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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14669 ***
+
+[Illustration: It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (_See page 165_)]
+
+
+
+
+JAFFERY
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+F. MATANIA
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+1915
+
+Press of
+J.J. Little & Ives Company
+New York, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO MY WIFE
+
+
+This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial affection
+I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and
+many dreams that we have shared.
+
+You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with
+the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote.
+You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913;
+so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on
+our Egyptian journey.
+
+_C'est bien loin, tout cela_! War overtook it in its serial course; and
+now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the
+moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.
+
+These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our
+home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted
+as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to
+live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to
+modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date;
+but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we
+from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last
+words.
+
+Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there,
+across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's
+work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel
+that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice
+thundering across the lawn. . . ?
+
+W.J.L.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                         FACING
+                                                          PAGE
+
+It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness             _Frontispiece_
+
+Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding      64
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek        78
+
+He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs            186
+
+"Go! You're nothing but a brute"                            228
+
+Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside        300
+
+And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning
+heap of a woman                                             316
+
+There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there
+as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too                  350
+
+
+
+
+THE
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+YEAR-BOOK
+
+A _bon-mot_ for each day in
+every year, selected from
+this popular author's works.
+
+_Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend, Jaffery
+Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following account of that
+dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say that I have been
+egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A man of my somewhat
+urbane and dilettante temperament does not do these things without being
+worried into them. I had the inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my
+wife), and she agreed, at the time, dutifully, that I ought to record
+our friend Jaffery's doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the
+first suggestion, the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the
+"egging on" is merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene
+insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge, all
+the facts of the story--although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian Boldero and
+poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the imbroglio, counted
+themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor wretch (a man must get
+home somewhere), was in the nursery; and that, finally, if she had been
+taught English grammar and spelling at school, she would have dispensed
+entirely with my pedantic assistance and written the story herself.
+Anyhow, man-like, I am broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't
+very much matter. Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I
+know they are one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so
+futile a thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
+self-appointed and fantastic task.
+
+But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that if it
+had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
+half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
+confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only to a
+man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to a man. On
+the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister women and her
+brother men which, but for her, would never reach a man's ears. So by
+combining the information obtained from our family encyclopædia under
+the feminine heading of China with that obtained under the masculine
+heading of Philosophy, I can, figuratively speaking, like the famous
+student, issue my treatise on Chinese Philosophy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago, when the
+parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves wantonly to the
+sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as I sat at my table,
+with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which I caught with the tail
+of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance, my quiet outlook on
+greenery and colour was obscured by a human form. I may mention that my
+study-table is placed in the bay of a window, on the ground floor. It is
+a French window, opening on a terrace. Beyond the parapet of the
+terrace, the garden, with its apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its
+lawn, its beds of tulips, its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts
+of other pleasant things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron
+railings separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow,
+when she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
+in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious cow.
+Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I digress. . . .
+
+I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife. She
+looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair _blond
+comme les blés_, and her mocking cornflower blue eyes, and her mutinous
+mouth, which has never yet (after all these years) assumed a responsible
+parent's austerity. She wore a fresh white dress with coquettish bits of
+blue about the bodice. In her hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper,
+the _Daily Telegraph_, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.
+
+"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"
+
+She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal of
+spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and laburnum,
+that I put down my pen and I smiled.
+
+"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."
+
+"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.
+
+"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand Meeting,
+next month, of the Hafiz Society."
+
+"I wonder," said Barbara, "why Hafiz always makes me think of sherbet."
+
+I remonstrated, waving a dismissing hand.
+
+"If that's all you've got to say--"
+
+"But it isn't."
+
+She crossed the threshold, stepped in, swished round the end of my long
+oak table and took possession of my library. I wheeled round politely in
+my chair.
+
+"Then, what is it?" I asked.
+
+"Have you read the paper this morning?"
+
+"I've glanced through the _Times_," said I.
+
+She patted her handful of bedclothing and let fall a blanket and a
+bed-spread or two--("Look at my beautifully, orderly folded _Times_,"
+said I, with an indicatory gesture) She looked and sniffed--and shed
+Vallombrosa leaves of the _Daily Telegraph_ about the library until she
+had discovered the page for which she was searching. Then she held a
+mangled sheet before my eyes.
+
+"There!" she cried, "what do you think of that?"
+
+"What do I think of what?" I asked, regarding the acre of print.
+
+"Adrian Boldero has written a novel!"
+
+"Adrian?" said I. "Well, my dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is capable
+of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He might write a
+sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth or steal the tin
+cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be still the same beautiful,
+charming, futile Adrian."
+
+Barbara pished and insisted. "But this is apparently a wonderful novel.
+There's a whole column about it. They say it's the most astounding book
+published in our generation. Look! A work of genius."
+
+"Rubbish, darling," said I, knowing my Adrian.
+
+"Take the trouble to read the notice," said Barbara, thrusting the paper
+at me in a superior manner.
+
+I took it from her and read. She was right. Somebody calling himself
+Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond Gate," which a
+usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to be a work of genius.
+He sketched the outline of the story, indicated its peculiar wonder. The
+review impressed me.
+
+"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else--not our Adrian."
+
+"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"
+
+"Thousands," said I.
+
+She pished again and tossed her pretty head.
+
+"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all about
+it."
+
+She departed through the library door into the recesses of the house
+where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of my
+presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied my
+thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the more I
+read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of "The Diamond
+Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same person.
+
+You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton
+and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of
+youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's
+shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were
+gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual
+capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of
+reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged one another pretty
+accurately and remained devoted friends. There were other men, of
+course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and each of us had our little
+separate circle; we did not form a mutual admiration society and
+advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and
+d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a quiet way, we recognised our
+quadruple union of hearts, and talked amazing rubbish and committed
+unspeakable acts of lunacy and dreamed impossible dreams in a very
+delightful, and perhaps unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our middle
+and late thirties--all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien
+grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He was the
+son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to talk to us
+of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they were
+haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he was forever
+writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always
+on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in him firmly. He
+alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.
+
+Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would
+certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and,
+because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at
+the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.
+Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review,
+and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy
+waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of
+Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I am a happy nonentity. I
+have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
+accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few founder's
+shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to
+gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the other three
+mattered. They were definite--Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian
+Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton,
+romantically definite. And poor old Tom was dead. Dear, impossible,
+feckless fellow. He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we
+thought his brilliant career was assured--but somehow circumstances
+baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking
+pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the
+meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He
+secured a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
+us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton. He never
+reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!
+
+So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my
+Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and
+then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a
+comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something
+idiotically desperate somewhere or the other--he was a war-correspondent
+by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of hot-cross
+buns), and a desperado by predilection--I had not heard from him for a
+year; and now Adrian--if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
+he--had written an epoch-making novel.
+
+But Adrian--the precious, finnikin Adrian--how on earth could he have
+written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond doubt he was a clever
+fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the Law Tripos and had done
+well in his Bar examination. But after fourteen years or so he was
+making twopence halfpenny per annum at his profession. He made another
+three-farthings, say, by selling elegant verses to magazines. He dined
+out a great deal and spent much of his time at country houses, being a
+very popular and agreeable person. His other means of livelihood
+consisted of an allowance of four hundred a year made him by his mother.
+Beyond the social graces he had not distinguished himself. And now--
+
+"It _is_ Adrian," cried my wife, bursting into the library. "I knew it
+was. He has had several other glorious reviews which we haven't seen.
+Isn't it splendid?"
+
+Her eyes danced with loyalty and gladness. Now that I too knew it was
+our Adrian I caught her enthusiasm.
+
+"Splendid," I echoed. "To think of old Adrian making good at last! I'm
+more than glad. Telephone at once, dear, for a copy of the book."
+
+"Adrian is bringing one with him. He's coming down to dine and stay the
+night. He said he had an engagement, but I told him it was rubbish, and
+he's coming."
+
+Barbara had a despotic way with her men friends, especially with Adrian
+and Jaffery, who, each after his kind, paid her very pretty homage.
+
+"And now, I've got a hundred things to do, so you must excuse me," said
+Barbara--for all the world as if I had invited her into my library and
+was detaining her against her will.
+
+My reply was smilingly ironical. She disappeared. I returned to Hafiz.
+Soon a bumble-bee, a great fellow splendid in gold and black and
+crimson, blundered into the room and immediately made furious racket
+against a window pane. Now I can't concentrate my mind on serious
+things, if there's a bumble-bee buzzing about. So I had to get up and
+devote ten minutes to persuading the dunderhead to leave the glass and
+establish himself firmly on the piece of paper that would waft him into
+the open air and sunlight. When I lost sight of him in the glad greenery
+I again came back to my work. But two minutes afterwards my little seven
+year old daughter, rather the worse for amateur gardening, and holding a
+cage of white mice in her hand, appeared on the threshold, smiled at me
+with refreshing absence of apology, darted in, dumped the white mice on
+an open volume of my precious Turner Macan's edition of Firdusi, and
+clambering into my lap and seizing pencil and paper, instantly ordained
+my participation in her favourite game of "head, body and legs."
+
+An hour afterwards a radiant angel of a nurse claimed her for purposes
+of ablution. I once more returned to Hafiz. Then Barbara put her head in
+at the door.
+
+"Haven't you thought how delighted Doria will be?"
+
+"I haven't," said I. "I've more important things to think about."
+
+"But," said Barbara, entering and closing the door with soft
+deliberation behind her and coming to my side--"if Adrian makes a big
+success, they'll be able to marry."
+
+"Well?" said I.
+
+"Well," said she, with a different intonation. "Don't you see?"
+
+"See what?"
+
+It is wise to irritate your wife on occasion, so as to manifest your
+superiority. She shook me by the collar and stamped her foot.
+
+"Don't you care a bit whether your friends get married or not?"
+
+"Not a bit," said I.
+
+Barbara lifted the Macan's Firdusi, still suffering the desecration of
+the forgotten cage of white mice, onto my manuscript and hoisted herself
+on the cleared corner of the table.
+
+"Doria is my dearest friend. She did my sums for me at school, although
+I was three years older. If it hadn't been for us, she and Adrian would
+never have met."
+
+"That I admit," I interrupted. "But having started on the path of crime
+we're not bound to pursue it to the end."
+
+"You're simply horrid!" she cried. "We've talked for years of the sad
+story of these two poor young things, and now, when there's a chance of
+their marrying, you say you don't care a bit!"
+
+"My dear," said I, rising, "what with you and Adrian and a bumble-bee
+and the child and two white mice, and now Doria, my morning's work is
+ruined. Let us go out into the garden and watch the starlings resting in
+the walnut trees. Incidentally we might discuss Doria and Adrian."
+
+"Now you're talking sense," said Barbara.
+
+So we went into the garden--and discussed the formation next autumn of a
+new rose-bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the afternoon train came Adrian, impeccably vestured and feverish
+with excitement. Two evening papers which he brandished nervously,
+proclaimed "The Diamond Gate" a masterpiece. The book had been only out
+a week--(we country mice knew nothing of it)--and already, so his
+publisher informed him, repeat orders were coming in from the libraries
+and distributing agents.
+
+"Wittekind, my publisher, declares it's going to be the biggest thing in
+first novels ever known. And though I say it as shouldn't, dear old
+Hilary,"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"it's a damned fine book."
+
+I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his
+manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a
+smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had
+conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured me
+in the shade. At one leap he had mounted to planes beyond our dreams.
+All this his attitude betokened. He removed the hand from my shoulder
+and flourished it in a happy gesture.
+
+"My fortune's made," he cried.
+
+"But, my dear fellow," I asked, "why have you sprung this surprise on
+us? I had no idea you were writing a novel."
+
+He laughed. "No one had. Not even Doria. It was on her account I kept it
+secret. I didn't want to arouse possible false hopes. It's very simple.
+Besides, I like being a dark horse. It's exciting. Don't you remember
+how paralysed you all were when I got my First at Cambridge? Everybody
+thought I hadn't done a stroke of work--but I had sweated like mad all
+the time."
+
+This was quite true, the sudden brilliance of the end of Adrian's
+University career had dazzled the whole of his acquaintance. Barbara,
+impatient of retrospect, came to the all-important point.
+
+"How does Doria take it?"
+
+He turned on her and beamed. He was one of those dapper, slim-built men
+who can turn with quick grace.
+
+"She's as pleased as Punch. Gave it to old man Jornicroft to read and
+insisted on his reading it. He's impressed. Never thought I had it in
+me. Can't see, however, where the commercial value of it comes in."
+
+"Wait till you show him your first thumping cheque," sympathised my
+wife.
+
+"I'm going to," he exclaimed boyishly. "I might have done it this
+afternoon. Wittekind was off his head with delight and if I had asked
+him to give me a bogus cheque for ten thousand to show to old man
+Jornicroft, he would have written it without a murmur."
+
+"How much did he really write a cheque for this afternoon?" I asked,
+knowing (as I have said before) my Adrian.
+
+Barbara looked shocked. "Hilary!" she remonstrated.
+
+But Adrian laughed in high good humour. "He gave me a hundred pounds on
+account."
+
+"That won't impress Mr. Jornicroft at all," said I.
+
+"It impressed my tailor, who cashed it, deducting a quarter of his
+bill."
+
+"Do you mean to say, my dear Adrian," I questioned, "that you went to
+your tailor with a cheque for a hundred pounds and said, 'I want to pay
+you a quarter of what I owe you, will you give me change?'"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But why didn't you pass the cheque through your banking account and
+post him your own cheque?"
+
+"Did you ever hear such an innocent?" he cried gaily. "I wanted to
+impress him, I did. One must do these things with an air. He stuffed my
+pockets with notes and gold--there has never been any one so all over
+money as I am at this particular minute--and then I gave him an order
+for half-a-dozen suits straight away."
+
+"Good God!" I cried aghast. "I've never had six suits of clothes at a
+time since I was born."
+
+"And more shame for you. Look!" said he, drawing my wife's attention to
+my comfortable but old and deliberately unfashionable raiment. "I love
+you, my dear Barbara, but you are to blame."
+
+"Hilary," said my wife, "the next time you go to town you'll order
+half-a-dozen suits and I'll come with you to see you do it. Who is your
+tailor, Adrian?"
+
+He gave the address. "The best in London. And if you go to him on my
+introduction--Good Lord!"--it seemed to amuse him vastly--"I can order
+half-a-dozen more!"
+
+All this seemed to me, who am not devoid of a sense of humour and an
+appreciation of the pleasant flippancies of life, somewhat futile and
+frothy talk, unworthy of the author of "The Diamond Gate" and the lover
+of Doria Jornicroft. I expressed this opinion and Barbara, for once,
+agreed with me.
+
+"Yes. Let us be serious. In the first place you oughtn't to allude to
+Doria's father as 'old man Jornicroft.' It isn't respectful."
+
+"But I don't respect him. Who could? He is bursting with money, but
+won't give Doria a farthing, won't hear of our marriage, and practically
+forbids me the house. What possible feeling can one have for an old
+insect like that?"
+
+"I've never seen any reason," said Barbara, who is a brave little woman,
+"why Doria shouldn't run away and marry you."
+
+"She would like a shot," cried Adrian; "but I won't let her. How can I
+allow her to rush to the martyrdom of married misery on four hundred a
+year, which I don't even earn?"
+
+I looked at my watch. "It's time, my friends," said I, "to dress for
+dinner. Afterwards we can continue the discussion. In the meanwhile I'll
+order up some of the '89 Pol Roger so that we can drink to the success
+of the book."
+
+"The '89 Pol Roger?" cried Adrian. "A man with '89 Pol Roger in his
+cellar is the noblest work of God!"
+
+"I was thinking," Barbara remarked drily, "of asking Doria to spend a
+few days here next week."
+
+"All I can say is," he retorted, with his quick turn and smile, "that
+you are the Divinity Itself."
+
+So, a short time afterwards, a very happy Adrian sat down to dinner and
+brought a cultivated taste to the appreciation of a now, alas!
+historical wine, under whose influence he expanded and told us of the
+genesis and the making of "The Diamond Gate."
+
+Now it is a very odd coincidence, one however which had little, if
+anything, to do with the curious entanglement of my friend's affairs
+into which I was afterwards drawn, but an odd coincidence all the same,
+that on passing from the dining room with Adrian to join Barbara in the
+drawing room, I found among the last post letters lying on the hall
+table one which, with a thrill of pleasure, I held up before Adrian's
+eyes.
+
+"Do you recognise the handwriting?"
+
+"Good Lord!" cried he. "It's from Jaffery Chayne. And"--he scanned the
+stamp and postmark--"from Cettinje. What the deuce is he doing there?"
+
+"Let us see!" said I.
+
+I opened the letter and scanned it through; then I read it aloud.
+
+     "Dear Hilary,
+
+     "A line to let you know that I'm coming back soon. I haven't quite
+     finished my job--"
+
+     "What was his job?"
+
+     "Heaven knows," I replied. "The last time I heard from him he was
+     cruising about the Sargasso Sea."
+
+     I resumed my reading.
+
+     "--for the usual reason, a woman. If it wasn't for women what a
+     thundering amount of work a man could get through. Anyhow--I'm
+     coming back, with an encumbrance. A wife. Not my wife, thank
+     Olympus, but another man's wife--"
+
+     "Poor old devil!" cried Adrian. "I knew he would come a mucker one
+     of these days!"
+
+     "Wait," said I, and I read--
+
+     "--poor Prescott's wife. I don't think you ever knew Prescott, but
+     he was a good sort. He died of typhoid. Only quaggas and yaks and
+     other iron-gutted creatures like myself can stand Albania. I'm
+     escorting her to England, so look out for us. How's everybody? Do
+     you ever hear of Adrian? If so, collar him. I want to work the
+     widow off on him. She has a goodish deal of money and is a kind of
+     human dynamo. The best thing in the world for Adrian."
