deeply of her red Burgundy.

She was simply an animal. Margot ate in much the same way, with greedy,

quick gestures, until her plate was piled high with empty mussel

shells. And, during the meal, they chattered trivialities, discussing

personal friends in a slangy, intimate phraseology.

The sharp taste of the sauce, with its flavour of the salt sea-water,

made Humphrey thirsty, and he, too, drank plenty of wine; and the

wine and the warmth sent the colour rushing to his cheeks, and filled

him with a sense of comfort. The whole atmosphere of the place had a

soothing effect on him.

The orchestra started to play a Spanish dance, and the woman in orange

rose from her seat, and tossing her lace shawl aside, moved down the

aisle of tables in a sidling, swinging dance, castanets clicking from

her thumbs, marking the sway and poise of her body above her hips. It

was a sexual, voluptuous dance, that stirred the senses like strong

wine. Now she flung herself backwards with a proud, uplifted chin. One

high-heeled satin shoe stamped the floor. Her eyes flashed darkly and

dangerously; she flaunted her bare throat and bosom before them; now

she moved with a lithe sinuous motion from table to table, one hand on

her hip, and the other swinging loosely by her side.

There was something terrible and triumphant in her dance to the beat of

the music with its rhythm of a heart throbbing in passion.

"Bravo! bravo!" they cried, as the dance finished. "_Bis_," shouted

Charnac, lolling back in his seat with his arm round Margot's shoulder.

"She dances well," said Humphrey.

Desirée turned her pale eyes on him. "I can dance better," she said,

and before he had realized it, she was up and in the centre of the

room, and everybody laughed and clapped hands, as Desirée began to

dance with stealthy, cat-like steps. Her face was impudent, as she

twined and twisted her thin body into contortions that set all the men

leering at her. It was frankly repulsive and horrible to Humphrey; she

seemed suddenly to have ceased to be a woman, just as when she had

started to eat. She was inhuman when she sang and ate and danced.

The blur of white flesh through the smoke, the odour of heavy scents,

and the sight of Desirée writhing in her horrid dance, sickened him.

He saw her white teeth gleaming between her lips, half-parted with the

exhaustion of her dance, he saw her eyes laughing at him, as though

she were proud and expected his applause, and he felt a profound,

inexplicable pity for her that overwhelmed his disgust.

She flung herself, panting, into her seat, and pushed back her

disordered yellow hair with her hands. "_Oh la! ... la!_" she cried,

laughing in gasps, "_c'est fatiguant, ça_ ... my throat is like a

furnace." And she clicked her glass against the glass that Humphrey

held in his hand, and drained it to the finish.

"Why did you do that?" asked Humphrey, huskily.

"Do what?"

"Dance like that--in front of all these people?"

"Why shouldn't I, if I want to?"

"I don't like it," he said, wondering why he was impelled to say so.

"Well, you shouldn't have said she dances well," Desirée replied.

"I must be going," Humphrey said.

"Oh, not yet," Charnac said. "Let's all go together."

"No," he pushed his chair away with sudden resolution. "I must go."

"But, my dear--" Desirée began.

"I must go," Humphrey repeated, slowly. It was like the repetition of a

lesson. "I must go now."

"Oh, well--" Charnac said.

The waiter appeared with a bill. "You will allow me to pay?" Humphrey

asked Charnac.

"_Mais non, mais non, mon ami_," he replied, good-naturedly. "It was I

who asked you to come, wasn't it? Another night it will be your turn."

"Another night," echoed Margot, in her high-pitched voice. "_J'adore

les Anglais, ils sont si gentils._"

"And why cannot you stop?" Desirée asked.

He avoided her eyes. Never could he explain in this room, with its

scent and its music and its warmth, that turned vice into happiness

and made virtue as chilling and intractable as marble. He only knew

that he had to go. He made some excuse--any excuse--work--a headache

... he did not know what he was saying; he was only conscious of those

narrow eyes beneath pale eyebrows, and red parted lips, and the soft

hand that lay in his--the soft hand with the finger-tips as beautiful

as rosy sea-shells.

They were not to blame; they could not be expected to know his

innermost life, nor why it was that he felt suddenly as if he had

profaned himself, and all that was most sacred to him. But that finer,

nobler self that was always dormant within him, as eager to awaken to

influences as it was to be lulled to sleep by them, became active and

alert....

There was a hint of dawn in the sky as he came out into the empty

street, his mind charged with a deep melancholy. But, as the cool air

played about his face, he breathed more freely after the stuffy warmth

of the room, and he walked with a firm step, square-shouldered, erect

and courageous.

V

Some weeks later there came a letter which brought the reality of

things into his own life. It was a short and regretful letter from a

firm of Easterham solicitors, announcing the death of his aunt.

They informed him of the fact in a few, brief, dignified words. There

was an undercurrent of excuse, as if they felt themselves personally

responsible for the sudden demise, and were anxious to apologise

for any inconvenience that might be felt by Mr Quain. He gathered

that his aunt had lived on an annuity, which expired with her; that

a little financial trouble--loans to a brother of whom Humphrey had

never heard--absorbed her furniture and all her possessions, with the

exception of a watch and chain, which she had willed to Humphrey. The

funeral was to take place two days hence--and that was all.

The letter moved him neither to tears nor sorrow. His aunt had been as

remote from him in life as she was in death. An unbridgeable abyss had

divided them. Never, during the years he had lived in Easterham, after

his father's death, had they talked of the fundamental things that

mattered to one another. He felt that he owed her nothing, least of all

love, for she remained in his memory a masterful, powerful influence,

trying to fetter him down to a narrow life, without comprehension of

the broad, beautiful world that lay at her doors.

He could see her now in her dress of some mysterious black pattern,

and always a shawl over her shoulder, her white hair plastered close

to her heavy gold earrings, her lips thin and compressed, and her eyes

hard-set, when she said, "You must Get On." She did not know, when she

urged him to go forward, how far he meant to go. Her vision of Getting

On was bounded by Easterham--what could she know and understand of all

the bewildering phases he had undergone; the bitter heartaches, the

misery of failure, and the glory of conquest in a world wider than a

million Easterhams.

But, as he thought of her dead, a strange feeling came to him that now

she could understand everything, that she knew all, and was even ready

to reach out in sympathy to him. Her last pathetic message--a watch and

chain! The rude knowledge that he had gained of the secret things of

her life--how she lived, her loan to the brother; it seemed that some

hidden door which they had both kept carefully locked had been flung

open widely--that his eyes were desecrating her profoundest secrets.

It was not the first time that Death had stirred his life, but this was

a sudden and unexpected snapping of a chain that bound him with his

boyhood. Always he had been subconsciously aware of his aunt's presence

in the scheme of things; there had been ingrained in him a certain fear

of her, that he had never quite shaken off. Behind the individuality of

his own life she had lurked, a shadowy figure, yet ready to emerge from

the shadows at a moment of provocation, and become real and distinct

and forbidding.

