Neither by nature crazy, nor by inclination eccentric, Mr. Gordon
Selsbury had at moments serious but comfortable doubts as to whether he
was not a little abnormal; whether he was not, in fine, one of those
rare and gifted mortals to whom was given Vision beyond the ordinary.
His environment was the commonplace City of London; his occupation a
shrieking incongruity for a spiritual man--he was an insurance broker.
And a prosperous insurance broker.
Sometimes he sat before the silver fire grate of his sitting-room,
amazed at the contradictory evidence of his own genius. Here (said he,
thinking impartially) was a man with a Conscious Soul, beside whom other
men were clods, vegetables, animals of the field, slaves to their
material demands. Lifted above the world and its peculiarly grimy
interests, he was a man whose spiritual head rose above fog and was one
with the snow-capped mountains and the blue skies. And yet--here was
the truly astonishing thing--he could grapple most practically with
these materialists and could tear from the clenched and frenzied paws
large quantities of soiled and greasy money....
“No, Trenter, I shall be out to-morrow afternoon. Will you please tell
Mr. Robert that I will see him at my office. Thank you, Trenter.”
Trenter inclined his head respectfully and went back to the telephone.
“No, sir, Mr. Selsbury will not be at home to-morrow.”
Bobbie Selsbury was annoyed.
“Will you tell him that he promised to play in a foursome with me, tell
him--ask him to come to the telephone.”
Gordon got up from his tapestried armchair with an expressionless face.
Before the servants he revealed nothing in the least degree emotive.
“Yes, yes, I know!” wearily. “But I had a prior engagement. You must get
somebody else. Old Mendlesohn ... what’s the matter with him? Rubbish,
my dear fellow.... At any rate, you must get somebody--I’m tremendously
busy to-morrow.... I don’t feel like discussing my business on the
telephone. Good-bye.”
He paced his dignified way to his den. Gordon Selsbury once rowed six
in the Varsity boat--there were crossed oars above his fireplace, though
he thought the display in bad taste. He had once been a fresher whose
chief joy in life had been to steal policemen’s helmets and ride a
bicycle down forbidden pathways, and to sprint from proctors. It seemed
difficult to believe. He was tall and good-looking in the Apollo
Belvedere manner. Fair, with a forehead which was large and thoughtful,
he baffled instant analysis by carrying through life two inches of
sidewhisker on either cheek. Men seeing him first thought he wrote music
or played a ’cello. Women on introduction guessed him as a dancer of
amazing agility, or possibly a film artist.
“Trenter....”
Trenter waited, his head attentively thrust forward, a simulation of
intense interest on his sharp features. He continued to wait, even as
Gordon continued to frown at the fireplace.
“Trenter....”
“Yes, sir?”
Slowly Mr. Selsbury turned his head until his eyes met Trenter’s.
“I saw you kissing the parlourmaid this morning. You are a married man,
I believe?”
Trenter blinked apprehensively. He was indeed married.
“I do not wish that sort of thing to happen again,” said Gordon, mildly
scandalised. “You are a married man with responsibilities which cannot
be ignored or set on one side. Eleanor, as I understand her name to be,
is a young girl, possibly inflammable, certainly impressionable. To
cloud a young girl’s life by awakening in her heart a passion which you
cannot return is most reprehensible. Even I have been rocked by the
current which the stone you cast has set into motion. My shaving water
was late this morning. This must not occur again.”
“No, sir,” said Trenter.
News comes instantly to the servants’ hall in any event. Now, telepathy
lagged behind Trenter’s spoken word.
Eleanor, tall, svelte, pallid of face, black eyebrows and eyes that
flashed, interrupted the operation of a lip-stick to listen. She was
tremulously indignant.
“Because he’s a St. Andrew, does he think that we haven’t any human
feelings? The poor cold-blooded fish! I’ll let him know that I won’t be
talked about and my name took away--taken away, I mean--by a prying,
sneaking, rubber-soled spy. He is too!”
“Who’s this St. Andrew?” Trenter was suspicious of all saints, being by
marriage a Primitive Baptist.
“He’s the man that women tempted and he wouldn’t,” said Eleanor,
prepared to drop the illustration. But Trenter was of another mind.
“Who’s been tempting him?” he asked, darkling eyed.
“Nobody: not if it’s me you mean. I’d like to see him put his arm round
_my_ waist! He’d never forget it!”
“He wouldn’t forget himself anyway,” said Trenter, relieved.
She tossed her head sceptically.
“Oh, I don’t know!” she said, and nodded to a warm, large woman in the
gingham and apron of her profession. “Ask cook!”
Trenter was dazed.
“Good God!--not you, cook?” he asked in a whisper.
Happily Mrs. Magglesark was not a quick thinker.
“Yes; I saw him too,” she said, and Eleanor, in terror that the telling
of the story should go elsewhere, trod on the opening of the cook’s
narrative.
“Me and cook--that is to say cook and I--were on top of a ’bus last
Sunday----”
“In Knightsbridge.” Thus the cook claimed her equal share of the
copyright.
“We were laughing and talking when cook said ‘Look, Nelly--there’s the
boss.’”