+
+     Adrian confounded the fellow. I continued--
+
+     "Prepare then for the Dynamic Widow. Love to Barbara, the fairy
+     grasshopper--"
+
+     "Who's that?"
+
+     "My daughter, Susan Freeth. The last time he saw her, she was
+     hopping about in a green jumper--Barbara would give you the
+     elementary costume's commercial name."
+
+     "--and yourself," I read. "By the way, do you know of a
+     granite-built, iron-gated, portcullised, barbicaned, really
+     comfortable home for widows?
+
+     Yours, Jaffery."
+
+Without waiting for comment from Adrian, I went with the letter into the
+drawing room, he following. I handed it to Barbara, who ran it through.
+
+"That's just like Jaffery. He tells us nothing."
+
+"I think he has told us everything," said I.
+
+"But who and what and whence is this lady?"
+
+"Goodness knows!" said I.
+
+"Therefore, he has told us nothing," retorted Barbara. "My own belief is
+that she's a Brazilian."
+
+"But what," asked Adrian, "would a lone Brazilian female be doing in the
+Balkans?"
+
+"Looking for a husband, of course," said Barbara.
+
+And like all wise men when staggered by serene feminine asseveration we
+bowed our heads and agreed that nothing could be more obvious.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Some weeks passed; but we heard no more of Jaffery Chayne. If he had
+planted his widow there, in Cettinje, and gone off to Central Africa we
+should not have been surprised. On the other hand, he might have walked
+in at any minute, just as though he lived round the corner and had
+dropped in casually to see us.
+
+In the meantime events had moved rapidly for Adrian. Everybody was
+talking about his book; everybody was buying it. The rare phenomenon of
+the instantaneous success of a first book by an unknown author was
+occurring also in America. Golden opinions were being backed by golden
+cash. Adrian continued to draw on his publishers, who, fortunately for
+them, had an American house. Anticipating possible alluring proposals
+from other publishers, they offered what to him were dazzling and
+fantastic terms for his next two novels. He accepted. He went about the
+world wearing Fortune like a halo. He achieved sudden fame; fame so
+widespread that Mr. Jornicroft heard of it in the city, where he
+promoted (and still promotes) companies with monotonous success. The
+result was an interview to which Adrian came wisely armed with a note
+from his publisher as to sales up to date, and the amazing contract
+which he had just signed. He left the house with a father's blessing in
+his ears and an affianced bride's kisses on his lips. The wedding was
+fixed for September. Adrian declared himself to be the happiest of God's
+creatures and spent his days in joy-sodden idleness. His mother, with
+tears in her eyes, increased his allowance.
+
+The book that created all this commotion, I frankly admit, held me
+spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most enthusiastic
+reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I had ever read. It
+was a modern high romance of love and pity, of tears iridescent with
+laughter, of strong and beautiful though erring souls; it was at once
+poignant and tender; it vibrated with drama; it was instinct with calm
+and kindly wisdom. In my humility, I found I had not known my Adrian one
+little bit. As the shepherd of old who had a sort of patronizing
+affection for the irresponsible, dancing, flute-playing, goat-footed
+creature of the woodland was stricken with panic when he recognised the
+god, so was I convulsed when I recognised the genius of my friend
+Adrian. And the fellow still went on dancing and flute-playing and I
+stared at him open-mouthed.
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, who was a widower, gave a great dinner party at his
+house in Park Crescent, in honour of the engagement. My wife and I
+attended, fishes somewhat out of water amid this brilliant but solid
+assembly of what it pleased Barbara to call "merchantates." She
+expressed a desire to shrink out of the glare of the diamonds; but she
+wore her grandmother's pearls, and, being by far the youngest and
+prettiest matron present, held her own with the best of them. There were
+stout women, thin women, white-haired women, women who ought to have
+been white-haired, but were not; sprightly and fashionable women; but
+besides Barbara, the only other young woman was Doria herself.
+
+She took us aside, as soon as we were released from the formal welcome
+of Mr. Jornicroft, a thickset man with a very bald head and heavy black
+moustache.
+
+"The sight of you two is like a breath of fresh air. Did you ever meet
+with anything so stuffy?"
+
+Now, considering that all these prosperous folks had come to do her
+homage I thought the remark rather ungracious.
+
+"It's apt to be stuffy in July in London," I said.
+
+She laid her hand on Barbara's wrist and pointed at me with her fan.
+
+"He thinks he's rebuking me. But I don't care. I'm glad to see him all
+the same. These people mean nothing but money and music-halls and bridge
+and restaurants--I'm so sick of it. You two mean something else."
+
+"Don't speak sacrilegiously of restaurants, even though you are going to
+marry a genius," said I. "There is one in Paris to which Adrian will
+take you straight--like a homing bird."
+
+"Wherever Adrian takes me, it will be beautiful," she said defiantly.
+
+My little critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly adorable
+in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly made, with
+dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a sensitive nose
+and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried her head high and,
+for so diminutive a person, appeared vastly important.
+
+Adrian, released from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles, to greet
+us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion to Barbara and
+my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from strict monogamy dealt me
+a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is only one man in the universe
+worthy of being so regarded by a woman; and he is oneself. Every
+true-minded man will agree with me. She was inordinately proud of him;
+proud too of herself in that she had believed in him and given him her
+love long before he became famous. Adrian's eyes softened as they met
+the glance. He turned to Barbara.
+
+"It's in a crowd like this that she looks so mysterious--an Elemental;
+but whether of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, I shall spend my life trying
+to discover."
+
+The faintest flush possible mounted to that pure ivory-white cheek of
+hers. She laughed and caught me by the arm.
+
+"I must carry you to Lady Bagshawe--you're taking her in to dinner. Her
+husband is Master of the Organ-Grinders' Company--"
+
+"No, no, Doria," said I.
+
+"--Well, it's some city company--I don't know--and she is a museum of
+diseases and a gazetteer of cure places. Now you know where you are."
+
+She led me to Lady Bagshawe. Soon afterwards we trooped down to dinner,
+during which I learned more of my inside than I knew before, and more of
+that of Lady Bagshawe than any of her most fervent adorers in their
+wildest dreams could have ever hoped to ascertain; during which, also, I
+endeavoured to convince an unknown, but agreeable lady on my left that I
+did not play polo, whereat, it seemed, her eight brothers were experts;
+and that Omar Khayyam was a contemporary not of the Prophet Isaiah, but
+of William the Conqueror. As for the setting--I am not an observant
+man--but I had an impression of much gold and silver and rare flora on
+the table, great gold frames enclosing (I doubt not) costly pictures on
+the walls, many desirable jewels on undesirable bosoms, strong though
+unsympathetic masculine faces, and such food and drink as Lucullus, poor
+fellow, did not live long enough to discover.
+
+When the ladies retired, and we moved up towards our host, I found
+myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile depravity of a
+gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard, the other arguing
+on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian loan. A vacant chair
+happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in hand, came round the table
+and sat down.
+
+"How are you getting on?"
+
+"Well," said I. "Very well." I sipped my port. I recognised Cockburn
+1870.
+
+"You seemed rather at a loose end."
+
+"When one has 1870 port to drink," said I, "why fritter away its flavour
+in vain words?"
+
+"It is damned good port," Adrian admitted.
+
+"Earth holds nothing better," said I.
+
+We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us. I confess that
+I rather surrendered myself to the wine. A little taper for cigarettes
+happened to be in front of me; I held my glass in its light and lost
+myself in the wine's pure depths of mystery and colour; and my mind
+wandered to the lusty sunshine of "Lusitanian summers" that was there
+imprisoned. I inhaled its fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and
+spacious generosity. Wine, like bread and oil--"God's three chief
+words"--is a thing of itself--a thing of earth and air and sun--one of
+the great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the eyes
+of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern Italy has
+its fascination for me, in that it is essentially something apart from
+the dust and empty racket of the world; how much more then this radiant
+vintage suddenly awakened from its slumber in the darkness of forty
+years. So I mused, as I think an honest man is justified in musing,
+soberly, over a great wine, when suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's
+face. He too was musing; but musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed
+to have swept his face and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his
+half-emptied glass, with the short stem of which his fingers were
+nervously toying. There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine
+flowed over the cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came
+back, manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to
+Mr. Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
+wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as one
+might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee came and
+liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart
+to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid,
+simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's Sheriff of the City of
+London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenæum
+Club. When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of
+Dry Bones--my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous
+Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions,
+I think, before I was born--my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and
+worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were overrun with
+Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail,
+he refused to be disillusioned. I told him that on the occasion of my
+last visit to the Megatherium--Thackeray, I explained--a Royal
+Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate
+"The Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the
+austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room story
+which was current at my preparatory school--and that in the library I
+ran into an equally desolate, though even less familiar Archdeacon, who
+seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and never let me go until he had
+impressed upon my mind the name and address of the only man in London
+who could cut clerical gaiters. But the simple child of sugar would have
+his way. There was but one Valhalla in London, and it was built by
+Decimus Burton.
+
+After that we joined the ladies for an unimportant half hour or so, and
+then Barbara and I took our leave. As we were motoring home--we live
+some thirty miles out of London--we discussed the dinner party,
+according to the way of married folks, home-bound after a feast, and I
+mentioned the trivial incident of Adrian and the broken glass. Why
+should his face have been so haggard when he had everything to make him
+happy?
+
+"He was thinking of Mr. Jornicroft's previous insulting behaviour."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"He told me," said Barbara.
+
+"I never knew Adrian to be seriously vindictive," said I.
+
+"It strikes me, my dear," replied Barbara, taking my hand, "that you are
+an old ignoramus."
+
+And this from a woman who actively glories in not knowing how many "r's"
+there are in "harassed."
+
+She nestled up to me. "We're not going abroad in August, are we?"
+
+"What?" I cried, "leave the English country during the only part of the
+year that is not 'deformed with dripping rains or withered by a frost'?
+Certainly not."
+
+"But we did last year, and the year before."
+
+"Pure accident. The year before, Susan was recovering from the measles
+and you had some pretty frocks which you thought would look lovely at
+Dinard. And last year you also had some frocks and insisted that
+Houlgate was the only place where Susan could avoid being stricken down
+by scarlet-fever."
+
+"Anyhow," said my wife, "we're not going away this year, for I've fixed
+up with Doria and Adrian to spend August at Northlands."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me so at once? Why did you ask me whether we were
+going away?"
+
+"Because I knew we weren't," she answered.
+
+In putting two questions at the same time, I blundered. The first was a
+poser and might have elicited some interesting revelation of feminine
+mental process. In forlorn hope I repeated it.
+
+"Why, I've told you, stupid," said Barbara. "You've no objection to
+their coming, have you?"
+
+"Good Lord, no. I'm delighted."
+
+"From the way you've argued, any one would have thought you didn't want
+them."
+
+Outraged by the illogic, I gasped; but she broke into a laugh.
+
+"You silly old Hilary," she said. "Don't you see that Doria must get her
+trousseau together and Adrian must find a house or a flat, that has to
+be decorated and furnished, and the poor child hasn't a mother or any
+sensible woman in the world to look after her but me?"
+
+"I see," said I, "that you intend having the time of your life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My prevision proved correct. In August came the engaged couple and every
+day Barbara took them up to town and whirled them about from house-agent
+to house-agent until she found a flat to suit them, and then from
+emporium to emporium until she found furniture to suit the flat, and
+from raiment-vendor to raiment-vendor until she equipped Doria to suit
+the furniture. She used to return almost speechless with exhaustion; but
+pantingly and with the glaze of victory in her eyes, she fought all her
+battles o'er again and told of bargains won. In the meantime had it not
+been for Susan, I should have lived in the solitude of an anchorite. We
+spent much time in the garden which we (she less conscious of irony than
+I) called our desert island. I was Robinson Crusoe and she was Man
+Friday, and on the whole we were quite happy; perhaps I should have been
+happier in a temperature of 80° in the shade if I had not been forced to
+wear the Polar bear rug from the drawing-room in representation of
+Crusoe's goatskins. I did suggest that I should be Robinson Crusoe's
+brother, who wore ordinary flannels, and that she should be Woman
+Wednesday. But Susan saw through the subterfuge and that game didn't
+work. One afternoon, however, Barbara, returning earlier than usual,
+caught us at it and expressing horror and indignation at the uses to
+which the bearskin was put, metaphorically whipped me and sent me to bed
+as being the elder of the naughty ones. After that we played at fairies
+in a glade, which was much cooler.
+
+It was in the evenings that I was loneliest; for then Barbara went early
+to bed, and the lovers strolled about together in the moonlight. With
+the intention, half-malicious, half-pitiful, of filling up my time,
+Doria taught me a new and complicated Patience. Then finally, when
+Doria, having spent a couple of polite minutes in the drawing-room, had
+retired, and when I was tired out from the strain of the day and
+half-asleep through weariness, Adrian would mix himself the longest
+possible brandy and soda, light the longest possible cigar and try to
+keep me up all night listening to his conversation.
+
+At last, one Friday evening, while I was engaged in my forlorn and
+unprofitable game, the butler entered the drawing-room with unperturbed
+announcement:
+
+"Mr. Chayne on the telephone, sir."
+
+I sent the card table flying amid the wreckage of my lay-out and rushed
+to the telephone.
+
+"Hullo! That you, Jaff?"
+
+"Yes, old man. Very much me. A devil of a lot of me. How are you?"
+
+His strong bass boomed through the receiver. I have always found a
+queer comfort in Jaffery's voice. It wraps you round about in thundering
+waves. We exchanged the commonplaces of delighted greeting. I asked:
+
+"When did you arrive?"
+
+"A couple of days ago."
+
+"Why on earth didn't you let me know at once?"
+
+I heard him laugh. "I'll tell you when I see you. By the way, can
+Barbara have me for the week-end?"
+
+This was like Jaffery. Most men would have asked me, taking Barbara for
+granted.
+
+"Barbara would have you for the rest of time," said I. "And so would
+Susan. I'll expect you by the 11 o'clock train."
+
+"Right," said he.
+
+"And, I say!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Talking of fair ladies--what about--?"
+
+"Oh, Hell!" came Jaffery's great voice. "She's here right enough."
+
+"Where?" I asked.
+
+"The Savoy. So is Euphemia--"
+
+Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a
+little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape.
+
+"Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her."
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?"
+
+"She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears.
+
+"Why not bring her down with Euphemia?"
+
+"I want a couple of days off. I want a good quiet time, with no female
+women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as you know, I
+love to distraction."
+
+"But will Euphemia be all right with her?"
+
+I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the "problem" was.
+
+"Right as rain. Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow night to a
+lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City Temple on Sunday.
+Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of
+Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless.
+Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to
+converse further I might have told him that another female woman, Doria
+Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he might not have come.
+Jaffery was always a queer fish where women were concerned. Not a
+chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean fish, now hot, now cold. I
+have seen him shrink like a sensitive plant in the presence of an
+ingenue of nineteen and royster in Pantagruelian fashion with a mature
+member of the chorus of the Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly,
+a scared Joseph, from the allurements of the charming wife of a Right
+Honourable Sir Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in
+front of an obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street.
+I do not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating
+that my dear old Jaffery had no morals. He had--lots of them. He was
+stuffed with them. But what they were, neither he nor I nor any one else
+was ever able to define. As a general rule, however, he was shy of
+strange women, and to that category did Doria belong.
+
+When the lovers came in I told them my news. Adrian expressed
+extravagant delight. A little tiny cloud flitted over Doria's brow.
+
+"Shall I like him?" she asked.
+
+"You'll adore him," cried Adrian.
+
+"I'll try to, dear, because he seems to mean so much to you. Are you
+going up to town with us to-morrow?"
+
+"There's only a morning's fitting at a dressmaker--no place for me," he
+laughed. "I'll stay and welcome old Jaffery."
+
+Again the most transient of tiny little clouds. But I could not help
+thinking that if Jaffery had been a woman instead of a mere man, there
+would have been a thunderstorm.
+
+When we were alone Adrian threw himself into a chair.
+
+"Women are funny beings," he said. "I do believe Doria is jealous of old
+Jaffery."
+
+"You have every reason to be proud," said I, "of your psychological
+acumen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of the
+train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of great
+sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his turn,
+shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck wondering
+heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself between us,
+linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down the quiet
+country platform. A porter followed with his suit-case.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"
+
+"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.
+
+"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople--you remember Robson of
+Pembroke--fussy little cock-sparrow--he'd just come from England and was
+full of it. You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"
+
+Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release himself
+and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub himself
+ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.
+
+"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the subway.
+"Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em. That's the
+pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives and families. I'm
+coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter. How are they?"
+
+I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station yard,
+where his eye fell upon a familiar object.
+
+"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"
+
+The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient, ancient car,
+the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment (together with the
+impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not allow me to sell. It had
+been a splendid thing in those far-off days. It kept me in health. It
+made me walk miles and miles along unknown and unfrequented roads. In
+the aggregate I must have spent months of my life doing physical culture
+exercises underneath it. You got into it at the back; it was about ten
+feet high, and you started it at the side by a handle in its midriff.
+But I loved it. It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and
+insulted it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go.
+But Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
+rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
+adventure.
+
+"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I don't keep a
+fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the donkey-cart. Get in
+and don't be so fastidious--unless you're afraid--"
+
+He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no attempt to
+enter the car.
+
+"Barbara gone away?"
+
+I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed by
+Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly unconcealed.
+
+"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
+business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."
+
+His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
+Northlands without Barbara--" He shook his head.
+
+We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though she
+choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were half way up
+the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who later on harnessed
+the donkey to her and pulled her into the motor-house. We dismounted,
+however, in the drive. A tiny figure in a blue smock came scuttling over
+the sloping lawn. The next thing I saw was the small blue patch
+somewhere in the upland region of Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth
+from him idiotic exclamations which are not worth chronicling,
+accompanied by a duet of bass and treble laughter. Then he set her
+astride of his bull neck and pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to
+hold.