And now he could scarcely realize that she was dead--that he was

absolutely alone in the world, though there might be, somewhere,

cousins and kinspeople whom he had never seen.

She had not been demonstratively kind to him in life. The watch and

chain she left was the first present he could ever remember receiving

from her. But he felt that he could not absent himself from her

funeral; it would be a sad and desolate business in the Easterham

churchyard, with not many people there, yet he knew that he could not

pass the day in Paris without thinking of her, lowered into the grave

to the eternal loneliness of death.

He sent a telegram to London, and received a reply a few hours later,

giving him permission to leave Paris, and the next day he travelled to

England.

The collection of papers and magazines rested unread in his lap. He

looked from the window on the succession of pictures that flashed

and disappeared--a blue-bloused labourer at work in the fields, or

a waggoner toiling along a country lane; children shouting by the

hedgerows, and the signal-women who sat by their little huts on the

railway as the train sped by. He could not read; sometimes, with a

sigh, he sought a paper (France had just caught the popular magazine

habit from England), turned the pages restlessly, and, finally, leaning

on the arm-rest, stared out of the window....

The shuttle of his mind went to and fro, twining together

the disconnected threads of his thoughts into a pattern of

memories--memories of his youth and his work and his aunt interwoven

with the strong, dominating thought of Elizabeth....

His thoughts turned continually to Elizabeth; sometimes they spun away

to something else, but always they were led back through a series of

memories to that night when he had kissed her for the first time.

It was odd how this absence from her seemed to have changed her in

his mind. There had been an undercurrent of disappointment in their

relations, of late. Her letters had been strangely sterile and

unsatisfying. She had written an evasive reply, after a delay, an

answer to his last letter begging her to come to him....

Yet he was eager to see her and to kiss her. He felt that she was all

that he had left to him in the world: that she and his work were all

that mattered....

A garrulous Frenchman lured him into conversation during dinner; he was

glad, for it gave him relief from the monotonous burden of his thoughts

... and on the boat he dozed in the sunshine of a smooth crossing.

Once in England again, the delight of an exile returning to his home

provided new sensations. The porters were deferentially solicitous for

his comfort; the Customs officers behaved with innate politeness, and

the little squat train, with its separate compartments, brought a glow

of happiness to him. He saw England as a stranger might see it for the

first time: he observed the discipline and order of the railway station

that came not from oppression but from high organization and planning.

There were no mistakes made; the boy brought his tea-basket and did not

overcharge him; the porter accepted sixpence and touched his hat, not

obsequiously, but in acknowledgment, without a suggestion of haggling

for more. It seemed incredible that he should find this perfection,

where a year ago he could not see it....

There were Frenchmen in the carriage, and he sat with the conscious

pride of an Englishman in his own country. The train moved out, giving

a glimpse of the harbour and the sea breaking in white lines over the

sloping beach; and then through a tunnel that emerged on fields. The

first thing he noticed was the vivid green of the country, and the way

it was cut up and divided into squares and oblongs: the small clumps of

low-set trees, the fat cattle, and the peace brooding over the land.

And then he noticed the little houses, low-storied and thatched, with a

feather of blue smoke waving from their chimneys. The whole journey was

a series of new impressions that elated him. Stations flashed and left

behind a blurred memory of advertisements, and names that breathed

of yeoman England: Ashford--Paddock Wood--Sevenoaks--Knockholt; and

then the advertisement-boards stood out of the green fields, blatantly

insisting on lung tonics and pills, marking off mile after mile that

brought him nearer to London. The houses closed in on the railway line;

the train ran now through larger stations of red brick, passing the

peopled platforms with an echoing roar; other crowded trains passed

them, going slowly to the suburbs they had left behind. A new note

seemed to come into the journey as the evening descended, and the world

outside was populous with lights.

The memory of the clean, sweet country, with its toy houses, was wiped

away by a swift blot of darkness as the train flashed through New

Cross, and out into the broad network of rails with which London begins.

He saw the factories and the sidings and the busy traffic of trains

overtaking one another, running parallel for a space, and then swaying

apart as one branched off to the south-eastern suburbs. He saw the

smoke hanging in thick clouds on the far horizon; masts and rigging

made spidery silhouettes against the sky; and the tall, factory

chimneys thrust out their monstrous tongues of livid fire.

The city was before him right and left, overgrown and tremendous. They

ran level with crooked chimney-pots and the scarred roofs of endless

rows of houses. The upper windows were yellow with light, and he caught

glimpses of women before mirrors and men in their shirt-sleeves. Dark

masses of clouds rolled before the moon. Something wet splashed on his

cheek.

A silent Englishman sitting next to him, said moodily: "Raining as

usual. I've never once come home without it raining." He laughed as

though it were a bitter joke.

Fantastic reflections wriggled on the wet, shining approach to

London Bridge--a swift vision of bus-drivers, with oilcloth capes

glinting in the rain, hurrying crowds, and something altogether new--a

motor-omnibus.

Then the train, with a dignified, steady movement, swung slowly across

Hungerford Bridge, and he saw the strong, resolute river, black and

broad, flowing to the bridges, within the jewelled girdle of the

Embankment.

The sense of England's greatness came to him, as the landmarks of

London were set in a semicircle before him: the tall dome of St Paul's,

the spires of churches, the turrets of great hotels, grey Government

offices, culminating in the vague majesty of the Houses of Parliament.

How different the streets were from Paris! There was a force and an

energy that seemed to be driving everything perpetually forward. This

business of getting to dinner--it was about half-past seven--was a

terribly earnest and crowded affair. The throng of motor-cars and

omnibuses jammed and flocked together in the Strand, held in leash

by a policeman's uplifted hand, and when it was released, it crawled

sluggishly forward. Here and there, rare sight for Humphrey, one of

the new motor-omnibuses lumbered forward heavily, threatening instant

annihilation of everything. There was no chatter of voices in the

crowd--no gesticulation--the people walked silently and hurriedly with

a set concentration of purpose.

He went to a hotel in the Adelphi to leave his bag. Then he came out,

pausing for a moment irresolutely in the crowd. It was too late, as he

had foreseen, to go to Elizabeth. He had made up his mind to see her on

his return from Easterham.

An omnibus halted by him: he boarded it, and as he passed the Griffin,

he breathed deeply like a monarch entering his own domain, for the

scent of the Street was in his nostrils and the old, well-known vision

of the lit windows passed before him, and a newsboy ran along shouting

a late edition. This was the only Street in the world, he felt, that he

loved; its people were his people, and its life was his life.