“I said ‘If that isn’t his nibs!’” amended Mrs. Magglesark.
“And there he was!” said Eleanor. “With a girl, very tall and dressed in
black, and he was holding her hand!”
“In the street?” incredulously.
“In the car: from the top of a ’bus you can look down into cars, if
they’re open. Many a sight I’ve seen!”
“Was she pretty?” asked Trenter, man-like.
Eleanor’s lips pursed.
“Well, I suppose some people would call her pretty. Did you think she
was pretty, cook?”
Mrs. Magglesark, having reached the age when she regarded all young
people as passable, thought she was pretty.
“Holding her hand!” Trenter was very thoughtful. “It wasn’t Mrs. van
Oynne?”
“Who is she?”
“She’s been here twice to tea. An American lady, rather well-dressed.
Heloise! That’s her name. And a good-looker. She usually wears black and
paradise feathers.”
“_She_ wore paradise feathers!” said cook and Eleanor together.
Trenter nodded.
“That’s her,” he said, “but there’s nothing in it. She’s a highbrow.
Reads books and all that. Last time she was here, she and him discussed
the Ego Soul. The little bits I heard I couldn’t make head or tail of.”
Eleanor was impressed.
“Funny for him to be discussing eggs,” she said.
It was not funny for Gordon Selsbury to discuss anything. With Heloise
van Oynne there seemed to be no subject, from kidney beans to
metaphysics, that he could not examine profitably. It is true that he
did most of the talking, but her rapt gaze rectified deficiencies of
speech.
Gordon sat with her that afternoon in the tearoom of the Coburg Hotel,
and they were comparatively alone.
“There is something I have wanted to say to you ever since I met you,
Heloise,” he said softly. “A month! It almost seems incredible! If our
theories are substantial it is incredible. We met before in the Temple
of Atlantis, where the bearded priests chanted the day through. And you
were a great lady and I was a humble gladiator. That the gladiatorial
games and even the factions of the circus have a more remote antiquity
than Rome, I am certain. Who knows but that the last remnants of dying
Atlantis were not the first peoples of Etruscan civilisation ...?”
Her fine eyes agreed with that theory. They said as plainly as though
the words were spoken: “How brilliant of you to associate Etruria with
the mythical civilisation of Atlantis!”
On the other hand, her eyes did not say many things that she thought.
“What is so fine about friendship,” Gordon was going on, “is that we
have lifted common interest above the sordid range of philanderism.”
“How’s that?”
Her head was bent forward eagerly, enquiringly. Trenter had the same
trick, only he looked pained.
“I mean”--Gordon Selsbury flicked a crumb of cake daintily from his
knee--“we have never tarnished the bright surface of our friendship
with that weakness which is so glibly styled ‘love.’”
“Oh!” Heloise van Oynne sat back in her basket chair. “That’s so,” she
said, and if there was a sense of immense satisfaction in her tone, even
one attuned to her spiritual wavelength would not have observed the
circumstance.
“The perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding, the dovetailing of
mind into mind, the oneness of a mutual soul--these transcend all
sentient impressions, whatever be the label they bear.”
She smiled slowly and with infinite sweetness and comradeship. Heloise
invariably smiled at Gordon that way when she wasn’t quite sure what he
was talking about. Though, as to souls----
“The soul is certainly the finest thing we have around,” she said, in
deep thought. “That’s where we’ve got most people skinned--I should say,
at a disadvantage, you and I, Gordon. One doesn’t like to bare one’s
heart; one shrinks instinctively even from self-revelation.”
She sighed as one who had got through an exercise of considerable
difficulty. Then, observing by certain signs that he had only, so to
speak, removed the lid of his introspections and that the real contents
of his mind would shortly spill, to be gathered up and replaced by her
none too sure hands, she interjected hastily:
“You were telling me, Gordon, about a cousin of yours in Australia--she
must certainly be interesting, and I’m just mad to hear about your
relations. I like you, Gordon--a lot. There’s nothing about you that
doesn’t fascinate me.”
She laid a gloved hand on his knee. No other woman could lay a hand,
gloved or ungloved, on Gordon Selsbury’s knee without his calling for
the police. But Heloise ... he laid his hand gently on hers.
“Diana? Well, really, I know nothing about her except that she had that
tremendous affair with a fellow called Dempsi. I told you that. She’s
very well off, I believe. I’ve taken a little notice of her--sent her a
few books and a word or two of advice. I often think that a man’s advice
is ever so much more acceptable to a young girl than a woman’s. When
were we talking about her? Oh, of course, I remember! It was when we had
that tremendous talk on the growth of the Ego....”
“Is she fair or dark?” Heloise nimbly blocked the road to metaphysics.
“I really don’t know. I had a letter from my aunt--her aunt also--just
before the poor creature died. She said that Diana had forgotten Dempsi
and wondered where she could get his photograph--the man is dead. Has it
ever occurred to you, Heloise, how absurd are such terms as life and
de----”
“Diana!” mused Heloise, aloud. “Poor little Australian girl. I should
like to meet her, Gordon.”
Gordon shook his head, smiling gently.
“I cannot imagine anything less likely,” he said, “than your meeting
her.”