+
+"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.
+
+She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish shock in
+her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an elephant with a robin
+on his head, unconscious of her weight. We mounted to the terrace in
+front of the house and having established my guests in easy chairs, I
+went indoors to order such drink as would be refreshing on a sultry
+August noon. When I returned I found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee,
+questioning Adrian, after the manner of a primitive savage, on the
+subject of "The Diamond Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity,
+dazzling our simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.
+
+"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked Jaffery. "Do
+you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a pen and jab it into
+a piece of paper, and--tchick!--up comes a golden sovereign every time
+he does it."
+
+Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she commanded.
+
+"I haven't got a pen," said he.
+
+"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
+Jaffery's knee.
+
+Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father of a
+feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I think,
+rather tactfully.
+
+"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old daddy
+hasn't got one."
+
+"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have you got
+one?"
+
+"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a golden
+pen in your mouth."
+
+The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his face and a
+doll in his mouth--the Archangel Gabriel, commonly known as Gabs, and so
+termed on account of his archi-angelic disposition, a hideous mongrel
+with a white patch over one eye and a brown patch over the other, with
+the nose of a collie and the legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a
+fox-terrier, whose mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold
+assertion that he was a Zanzibar bloodhound--the lucky advent of this
+pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from the
+somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the rescue
+or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to it to explain
+the mystery of the golden pen.
+
+"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said I, waving
+a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic widow?"
+
+"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene and
+sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll tell you
+about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar way, showing
+two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between the hair on lip
+and chin.
+
+"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What were
+you doing in Albania, for instance?"
+
+"Prospecting," said he.
+
+"In what--gold, coal, iron?"
+
+"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of these
+days--and one of these days very soon--in the Balkans. From Scutari to
+Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming triangle--it's going to be a
+battlefield. The war correspondent who goes out there not knowing his
+ground will be a silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So
+poor old Prescott--you must know Prescott of Reuter's?--anyhow that was
+the chap--poor old Prescott and I went out exploring. When he pegged out
+with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his widow down at Cettinje
+where I have some pals, and started out again on my own. That's all."
+
+He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always had to
+provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his throat.
+
+"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your adventures," said
+Adrian.
+
+Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if you'll
+give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and white
+handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.
+
+But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and for the
+next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his wanderings.
+He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his experiences, even
+those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the laughter got into his
+speech, so that many amusing episodes were told in the roars of a
+hilarious lion.
+
+Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
+Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
+front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door, appeared
+to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and almost hugged
+her. And there they stood holding on to each other's hands and smiling
+into each other's faces and saying how well they looked, regardless of
+the fact that they were blocking the way for Doria, who remained in the
+car, I had to move them on with the reminder that they had the whole
+week-end for their effusions. Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to
+Doria then, for the first time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery
+blinked at her oddly as he held her little gloved fingers in his
+enormous hand. And, indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very
+striking object to come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's
+vision, with her chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath
+which her great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white
+face.
+
+She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then after a
+fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so much of you."
+
+He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze of
+admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's waist. The
+ladies went indoors to take off their things, accompanied by Adrian, who
+wanted a lover's word with Doria on the way. Jaffery followed her with
+his eyes until she had disappeared at the corner of the hall-stairs.
+Then he took me by the arm and led me up towards the terrace.
+
+"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.
+
+"Doria Jornicroft," said I.
+
+"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my life."
+
+"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I with a
+laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged to Adrian."
+
+He dropped my arm. "Do you mean--she's going to marry him?"
+
+"Next month," said I.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not enlighten
+me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The most
+pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce didn't you
+tell me before?"
+
+"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought we would
+give you as long a respite as possible."
+
+"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that Adrian's
+fiancée was knocking around I'd have lumped her in my heart with Barbara
+and Susie."
+
+"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.
+
+His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy old
+Adrian getting married!"
+
+"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get married. I'm
+married."
+
+"Oh, you--you were born to be married," he said crushingly.
+
+"And so are you," I retorted.
+
+"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in petticoats,
+whom I should have to swear to love, honour and obey--?"
+
+"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears obedience."
+
+"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"
+
+His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
+adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her tail
+in the air and scampered away, in terror.
+
+"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can
+always cut them when you like."
+
+"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends and
+makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I know 'em?
+They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."
+
+He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
+institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
+provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
+multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
+But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
+untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
+conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
+scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
+them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
+spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
+colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.
+
+"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
+you were a devil of a fellow."
+
+"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory, or
+rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of those men
+who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs with air, who
+must get out into the wilds if they're to live--God! I'd sooner be
+snowed up on a battlefield than smirk at a damned afternoon tea-party
+any day in the week! If I want a woman, I like to take her by her hair
+and swing her up behind me on the saddle and ride away with her--"
+
+"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"
+
+"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But that's my
+attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would be for me to
+tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of a thing in
+petticoats."
+
+"You're a blessed innocent," said I.
+
+Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined us on
+the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his philosophy, caught
+him by the shoulders and shook him in pain-dealing exuberance. Old
+Adrian was going to be married. He wished him joy. Yet it was no use his
+wishing him joy because he already had it--it was assured. That
+exquisite wonder of a girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially
+lucky devil. He, Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .
+
+"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to you," said
+I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and swung her up
+behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her. It's a little way
+Jaffery has."
+
+In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face, Jaffery
+grew red.
+
+"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy that he
+was.
+
+And I shut up--not because he commanded, but because Barbara, like
+spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at noontide, appeared on
+the terrace.
+
+Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy Jaffery and
+Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they should sit next
+each other. He helped the child to impossible viands, much to my wife's
+dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories of Bulgaria, somewhat to her
+puzzledom, but wholly to her delight. But when he proposed to fill her
+silver mug (which he, as godfather, had given her on her baptism) with
+the liquefied dream of Paradise that Barbara, _sola mortalium_, can
+prepare, consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and
+borage and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
+Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the crystal
+jug of joy poised in his hand.
+
+"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"
+
+"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your mother's
+hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child and fill up your
+own glass."
+
+"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
+Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer holiday!"
+
+At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a
+handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold
+beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian
+butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he
+returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded
+it wide-eyed.
+
+"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible
+whisper.
+
+"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if
+I don't get enough to eat!"
+
+"And Aunt Doria?"
+
+Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.
+
+"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.
+
+It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
+inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
+with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
+out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
+appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
+lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
+We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
+devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
+interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
+new kind of hippopotamus.
+
+The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
+east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
+swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
+three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
+earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
+responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
+discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
+the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
+that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
+matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied
+attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its
+merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
+pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery's
+voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out
+of my head. I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.
+
+"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all
+that," Jaffery was saying--his light word about an ogre at lunch was not
+a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a
+vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf--she had taken off
+her hat--engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on
+the defensive--"and you're always tracking down motives to their roots,
+and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things--"
+
+"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual woman's
+nature, the blatant universalist has his points."
+
+"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like a
+dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against glass
+panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches off. Do
+you see what I'm driving at?"
+
+Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away his
+corona corona--a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and ninety-nine men
+out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had religiously preserved two
+inches of ash on his)--and hauled out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could
+not hear what she said. When she had finished, he edged a span nearer.
+
+"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple sort of
+savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian complications
+of feeling. I've had in my life"--he stuck pouch and pipe on the stone
+beside him--"I've had in my life just a few men I've loved--I don't
+count women--men--men I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one
+cares for people?"
+
+She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
+
+"The latest was poor Prescott--he has just pegged out--you'll hear soon
+enough about Prescott. There was Tom Castleton--has Adrian told you
+about Castleton--?"
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"He will--of course--a wonder of a fellow--up with us at Cambridge. He's
+dead. There only remains Hilary, our host, and Adrian."
+
+As far as I could gather--for she spoke in the ordinary tones of
+civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression that he was
+whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest bull--as far as I
+could gather, she said:
+
+"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than Mr.
+Freeth and Adrian."
+
+"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't. If I
+was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no prospect of
+earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and say, 'Keep me for
+the rest of my life'--and they would do it"
+
+"And would you do the same for either of them?"
+
+Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and towered
+over her.
+
+"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
+children's children."
+
+He sat down again in confusion at having been led into hyperbole. But he
+took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands, somewhat to her
+alarm--for, in her world, she was not accustomed to gigantic males
+laying unceremonious hold of her--
+
+"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this--that if Adrian's
+wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go away and cut my
+throat"
+
+Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
+willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends; whereupon he
+caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the terrace towards us,
+shouting out his news.
+
+"I've fixed it up with Doria"--he turned his head--"I can call you
+Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission--what else could she do? "We're
+going to be friends. And I say, Barbara, they'll want a wedding-present.
+What shall I give 'em? What would you like?"
+
+The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had followed
+demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for from the
+drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who marched up straight
+to Jaffery.
+
+"A lady to see you, sir"
+
+"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"
+
+He stared at Franklin, in dismay.
+
+"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put her down
+at the back entrance. She would not give her name."
+
+"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of a
+desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the slip."
+
+Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"
+
+Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:
+
+"The dynamic widow," said he.
+
+"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.
+
+But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She has no
+business to come running after you like this. She must be taught
+manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"
+
+She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, thereby
+demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her own house.
+
+Presently Franklin reappeared.
+
+"Mrs. Prescott," said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+That there should have been in the uncommon-tall young woman of buxom
+stateliness and prepossessing features, attired (to the mere masculine
+eye) in quite elegant black raiment--a thing called, I think, a picture
+hat, broad-brimmed with a sweeping ostrich feather, tickled my especial
+fancy, but was afterwards reviled by my wife as being entirely unsuited
+to fresh widowhood--what there should have been in this remarkable
+Junoesque young person who followed on the heels of Franklin to strike
+terror into Jaffery's soul, I could not, for the life of me, imagine. In
+the light of her personality I thought Barbara's _coup de théâtre_
+rather cruel. . . . Of course Barbara received her courteously. She,
+too, was surprised at her outward aspect, having expected to behold a
+fantastic personage of comic opera.
+
+"I am very pleased to see you, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+Liosha--I must call her that from the start, for she exists to me as
+Liosha and as nothing else--shook hands with Barbara, making a queer
+deep formal bow, and turned her calm, brown eyes on Jaffery. There was
+just a little quarter-second of silence, during which we all wondered in
+what kind of outlandish tongue she would address him. To our gasping
+astonishment she said with an unmistakable American intonation: "Mr.
+Chayne, will you have the kindness to introduce me to your friends?"
+
+I broke into a nervous laugh and grasped her hand "Pray allow me. I am
+Mr. Freeth, your much honoured host, and this is my wife, and . . .
+Miss Jornicroft . . . and Mr. Boldero. Mr. Chayne has been deceiving us.
+We thought you were an Albanian."
+
+"I guess I am," said the lady, after having made four ceremonious bows,
+"I am the daughter of Albanian patriots. They were murdered. One day I'm
+going back to do a little murdering on my own account."
+
+Barbara drew an audible short breath and Doria instinctively moved
+within the protective area of Adrian's arm. Jaffery, with knitted brow,
+leaned against one of the posts supporting the old wistaria arbour and
+said nothing, leaving me to exploit the lady.
+
+"But you speak perfect English," said I.
+
+"I was raised in Chicago. My parents were employed in the stockyards of
+Armour. My father was the man who slit the throats of the pigs. He was a
+dandy," she said in unemotional tones--and I noticed a little shiver of
+repulsion ripple through Barbara and Doria. "When I was twelve, my
+father kind of inherited lands in Albania, and we went back. Is there
+anything more you'd like to know?"
+
+She looked us all up and down, rather down than up, for she towered
+above us, perfectly unconcerned mistress of the situation. Naturally we
+made mute appeal to Jaffery. He stirred his huge bulk from the post and
+plunged his hands into his pockets.
+
+"I should like to know, Liosha," said he, in a rumble like thunder, "why
+you have left my sister Euphemia and what you are doing here?"
+
+"Euphemia is a damn fool," she said serenely. "She's a freak. She ought
+to go round in a show."
+
+"What have you been quarrelling about?" he asked.
+
+"I never quarrel," she replied, regarding him with her calm brown eyes.
+"It is not dignified."
+
+"Then I repeat, most politely, Liosha--what are you doing here?"
+
+She looked at Barbara. "I guess it isn't right to talk of money before
+strangers."
+
+Barbara smiled--glanced at me rebukingly. I pulled forward a chair and
+invited the lady to sit--for she had been standing and her astonishing
+entrance had flabbergasted ceremonious observance out of me. Whilst she
+was accepting my belated courtesy, Barbara continued to smile and said:
+
+"You mustn't look on us as strangers, Mrs. Prescott. We are all Mr.
+Chayne's oldest and most intimate friends."
+
+"Do tell us what the row was?" said Jaffery.
+
+Liosha took calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a pleasant-faced
+and by no means an antagonistic assembly--even Doria's curiosity lent
+her a semblance of a sense of humour--she relaxed her Olympian serenity
+and laughed a little, shewing teeth young and strong and exquisitely
+white.
+
+"I am here, Jaff Chayne," she said, "because Euphemia is a damn fool.
+She took me this morning to your big street--the one where all the shops
+are--"
+
+"My dear lady," said Adrian, "there are about a hundred miles of such
+streets in London."
+
+"There's only one--" she snapped her fingers, recalling the name--"only
+one Regent Street, I ever heard of," she replied crushingly. "It was
+Regent Street. Euphemia took me there to shew me the shops. She made me
+mad. For when I wanted to go in and buy things she dragged me away. If
+she didn't want me to buy things why did she shew me the shops?" She
+bent forward and laid her hand on Barbara's knee. "She must he a damn
+fool, don't you think so?"
+
+Said Barbara, somewhat embarrassed:
+
+"It's an amusement here to look at shops without any idea of buying."
+
+"But if one wants to buy? If one has the money to buy?--I did not want
+anything foolish. I saw jewels that would buy up the whole of Albania.
+But I didn't want to buy up Albania. Not yet. But I saw a glass cage in
+a shop window full of little chickens, and I said to Euphemia: 'I want
+that. I must have those chickens.' I said, 'Give me money to go in and
+buy them.' Do you know, Jaff Chayne, she refused. I said, 'Give me my
+money, my husband's money, this minute, to buy those chickens in the
+glass cage.' She said she couldn't give me my husband's money to spend
+on chickens."
+
+"That was very foolish of her," said Adrian solemnly, "for if there's
+one thing the management of the Savoy Hotel love, it's chicken
+incubators. They keep a specially heated suite of apartments for them."
+
+"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not. She knows
+less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She refused. I saw an
+automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he
+will give me the money.' He asked where Mr. Jaff Chayne was. I said he
+was staying with Mr. Freeth, at Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not
+a fool like Euphemia. I remember. I left Euphemia standing on the
+sidewalk with her mouth open like that"--she made the funniest grimace
+in the world--"and the automobile brought me here to get some money to
+buy the chickens." She held out her hand to Jaffery.
+
+"Confound the chickens," he cried. "It's the taxi I'm thinking
+of--ticking out tuppences, to say nothing of the mileage. Liosha," said
+he, in a milder roar, "it's no use thinking of buying chickens this
+afternoon. It's Saturday and the shops are shut. You go home before that
+automobile has ticked out bankruptcy and ruin. Go back to the Savoy and
+make your peace with Euphemia, like a good girl, and on Monday I'll talk
+to you about the chickens."
+
+She sat up straight in her chair.
+
+"You must take me somewhere else. I've got no use for Euphemia."
+
+"But where else can I take you?" cried Jaffery aghast.
+
+"I don't know. You know best where people go to in England. Doesn't he?"
+She included us all in a smile.
+
+"But you must go back to Euphemia till Monday, at any rate."
+
+"And she has arranged such a nice little programme for you," said
+Adrian. "A lecture on Tolstoi to-night and the City Temple to-morrow.
+Pity to miss 'em."
+
+"If I saw any more of Euphemia, I might hurt her," said Liosha.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Jaffery. "But you must go somewhere." He turned to me
+with a groan. "Look here, old chap. It's awfully rough luck, but I must
+take her back to the Savoy and mount guard over her so that she doesn't
+break my poor sister's neck."
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Liosha.
+
+"How far would you go?" Adrian asked politely, with the air of one
+seeking information.
+
+"Oh, shut up, you idiot," Jaffery turned on him savagely. "Can't you see
+the position I'm in?"
+
+"I'm very sorry you're angry, Jaff Chayne," said Liosha with a certain
+kind dignity. "But these are your friends. Their house is yours. Why
+should I not stay here with you?"
+
+"Here? Good God!" cried Jaffery.
+
+"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady
+manners.
+
+"The very thing," said I.
+
+Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested,
+growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing
+would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott.
+Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm.
+
+"But why shouldn't they have me? When a stranger asks for hospitality in
+Albania he is invited to walk right in and own the place. Is it refused
+in England?"
+
+"Strangers don't ask," growled Jaffery.
+
+"It would make life much more pleasant if they did," said Barbara,
+smiling. "Mrs. Prescott, this bear of a guardian or trustee or whatever
+he is of yours, makes a terrible noise--but he's quite harmless."
+
+"I know that," said Liosha.
+
+"He does what I tell him," the little lady continued, drawing herself up
+majestically beside Jaffery's great bulk. "He's going to stay here, and
+so will you, if you will so far honour us."
+
+Liosha rose and bowed. "The honour is mine."
+
+"Then will you come this way--I will shew you your room."
+
+She motioned to Liosha to precede her through the French window of the
+drawing-room. Before disappearing Liosha bowed again. I caught up
+Barbara.
+
+"My dear, what about clothes and things?"
+
+"My dear," she said, "there's a telephone, there's a taxi, there's a
+maid, there's the Savoy hotel, and there's a train to bring back maid
+and clothes."