He turned into the Pen Club, to friendship, good-fellowship and

welcome. And all the old friends were there--Larkin, retelling old

stories, Chander spinning merry yarns, and Vernham making melancholy

epigrams. Willoughby, he learnt, was away on a mystery in the north,

and Jamieson was at a first night.

"By the way," said Larkin, "heard about Tommy Pride?"

"No. What's happened?"

"He's left _The Day_."

"Sacked?" asked Humphrey.

Larkin nodded. "Rather rough on poor old Tommy. Married, isn't he?"

A picture of his first visit to the home of the Prides leapt before

Humphrey's eyes, and the comfort, the cheeriness, that hid all the hard

work of the week. The news hurt him queerly.

"What's he doing?" he asked.

"Well, not much. Tommy's not a youngster, you know. I suppose the

Newspaper Press Fund will tide him over a bit."

Larkin dropped the subject, to listen to a story from Vernham. After

all, it was the most casual thing in the happenings of Fleet Street

to them: it might happen to them any day; it was bound to happen to

them one day. And there would always be young men ready to take their

places. Nobody was to blame; it was just one of the chances of the

inexorable system which made their work a gamble, where men hazarded

their wits and their lives, and lost or won in the game.

Humphrey knew more than they did what it meant for Tommy Pride. He

heard as a mocking echo now, the old cry, "Two pounds a week and a

cottage in the country."...

"Have a drink," Larkin said.

He became suddenly out of tune with the place. His perception of Fleet

Street altered. He saw the relentless cruelty of it, the implacable

demand for sacrifice that it always made. He visioned it as a giant

striding discordantly through the lives of men, crushing them with a

strength as mighty as its own machines that roared in the night ... a

clumsy and senseless giant, that towered above them, against whom all

struggles were pitiful ... futile.

VI

"One lump or two?" asked Elizabeth, holding the sugar-tongs poised over

his cup of tea.

"One, please," said Humphrey.

"Milk or cream?"

"Milk."

She handed him the cup in silence. There was something in the frank,

questioning look in her blue eyes that made him avert his gaze. Their

meeting had not been at all as he had imagined it. He did not spring

towards her, boyishly, and take her in his arms and kiss her. He had

approached her humbly and timidly when she stood before him, in all

her white purity and beauty, and their lips had met in a brief kiss of

greeting. Her manner had been curiously formal and restrained, empty of

all outward display of emotion.

And now they sat at tea in her room with the conversation lagging

between them. As he looked round at the room with its chintzes and

rose-bowls, its old restfulness reasserted itself. But to Humphrey

it seemed now more than restful--it seemed stagnant and out of the

world.... Somewhere, in Paris, there were music and laughter, but here,

in this quiet backwater of London, one's vision became narrow, and life

seemed a monotonous repetition of days. He felt moody, depressed; a

sense of coming disaster hung over his mind, like a shadow. Her quick

sympathy perceived his gloom.

"You ought not to have gone," she said, softly.

"You mean to the funeral?"

"Yes; you are too susceptible ... too easily influenced by

surroundings. There was no need to come all this way to make yourself

miserable."

"I don't know why I went," he said. "We never had much in common,

my aunt and I, but somehow ... I don't know ... I couldn't bear the

thought of not being present at her funeral. I had a silly sort of idea

that she would know if I were not there."

"You are too susceptible," she repeated. "Sometimes I wish you were

stronger. You are too much afraid of what people will think of you.

This death has meant nothing at all to you, but you are ashamed to say

so."

"It has meant something to me," he said. "I don't mean that I felt

a wrench, as if some one whom I loved very dearly had gone ... I

felt that when my father died ... but her death has changed me

somehow--here--" and he tapped his breast, "I feel older. I feel as if

I had stood over the grave and seen the burial of my youth."

"It has made you gloomy," Elizabeth said. "I think you would have been

truer to yourself if you had remained in Paris."

He reflected for a few moments, drinking his tea. He felt sombre

enough in his black clothes and black tie--dreary concessions to

conventionality.

"Ah, but I wanted to see you, Elizabeth," he said earnestly. "It's

terribly lonely without you."

She leaned forward and laid her hand lightly on his, with a soft,

caressing touch. "It's good of you to say that," she said, and then,

with a frank smile, "tell me, Humphrey, do you really miss me very

much?"

"I do," he said; and he began talking of himself and all that he did in

Paris. Elizabeth listened with an amused smile playing about her lips.

He told her of his work and his play, growing enthusiastic over Paris,

speaking with all the self-centredness of the egotist.

"It seems very pleasant," she said. "You are to be envied, I think. You

ought to be very happy: doing everything that you want to do; occupying

a good position in journalism."

He purred mentally under her praise. Already he felt better; her

presence stimulated him; but he could not see, nor understand, the true

Elizabeth, for the mists of vanity, ambition and selfishness clouded

his vision at that moment. If only he had forgotten himself ... if only

he had asked her one question about herself and _her_ work, or shown

the smallest interest in anything outside his own career, he might have

risen to great heights of happiness.

This was the second in which everything hung in the balance. He saw

Elizabeth lean her chin in the palm of her hand and contemplate

reflectively the distance beyond him. He marked the beauty of her lower

arm, bare to the rounded charm of the elbow, as it rested on the curve

of the arm-chair. So, he thought, would she sit in Paris, and grace his

life.

And then, suddenly, her face became grave, and she said, abruptly:

"Humphrey, I want to talk to you very seriously. I want to know whether

you will give up journalism."

He remembered her hint of this far back in the months when she had

first allowed him to tell her of his love. He had thought the danger

was past, but now she came to him, with a deliberate, frontal attack on

the very stronghold of his existence.

"Give up journalism!" he echoed. "What for?"

All the weapons of her sex were at her command. She might have said,

"For me"; she might have smiled and enticed and cajoled. But she

brushed these weapons aside disdainfully. Hers was the earnest business

of putting Humphrey to the test.

"Because I think you and I will never be happy together if you do not.

Because, if I marry you (he noticed she did not say, 'When I marry

you'), I should not want your work to occupy a larger place in our

lives than myself. Because I hate your work, and I think you can do

better things. Those are my reasons."

He stood up and walked to the window, looking out on the trees that

made an avenue of the quiet road. A man with a green baize covered tray

on his head came round the corner, swinging a bell up and down.

"Well?" she said.

"Oh but look here, Elizabeth," he began, "you spring something like

this on me suddenly, and expect me to answer at once...."

"Oh, no! you can have time to think it over. You've had nearly a year,

you know."

"How do you make that out?"

"Have you forgotten? When you were going to Paris--before you were

going to Paris even--I tried to show you that I wanted you to give up

the work. I remember you promised things. You said you'd write books,

or do essays for the weeklies...."

"But, dear, you can't make a living writing books--unless you fluke,

or unless you're a genius; as for essays for the weeklies, frankly, I

don't believe I can do them--I'm not brilliant enough."

"Yes, you are," Elizabeth urged. (Fatal mistake to make, it smoothed

all his vanity the right way.) "I believe in you, Humphrey. If I didn't

believe in you, I wouldn't be talking as I am now. And, besides, I've

told you before, I have enough for us both."

Though she was offering him freedom; though, if he wished, he could

accept her offer and be rid for ever from the torments of Fleet Street,

he could not leave its joys.

"You don't understand," he said. "You couldn't expect me to live on

you...."

"Why not? I should be prepared to live on you, if I were poor."

"That's different. You're a woman."

She laughed. "We won't go into the side-issues of arguments over

ethics," she said. "You need not live on me. You told me that you

had saved four hundred pounds. If we lived simply that would keep us

both for a start, and you could be adding to your income by writing.

Humphrey, don't you see I'm trying to rescue you. I want you to do

something fine and noble; I want you to go forward."

"Well, I've gone forward," he said. "I've made myself in the Street.

You don't know what you ask when you want me to give it up. Nobody

can understand it unless he's been in the game. I can't think what it

is--it isn't vanity, because all that we write is unsigned; it's sheer

love of the work that drives us on."

"But you hate it, too."

"We hate it as fiercely as we love it..." he said, simply. "One day we

say to ourselves, 'We will give it up.' That's what I say to you, now.

I'm going to give it up, one day."

"That you have also promised before," she said, in a gentle voice. "Let

us talk it over between ourselves. Why shouldn't you leave now?"

He was cornered: he stood at bay, facing her beauty, but behind it and

above it he saw all the struggles and endeavour and splendid triumph

that awaited him in the restless years to come, when each day would

be a battle-field, and any might bring him defeat or conquest. He saw

the world opening before him, and far-off cities close at hand; he

saw himself wandering through the years, touching the lives of men; a

privileged person, always behind the scenes of life, with a hint of

power perhaps.... And, in exchange, she offered him peace and rest,

both of which corroded the soul eager for war; peace and rest and

love, that would be so beautiful until the years made them familiar

and wearisome, until he would be forced to go out again into the thick

of the battle ... and by that time his armour would be rusty, and the

years of peace would have blunted his sword.

"Elizabeth," he said slowly, "I can't live in a room, now. I can't

always look out of the window on the same scene. I must keep moving.

Each day must bring me a fresh scene, a fresh experience. I have grown

so used to change and movement that a week without it makes life dull

and unbearable. I'm not fit for anything else but the work I do. I'm

born to do that and nothing else. Everything in life now I see from

the point of view of 'copy.'" He laughed, but there was a sob in his

laughter at his shameful confession. "Why, even at the funeral, as I

stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that

I could write a splendid column about it, and instead of feeling the

solemnity of it all, I found that I was watching the white surplices

against the green trees, and looking at the faces of the people, and

painting a picture in my mind...."

He paused. Her eyes were downcast, and her fingers played absently with

the loops of the chain that hung from her neck.

"It's a habit," he went on. "It's grown on me, so that I see life and

its emotions as a series of things to be written about. Why shouldn't

I have thought as I did at the funeral? I have been taught to do it,

when I go to the funerals of great men that I have to report. I'm a

journalist ... a reporter. I've seen men eat their hearts out in a

year, after they've left the Street light-heartedly. The reaction comes

suddenly. Things are happening all around them, and they're out of it.

And they creep back, and try to get a job again. That's what Kenneth

himself will do one day.... I don't want to be one of those, Elizabeth.

I want to go through with it, right through to the failure at the end

of all, and when the failure comes, I'll build up again."

She spread out her hands helplessly. "I see..." she said, "I see...."

That was all for a moment, and then, again: "If you were doing

something worthy, I could understand; if you were producing art, I

could understand, too ... but this"--a copy of _The Day_ was on the

table, and she held it in her hand--"this is unworthy. This is all you

produce with your infinite labour."

"It's not unworthy ... we have our ideals."

She laughed, and her laugh stung him.

"Humphrey, you have the ha'penny mind that does not see beyond its own

nose. You just live for the day itself. Oh!" she cried, "if you knew

how I hate your Ferrol, and all that he stands for: all the ignoble

things in life, painting everything with the commercial taint of

worldly success. There was a beautiful picture bought the other day for

the National Gallery. I see it is to be known as the '£60,000 picture.'

That's the spirit behind Ferrol ... we might be crying for great

reforms--I have not spoken of my work in all this--we might be lifted

up with the power at his command...."

When she spoke of Ferrol, Humphrey remembered all that had been done

for him. What could she know of Ferrol's personality, of his splendid

force, of the thousand generous acts that remained hidden, while

only the things were remembered that blackened his reputation. His

admiration for Ferrol was immeasurable. He saw in the indomitable

energy of the man something tangible and positive among all the

negative virtues of life. Ferrol stood for achievement that crowned the

indefatigable years. And with it all, this superman could descend from

his loftiness and be human and weave the spell of his humanity about

the lives of others.

"You don't understand Ferrol," he said. "Very few people do. But he has

been kind to me ... there's something in Ferrol that draws me to him.

One day you will see he will do all that you expect him to do, but the

time is not yet ripe for that. And you speak as if Ferrol were the only

man in England who owned a newspaper. What of the others--have any of

them done as much good as he has done?"

"Whatever good he has done, is done from motives of gain."

"I do not look at motives," he retorted. "I look only at the effects of

the action. If a bad deed is done from good motives, it does not make

the deed anything but bad."

They were standing face to face now.

"Come, Elizabeth," he said, moving towards her. "You do not know how I

love you, and if you loved me, you would not ask me to give up my work."

Her face was white and beautiful, and her hand went up to her heart

with a womanly gesture. She spoke in a low, deliberate voice.

"In all that we have said, there has never been a word of what giving

up _my_ work may mean to me. Yet you would have me abandon it, and

forsake all the good we have tried to build up...."

"You would have to give it up, one day, Elizabeth. Besides, if you

like," he said, desperately, "I'll go to Ferrol and ask him to remove

me from Paris back to London. I'll do anything to meet you, I only want

to make you happy."

"Oh, don't keep on saying that sort of thing," she said; "it irritates

me. Those hollow repetitions of set phrases--just because they're the

right thing to say."

"I think you are unreasonable," he began. "I have worked all these

years for success, and now, just when I've won it, you wish me to throw

everything away."

"I wish you to do nothing against your will. I thought you would have

seen my point of view. I thought you would be ready to share in my

work, which is the work of humanity.... I am sorry. You see, we clash.

We shall be better alone."

He stared at her with dull incomprehension. "We clash. We shall be

better alone." The words repeated themselves over and over again in his

brain. And his mind suddenly went back to a little room in the Strand

and the tears of Lilian....