+
+When Barbara takes command like this, the wise man effaces himself. She
+would run an Empire with far less fuss than most people devote to the
+running of a small sweet-stuff shop. I smiled and returned to the
+others. Jaffery was again filling his huge pipe.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+Adrian burst out laughing "But she's immense, your widow! The most
+refreshing thing I've seen for many a day. The way she clears the place
+of the cobwebs of convention! She's great. Isn't she, Doria?"
+
+"I can quite understand Mr. Chayne finding her an uncomfortable charge."
+
+"Thank you," said Jaffery, with rather unnecessary vehemence. "I knew
+you would be sympathetic." He dropped into a chair by her side. "You
+can't tell what an awful thing it is to be responsible for another human
+being."
+
+"Heaps of people manage to get through with it--every husband and
+wife--every mother and father."
+
+"Yes; but not many poor chaps who are neither father nor husband are
+responsible for another fellow's grown-up widow."
+
+Doria smiled. "You must find her another husband."
+
+"That's a great idea. Will you help me? Before I knew of Adrian's great
+good fortune, I wrote to Hilary--ho! ho! ho! But we must find somebody
+else."
+
+"Has she any money?" asked Doria, who smiled but faintly at the jocular
+notion of a Liosha-bound Adrian.
+
+"Prescott left her about a thousand a year. He was pretty well off, for
+a war-correspondent."
+
+"I don't think she'll have much difficulty. Do you know," she added,
+after a moment or two of reflection, "if I were you, I would establish
+her in a really first-class boarding-house."
+
+"Would that be a good way?" Jaffery asked simply.
+
+She nodded. "The best. She seems to have fallen foul of your sister."
+
+"The dearest old soul that ever lived," said Jaffery.
+
+"That's why. I'm sure I know your sister perfectly. The daughter of an
+Albanian patriot who used to kill pigs in Chicago--why, what can your
+poor sister do with her? Your sister is much older than you, isn't she?"
+
+"Ten years. How did you guess?"
+
+Doria smiled with feminine wisdom. "She's the gentlest maiden lady that
+ever was. It's only a man that could have thought of saddling her with
+our friend. Well--that's impossible. She would be the death of your
+sister in a week. You can't look after her yourself--that wouldn't be
+proper."
+
+"And it would be the death of me too!" said Jaffery.
+
+"You can't leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the poor
+woman would die of boredom. The only thing that remains is the
+boarding-house."
+
+Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen Goth
+receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.
+
+"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."
+
+"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not displayed
+enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.
+
+So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on the
+mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
+exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts.
+Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry
+convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own;
+she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to the type for whom
+vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had made no vows, save of
+loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided they are kept, are
+perfectly consistent with a man's falling hopelessly, despairingly in
+love with his friend's affianced bride. And, as far as Barbara and
+myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that
+Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call _le
+coup de foudre_, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had
+first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise
+the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at
+her little feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.
+
+The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a hitherto
+undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of
+a wife. Why he married her has never been told. Why the mortal male whom
+we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing
+mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an
+insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we
+expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of
+matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The
+ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
+love--and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum,
+there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the
+world worth the hearing--we have quite a different condition of affairs.
+Did you ever hear of an ogre sighing himself to a shadow for love of a
+gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending
+his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin
+princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a
+wraith of a creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and
+stars. He stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy,
+feathery tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand.
+Its touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his
+arm. He has a mighty respect for her. He could take her up in his
+fingers and eat her like a quail--the one satisfactory method of eating
+a quail is unfortunately practised only by ogres--but he does not want
+to eat her. He goes on his knees, and invites her to chew any portion of
+him that may please her dainty taste. In short he makes the very
+silliest ass of himself, and the elfin princess, who of course has come
+into contact with the Real Beautiful Young Man of the Story Books, won't
+have anything to do with the Ogre; and if he is more rumbustious than he
+ought to be, generally finds a way to send him packing. And so the poor
+Ogre remains, planted there. The Fairy Tales, I remark again, are very
+true in demonstrating that the Ogre loves the elf and not the Ogress.
+But all the same they are deucedly unsympathetic towards the poor Ogre.
+The only sympathetic one I know is Beauty and the Beast; and even that
+is a mere begging of the question, for the Beast was a handsome young
+nincompoop of a Prince all the time!
+
+Barbara says that this figurative, allusive adumbration of Jaffery's
+love affair is pure nonsense. Anything less like an ogre than our
+overgrown baby of a friend it would he impossible to imagine. But I hold
+to my theory; all the more because when Adrian and I returned from our
+stroll round the garden, we found Jaffery standing over her, legs apart,
+like a Colossus of Rhodes, and roaring at her like a sucking dove. I
+noticed a scared, please-don't-eat-me look in her eyes. It was the ogre
+(trying to make himself agreeable) and the princess to the life.
+
+Presently tea was brought out, and with it came Barbara, a quiet laugh
+about her lips, and Liosha, stately and smiling. My wife to put her at
+her ease (though she had displayed singularly little shyness), after
+dealing with maid and taxi, had taken her over the house, exhibited
+Susan at tea in the nursery, and as much of Doria's trousseau as was
+visible in the sewing-room. The approaching marriage aroused her keen
+interest. She said very little during the meal, but smiled
+embarrassingly on the engaged pair. Jaffery stood glumly devouring
+cucumber sandwiches, till Barbara took him aside.
+
+"She's rather a dear, in spite of everything, and I think you're
+treating her abominably."
+
+Jaffery grew scarlet beneath the brick-coloured glaze.
+
+"I wouldn't treat any woman abominably, if I could help it."
+
+"Well, you can help it--" and taking pity on him, she laughed in his
+face. "Can't you take her as a joke?"
+
+He glanced quietly at the lady. "Rather a heavy one," he said.
+
+"Anyhow come and talk to us and be civil to her. Imagine she's the
+Vicar's wife come to call."
+
+Jaffery's elementary sense of humour was tickled and he broke out into a
+loud guffaw that sent the house cat, a delicate mendicant for food,
+scuttling across the lawn. The sight of the terror-stricken animal
+aroused the rest of the party to harmless mirth.
+
+"Tell me, Mrs. Prescott," said Adrian, "was he allowed to do that in
+Albania?"
+
+"I guess there aren't many things Jaff Chayne can't do in Albania,"
+replied Liosha. "He has the _bessas_ that carry him through and he's as
+brave as a lion."
+
+"I suppose you like brave men?" said Doria.
+
+"A woman who married a coward would be a damn fool--especially in
+Albania. I guess there aren't many in my mountains."
+
+"I wish you would tell us about your mountains," said Barbara
+pleasantly.
+
+"And at the same time," said I, "Jaff might let us hear his story. That
+is to say if you have no objection, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+"With us," said Liosha, "the guest is expected to talk about himself;
+for if he's a guest he's one of the family."
+
+"Shall I go ahead then?" asked Jaffery, "and you chip in whenever you
+feel like it?"
+
+"That would be best," replied Liosha.
+
+And having lit a cigarette and settled herself in her deck-chair, she
+motioned to Jaffery to proceed. And there in the shade of the old
+wistaria arbour, surrounded by such dainty products of civilisation as
+Adrian (in speckless white flannels and violet socks) and the tea-table
+(in silver and egg-shell china) this pair of barbarians told their tale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It is some years now since that golden August afternoon, and my memory
+of the details of the story of Liosha as told by Jaffery and illustrated
+picturesquely by the lady herself is none of the most precise.
+Incidentally I gathered, then and later in the smoking-room from Jaffery
+alone, a prodigious amount of information about Albania which, if I had
+imprisoned it in writing that same evening as the perfect diarist is
+supposed to do, would have been vastly useful to me at the present
+moment. But I am as a diarist hopelessly imperfect. I stare, now, as I
+write, at the bald, uninspiring page. This is my entry for Aug. 4th,
+19--.
+
+"Weighed Susan. 4 st. 3.
+
+"Met Jaffery at station.
+
+"Albanian widow turned up unexpectedly after lunch. Fine woman. Going to
+be a handful. Staying week-end. Story of meeting and Prescott marriage.
+
+"Promised Susan a donkey ride. Where the deuce does one get donkeys
+warranted quiet and guaranteed to carry a lady? _Mem:_ Ask Torn
+Fletcher.
+
+"_Mem:_ Write to Launebeck about cigars."
+
+Why I didn't write straight off to Launebeck about the cigars, instead
+of "mem-ing" it, may seem a mystery. It isn't. It is a comfortable habit
+of mine. Once having "mem-ed" an unpleasant thing in my diary, the
+matter is over. I dismiss it from my mind. But to return to Liosha--I
+find in my entry of sixty-two words thirty-five devoted to Susan, her
+donkey and the cigars, and only twenty-seven to the really astonishing
+events of the day. Of course I am angry. Of course I consult Barbara. Of
+course she pats the little bald patch on the top of my head and laughs
+in a superior way and invents, with a paralysing air of verity, an
+impossible amplification of the "story of meeting and Prescott
+marriage." And of course, the frivolous Jaffery, now that one really
+wants him, is sitting astride of a cannon, and smoking a pipe and,
+notebook and pencil in hand, is writing a picturesque description of the
+bungling decapitation by shrapnel of the general who has just been
+unfolding to him the whole plan of the campaign, and consequently is
+provokingly un-getatable by serious persons like myself[A].
+
+[Footnote A: Hilary is writing at the end of the late Balkan
+war.--W.J.L.]
+
+So for what I learned that day I must trust to the elusive witch,
+Memory. I have never been to Albania. I have never wanted to go to
+Albania. Even now, I haven't the remotest desire to go to Albania. I
+should loathe it. Wherever I go nowadays, I claim as my right bedroom
+and bath and viands succulent to the palate and tender to the teeth. My
+demands are modest. But could I get them in Albania? No. Could one
+travel from Scutari to Monastir in the same comfort as one travels from
+London to Paris or from New York to Chicago? No. Does any sensible man
+of domestic instincts and scholarly tastes like to find himself halfway
+up an inaccessible mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed
+desperadoes in fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of
+pistols, daggers and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical
+demonstration with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with
+a mania of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your
+repose, to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call
+the flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They were
+made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other irresponsible
+phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit, as windscreens and
+water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can assume very pretty
+colours, owing to varying atmospheric conditions; and the more jagged
+and unenticing they are, the greater is their specious air of
+stupendousness. . . . At any rate they are hindrances to convenient
+travel and so I go among them as little as possible.
+
+To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and Liosha,
+Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to live in. It is
+divided into three religious sects, then re-divided into heaven knows
+how many tribes. What it will be when it gets autonomy and a government
+and a parliament and picture-palaces no one yet knows. But at the time
+when my two friends met it was in about as chaotic a condition as a
+jungle. Some tribes acknowledged the rule of the Turk. Others did not.
+Every mountainside had a pretty little anarchical system of its own.
+Every family had a pretty little blood feud with some other family.
+Accordingly every man was handy with knife and gun and it was every
+maiden's dream to be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel
+in the neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
+Liosha.
+
+When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
+prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he lived,
+I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been betrothed years
+before. The price her father demanded was high. Not only did he hold a
+notable position on his mountain, but he had travelled to the fabulous
+land of America and could read and write and could speak English and
+could handle a knife with peculiar dexterity. Again, Liosha was no
+ordinary Albanian maiden. She too had seen the world and could read and
+write and speak English. She had a will of her own and had imbibed
+during her Chicago childhood curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine
+independence. Being beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize
+bride worth (in her father's eyes) her weight in gold.
+
+It was to try to reduce this excessive valuation that the young
+cutthroat visited his father's house. During the night two families, one
+of whom had a feud with the host and another with the guest, each
+attended by an army of merry brigands, fell upon the sleeping homestead,
+murdered everybody except Liosha, who managed to escape, plundered
+everything plunderable, money, valuables, household goods and live
+stock, and then set fire to the house and everything within sight that
+could burn. After which they marched away singing patriotic hymns. When
+they had gone Liosha crept out of the cave wherein she had hidden, and
+surveyed the scene of desolation.
+
+"I tell you, I felt just mad," said Liosha at this stage of the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember Barbara and Doria staring at her open-mouthed. Instead of
+fainting or going into hysterics or losing her wits at the sight of the
+annihilation of her entire kith and kin--including her bridegroom to
+be--and of her whole worldly possessions, Liosha "felt just mad," which
+as all the world knows is the American vernacular for feeling very
+angry.
+
+"It was enough to turn any woman into a raving lunatic," gasped Barbara.
+
+"Guess it didn't turn me," replied Liosha contemptuously.
+
+"But what did you do?" asked Dora.
+
+"I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with that
+crowd." She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.
+
+[Illustration: Where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.]
+
+"And that's where we came in, don't you see?" interposed Jaffery
+hastily.
+
+You can imagine the scene. The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red and
+hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain path on
+ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of despair where
+the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding.
+
+Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form
+acquaintance. She told her story to the two horror-stricken men. British
+instinct cried out for justice. They would take her straight to the Vali
+or whatever authority ruled in the wild land, so that punishment should
+be inflicted on the murderers. But she laughed at them. It would take an
+army to dislodge her enemies from their mountain fastnesses. And who
+could send an army but the Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his
+head over the massacre of a few Christians? As for a local government,
+the _mallisori_, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any. The
+Englishmen swore softly. Liosha nodded her head and agreed with them.
+What was to be done? The Englishmen, alter giving her food and drink
+which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place where she
+could find relations or friends. Again she laughed scornfully.
+
+"All my relations lie there"--she pointed to the smoking ruins. "And I
+have no friends. And as for your escorting me--why I guess it would be
+much more use my escorting you."
+
+"And where would you escort us?"
+
+"God knows," she said.
+
+Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world, homeless
+and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were responsible to
+God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who spoke the English
+of the stockyards of Chicago. Again what was to be done? They could take
+her back to Scutari, whence they had come, in the hope of finding a
+Roman Catholic sisterhood. The proposal evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm.
+Liosha being convinced that they would turn her into a nun--the last
+avocation in the world she desired to adopt. Her simple idea was to go
+out to America, like her father, return with many bags of gold and
+devote her life to the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of
+her enemies. When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she
+replied that she would work in the packing-houses like her mother. But
+how, they asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago? "It
+must come from you!" she said. And the men looked at each other, feeling
+mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves. Then,
+being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she asked them what
+they were doing in Albania. They explained. They were travellers from
+England, wandering for pleasure through the Balkans. They had come from
+Scutari, as far as they could, in a motor-car. Liosha had never heard of
+a motor-car. They described it as a kind of little railway-engine that
+didn't need rails to run upon. At the foot of the mountains they had
+left it at a village inn and bought the ragged ponies. They were just
+going ahead exploring.
+
+"Do you know the way?" she asked with a touch of contempt.
+
+They didn't.
+
+"Then I guess I'll guide you. You pay me wages every day until you're
+tired and I'll use the money to go out to Chicago." And seeing them
+hesitate, she added: "No one's going to hurt me. A woman is safe in
+Albania. And if I'm with you, no one will hurt you. But if you go on by
+yourselves you'll very likely get murdered."
+
+Fantastic as was her intention, they knew that, as far as they
+themselves were concerned, she spoke common-sense. So it came to pass
+that Liosha, having left them for a few moments to take grim farewell of
+the charred remains of her family lying hidden beneath the smouldering
+wreckage, returned to them with a calm face, mounted one of the ponies
+and pointing before her, led the way into the mountains.
+
+Now, if old Jaff would only sit down and write this absurd Odyssey in
+the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to me, he would
+produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But he never will. As
+a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few Westerners have done
+and learned useful bits of language and made invaluable friends, and
+although he appreciated the journey's adventurous and humorous side, it
+did not afford him complete satisfaction. A day or two after their
+start, Prescott began to shew signs of peculiar interest in their guide.
+In spite of her unquestioning readiness to shoulder burdens, Prescott
+would run to relieve her. Liosha has assured me that Jaffery did the
+same--and indeed I cannot conceive Jaffery allowing a female companion
+to stagger along under a load which he could swing onto his huge back
+and carry like a walnut. To go further--she maintains that the two
+quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation of her labours, so much so,
+that often before they had ended their quarrel, she had performed the
+task in dispute. This of course Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was
+there, paid to do certain things, and she had to do them. The way
+Prescott spoiled her and indulged her, as though she were a little
+dressed-up cat in a London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman
+accustomed to throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head,
+was simply sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's
+infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. Jaffery
+talked (not before Liosha, but to Adrian and myself, that night, after
+the ladies had gone to bed) as if the girl had woven a Vivien spell
+around his poor friend. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's way. . . .
+
+At all events, whether Jaffery was jealous or not, it is certain that
+Prescott fell wildly, blindly, overwhelmingly in love with Liosha.
+Considering the close intimacy of their lives; considering that they
+were in ceaseless contact with this splendid creature, untrammelled by
+any convention, daughter of the earth, yet chaste as her own mountain
+winds; and considering that both of them were hot-blooded men, the only
+wonder is that they did not fly at each other's throats, or dash in each
+other's heads with stones, after the fashion of prehistoric males. It is
+my well-supported conviction, however, that Jaffery, honest old bear,
+seeing his comrade's very soul set upon the honey, trotted off and left
+him to it, and made pretence (to satisfy his ursine conscience) of
+growling his sarcastic disapproval.
+
+"The devil of it was," he declared that night, with a sweep of his arm
+that sent a full glass of whiskey and soda hurtling across space to my
+bookshelves and ruining some choice bindings--"the devil of it was,"
+said he, after expressing rueful contrition, "that she treated him like
+a dog, whereas I could do anything I liked with her. But she married
+him."
+
+Of course she married him. Most Albanian young women in her position
+would have married a brave and handsome Englishman of incalculable
+wealth--even if they had not Liosha's ulterior motives. And beyond
+question Liosha had ulterior motives. Prescott espoused her cause hotly.
+He convinced her that he was a power in Europe. As a Reuter
+correspondent he did indeed possess power. He would make the civilised
+world ring with this tale of bloodshed and horror. He would beard
+Sultans in their lairs and Emperors in their dens. He would bring down
+awful vengeance on the heads of her enemies. How Sultans and Emperors
+were to do it was as obscure as at the horror-filled hour of their first
+meeting. But a man vehemently in love is notoriously blind to practical
+considerations. Prescott put his life into her hands. She accepted it
+calmly; and I think it was this calmness of acceptance that infuriated
+Jaffery. If she had been likewise caught in the whirlpool of a mad
+passion, Jaffery would have had nothing to say. But she did not (so he
+maintained) care a button for Prescott, and Prescott would not believe
+it. She had promised to marry him. That ideal of magnificent womanhood
+had promised to marry him. They were to be married--think of that, my
+boy!--as soon as they got back to Scutari and found a British Consul and
+a priest or two to marry them. "Then for God's sake," roared Jaffery,
+"let us trek to Scutari. I'm fed up with playing gooseberry. The Giant
+Gooseberry. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+So they shortened their projected journey and, making a circuit, picked
+up the motor-car--a joy and wonder to Liosha. She wanted to drive
+it--over the rutted wagon-tracks that pass for roads in Albania--and
+such was Prescott's infatuation that he would have allowed her to do so.
+But Jaffery sat an immovable mountain of flesh at the wheel and brought
+them safely to Scutari. There arrangements were made for the marriage
+before the British Vice-Consul. On the morning of the ceremony Prescott
+fell ill. The ceremony was, however, performed. Towards evening he was
+in high fever. The next morning typhoid declared itself. In two or three
+days he was dead. He had made a will leaving everything to his wife,
+with Jaffery as sole executor and trustee.
+
+This sorry ending of poor Prescott's romance--I never knew him, but
+shall always think of him as a swift and vehement spirit--was told very
+huskily by Jaffery beneath the wistaria arbour. Tears rolled down
+Barbara's and Doria's cheeks. My wife's sympathetic little hand slid
+into Liosha's. With her other hand Liosha fondled it. I am sure it was
+rather gratitude for this little feminine act than poignant emotion that
+moistened Liosha's beautiful eyes.
+
+"I haven't had much luck, have I?"
+
+"No, my poor dear, you haven't," cried Barbara in a gush of kindness.
+
+In the course of a few weeks to have one's affianced husband murdered
+and one's legal though nominal husband spirited away by disease, seemed
+in the eyes of my gentle wife to transcend all records of human tragedy.
+Very soon afterwards she made a pretext for taking Liosha away from us,
+and I had the extraordinary experience of seeing my proud little
+Barbara, who loathes the caressive insincerities prevalent among women,
+cross the lawn with her arm around Liosha's waist.
+
+The rest of the bare bones of the story I have already told you.
+Jaffery, after burying his poor comrade, took ship with Liosha and went
+to Cettinje, where he entrusted her to the care of old friends of his,
+the Austrian Consul and his wife, and made her known as the widow of
+Prescott of Reuter's to the British diplomatic authorities. Then having
+his work to do, he started forth again, a heavy-hearted adventurer, and,
+when it was over, he picked up Liosha, for whom Frau von Hagen had
+managed to procure a stock of more or less civilised raiment, and
+brought her to London to make good her claim, under Prescott's will, to
+her dead husband's fortune.
+
+Now this is Jaffery all over. Put him on a battlefield with guns going
+off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of a herd of
+crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation, and will
+telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of the born
+journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life, which a child
+of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and he is scared to
+death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for instance, when he arrived in
+London, or any other sensible woman, say, like Frau von Hagen of
+Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a timid maiden lady of forty-five,
+from her tea-parties and Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge
+Wells, and plants her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this
+disconcerting product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady
+was at her wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born
+baby or a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to
+this type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
+the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing the
+fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.
+
+"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
+day--they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk before
+dinner--"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi! My dear Jaffery!
+And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the girl to church, why not
+her own church, the Brompton Oratory or Farm Street?"
+
+"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship--she still calls it
+Popish, poor dear--to save her soul alive, or anybody else's soul,"
+replied Jaffery.
+
+"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara. "She's
+even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal. I'll see to
+Liosha."
+
+Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous of her,
+but he couldn't dream of it.
+
+"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And there's
+Franklin. Come to dinner."
+
+"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.
+
+We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha, who sat on
+my right, refreshingly free in her table manners (embarrassingly so to
+my most correct butler), was equally free in her speech. She provided me
+with excellent entertainment. I learned many frank truths about Albanian
+women, for whom, on account of their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed
+the most scathing contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, were
+full size. Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
+disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
+grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
+great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth Century
+product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue Laundry,
+merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha, for all her
+yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise annoy her enemies,
+did not greatly regret the loss of the distinguished young Albanian
+cutthroat who was her affianced. Had he lived she would have spent the
+rest of her days in saying, like Melisande, "I am not happy." She would
+have been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving
+drudge, while he went triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among
+the scattered Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a
+whole-hearted detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that
+the death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that it
+might have done.
+
+You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian, wanted to
+run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds of civilisation.
+His daughter (woman the world over) was all for hunting. He had spent
+twenty years in America. By a law of gravitation, natural only in that
+Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago, he had come across an Albanian
+wife. . . .
+
+Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me tell you
+a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery Chayne or
+Liosha--except perhaps to shew that there is no reason why a Tierra del
+Fuegan foundling should not run across his long-lost brother on Michigan
+Avenue, and still less reason why Albanian male should not meet Albanian
+female in Armour's stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged
+on, as I said on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't
+see why I should not put into them anything I choose.
+
+An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received a
+representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to interview him.
+The interviewer was a typical American reporter, blue-eyed, high
+cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung, courteous, intensely alive,
+desirous to get to the heart of my friend's mystery, and charmingly
+responsive to his frank welcome. They talked. My friend, to give the
+young man his story, discoursed on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of
+the conglomeration of all the races under Heaven. To point his remarks
+and mark his contrasts he used the words "we English" and "you
+Americans." After a time the young man smiled and said: "But am not an
+American--at least I'm an American citizen, but I'm not a born
+American."
+
+"But," cried my friend, "you're the essence of America."
+
+"No," said the young man, "I'm an Icelander."
+
+Thus it was natural for Liosha's father to find an Albanian wife in
+Chicago. She too was superficially Americanised. When they returned to
+Albania with their purely American daughter, they at first found it
+difficult to appear superficial Albanians. Liosha had to learn Albanian
+as a foreign language, her parents and herself always speaking English
+among themselves. But the call of the blood rang strong in the veins of
+the elders. Robbery and assassination on the heroic scale held for the
+man an irresistible attraction, and he acquired great skill at the
+business; and the woman, who seems to have been of a lymphatic
+temperament, sank without murmuring into the domestic subjection into
+which she had been born. It was only Liosha who rebelled. Hence her
+complicated attitude towards life, and hence her entertaining talk at
+the dinner table.
+
+I enjoyed myself. So, I think, did everybody. When the ladies rose,
+Jaffery, who was nearest the door, opened it for them to pass out,
+Barbara, the last, lingered for a second or two and laid her hand on
+Jaffery's arm and looked up at him out of her teasing blue eyes.
+
+"My dear Jaff," she said, "what kind of a dinner do you eat when you
+_are_ hungry?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Barbara having freed Jaffery from immediate anxieties with regard to
+Liosha, easily persuaded him to pay a longer visit than he had proposed.
+A telephonic conversation with a first distracted, then
+conscience-smitten and then much relieved Euphemia had for effect the
+payment of bills at the Savoy and the retreat of the gentle lady to
+Tunbridge Wells. Liosha remained with us, pending certain negotiations
+darkly carried on by my wife and Doria in concert. During this time I
+had some opportunity of observing her from a more philosophic standpoint
+and my judgment was--I will not say formed--but aided by Barbara's
+confidential revelations. When not directly thwarted, she seemed to be
+good-natured. She took to Susan--a good sign; and Susan took to her--a
+better. Finding that her idea of happiness was to sprawl about the
+garden and let the child run over her and inveigle her into childish
+games and call her "Loshie" (a disrespectful mode of address which I had
+all the pains in the world in persuading Barbara to permit) and
+generally treat her as an animate instrument of entertainment, we
+smoothed down every obstacle that might lie in this particular path to
+beatitude. So many difficulties were solved. Not only were we spared the
+problem of what the deuce to do with Liosha during the daytime, but also
+Barbara was able to send the nurse away for a short and much needed
+holiday. Of course Barbara herself undertook all practical duties; but
+when she discovered that Liosha experienced primitive delight in
+bathing Susan--Susan's bath being a heathen rite in which ducks and fish
+and swimming women and horrible spiders played orgiac parts, and in
+getting up at seven in the morning--("Good God! Is there such an hour?"
+asked Adrian, when he heard about it)--in order to breakfast with Susan,
+and in dressing and undressing her and brushing her hair, and in
+tramping for miles by her side while with Basset, her vassal, in
+attendance, Susan rode out on her pony; when Barbara, in short, became
+aware of this useful infatuation, she pandered to it, somewhat
+shamelessly, all the time, however, keeping an acute eye on the zealous
+amateur. If, for instance, Liosha had picked a bushel of nectarines and
+had established herself with Susan, in the corner of the fruit garden,
+for a debauch, which would have had, for consequence, a child's funeral,
+Barbara, by some magic of motherhood, sprang from the earth in front of
+them with her funny little smile and her "Only one--and a very ripe
+one--for Susan, dear Liosha." And in these matters Liosha was as much
+overawed by Barbara as was Susan.
+
+This, I repeat, was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she would
+have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my child was
+naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She was _rarissinia
+avis_ in the lands of small girls--one of the few points on which
+Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement. No one could have helped
+falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in the case of Liosha, who was
+an out-of-the-way, incalculable sort of creature--it was a good sign.
+Perhaps, considering the short period during which I had her under close
+observation, it was the best sign. She had grievous faults.
+
+One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, Barbara burst into my
+dressing-room.
+
+"Reynolds has given me notice."
+
+"Oh," said I, not desisting (as is the callous way of husbands the world
+over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of my tie. "What
+for?"
+
+"Liosha has just gone for her with a pair of scissors."
+
+"Horrible!" said I, getting the ends even. "I can imagine nothing more
+finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat with nail scissors,
+especially when the subject is unwilling."
+
+Barbara pished and pshawed. It was no occasion for levity.
+
+"I agree," said I. The dressing hour is the calmest and most philosophic
+period of the day.
+
+Barbara came up to me blue eyed and innocent, and with a traitorous
+jerk, undid my beautiful white bow.
+
+"There, now listen."
+
+And I, dilapidated wretch, had to listen to the tale of crime. It
+appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a
+ready-made gown--a model gown I believe is the correct term--insisted on
+her being properly corseted. Liosha, agonisingly constricted, rebelled.
+The maid was obdurate. Liosha flew at her with a pair of scissors. I
+think I should have done the same. Reynolds bolted from the room. So
+should I have done. I sympathised with both of them. Reynolds fled to
+her mistress, and, declaring it to be no part of her duty to wait on
+tigers, gave notice.
+
+"We can't lose Reynolds," said I.
+
+"Of course we can't."
+
+"And we can't pack Liosha off at a moment's notice, so as to please
+Reynolds."
+
+"Oh, you're too wise altogether," said my wife, and left me to the
+tranquil completion of my dressing.
+
+Liosha came down to dinner very subdued, after a short, sharp interview
+with Barbara, who, for so small a person, can put on a prodigious air of
+authority. As a punishment for bloodthirsty behaviour she had made her
+wear the gown in the manner prescribed by Reynolds; and she had
+apologised to Reynolds, who thereupon withdrew her notice. So serenity
+again prevailed.
+
+In some respects Liosha was very childish. The receipt of letters, no
+matter from whom--even bills, receipts and circulars--gave her
+overwhelming joy and sense of importance. This harmless craze, however,
+led to another outburst of ferocity. Meeting the postman outside the
+gate she demanded a letter. The man looked through his bundle.
+
+"Nothing for you this morning, ma'am."
+
+"I wrote to the dressmaker yesterday," said Liosha, "and you've got the
+reply right there."
+
+"I assure you I haven't," said the postman.
+
+"You're a liar," cried Liosha, "and I guess I'm going to see."
+
+Whereupon Liosha, who was as strong as a young horse, sprang to
+death-grapple with the postman, a puny little man, pitched him onto the
+side of the road and calmly entered into felonious possession of His
+Majesty's mails. Then finding no letter she cast the whole delivery over
+the supine and gasping postman and marched contemptuously into the
+house.
+
+The most astonishing part of the business was that in these outbreaks of
+barbarity she did not seem to be impelled by blind rage. Most people who
+heave a postman about a peaceful county would do so in a fit of passion,
+through loss of nerve-control. Not so Liosha. She did these things with
+the bland and deadly air of an inexorable Fate.
+
+The perspiration still beads on my brow when I think of the cajoling and
+bribing and blustering and lying I had to practise in order to hush up
+the matter. As for Liosha, both Jaffery and I rated her soundly. I
+explained loftily that not so many years ago, transportation, lifelong
+imprisonment, death were the penalties for the felony which she had
+committed.
+
+[Illustration: Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.]
+
+"You ought to have a jolly good thrashing," roared Jaffery.
+
+At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes of
+angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall table and
+handed it to the red-bearded giant.
+
+"I guess I do," she said. "Beat me."
+
+And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her at her
+word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing without a
+murmur. What was one to do with such a woman?
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek. Gradually she
+raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was startled to see the
+most extraordinary doglike submission. He frowned portentously and shook
+his head. Her lips worked, and after a convulsive sob or two, she threw
+herself on the ground, clasped his knees, and to our dismay burst into a
+passion of weeping. Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture,
+like a fairy tornado, released us from our embarrassing position. She
+annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.
+
+"Oh, go away, both of you, go away!"
+
+So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.
+
+Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very
+pleasantly. Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight (it
+was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course. Adrian and
+Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to justify my
+position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard at a Persian
+Grammar. Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime arranging for
+Liosha's future. Her organising genius had brought Doria's suggestion as
+to the First Class London Boarding House into the sphere of practical
+things. The Boarding House idea alone would not work; but, combine it
+with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran on wheels.
+
+"Even you," said Barbara, as though I were a sort of Schopenhauer, a
+professional disparager of her sex--"even you have a high opinion of
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+I had. Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine. She was not very
+beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very angelic or very
+anything--but she was one of those women of whom everybody has a high
+opinion. The impoverished widow of an Indian soldierman, with a son
+soldiering somewhere in India, she managed to do a great deal on very
+small means. She was a woman of the world, a woman of character. She
+knew how to deal with people of queer races. Heaven indicated her for
+appointment by Barbara as Liosha's duenna in the Boarding House. Mrs.
+Considine, herself compelled to live in these homes for the homeless,
+gladly accepted the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who
+happened then to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away,
+so to speak, with her contract in her pocket. It was part of the
+programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha's
+education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil into her
+a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and gradually root
+out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to death. It was a
+capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of a smile, in which,
+seeing Barbara's shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I suppressed the irony.
+
+When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most care-free
+fellow alive. His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude towards Liosha
+changed. He established himself as fellow slave with her under the whip
+of Susan's tyranny. It did one good to see these two magnificent
+creatures sporting together for the child's, and incidentally their own,
+amusement. For the first time during their intercourse they met on the
+same plane.
+
+"She's really quite a good sort," said Jaffery.
+
+But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more
+touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed so
+anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
+puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
+herself to read him little lectures.
+
+"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him one
+day.
+
+"Do you think I am?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said apologetically--"when
+there's one for me to do. And when there isn't I kind of prepare myself
+for the next. For instance I've got to keep myself always fit."
+
+"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
+superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self that
+matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of self-development. If
+a human being is the same at the end of a year as he was at the
+beginning he has made no spiritual progress."
+
+Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived," said
+he.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from one year's
+end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent, and so, that I
+don't live."
+
+"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every one
+must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the conscious
+striving after spiritual progress is so necessary--and you seem to put
+it aside. It is such waste of life."
+
+"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.
+
+She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see--well, what do you
+do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make notes about them
+in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the future. When you come
+across anything to kill, you kill it. It also pleases you to come across
+anything that calls for an exercise of strength. When there is a war or
+a revolution or anything that takes you to your real work, as you call
+it, you've only got to go through it and report what you see."
+
+"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every chap
+that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign. And it
+isn't every chap that can _see_ the things he ought to write about.
+That's when the training comes in."
+
+Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession, my dear
+Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the Alpha and Omega
+of things? Don't you see? The real life is intellectual, spiritual,
+emotional. What are your ideals?"
+
+Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools of eyes lay the
+spirituality that made her a mystery so sacred. He, great hulking
+fellow, was a gross lump of clay. Ideals?
+
+"I don't suppose I have any," said he.
+
+"But you must. Everybody has, to a certain extent."
+
+"Well, to ride straight and tell the truth--like the ancient Persians, I
+suppose it was the Persians--anyway it's a sort of rough code I've got."
+
+"Have you read Nietzsche?" she asked suddenly.
+
+He frowned perplexedly. "Nietzsche--that's the mad superman chap, isn't
+it? No. I've not read a word."
+
+"I do wish you would. You'll find him so exhilarating. You might
+possibly agree with a lot of what he says. I don't. But he sets you
+thinking."
+
+She sketched her somewhat prim conception of the Nietzschean philosophy,
+and after listening to it in dumb wonder, he promised to carry out her
+wishes. So, when I came down to my library that evening dressed for
+dinner, I found him, still in morning clothes, with "Thus Spake
+Zarathustra" on his knees, and a bewildered expression on his face.
+
+"Have you read this, Hilary?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"Understand it?"
+
+"More or less."
+
+"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria understands it
+too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he rose ponderously and
+looked down on me with serious eyes--"what the Hell is it all about?"