"You mean that," he said, slowly. "You mean that."

She nodded. "Don't you see how impossible it would be?"

"You never loved me," he flung forth as a challenge. "You could have

helped me and understood me.... I am not so bad as you think I am."

A sad smile answered him. "I understand you so well, Humphrey, that I

know I shall never be able to help you."

He looked about him in weak hesitation. "I suppose I must begin again,"

he said.

"You ... you ... all the time it is you," she cried, passionately. "And

what about myself; must not I begin over again, too?"

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words. He longed

intensely to be away from her now, to be out in the open street where

he could think. This room was stifling. He went through the horrid

methodical business of parting as if it were all a dream. He remembered

glancing at the clock in a casual way, and saying, "I'd better be

going"; he remembered the ludicrous search for one glove, he murmuring

that it didn't really matter, and she insisting on a search with

aching minuteness....

He never saw her again; her life had impinged on his, and left its

impression, as many others had done. He did not regret her as he had

regretted Lilian, for she had outraged his self-respect, and left him

abashed and humbled.

VII

He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in

Narbonne.

At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the

wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the

vintages--making one cask into a dozen--so that they came to a year

when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market,

that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the

gutters, and wine to give to the pigs--but without bread to give to

their children.

Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few

vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among

straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade

them stop.

For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous

prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no

giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths.

Odd stories of the despair of love--sick peasantry at postponed

weddings--filled the papers; the _Assiette au Beurre_ published

a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in

Paris--but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand _vignerons_

were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver

banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to

make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....

And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the

forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their

papers, while Dagneau, up at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered

facts and official _communiqués_.

Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped

away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting

his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of

keeping _The Day_ well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power

of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind

less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty.

In a week--a brief week--he had gone through every phase of sorrow,

anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing--indeed,

he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth

for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it

was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths

followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to

violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away

the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would

never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and

unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and

lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in

his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities,

of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and

vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire

ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when

his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free

from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the

thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those

constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,--a

guerrilla warfare with conscience.

They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as

he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to

stand alone....

The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head.

"Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but

the voice of _The Day_ calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the

sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind

but the news of the night....

* * * * *

He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell

rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where

have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained

his absence.

"Can you come to supper to-night," Charnac called. "Your little Desirée

will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling

Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought

to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes

that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of

cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever

since in his mind:

"... Je perds la tête

'Suis comme une bête."

He saw her in all her alluring languor, secret, and mysterious. And it

was the eternal mystery in her that attracted him. For a few moments he

hesitated, indeterminately, at the telephone. "_Eh bien, mon vieux_,"

called Charnac's voice. "Will you come? 11.30 at the Chariot d'Or."

"I'll come," said Humphrey.

It was ten-thirty. Ripples of unrest stirred his mind; he felt deeply

agitated. He knew that he was on the brink of a new and complex

development in his life; and the future stretched before him, vague

and impenetrable, full of a promise of mournful and fierce delights, of

happiness inconceivable, and sorrow inexperienced. No scruples retarded

him now, and the voice of conscience was stilled, but despite all this,

an indefinable mist of melancholy clouded his soul.

Dagneau came briskly into the office. Humphrey ceased brooding, and

swung round in his chair.

"Lamb," he said, "I'm going out to supper to-night."

"Oh! la! la!" Dagneau laughed. "Who's the lucky lady?"

"Not for the likes of little lambs that have to stay in the office and

keep the fort."

Dagneau made a grimace. "I suppose it isn't safe for both of us to

leave," he said.

"No fear," Humphrey replied. "There's no knowing what these fellows

mayn't be up to in the South. Anyhow, if anything urgent happens, come

along to me. I shall be in the Chariot d'Or until one o'clock."

Dagneau was a good fellow, thought Humphrey, as his cab climbed the

hill to Montmartre. It was jolly decent of him not to mind. He forgot

the office now, and thought only of the night's adventuring. There

was fully a half-hour to spare, so he idled it away on the terrace of

a café sipping at a liqueur. Every variety of street hawker came to

persuade sous from him: they had plaster figures for sale, or wanted

to cut his silhouette in black paper, or draw a portrait of him in

pastels, or sell him ballads and questionable books, bound in pink,

pictorial covers. The toy of the moment, frankly indecent, yet offered

with a childlike innocence that made it impossible for one to be

disgusted with the vendors, was thrust before him fifty times. They

showed him how it worked, and when he refused, they brought from inner

pockets picture-postcards which they tried to show him covertly, until

he drove them away with the _argot_ he had learned from Dagneau.

At the time appointed a cab climbed the steep Rue Pigalle, and drew up

before the Chariot d'Or. Charnac sat in the middle comfortably squeezed

in between Margot and Desirée. They waved a cheery greeting as they saw

Humphrey, and he helped them down. Without any question he linked his

arm in Desirée's, and led her up the brilliant scarlet staircase to the

supper-room. Her meek acceptance of him, and the touch of her, gave

him a strong sense of possession. This woman acknowledged his right of

mastery over her, without a word being spoken, without any pleading, or

the bitter pain of uncertainty. From that moment he felt she was his

completely and unquestionably. There was no need to woo her and win

her; she was to be taken, and she would yield herself up, as women were

taken and women yielded themselves up in the earliest days of the earth.

They went to their table. He had no eyes for anyone but Desirée. She

threw off her wrap, with a gesture of her shoulders, and as it tumbled

from them, they shone white and shapely, and a rose was crushed to her

bosom, making a splash of scarlet on her white bodice. She laughed and

looked at him frankly, as if there were to be no secrets between them,

and once, while the supper was being ordered, her thin hand rested in

his, and he was stirred to wild, delicious emotion. Yes, she was all

as he had imagined her; she had not changed at all, and her yellow

hair and pale eyebrows and thin face culminating in her pointed chin,

reminded him of an Aubrey Beardsley picture--those slanting eyes, and

red lips eternally shaped for a kiss, and the slender throat that

rippled below the white surface of its skin when she spoke, the thin

bare arms, and her hands, balanced on delicate wrists--those hands

with their long dainty fingers and exquisite finger-tips. The sight of

her inflamed him.

Their conversation was commonplace. Why, she wanted to know, did he run

away the last time they met. He lied to her, and pleaded a headache.

"And you won't run off this time?" she asked, with a childish note of

appeal in her voice.

He sought her hand and held it in his own. She drew it away with a

little grimace. "You're hurting me," she said.

Occasionally Margot cut into their conversation. She lacked the beauty

of her sister, her figure was stouter, and her face was not well

made-up. She treated Charnac with good-natured tolerance.

During the supper--again the famous mussels--Desirée asked Humphrey

many questions about himself--they were not questions which penetrated

deeply into his private life, indeed, she showed no desire to pry into

his surroundings. She wanted to know his tastes, and his likes and

dislikes, and when, sometimes, he said anything that showed that they

had something in common, she laughed delightedly at the discovery.