+
+I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before rushing
+up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time to expound a
+philosophic system."
+
+Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression and the
+Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the essentials of life,
+we should have been met with bellows of rude and profane derision. I
+don't believe he had even roughly considered what kind of an
+individuality he had, still less enquired into the state of his
+spiritual being. But the flip of a girl he professed so much to despise
+came along and reduced him to a condition of helpless introspection. I
+cannot say that it lasted very long. Psychology and metaphysics and
+æsthetics lay outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his
+own simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it
+an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual superiority.
+On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the subtler mental
+qualities, videlicet his similitude of the bumble-bee; now, however, he
+went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a
+chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with
+childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the
+shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by
+Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader
+of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.
+
+Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had laughed over
+him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had guessed (with
+Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt, found in his humility
+something pathetic which was lost to Adrian. The latter only saw the
+blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews and sinews, at the mercy of
+anything in petticoats, from Susan upward. I disagreed. He was not at
+the mercy of Liosha.
+
+"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library, Jaffery
+having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about in mortal
+terror of her?"
+
+"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an abominable
+nuisance--a millstone round his neck--a responsibility--"
+
+"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too probable
+huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and Doria he knows
+he's safe--spared the worst--so he yields and they pick him up--look at
+him and stand him on his head and do whatever they darn well like to
+him; but with Liosha he knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued,
+after having lit a cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his
+way. With Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of
+marriage or nothing."
+
+"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon think of
+marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."
+
+"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal funk lest
+his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her pedestal and with
+resistless hands take him away and marry him."
+
+"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the day,"
+said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of observation."
+
+For some unaccountable reason Adrian's pale face flushed scarlet. He
+broke out vexedly:
+
+"I don't see what my imaginative work has got to do with the
+trivialities of ordinary life. As a matter of fact," he added, after a
+pause, "the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and it's the same
+imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with Jaffery and this
+unqualifiable lady."
+
+"All right, my dear man," said I, pacifically. "Probably you're right
+and I'm wrong. I was only talking lightly. And speaking of
+imagination--what about your next book?"
+
+"Oh, damn the next book," said he, flicking the ash off his cigarette.
+"I've got an idea, of course. A jolly good idea. But I'm not worrying
+about it yet."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+He threw his cigarette into the grate. How, in the name of common sense,
+could he settle down to work? Wasn't his head full of his approaching
+marriage? Could he see at present anything beyond the thing of dream and
+wonder that was to be his wife? I was a cold-blooded fish to talk of
+novel-writing.
+
+"But you'll have to get into it sometime or other," said I.
+
+"Of course. As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down to a
+normal life in the flat."
+
+"What does Doria think of the new idea?"
+
+Thousands who knew him not were looking forward to Adrian Boldero's new
+book. We, who loved him, were peculiarly interested. Somehow or other we
+had not touched before so intimately on the subject. To my surprise he
+frowned and snapped impatient fingers.
+
+"I haven't told Doria anything about it. It isn't my way. My work's too
+personal a thing, even for Doria. She understands. I know some fellows
+tell their plots to any and everybody--and others, if they don't do
+that, lay bare their artistic souls to those near and dear to them.
+Well, I can't. A word, no matter how loving, of adverse criticism, a
+glance even that was not sympathetic would paralyse me, it would shatter
+my faith in the whole structure I had built up. I can't help it. It's my
+nature. As I told you two or three months ago, it has always been my
+instinct to work in the dark. I instanced my First at Cambridge. How
+much more powerful is the instinct when it's a question of a vital
+created thing like a novel? My dear Hilary, you're the man I'm fondest
+of in the world. You know that. But don't worry me about my work. I
+can't stand it. It upsets me. Doria, heart of my heart and soul of my
+soul, has promised not to worry me. She sees I must be free from outside
+influences--no matter how closely near--but still outside. And you must
+promise too."
+
+"My dear old boy," said I, somewhat confused by this impassioned
+exposition of the artistic temperament, "you've only got to express the
+wish--"
+
+"I know," said he. "Forgive me." He laughed and lit another cigarette.
+"But Wittekind and the editor of _Fowler's_ in America--I've sold him
+the serial rights--are shrieking out for a synopsis. I'm damned if I'm
+going to give 'em a synopsis. They get on my nerves. And--we're intimate
+enough friends, you and I, for me to confess it--so do our dearest
+Barbara and old Jaff, and you yourself, when you want to know how I'm
+getting on. Look, dear old Hilary"--he laughed again and threw himself
+into an armchair--"giving birth to a book isn't very much unlike giving
+birth to a baby. It's analogical in all sorts of ways. Well, some women,
+as soon as the thing is started, can talk quite freely--sweetly and
+delicately--I haven't a word to say against them--to all their women
+friends about it. Others shrink. There's something about it too near
+their innermost souls for them to give their confidence to anyone. Well,
+dear old Hilary--that's how I feel about the novel."
+
+He spoke from his heart. I understood--like Doria.
+
+"Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls it 'the sorrowful, great gift,'" said
+I. "We who haven't got it can only bow to those who have."
+
+Adrian rose and took a few strides about the library.
+
+"I'm afraid I've been talking a lot of inflated nonsense. It must sound
+awfully like swelled head. But you know it isn't, don't you?"
+
+"Don't he an idiot," said I. "Let us talk of something else."
+
+We did not return to the subject.
+
+In the course of time came Mrs. Considine to carry off Liosha to the
+First Class Boarding House which she had found in Queen's Gate. Liosha
+left us full of love for Barbara and Susan and I think of kindly feeling
+for myself. A few days afterwards Jaffery went off to sail a small boat
+with another lunatic in the Hebrides. A little later Doria and Adrian
+went to pay a round of short family visits beginning with Mrs. Boldero.
+So before August was out, Barbara and Susan and I found ourselves alone.
+
+"Now," said I, "I can get through some work."
+
+"Now," said Barbara, "we can run over to Dinard."
+
+"What?" I shouted.
+
+"Dinard," she said, softly. "We always go. We only put it off this year
+on account of visitors."
+
+"We definitely made up our minds," I retorted, "that we weren't going to
+leave this beautiful garden. You know I never change my mind. I'm not
+going away."
+
+Barbara left the room, whistling a musical comedy air.
+
+We went to Dinard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by writing
+descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so many pebbly
+facts into such a small compass. They know the names of everybody who
+attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of poor relations.
+With the cold accuracy of an encyclopædia, and with expert technical
+discrimination, they mention the various fabrics of which the costumes
+of bride and bridesmaids were composed. They catalogue the wedding
+presents with the correct names of the donors. They remember what hymns
+were sung and who signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the
+honeymoon. They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
+departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their accounts
+naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be faithful records
+of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word that brings a scene
+before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are never collected and
+published in book form.
+
+Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria and
+Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.
+
+"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away and
+presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This is a
+full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in useful
+some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in bodily."
+
+I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end it in
+despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure up to my
+mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it back to
+Barbara.
+
+"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.
+
+And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as legally and
+irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of a distinguished
+congregation assembled in a fashionable London church could marry them.
+Of what actually took place I have the confused memory of the mere man.
+I know that it was magnificent. All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft
+were splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria,
+dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek,
+looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was
+best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by
+the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
+set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
+mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . . .
+Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook
+hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude of one
+accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving from church to
+reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox manner of the superior
+husband, at the modern wedding.
+
+"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic of
+marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and never knew
+his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring but the symbol of
+the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the expression of a hope for a
+prolific union? The satin slipper tied on to the carriage or thrown
+after it? Good luck? No such thing. It was once part of the marriage
+ceremony for the bridegroom to tap the wife with a shoe to symbolise
+his assertion of and her acquiescence in her entire subjection."
+
+"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara sweetly. "Did
+you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."
+
+I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do with the
+subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"
+
+She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course not."
+
+Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.
+
+It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in Park
+Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage. He had been
+very hearty and booming all the time, the human presentment of a
+devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great laugh thundering
+cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected the heterogeneous
+gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and pursy lips vibrated into
+smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have never attended, and I am sure
+it was nothing but Jaffery's pervasive influence that infused vitality
+into the deadly and decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich
+Silenic personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of
+Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and
+apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail of
+Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had managed to
+make a journalistic reputation as a great war and foreign correspondent.
+Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an inch or two aside. I saw him
+mingle with an alien crowd, and, by what On the surface appeared to be
+sheer brute full-bloodedness, compel them to his will. The wedding was
+not to be a hollow clang of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all
+hearts. In order that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be
+memorable he had instinctively put out the forces that had carried him
+unscathed through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men.
+He could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had started
+the working of the sap of life.
+
+As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an
+Elizabethan spaciousness. . . . There was no hugger-mugger escape of
+travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal progress
+through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of the Ceremonies,
+exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted them to their
+glittering carriage and pair--and, unconscious of anthropological truth,
+threw the slipper of woman's humiliation. The carriage drove off amid
+the cheers of the multitude. Jaffery stood and watched it until it
+disappeared round the curve. In my eagerness to throw the unnecessarily
+symbolic rice I had followed and stayed a foot or two away from him; and
+then I saw his face change--just for a few seconds. All the joyousness
+was stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists
+of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and unclenched
+themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly he gulped
+something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me by the
+shoulders.
+
+"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you wish
+you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or Honolulu--wherever you chose
+without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He linked his arm in mine, and said in what
+he thought was a whisper: "For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to
+find a real drink."
+
+We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons were
+set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda and poured
+it down his throat.
+
+"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.
+
+"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his frock
+coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me a suit of
+armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."
+
+I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see that
+transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the discomfort of
+the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with the swallowing of
+the huge jorum of alcohol.
+
+Of course I told Barbara all about it--it is best to establish your wife
+in the habit of thinking you tell her everything--and she was more than
+usually gentle to Jaffery. We carried him down with us to Northlands
+that afternoon, calling at his club for a suit-case. In the car he
+tucked a very tired and comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his
+great arm. There was something pathetically tender in the gathering of
+the child to him. Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the
+harmonics of chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were
+alone together, she said with tears very near her eyes:
+
+"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"
+
+"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the tongue of
+an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still earth-bound."
+
+The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her hand.
+
+"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love you."
+
+For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is praise
+indeed.
+
+"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are going to be
+happy?"
+
+"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two people can
+possibly be."
+
+She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were both of
+them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods. I avowed
+absolute agreement.
+
+"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if Jaffery had
+come along first and there had been no question of Adrian. Would they
+have been happy?"
+
+Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you satisfied? You
+have made one match--you, and you'll pardon me for saying so, not
+Heaven--and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical
+one."
+
+"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."
+
+I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her
+and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph
+over me.
+
+During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of
+Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness--she had an eerie
+way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn.
+That was his home. He had no possessions.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got about three
+hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say
+nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever
+saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow."
+
+"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner
+plate or a fork?"
+
+"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be called for in
+all the shops of London."
+
+He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture. I
+laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a thousand
+pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of household clutter, he
+certainly is that household clutter's potential owner. Between us we
+developed this incontrovertible proposition.
+
+"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's Stores and
+purchase a comfortable home?"
+
+"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for the
+interior of China the day after to-morrow."
+
+"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.
+
+"The interior of China?" I reëchoed, with masculine definiteness.
+
+"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into hysterics
+if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me, Barbara. It
+would do him a thundering lot of good."
+
+At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately. I need
+not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the interior of
+China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long he would be away.
+
+"A year or two," he replied casually.
+
+"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no conception of
+time and space."
+
+"A couple of years pass pretty quick," said Jaffery.
+
+"So does a lifetime," said I.
+
+Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the amenities of
+civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again. In vain he pleaded
+his job, the valuable copy he would send to his paper. I proved to him
+it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he could not understand why we
+should be startled by the announcement that within forty-eight hours he
+would be on his way to lose himself for a couple of years in Crim
+Tartary.
+
+"Suppose I sprang a thing like that on you," said I. "Suppose I told you
+I was starting to-morrow morning for the South Pole. What would you
+say?"
+
+"I should say you were a liar. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+In his mirth he rubbed his hands and feet together like a colossal fly.
+The joke lasted him for the rest of the evening.
+
+So, the next morning Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as ever I
+get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We felt sad; not
+only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something in the quiet
+backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less
+happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer _Wanderlust_ that
+had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of
+escaping from the unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he
+betook himself would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . .
+It was just as well he had gone, said Barbara.
+
+A man of intense appetites and primitive passions, like Jaffery, for all
+his loyalty and lovable childishness, was better away from the
+neighbour's wife who had happened to engage his affections. If he lost
+his head. . . .
+
+I had once seen Jaffery lose his head and the spectacle did not make for
+edification. It was before I was married, when Jaffery, during his
+London sojourn, had the spare bedroom in a set of rooms I rented in
+Tavistock Square. At a florist's hard by, a young flower seller--a hussy
+if ever there was one--but bewitchingly pretty--carried on her poetical
+avocation; and of her did my hulking and then susceptible friend become
+ragingly enamoured. I repeat, she was a hussy. She had no intention of
+giving him more than the tip of her pretty little shoe to kiss; but
+Jaffery, reading the promise of secular paradise in her eyes, had no
+notion of her little hard intention. He squandered himself upon her and
+she led him a dog's life. Of course I remonstrated, argued, implored. It
+was like asking a hurricane politely not to blow. Her name I remember
+was Gwenny. One summer evening she had promised to meet him outside the
+house in Tavistock Square--he had arranged to take her to some Earl's
+Court Exhibition, where she could satiate a depraved passion for
+switch-backs, water-chutes and scenic railways. At the appointed hour
+Jaffery stood in waiting on the pavement. I sat on the first floor
+balcony, alternately reading a novel and watching him with a sardonic
+eye. Presently Gwenny turned the corner of the square--our house was a
+few doors up--and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the
+square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in the
+height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously accompanied
+by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young man; his arm was
+round her waist, and her arm was around his, in the approved enlinkment
+of couples in her class who are keeping company, or, in other words,
+are, or are about to be, engaged to be married. A curious shock vibrated
+through Jaffery's frame. He flamed red. He saw red. Gwenny shot a
+supercilious glance and tossed her chin. Jaffery crossed the road and
+barred their path. He fished in his pocket for some coins and addressed
+the scrubby man, who, poor wretch, had never heard of Jaffery's
+existence.
+
+"Here's twopence to go away. Take the twopence and go away. Damn
+you--take the twopence."
+
+The man retreated in a scare.
+
+"Won't you take the twopence? I should advise you to."
+
+Anybody but a born fool or a hero would have taken the twopence. I think
+the scrubby man had the makings of a hero. He looked up at the blazing
+giant.
+
+"You be damned!" said he, retreating a pace.
+
+Then, suddenly, with the swiftness of a panther, Jaffery sprang on him,
+grasped him in the back by a clump of clothes--it seemed, with one hand,
+so quickly was it done--and hurled him yards away over the railings. I
+can still see the flight of the poor devil's body in mid air until it
+fell into a holly-bush. With another spring he turned on the paralysed
+Gwenny, caught her up like a doll and charged with her now screaming
+violently against the shut solid oak front door. A flash of instinct
+suggested a latchkey. Holding the girl anyhow, he fumbled in his pocket.
+It was an August London evening. The Square was deserted; but at
+Gwenny's shrieks, neighbouring windows were thrown up and eager heads
+appeared. It was very funny. There was Jaffery holding a squalling girl
+in one arm and with the other exploring available pockets for his
+latchkey. I had one of the inspirations of my life. I rushed into my
+bedroom, caught up the ewer from my washstand, went out onto the extreme
+edge of the balcony and cast the gallon or so of water over the heads of
+the struggling pair. The effect was amazing. Jaffery dropped the girl.
+The girl, once on her feet, fled like a cat. Jaffery looked up
+idiotically. I flourished the empty jug. I think I threatened to brain
+him with it if he stirred. Then people began to pour out of the houses
+and a policeman sprang up from nowhere. I went down and joined the
+excited throng. There was a dreadful to-do. It cost Jaffery five hundred
+pounds to mitigate the righteous wrath of the young man in the
+holly-bush, and save himself from a dungeon-cell. The scrubby young man,
+who, it appeared, had been brought up in the fishmongering trade, used
+the five hundred pounds to set up for himself in Ealing, where very
+shortly afterwards Gwenny joined him, and that, save an enduring
+ashamedness on the part of Jaffery, was the end of the matter.
+
+So, if Jaffery did lose his head over Doria, there might be the devil to
+pay. We sighed and reconciled ourselves to his exile in Crim Tartary.
+After all, it was his business in life to visit the dark places of the
+earth and keep the world informed of history in the making. And it was a
+business which could not possibly be carried on in the most cunningly
+devised home that could be purchased at Harrod's Stores.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+In the course of time Adrian and Doria returned from Venice, their heads
+full of pictures and lagoons and palaces, and took proud possession of
+their spacious flat in St. John's Wood. They were radiantly happy, very
+much in love with each other. Having brought a common vision to bear
+upon the glories of nature and art which they had beheld, they were
+spared the little squabbles over matters of æsthetic taste which often
+are so disastrous to the serenity of a honeymoon. Touchingly they
+expounded their views in the first person plural. Even Adrian, whom I
+must confess to have regarded as an unblushing egotist, seldom delivered
+himself of an egotistical opinion. "We don't despise the Eclectics,"
+said he. And--"We prefer the Lombardic architecture to the purely
+Venetian," said Doria. And "we" found good in Italian wines and "we"
+found nothing but hideousness in Murano glass. They were, therefore, in
+perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The only difference I
+could see between them was that Adrian loved to wallow in the comfort of
+a club or another person's house, but insisted on elegant austerity in
+his own home, whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere. So they
+had a pure Jacobean entrance hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire
+bedroom, and as far as I could judge by the barrenness of the apartment,
+a Spartan study for Adrian.
+
+On our first visit, they triumphantly showed us round the establishment.
+We came last to the study.
+
+"No really fine imaginative work," said Adrian, with a wave of the hand
+indicating the ascetic table and chair, the iron safe, the bookcase and
+the bare walls--"no really fine imaginative work can be done among
+luxurious surroundings. Pictures distract one's attention, arm-chairs
+and sofas invite to sloth. This is my ideal of a novelist's workshop."
+
+"It's more like a workhouse," said Barbara, with a shiver. "Or a
+condemned cell. But even a condemned cell would have a plank bed in it."
+
+"You don't understand a bit," said Doria, with a touch of resentment at
+adverse criticism of her paragon's idiosyncrasies, "although Adrian has
+tried to explain it to you. It's specially arranged for concentration of
+mind. If it weren't for the necessity of having something to sit upon
+and something to write at and a few necessary reference books and a
+lock-up place, we should have had nothing in the room at all. When
+Adrian wants to relax and live his ordinary human life, he only has to
+walk out of the door and there he is in the midst of beautiful things."
+
+"Oh, I quite see, dear," said Barbara, with a familiar little flash in
+her blue eyes. "But do you think a leather seat for that hard wooden
+chair--what the French call a _rond-de-cuir_--would very greatly impair
+the poor fellow's imagination?"
+
+"It might be economical, too," said I, "in the way of saving
+shininess!--"
+
+Adrian laughed. "It does look a bit hard, darling," said he.
+
+"We'll get a leather seat to-day," replied Doria.
+
+But she did not smile. Evidently to her the spot on which Adrian sat was
+sacrosanct. The room was the Holy of Holies where mortal man put on
+immortality. Flippant comment sounded like blasphemy in her ears. She
+even grew somewhat impatient at our lingering in the august precincts,
+although they had not yet been consecrated by inspired labour. Their
+unblessed condition was obvious. On the large library table were a
+couple of brass candlesticks with fresh candles (Adrian could not work
+by electric light), a couple of reams of scribbling paper, an inkpot, an
+immaculate blotting pad, three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's
+whimsies to write always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an
+office stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this
+last monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination
+and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road, but
+not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of challenge
+from Doria, I forebore to make ignorant criticism.
+
+In the bedroom while Barbara was putting on her veil and powdering her
+nose (this may be what grammarians call a _hysteron proteron_--but with
+women one never can tell)--Doria broke into confidences not meet for
+masculine ears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, darling," she cried, looking at Barbara with great awe-stricken
+eyes, "you can't tell what it means to be married to a genius like
+Adrian. I feel like one of the Daughters of Men that has been looked
+upon by one of the Sons of God. It's so strange. In ordinary life he's
+so dear and human--responsive, you know, to everything I feel and
+think--and sometimes I quite forget he's different from me. But at
+others, I'm overwhelmed by the thought of the life going on inside his
+soul that I can never, never share--I can only see the spirit that
+conceived 'The Diamond Gate'--don't you understand, darling?--and that
+is even now creating some new thing of wonder and beauty. I feel so
+little beside him. What more can I give him beyond what I have given?"
+
+Barbara took the girl's tense face between her two hands and smiled and
+kissed her.
+
+"Give him," said she, "ammoniated quinine whenever he sneezes."
+
+Then she laughed and embraced the Heavenly One's wife, who, for the
+moment, had not quite decided whether to feel outraged or not, and
+discoursed sweet reasonableness.
+
+"I should treat your genius, dear, just as I treat my stupid old
+Hilary."
+
+She proceeded to describe the treatment. What it was, I do not know,
+because Barbara refused to tell me. But I can make a shrewd guess. It's
+a subtle scheme which she thinks is hidden from me; but really it is so
+transparent that a babe could see through it. I, like any wise husband,
+make, however, a fine assumption of blindness, and consequently lead a
+life of unruffled comfort.
+
+Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my doubts.
+Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old Hilary's chair and
+worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent wife and I've no fault to
+find with her; but she has never done that, and she is the last woman in
+the world to counsel any wife to do it. Personally, I should hate to be
+worshipped. In worship hours I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a
+sense of congruity can imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship
+would bore me to paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as
+the new hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more
+he was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration
+he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette--a way which
+Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown with the
+grape on Mount Cithaeron--and a way of exhaling a cloud of smoke, holier
+than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of the adorer, which moved me
+at once to envy and exasperation.
+
+Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either in
+their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands than in
+St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of upholstered
+furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox on his tongue
+and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while Doria, chin on palm,
+and her great eyes set on him, drank in all the wonder of this
+miraculous being.
+
+I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the man."
+
+Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of
+view. . . .
+
+"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking. When she
+has turned him into the idiot--"
+
+"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.
+
+"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"
+
+"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I. "The
+unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole
+consistency."
+
+Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none,
+the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a while and then,
+quickly, a smile replaced the frown.
+
+"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she said
+sweetly.
+
+I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates of a
+torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she vanished
+from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned high-falutin' phrase is
+the best description I can give of the elusive uncapturable nature of
+this wife of mine. It is a pity that she has so little to do with the
+story of Jaffery which I am trying to relate, for I should like to make
+her the heroine. You see, I know her so well, or imagine I do, which
+comes to the same thing, and I should love to present you with a
+solution, of this perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled
+conundrum that is Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a
+_raisonneur_ in the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the
+background. _Paullo majora canamus_. Let us come to the horses.
+
+All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha. As deputies for the
+absent trustee we received periodical reports from the admirable Mrs.
+Considine, and entertained both ladies for an occasional week-end. On
+the whole, her demeanour in the Queen's Gate boarding-house was
+satisfactory. At first trouble arose over a young curly haired Swiss
+waiter who had won her sympathy in the matter of a broken heart. She had
+entered the dining-room when he was laying the table and discovered him
+watering the knives and forks with tears. Unaccustomed to see men weep,
+she enquired the cause. He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a
+woeful tale of a faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and
+well-to-do. He had looked forward to marry her at the end of the year,
+and to pass an unruffled life in the snugness of the _delicatessen_ shop
+which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had announced her
+engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among the chitterlings and
+liver-sausages was shattered. Herr Gott! what was he to do? Liosha
+counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and assassination of his rival.
+To kill another man for her was the surest way to a woman's heart. The
+waiter approved the scheme, but lacked the courage--also the money to go
+to Neuchatel. Liosha, espousing his cause warmly, gave him the latter at
+once. The former she set to work to instil into him. She waylaid him at
+odd corners in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and
+sought to inspire him with the true Balkan spirit. She even supplied him
+with an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp. At last, the poor craven,
+finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the mistress
+of the boarding-house protection against his champion. Mrs. Considine,
+called into consultation, was informed that Mrs. Prescott must either
+cease from instigating the waiters to commit murder or find other
+quarters. Liosha curled a contemptuous lip.
+
+"If you think I'm going to have anything more to do with the little
+skunk, you're mistaken."
+
+And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room,
+approached her with the tray, she waved him off.
+
+"See here," she said calmly, "just you keep out of my way or I might
+tread on you."
+
+Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the genteel
+assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole difficulty by
+bolting from the house, never to return.
+
+When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter, Liosha
+shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
+
+"I guess," she said, "if a man loves a woman strongly enough to cry for
+her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted in, without
+being told."
+
+"But you don't seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to take
+the life of a human being," said Barbara.
+
+"I can understand how you feel," Liosha admitted. "But I don't feel
+about it the same as you. I've been brought up different."
+
+"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father made
+his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished with the
+pigs he took on humans who displeased him."
+
+"And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.
+
+Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she extracted a
+promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a knife into
+anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so doing.
+
+But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace, Liosha
+led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house. If she now and
+then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits and free
+expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them a chronic
+topic of conversation. A large though somewhat scornful generosity also
+established her in their esteem. She would lend or give anything she
+possessed. When one of the forlorn and woollen-shawled old maids fell
+ill, she sat up of nights with her, and in spite of her ignorance of
+nursing, which was as vast as that of a rhinoceros, magnetised the
+fragile lady into well-being. I think she was fairly happy. If London
+had been situated amid gorges and crags and ravines and granite cliffs
+she would have been completely so. She yearned for mountains. Mrs.
+Considine to satisfy this nostalgia took her for a week's trip to the
+English Lakes. She returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for
+unimportant undulations, and declaring her preference for London. So in
+London she remained.
+
+In these early stages of our acquaintance with Liosha, she counted in
+our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even in the crises
+of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not rob us of our
+night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy personality whose
+quaint vagaries afforded us constant amusement than as an intense human
+soul. The working out of her destiny did not come within the sphere of
+our emotional sympathies like that of Adrian and Doria. The latter were
+of our own kind and class, bound to us not only by the common traditions
+of centuries, but by ties of many years' affection. It is only natural
+that we should have watched them more closely and involved ourselves
+more intimately in their scheme of things.
+
+The first fine rapture of house-pride having grown calm, the Bolderos
+settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life tempered by the
+amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian worked, Doria read Dante
+and attended performances of the Intellectual Drama; when Adrian
+relaxed, she cooked dainties in a chafing dish and accompanied him to
+Musical Comedy. They entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out
+into cultivated society. The Art of Life, they declared, was to catch
+atmosphere, whatever that might mean. Adrian explained, with the gentle
+pity of one addressing himself to the childish intelligence.
+
+"It's merely the perfect freedom of mental adaptation. To discuss
+pragmatism while eating oysters would be destructive to the enjoyment
+afforded by the delicate sense of taste, whereas, to let one's mind
+wander from the plane of philosophic thought when preparing for a
+Hauptmann or a Strindberg play would lead to nothing less than the
+disaster of disequilibrium."
+
+Saying this he caught my cold, unsympathetic gaze, but I think I noticed
+the flicker of an eyelid. Doria, however, nodded, in wide-eyed approval.
+So I suppose they really did practise between themselves these modal
+gymnastics. They were all of a piece with the "atmospheres" evoked in
+the various rooms of the flat. To Barbara and myself, comfortable
+Philistines, all this appeared exceeding lunatic. But every married
+couple has a right to lay out its plan of happiness in its own way. If
+we had made taboo of irrelevant gossip between the acts of a serious
+play our evening would have been a failure. Theirs would have been, and,
+in fact, was a success. Connubial felicity they certainly achieved: and
+what else but an impertinence is a criticism of the means?
+
+Easter came. They had been married six months. "The Diamond Gate" had
+been published for nearly a year and was still selling in England and
+America. Adrian flourishing his first half-yearly cheque in January had
+vowed he had no idea there was so much money in the world. He basked in
+Fortune's sunshine. But for all the basking and all the syllabus of the
+perfect existence, and all his unquestionable love for Doria, and all
+her worship for him together with its manifestation in her admirable
+care for his material well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began
+to strike me as a man lacking some essential of happiness. They spent a
+week or so with us at Northlands. Adrian confessed dog-weariness. His
+looks confirmed his words. A vertical furrow between the brows and a
+little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair
+moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face. In moments
+of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a squint, appeared
+in his blue eyes. He was no longer debonair, no longer the lightly
+laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox seeing flippancy in the
+Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in Little Tich. He was morose and
+irritable. He had acquired a nervous habit of secretly rubbing his
+thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips when Doria, in her pride, spoke of
+his work, which amounted almost to ill-breeding. It was only late at
+night during our last smoke that he assumed a semblance of the old
+Adrian; and by that time he had consumed as much champagne and brandy as
+would have rendered jocose the prophet Jeremiah.
+
+He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From Doria we
+learned the cause. For the last three months he had been working at
+insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he
+breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and
+remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he began a three-hour
+spell of work. At night a four hours' spell--from nine to one, if they
+had no evening engagement, from midnight to four o'clock in the morning
+if they had been out.
+
+"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of this
+maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't let him
+do it. He is killing himself."
+
+"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting out
+creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous novelists
+whom I meet at the Athenæum have told me so themselves. Even prodigious
+people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola--"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist must be
+a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why--those two that you've
+mentioned--they slung out stuff by the bucketful. It didn't matter to
+them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the rhythm and the balance
+and the beauty of every sentence he writes--to say nothing of the
+subtlety of his analysis and the perfect drawing of his pictures. My
+dear, good people"--she threw out her hands in an impatient
+gesture--"you don't know what you're talking about. How can you? It's
+impossible for you to conceive--it's almost impossible even for me to
+conceive--the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four
+hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is
+stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine
+that work like Adrian's is to be done in this dead mechanical way."
+
+"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My admiration for
+Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I repeat that no human
+brain since the beginning of time has been capable of spinning cobwebs
+of fancy for twelve hours a day, day in and day out for months at a
+time. Look at your husband. He has tried it. Does he sleep well?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has he a hearty appetite?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Is he a light-hearted, cheery sort of chap to have about the place?"
+
+"He's naturally tired, after his winter's work," said Doria.
+
+"He's played out," said I, "and if you are a wise woman, you'll take him
+away for a couple of months' rest, and when he gets back, see that he
+works at lower pressure."
+
+Doria promised to do her best; but she sighed.
+
+"You don't realise Adrian's iron will."
+
+Once more I recognised with a shock that I did not know my Adrian. I
+used to think one could blow the thistledown fellow about whithersoever
+one pleased. Of the two, Doria seemed to have unquestionably the
+stronger will-power.
+
+"Surely," said I, "you can twist him round your little finger."
+
+Doria sighed again--and a wanly indulgent smile played about her lips.
+
+"You two dear people are so sensible, that it makes me almost angry to
+see how you can't begin to understand Adrian. As a man, of course I have
+a certain influence over him. But as an artist--how can I? He's a thing
+apart from me altogether. I know perfectly well that thousands of
+artists' wives wreck their happiness through sheer, stupid jealousy of
+their husbands' art. I'm not such a narrow-minded, contemptible woman."
+She threw her little head up proudly. "I should loathe myself if I
+grudged one hour that Adrian gave to his work instead of to me."
+
+This time Barbara and I sighed, for we realised how vain had been our
+arguments. Our considerably greater knowledge of life, our stark
+common-sense, our deep affection for Adrian counted as naught beside the
+fact that we had no experience whatever in the rearing of a genius.
+
+That word "genius" came too often from Doria's lips. At first it
+irritated me; then I heard it with morbid detestation. In the course of
+a more or less intimate conversation with Adrian, I let slip a mild
+expression of my feelings. He groaned sympathetically.
+
+"I wish to heaven she wouldn't do it," said he. "It puts a man into such
+a horrible false position towards himself. It's beautiful of her, of
+course--it's her love for me. But it gets on my nerves. Instead of
+sitting down at my desk with nothing in my mind but my day's work to
+slog through, I hear her voice and I have to say to myself, 'Go to. I am
+a genius. I mustn't write like any common fellow. I must produce the
+work of a genius.' It really plays the devil with me."
+
+He walked excitedly about the library, flourishing a cigar and
+scattering the ash about the carpet. I am pernicketty in a few ways and
+hate tobacco ash on my carpet; every room in the house is an arsenal of
+ash trays. In normal mood Adrian punctiliously observed the little laws
+of the establishment. This scattering of cigar ash was a sign of
+spiritual convulsion.
+
+"Have you explained the matter to Doria?" I asked.
+
+He halted before me performing his new uncomfortable trick of slithering
+thumb over finger tips.
+
+"No," he snapped. "How can I?"
+
+I replied, mildly, that it seemed to be the simplest thing in the world.
+He broke away impatiently, saying that I couldn't understand.
+
+"All right," said I, though what there was to understand in so
+elementary a proposition goodness only knows. I was beginning to resent
+this perpetual charge of non-intelligence.
+
+"I think we had better clear out," he said. "I'm only a damned nuisance.
+I've got this book of mine on the brain"--he held up his head with both
+hands--"and I'm not a fit companion for anybody."
+
+I adjured him in familiar terms not to talk rubbish. He was here for the
+repose of country things and freedom from day-infesting cares. Already
+he was looking better for the change. But I could not refrain from
+adding:
+
+"You wrote 'The Diamond Gate' without turning a hair. Why should you
+worry yourself to death about this new book?"
+
+When he answered I had the shivering impression of a wizened old man
+speaking to me. The slight cast I had noticed in his blue eyes became
+oddly accentuated.
+
+"'The Diamond Gate,'" he said, peering at me uncannily, "was just a
+pretty amateur story. The new book is going to stagger the soul of
+humanity."
+
+"I wish you weren't such a secretive devil," said I. "What's the book
+about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It will do you good."
+
+I put my arm round his shoulders and my hand gave him an affectionate
+grip. My heart ached for the dear fellow, and I longed, in the plain
+man's way, to break down the walls of reserve, which like those of the
+Inquisition Chamber, I felt were closing tragically upon him.
+
+"Come, come," I continued. "Get it out. It's obvious that the thing is
+suffocating you. I'll tell nobody--not even that you've told me--neither
+Doria nor Barbara--it will be the confidence of the confessional. You'll
+be all the better for it. Believe me."
+
+He shrugged himself free from my grasp and turned away; his nervous
+fingers plucked unconsciously at his evening tie until it was loosened
+and the ends hung dissolutely over his shirt front.
+
+"You're very good, Hilary," said he, looking at every spot in the room
+except my eyes. "If I could tell you, I would. But it's an enormous
+canvas. I could give you no idea--" The furrow deepened between his
+brows--"If I told you the scheme you would get about the same dramatic
+impression as if you read, say, the letter R, in a dictionary. I'm
+putting into this novel," he flickered his fingers in front of
+me--"everything that ever happened in human life."
+
+I regarded him in some wonder.
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, "you can't compress a Liebig's Extract of
+Existence between the covers of a six-shilling novel."
+
+"I can," said he, "I can!" He thumped my writing table, so that all the
+loose brass and glass on it rattled. "And by God! I'm going to do it."
+
+"But, my dearest friend," I expostulated, "this is absurd. It's
+megalomania--_la folie des grandeurs_."
+
+"It's the divinest folly in the world," said he.