Her eyes held a wonderful knowledge in them, but the boldness of their

gaze did not suggest immodesty to him. Her eyes seemed to say: "There

are certain things in life we never talk about. But I understand them

all, and I know that you know I understand." It made him feel that

there was nothing artificial about their friendship; in one bound they

had attained perfect understanding, and it was miraculous to him.

It was miraculous to him to sit there, with the music surging in his

veins, and to look upon this delicately-wrought creature, beautiful,

perfect in body, knowing that when he wished he could take her in his

arms, and she would give herself to him without any hesitation. She was

utterly strange to him, and yet, by this miracle, their lives were

already commingled in swift intimacy. He thought of the other two women

who had influenced his life: though he had kissed them, and spent long

hours with them, they seemed now irrevocably distant from him, and

never had he penetrated to the stratum of full comprehension that lay

below the surface of misunderstandings....

He looked back on the years that were past, and he could only see

himself struggling and pleading and breaking his heart to win that

which was won now without any contest at all. Was it love or passion

that he wanted from them. Ah! if we would only be frank with ourselves,

and admit that there is no love without passion, there is no passion

without love: that by separating passion from love, it has become a

degraded and hidden thing.

And Humphrey wanted love: the desire for love, love inseparable from

passion, had made a turbulent underflow beneath the stream of his life.

Twice he had tried to grasp love, twice it had eluded him. He had been

despoiled by circumstance ... cheated by his own conscience.

It was miraculous to him now, that he should be able to wrest his prize

from life with so little struggle after all. He looked at Desirée, and

her eyes smiled--how incredibly near they seemed to one another, how

the unattainable drew close to him and smiled....

He became aware of his name spoken aloud, and he looked up and saw a

waiter looking round the room, with Dagneau at his side. Dagneau's face

was strained and anxious. He seemed out of breath. Suddenly he caught

sight of Humphrey, and hurried towards him. He raised his hat to the

group. "Pardon, mad'm'selle," he said to Desirée, as he put a telegram

before Humphrey.

The blue slips pasted on the paper danced before his eyes.

"_Qu'est que c'est?_" Margot asked, fussily.

"Ferrol wants you to go to Narbonne," Dagneau said. "There's been

shooting there.... I looked up the trains. You can catch the one

o'clock from the Gare d'Orsay if you hurry."

Humphrey stared stupidly at the telegram, and Desirée touched him with

her hand.

"_C'est quelque chose de grave?_" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Narbonne," he said to Charnac, laconically.

"_Oh! nom d'un nom_--to-night?" asked Charnac. "_C'est embêtant, ça._"

And, suddenly, Humphrey grew peaceful again, and all the turbulence of

his thoughts calmed down and flowed towards the one desire that he had

made paramount in his life--the desire of the journalist for news, the

longing of the historian for history.

Fleet Street called to him from those blue strips with their printed

message. "Go Narbonne immediately cover riots," and the signature that

symbolized Fleet Street--"Ferrol"--held in it all the power that had

made him a puppet of Fate.

But Narbonne.... From all parts of Europe the Special Correspondents

would be converging on the town. There would be great doings to

describe, new interests to make him forget rapidly.

Dagneau helped him on with his coat. "Send on my bag," he said,

glancing at his watch. "I'm awfully sorry," he added to Charnac.

"You'll understand. Explain to them, won't you? Dagneau, stop and

finish my supper."

He forgot everything else ... what else mattered?

"_Dis donc_," Desirée said, "are you going again?" How surprisingly

unimportant she seemed at this moment. Her expression was

half-suppliant, half-petulant. "If you go," she said distinctly, "I

will never speak to you again--never."

As if she could hold him back when others had failed! But he was moved

to show her tenderness. A momentary pang of regret shot across him

because he had to leave her. "Don't be cross," he whispered. "I shall

be back in three days."

She turned her head away impetuously. And he realized that there never

had been, nor ever could be, anything in common between them.

* * * * *

Once, when he was dozing in the train speeding southwards to Bordeaux,

he woke up and laughed as he remembered the ludicrous amazement on the

face of Desirée as he left her suddenly and gladly to take up his work.

VIII

The matters that occupied his mind belonged only to his work. In the

early morning at Bordeaux, when he had to change, he bought a budget

of morning papers, and read them in the refreshment-room over his roll

and coffee. The news was alarming enough: people were fleeing from

Narbonne and the neighbouring towns. Seven had been shot in a riot on

the previous night; the soldiery was in charge of the town, and martial

law had been proclaimed.

The French journalists excelled themselves in superlatives ... their

stories were vain accounts of personal emotions and experiences, for it

is the fashion with them to thrust their personality in front of the

news.

Thereafter, on the journey to Narbonne, Humphrey wondered how he was

going to get his telegrams out of the town, if it were besieged. He

bought a map of the district and studied it: it might be necessary to

send a courier to Perpignan, or back to Bordeaux, or, if things were

very bad indeed, there were carrier pigeons; the Spanish frontier at

Port Bou was not very far away also ... perhaps, he could find some

one to whom to telephone. It was his business to get any news out of

Narbonne, and there would be no excuse for failure.

The people in his carriage were talking of the shooting.

"I shouldn't like to be going there," one said.

"It will be worse to-night," another remarked. "Those Southerners lose

their heads so quickly."

It seemed odd to Humphrey that while they were talking of it in this

detached way, he alone, probably, out of the whole train-load, was

about to plunge into the actualities of revolution of his own free

will. For the next few days he would be living with the grievances of

the wine-growers, learning things that were unknown to him now. He

would have to record and describe all that happened. His was the power

to create sympathy in English households for the wrongs of these people

starving in the midst of their fertile vineyards.

The brakes jarred the carriages of the train. Heads were put out of the

window. On the up-line a goods train carrying flour had met with an

accident. The engine lay grotesquely on one side, powdered with white

flour, and the vans looked as if they had been out in a snow-storm. The

melancholy sight of the shattered train slid past, as their own train

jolted slowly on its journey.

"What is it--have they wrecked the train?" some one asked.

"No," another said, pointing to a paragraph in the paper, "it was

an accident. The engine ran off the metals last night. It's in the

_Depêche de Toulouse_."

They all chattered among themselves. It was a trivial affair, then--one

had thought for a moment that those sacred Narbonnais...!

But there was something sinister in that wrecked train with its broken

vans and its engine covered in a cloud of white. It seemed to presage

disaster, as it lay there outside the door of the town.

The train stopped. "Narbonne" cried the porters. Humphrey descended

as though it was the commonest thing in his life to enter garrisoned

cities. The platform was full of soldiers, some standing with fixed

bayonets, others sleeping on straw beside their stacked arms. Officers

strolled up and down to the clank of their swords; outside, through the

door of the station, itself guarded by an infantryman in a blue coat,

with its skirts tucked back, he caught a glimpse of horses tethered to

the railings.

Nobody stopped him but the ticket-collector: in the midst of all this

outward display of militarism, the business of the station went on as

usual. Trains steamed in and departed; expresses pounded through on

their way to Paris; porters were busy with parcels. The hotel buses

were drawn up outside, just as if nothing in the world had happened to

disturb the life of the town. He chose the Hotel Dorade omnibus, and

away they went.

The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The

avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers

in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or

lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the

shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses

were like barracks, with the _képis_ of soldiers visible between the

chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square--cavalry held it, and

another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white

tents.

Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main

Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the

courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and

yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the

Government. The soldiers read them idly.

And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside

the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings,

drinking their vermouth or absinthe!

Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked

about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people

stood here and there, with grim faces and stern-set lips; they

looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a

regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles,

it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of

"Assassins!"

At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of

stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid

there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of

white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested

against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:--

|

|

-----

|

|

|

|

RENÉ DUCLOS

âgé de 29 ans

assasiné par le gouvernement.

There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood.

Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball

cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her

death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have

been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in

the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute

she was dead.

These signs of tragedy made a deep impression on Humphrey's

journalistic sense. He saw that the soldiers had not dared to move the

mounds that reminded the people of the dreadful happenings in their

midst. And they were surrounded by little silent crowds, who spelt out

the inscriptions, sighed, and departed with mutterings.

A man with bloodshot eyes, and unkempt hair, his chin thick with

bristles, lurched across the road, and stood by Humphrey, regarding him

with a curious, persistent gaze. Humphrey moved away, and the man edged

after him. He made for the main Boulevards where the crowded cafés gave

him a sense of safety. He turned round, and saw that he was still being

shadowed.

A voice hailed him from a café: he turned and saw O'Malley, the

Irishman of _The Sentinel_.

"Hallo," said O'Malley, "been here long?"

"Just arrived," Humphrey said. He was glad to see a friend. That

unkempt man who had followed him made him feel uncomfortably insecure.

"Where are you stopping?" O'Malley asked.

"At the Dorade."

"I'm there too: there's a whole gang of French and English fellows

here. Been having no end of adventures. My carriage was held up outside

Argelliers yesterday, and they wanted to see my papers. As bad as the

flight to Varennes, isn't it?" He laughed, and they sat down to drink.

The unkempt man took up his position against the parapet of the bridge

opposite.

Humphrey noticed that O'Malley wore a white band round his arm with a

blue number on it, and his name, coupled with _The Sentinel_, written

in ink that had frayed itself into the fabric.

"You'll have to get one of these," O'Malley explained. "It isn't safe

to be a stranger here. They're issued by the People's Committee to

journalists who show their credentials. A lot of detectives have been

down here, you see, posing as journalists, and asking questions in the

villages, getting all sorts of information; that's how they managed to

arrest the ringleaders in the villages."

"It was a pretty mean trick," Humphrey said.

"Mean--I should think it was. They nearly lynched Harridge, the

photographer, yesterday, and they chased another so-called journalist

to the river, and he had to swim for his life, while the mob fired

pot-shots at him from the bridges. So now they've placarded the town to

explain that every real journalist has a white armband with a number on

it."

Humphrey looked at the shaggy man opposite. "Good Lord!" he said,

"that's why that fellow's been shadowing me...."

"Yes. He's one of the Committee's spies."

"I'd better get that armband quick."

"No hurry. You're all serene in my company. We'll finish our drink and

stroll up together."

On the way O'Malley told him some of the latest developments. The chief

ringleader, the man whom the wine-growers hailed as the Redeemer, was

still at large, and nobody knew where he was. Picture-postcards of the

bearded man with a halo round his head and a bunch of grapes dangling

from a cross that he held in his right hand, were selling in thousands

at two sous each.

"To-morrow there are the funerals," remarked O'Malley. "Seven funerals

at once. It ought to make a good story."

They came to a dingy house, where there were no soldiers. Humphrey

followed O'Malley up a narrow, twisting staircase to a little room.

The walls were plastered with the posters he had seen on the street

hoardings. Five men sat in the room, smoking cigarettes. The air

was full of the stale reek of cheap tobacco. They sat in their

shirt-sleeves with piles of papers before them.

One of them, a gross man with a black moustache straggling over his

heavy under lip, spread out his fat hands in inquiry. Another, thin,

undersized and dirty, with a rat-like face, peered at them with

blinking red-rimmed eyes.

"What do you want?" he asked, gruffly.

O'Malley, in his best Irish-French, explained his business and

presented Humphrey. The hollow farce of polite phrases, which mean

nothing in France, was played out. They wanted to see his _carte

d'identité_ and all the credentials he had. Humphrey unloaded his

pocket-book on them. Finally, they made him sign a book, and they gave

him a white armlet; he pinned it round his arm, and walked forth a free

man. The unkempt man stood on the opposite side of the street still

watching him.

And now, as he walked along the streets of Narbonne, with the white

armlet of the revolutionaries giving him protection, he smiled to see

the soldiers guarding the streets.

"Look here," he said to O'Malley, "who's going to give me anything to

prevent the soldiers bayoneting me?"

"Yes--I've thought of that too," O'Malley answered. "Funny, isn't it,

that we've got to fly for a safeguard to the People's Committee? By

the way, don't you get talking to strangers more than you can help.

They're down on spies. I'm going to get my copy off now. See you at the

post-office."

Humphrey went back to the Dorade, and wrote his message, a descriptive

account of all that he had seen, in abbreviated telegraphese. Other

correspondents were there, war correspondents used to open campaigns,

prepared for all emergencies; others had come from the Fleet Streets

of Spain and Belgium and Germany. There was an American, too, who

had travelled from Paris: as he had not yet obtained his armband, he

remained in the hotel, writing very alarming telegrams.

The Englishmen dined together--a jolly party--at a large round table,

and, afterwards, they all went out to look at the town at night under

arms. Once, during their walk, the sound of firing came to them, and

they ran helter-skelter up the Boulevard right into the arms of a

young lieutenant, who laughed and told them that nothing serious had

happened. He invited them all to a drink in a café, and just to satisfy

them, Humphrey went reconnoitring and found that all was peaceful.

He had no time to think of anything but his work. At midnight he went

to bed and slept deeply.

* * * * *

On the second day the "Redeemer," whom every one had imagined to be

captured, suddenly appeared in Narbonne, and was whisked away in a

motor-car to Argelliers, his native town. Bouvier, of the _Petit

Journal_, saw him, dashed into a motor-garage, and hired a car in an

instant.

"_Viens_," he shouted, as Humphrey strolled down the Street. "The

'Redeemer' has come back. You can share my car." Humphrey, knowing

nothing except that Bouvier was very excited, and that, by a chance,

some big news had come under his notice, jumped into the car, and away

they whirled into the open country.

The Southern landscape was vivid in the hot sunshine of the late

autumn; they left clouds of dust behind them as the car raced along to

overtake the car of the "Redeemer." They passed the spacious vineyards,

where the grapes grew like stunted hop-fields, twining round their

little sticks; they sped through avenues of poplars, and almond trees

and ilex; through villages where old women cheered and pointed down the

long road.

"We're catching him up," Bouvier grunted. "They must have heard the

news of his coming somehow."

A bend in the road, and a bridge with the blue river running beneath

its arches; farmhouses and boys driving cattle home; children swinging

on a gate, and old men plodding towards the sunset, on sticks that

could never straighten their bent backs: the country came at them and

receded from them in a succession of pictures framed in the hood of

their car. Vineyards, and again vineyards, with the ungathered grapes

withering in the sun, and people crying to them, "He's come back: the

brave fellow."

As the road led nearer to Argelliers they overtook yellow coaches, full

of people, and country carts swinging along. The drivers pointed their

whips ahead, and shouted something, but the words were lost in the rush

of the wind as the car rushed by them.

"The whole countryside seems to know that he's escaped. There'll be

thousands in the Market Place," Bouvier said.

"It'll be a fine story," Humphrey agreed. "Those other fellows must

have missed it." He was drunk with the excitement and the happiness of

hunting a quarry.

They came to the Market Place of Argelliers, and the sight amazed him.

Left and right the people crushed together--a rectangular pattern of

humanity. People of all ages had been drawn there by the magnetism of

this man who had stirred up the South to revolt. The caps and dresses

of the women and girls gave touches of colour to the sombre crowd of

men, and, as he stood up in the motor-car for a better view, he saw

row upon row of pink, upturned faces, parted, eager lips, and eyes

that strained against the sunshine to see the black-clad figure of

a man standing on the low roof of the People's Committee. Boys had

climbed the trees round the Market Place--their gaping faces shone from

the dark branches; and on the outskirts of the vast crowd men and

women stood up in carts and waggonettes--horses had been harnessed to

anything that ran on wheels.

There was not a soldier in sight. The sun shone fiercely on the Market

Place of Argelliers, where two thousand people were thinking of their

wrongs. And the man on the roof talked to them. His voice, strong and

sonorous, came to them urging them to be of good cheer. They flung back

at him cries of encouragement, and called him by name.

"I'm going into the crowd," Humphrey said.

"Better stop here," urged Bouvier. "They're an excitable lot."

"I must hear what he's saying."

Humphrey climbed out of the car, and pushed his way into the middle

of the crowd. There was a loud shouting over some remark that the

speaker had made. He found himself wedged in tightly between heavy,

broad-shouldered men, with black eyes and swarthy faces. He heard

the man on the roof speak about those who had been attacking him,

and a voice close to Humphrey yelled, "_La Depêche de Toulouse_,"

and immediately another voice cried out, "_Conspuez la Depêche de

Toulouse_." He turned at the voice and saw, with a sudden shock, the

shaggy-haired man with the bloodshot eyes who had dogged his footsteps

that first day in Narbonne. Their glances met. Humphrey thrust back

into his pocket the pencil with which he had been making furtive notes.

"_Conspuez les autres!_" cried the man with the bloodshot eyes,

"_conspuez les mouchards_."

He was conscious of a new note in the crowd: he saw anger and hatred

passing swiftly over all the faces around him. They turned on him with

relentless eyes. He saw the shaggy-haired man shouldering his way, and

scrambling towards him with crooked fingers that clawed at the air. In

one quick second he realized that he was in danger.

"_Conspuez les autres._" The cry rose all about him swelling to a roar

of confusion.

"_En voilà un!_" shouted the shaggy man, pointing to Humphrey's white

armband. They surged against him, and he was swept from his feet. He

heard the shriek of women, and the babble and a murmur that ran like an

undercurrent through the storm of noisy voices. The black figure on the

roof was wringing his hands, and trying to calm the mob.

Humphrey turned to escape. "What a fool I was to come into the thick of

it," he thought. Once, in the struggle, he saw Bouvier standing with a

white face in the motor-car, probably wondering what the row was about.

And then, they came at him suddenly and determinedly. Remorseless and

menacing faces were thrust close to him. He struck out and a thrill

went up his arm as his fist met a hard cheek-bone.

Something fell on his arm with a heavy, aching blow that left it numb

and limp, and at the same moment an excruciating spasm of self-pity

swept upward from his soul, as he saw, as in a red mist, uplifted,

clenched hands struggling to meet him. This was real life at last. He

had ceased to be an onlooker; the game was terrible and earnest, and he

was, for the first time, the principal figure in the play. His agony

did not last long.

The hot breath of the men was on him, and the evil, bloodshot eyes of

the shaggy-haired man who had denounced him, loomed terribly large,

like great red-veined moons.

And, in that last moment, before all consciousness went from him for

ever, as he swayed and fell before the trampling mob, in that supreme

moment when deliverance came from all the tribulations that life held

for him, an odd, whimsical idea twisted his lips into a smile as he

thought:

"What a ripping story this will make for _The Day_."

THE END

COLSTONS LIMITED, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

Hyphenation has been retained as in the original publication.

Page 25, in the phrase "every day" a space was kept

(every day, it seemed).

Page 31, comma erased (among which, "Twencent").

Page 41, double quotes added ("We had an awful row.).

Page 56, hyphen retained (a bed-sitting room).

Page 77, apostrophe added (reporters' room).

Page 112, She changed to she (Yes, she had remembered him,).

Page 121, period added (he began.).

Page 190, double quotes added (I know.").

Page 192, period erased (to wait...").

Page 195, apostrophe replaced by period (she was now.).

Page 212, double quotes added (I wrote about....").

Page 212, double quotes added (Thanks for the bob....").

Page 245, period added (of the office.).

Page 254, sedn changed to send in (I'll send you).

Page 256, single quote added (forgotten by to-morrow.').

Page 256, single quote added (go I.'").

Page 307, question mark changed to period (Not as big as London.).

Page 310, phaseology changed to phraseology in (intimate phraseology.).

Page 340, period added (anything in common between them.).

Both "latchkey" and "latch-key" were used in this text. This text also

uses "countryside" and "country-side", "earrings" and "ear-rings",

"lawsuits" and "law-suits", "notebook" and "note-book", "schoolmasters"

and "school-masters", "tablecloths" and "table-cloths". This was retained.

End of Project Gutenberg's Mightier than the Sword, by Alphonse Courlander