+
+He threw a cigar stump into the fireplace and poured himself out and
+drank a stiff whisky and soda. Then he laughed in imitation of his
+familiar self.
+
+"You dear prim old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come
+straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
+centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. And now,
+good-night."
+
+He laughed, waved his arm in a cavalier gesture and went from the room,
+slamming the door masterfully behind him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+We kept the unreasonable pair at Northlands as long as we could, doing
+all that lay in our power to restore Adrian's idiotically impaired
+health. I motored him about the county; I took him to golf, a pastime at
+which I do not excel; and I initiated him into the invigorating
+mysteries of playing at robbers with Susan. We gave a carefully selected
+dinner-party or two, and accepted on his behalf a few discreet
+invitations. At these entertainments--whether at Northlands or
+elsewhere--we caused it to be understood that the lion, being sick,
+should not be asked to roar.
+
+"It's so trying for him," said Doria, "when people he doesn't know come
+up and gush over 'The Diamond Gate'--especially now when his nerves are
+on edge."
+
+On the occasion of our second dinner-party, the guests having been
+forewarned of the famous man's idiosyncrasies, no reference whatever was
+made to his achievements. We sat him between two pretty and charming
+women who chattered amusingly to him with what I, who kept an eye open
+and an ear cocked, considered to be a very subtly flattering deference.
+Adrian responded with adequate animation. As an ordinary clever,
+well-bred man of the world he might have done this almost mechanically;
+but I fancied that he found real enjoyment in the light and picturesque
+talk of his two neighbours. When the ladies left us, he discussed easy
+politics with the Member for our own division of the County. In the
+drawing-room, afterwards, he played a rubber at bridge, happened to
+hold good cards and smiled an hour away. When the last guest departed,
+he yawned, excused himself on the ground of healthy fatigue and went
+straight off to bed. Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on the
+success of our dinner-party. The next day Adrian went about as glum as a
+dinosaur in a museum, and conveyed, even to Susan's childish mind, his
+desire for solitude. His hang-dog dismalness so affected my wife, that
+she challenged Doria.
+
+"What in the world is the matter with him, to-day?"
+
+Doria drew herself up and flashed a glance at Barbara--they were both
+little bantams of women, one dark as wine, the other fair as corn. If
+ever these two should come to a fight, thought I who looked on, it would
+be to the death.
+
+"Your friends are very charming, my dear, and of course I've nothing to
+say against them; but I was under the impression that every educated
+person in the English-speaking world knew my husband's name, and I
+consider the way he was ignored last night by those people was
+disgraceful."
+
+"But, my dear Doria," cried Barbara, aghast, "we thought that Adrian was
+having quite a good time."
+
+"You may think so, but he wasn't. Adrian's a gentleman and plays the
+game; but you must see it was very galling to him--and to me--to be
+treated like any stockbroker--or architect--or idle man about town."
+
+"You are unfortunate in your examples," said I, intervening judicially.
+"Pray reflect that there are architects alive whose artistic genius is
+not far inferior to Adrian's."
+
+"You know very well what I mean," she snapped.
+
+"No, we don't, dear," said Barbara dangerously. "We think you're a
+little idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. We took the trouble to
+tell every one of those people that Adrian hated any reference to his
+work, and like decent folk they didn't refer to it. There--now round
+upon us."
+
+The pallor deepened a shade in Doria's ivory cheek.
+
+"You have put me in the wrong, I admit it. But I think it would have
+been better to let us know."
+
+What could one do with such people? I was inclined to let them work out
+their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but Barbara decided
+otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree of lunacy as
+warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain duty to look
+after them. So we continued to look after our genius and his worshipper,
+and we did it so successfully that before he left us he recovered his
+sleep in some measure, and lost the squinting look of strain in his
+eyes.
+
+On the morning of their departure I mildly counselled him to temper his
+fine frenzy with common-sense.
+
+"Knock off the night work," said I.
+
+He frowned, fidgeted with his feet.
+
+"I wish to God I hadn't to work at all," said he. "I hate it! I'd sooner
+be a coal-heaver."
+
+"Bosh!" said I. "I know that you're an essentially idle beggar; but
+you're as proud as Punch of your fame and success and all that it means
+to you."
+
+"What does it mean after all?"
+
+"If you talk in that pessimistic way," I said, "you'll make me cry.
+Don't. It means every blessed thing in the world to you. At any rate it
+has meant Doria."
+
+"I suppose that's true," he grunted. "And I suppose I am essentially
+idle. But I wish the damned thing would get written of its own accord.
+It's having to sit down at that infernal desk that gets on my nerves. I
+have the same horrible apprehension of it--always have--as one has
+before a visit to the dentist, when you know he's going to drill hell
+into you."
+
+"Why do you work in such a depressing room?" I asked. "If I were shut up
+alone in it, I would stick my nose in the air and howl like a dog."
+
+"Oh, the room's all right," said he. Then he looked away absently and
+murmured as if to himself, "It isn't the room."
+
+"Then what is it?" I persisted.
+
+He turned with a dreary sort of smile. "It's the born butterfly being
+condemned to do the work of the busy bee."
+
+A short while afterwards we saw them drive off and watched the car
+disappear round the bend of the drive.
+
+"Well, my dear," said I, "thank goodness I'm not a man of genius."
+
+"Amen!" said Barbara, fervently.
+
+As soon as they had settled down in their flat, Adrian began to work
+again, in the same unremitting fashion. The only concession he made to
+consideration of health was to go to bed immediately on his return from
+dinner-parties and theatres instead of spending three or four hours in
+his study. Otherwise the routine of toil went on as before. One
+afternoon, happening to be in town and in the neighbourhood of St.
+John's Wood, I called at the flat with the idea of asking Doria for a
+cup of tea. I also had in my pocket a letter from Jaffery which I
+thought might interest Adrian. The maid who opened the door informed me
+that her mistress was out. Was Mr. Boldero in? Yes; but he was working.
+
+"That doesn't matter," said I. "Tell him I'm here."
+
+The maid did not dare disturb him. Her orders were absolute. She could
+not refuse to admit me, seeing that I was already in the hall; but she
+stoutly refused to announce me. I argued with the damsel.
+
+"I may have business of the utmost importance with your master."
+
+She couldn't help it. She had her orders.
+
+"But, my good Ellen," said I--the minx had actually been in our service
+a couple of years before!--"suppose the place were on fire, what would
+you do?"
+
+She looked at me demurely. "I think I should call a policeman, sir."
+
+"You can call one now," said I, "for I'm going to announce myself. Don't
+tell me I'll have to walk over your dead body first, for it won't do."
+
+I know it is not looked upon as a friendly act to interrupt a man in his
+work and to disregard the orders given to his servants, but I was
+irritated by all this Grand Llama atmosphere of mysterious seclusion.
+Besides, I had been walking and felt just a little hot and dusty and
+thirsty, and I felt all the hotter, dustier and thirstier for my
+argument with Ellen.
+
+"I'll announce myself," I said, and marched to the door of Adrian's
+study. It was locked. I rapped at the door.
+
+"Who's there?" came Adrian's voice.
+
+"Me. Hilary."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"I happen to be a guest under your roof," said I, with a touch of
+temper.
+
+"Wait a minute," said he.
+
+I waited about two. Then the door was unlocked and opened and I strode
+in upon Adrian who looked rather pale and dishevelled.
+
+"Why the deuce," said I, "did you keep me hanging about like that?"
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied. "But I make it a fixed rule to put away my
+work"--he waved a hand towards the safe--"whenever anybody, even Doria,
+wants to come into the room."
+
+I glanced around the cheerless place. There were no traces of work
+visible. Save that the quill pens and blotting pad were inky, his
+library table seemed as immaculate, as unstained by toil, as it did on
+the occasion of my first visit.
+
+"You needn't have made all that fuss," said I. "I only dropped in for a
+second or two. I wanted to ask for a drink and to show you a letter from
+Jaffery."
+
+"Oh, Jaffery!" He smiled. "How's the old barbarian getting on?"
+
+"Tremendously. He's the guest of a Viceroy and living in sumptuousness.
+Read for yourself."
+
+I took from my pocket letter and envelope. Now I am a man who keeps few
+letters and no envelopes. The second post bringing Jaffery's epistle had
+just arrived when I was leaving Northlands that morning, and it was but
+an accident of haste that the envelope had not been destroyed. I took
+the opportunity of tearing it up while Adrian was reading. With the
+pieces in my hand, I peered about the room.
+
+"What are you looking for?" he asked.
+
+"Your waste-paper basket."
+
+"Haven't got such a thing."
+
+I threw my litter into the grate.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I'm not going to pander to the curiosity of housemaids," he replied
+rather irritably.
+
+"What do you do with your waste paper, then?"
+
+"Never have any," he said, with his eyes on Jaffery's letter.
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Do you pigeon-hole bills and money-lenders'
+circulars and second-hand booksellers' catalogues and all their
+wrappers?"
+
+He folded up the letter, took me by the arm and regarded me with a smile
+of forced patience.
+
+"My dear Hilary, can't you ever understand that this room is just a
+workshop and nothing else? Here I think of nothing but my novel. I would
+as soon think of conducting my social correspondence in the bathroom. If
+you want to see the waste-paper basket where I throw my bills and
+unanswered letters from duchesses, and the desk--I share it with
+Doria--where I dash off my brilliant replies to money-lenders, come into
+the drawing-room. There, also, I shall be able to give you a drink."
+
+My eyes, following an unconscious glance from his, fell upon a new and
+hitherto unnoticed object--a little table, now startlingly obvious, in a
+corner of the all but unfurnished room, bearing a tray with half full
+decanter, syphon and glass.
+
+"You've got all I want here," said I.
+
+"No. That's mere stimulant. _Sapit lucernam_. It has a horrible flavour
+of midnight oil. There's not what you understand by a drink in it. Let's
+get out of the accursed hole."
+
+He dragged me almost by force into the drawing-room, where he
+entertained me courteously. It was curious to observe how his manner
+changed in--I have to use the Boldero jargon--in the different
+atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his whisky--a present from old
+man Jornicroft, a rare blend which just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's
+word, he declared, was delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and
+there a one in the City of London were able to procure. In its flavour,
+said he, lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me
+a Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On enquiry
+as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I learned that
+since eminent tenors and divas had sung into gramophones, the standard
+had appreciated.
+
+"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can afford it."
+
+For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
+drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington Station
+under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and afterwards at
+home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I had loosely and
+playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic, without a thought as
+to the exact significance of the term. Now a horrible thought harassed
+me. Had I been precise without knowing it?
+
+Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy of their
+working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard of are such
+fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which Adrian surrounded
+himself. Why should he put himself under lock and key? Why should he not
+allow human eye to fall, even from the distance prescribed by good
+manners, upon his precious manuscript? Why need he use care so
+scrupulous as not to expose even torn up bits of rough draft to the
+ancillary publicity of a waste-paper basket? Soundness of mind did not
+lie that way. The terms in which he alluded to his book were not those
+of a sane man filled with the joy of his creation. None of us, not even
+Doria, knew how the story was progressing. He had signed a contract with
+an American editor for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in
+the middle of May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered.
+Doria told Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much
+of the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
+putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with him,
+calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I had been
+right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to the malady and
+shivered.
+
+Suddenly, a day or two afterwards, came news that, to some extent,
+relieved my mind.
+
+While the Bolderos were at breakfast, a cable arrived from the Editor.
+It ran: "Unless half of manuscript is delivered to-day at London Office
+will cancel contract." Adrian read it, frowned and handed it to Doria.
+It seems that in all business matters she had his confidence.
+
+"Well, dear?" she said, looking up at him.
+
+He broke out angrily. "Did you ever hear such amazing insolence? I give
+this pettifogging tradesman the privilege of publishing my novel in his
+rubbishy periodical and he dares to dictate terms to me! Half a novel,
+indeed! As if it were half a bale of calico. The besotted fool! As well
+ask a clock-maker to deliver half a clock."
+
+"Argument by analogy is rather dangerous," she said gently, seeking to
+turn aside his wrath with a smile. "It's not quite the same thing. Can't
+you give him something to go on with?"
+
+"I can, but I won't. I'll see him damned first." He turned to the maid
+and demanded a telegraph form.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to teach him a lesson. He thinks I'm going to be taken in by
+his bluff and run round with a brown paper parcel to Fleet Street or
+wherever his beastly office is. He's mistaken. There," he wrote the
+cable hurriedly and read it aloud, "'Shall not deliver anything. Only
+too glad to cancel contract.' He'll he the most surprised and disgusted
+man in America!"
+
+"Need you put it quite like that?" said Doria.
+
+"It's the only way to make him understand. He has been buzzing round me
+like a wasp for the past month. Now he's squashed. And now," said he,
+getting up and lighting a cigarette, "I'm not going to do another stroke
+of work for three months."
+
+It was the news of this last announcement that relieved my mind: not the
+story of Adrian's intolerable treatment of the editor, which was of a
+piece with his ordinary attitude towards his own genius. The
+capriciousness of the resolution startled me; but I approved
+whole-heartedly. I would have counselled immediate change of scene, had
+not Adrian anticipated my advice by rushing off then and there to Cook's
+and taken tickets to Switzerland. Having some business in town, I
+motored up with Barbara earlier than I need have done, and we saw them
+off at Victoria Station. Adrian, in holiday spirits, talked rather
+loudly. Now that he was free from the horror of that bestial vampire
+sucking his blood--that was his way of referring to the long suffering
+and hardly used editor--life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his
+spirit could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean.
+He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months communing
+with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain heights, three
+months calm discipline of the soul--that was what he needed. Then to
+work, and in another three months, _currente calamo_, the book would be
+written.
+
+"And what is Doria going to do on top of the Matterhorn?" asked my wife.
+
+Doria cried out, "Oh, don't tease. We're not going near the Matterhorn.
+We're going to read beautiful books, and see beautiful things and think
+beautiful thoughts." She dragged Barbara a step or two aside. "Don't you
+think this is the best thing that could have happened?" she asked, with
+her anxious, earnest gaze.
+
+"The very, very best, dear," replied Barbara gently.
+
+And indeed it was. If ever a man realised himself to be on the verge of
+the abyss, I am sure it was Adrian Boldero. Some haunting fear was set
+at the back of his laughing eyes--the expression of an animal instinct
+for self-preservation which discounted the balderdash about the soaring
+yet disciplined soul.
+
+I whispered to Doria: "Don't go too far into the wilds out of reach of
+medical advice."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're taking away a sick man."
+
+"Do you really think so?"
+
+"I do," said I.
+
+She looked to right and left and then at me full in the face, and she
+gripped my hand.
+
+"You're a good friend, Hilary. God knows I thank you."
+
+From which I clearly understood that her passionately loyal heart was
+grievously sore for Adrian.
+
+During their absence abroad, which lasted much longer than three months,
+we heard fairly regularly from Doria; twice or thrice from Adrian. After
+a time he grew tired of mountaintops and solitude and declared that his
+inspiration required steeping in the past, communion with the hallowed
+monuments of mankind. So they wandered about the old Italian cities,
+until he discovered that the one thing essential to his work was the
+gaiety of cosmopolitan society; whereupon they went the round of French
+watering-places, where Adrian played recklessly at baccarat and spent
+inordinate sums on food. And all the time Doria wrote glowingly of their
+doings. Adrian had put the book out of his head, was always in the best
+of spirits. He had completely recovered from the strain of work and was
+looking forward joyously to the final spurt in London and the
+achievement of the masterpiece.
+
+Meanwhile we played the annual comedy of our August migration; the only
+change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West Coast of
+Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One gleam of joy
+irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn--the news that Jaffery, his
+mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would be home for Christmas.
+Our host and hostess were sporting folk with red, weatherbeaten faces
+and a mania (which they expected us to share) for salmon-fishing in the
+pouring rain. As neither Barbara nor I were experts--I always trembled
+lest a strong young fish getting hold of the end of Barbara's line
+should whisk her over like a feather into the boiling current--and as
+for myself, I prefer the more contemplative art of bottom fishing from a
+punt in dry weather--our friends caught all the salmon, while we merely
+caught colds in the head. Many an hour of sodden misery was cheered by
+the whispered word of comfort: Jaffery would be home for Christmas. And
+when, at ten o'clock in the evening, just as we were beginning to awake
+from the nightmare of the day, and to desire sprightly conversation, our
+host and hostess fell into a lethargy, and staggered off to slumber, we
+beguiled the hour before bedtime with talk of Jaffery's homecoming.
+
+At last we escaped and took the good train south. The Bolderos had
+already returned to London. They came to spend our first week-end at
+Northlands. Adrian professed to be in the robustest of health and to
+have not a care in the world. The holiday, said he, had done him
+incalculable good. Already he had begun to work in the full glow of
+inspiration. We thought him looking old and hag-ridden, but Doria seemed
+happy. She had her own reason for happiness, which she confided to
+Barbara. It would be early in the New Year. . . . Her eyes, I noticed,
+were filled with a new and wonderful love for Adrian. On the Sunday
+afternoon as we were sauntering about the garden, Adrian touched upon
+the subject in a man's shy way when speaking to his fellow man.
+
+"Why," said I with a laugh, "that's just about the time you expect the
+book to be out."
+
+He gave me a queer, slanting look. "Yes," said he, "they'll both be born
+together."
+
+That night, to my consternation and sorrow, he went to bed quite fuddled
+with whisky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Never shall I forget that Christmastide. Its shadow has fallen on every
+Christmas since then. And, in the innocent insolence of our hearts, we
+had planned such a merry one. It was the first since our marriage that
+we were spending at Northlands, for like dutiful folk we had hitherto
+spent the two or three festival days in the solid London house of
+Barbara's parents. Her father, Sir Edward Kennion, retired Permanent
+Secretary of a Government Office, was a courtly gentleman with a
+faultless taste in old china and wine, and Lady Kennion a charming old
+lady almost worthy of being the mother of Barbara. To speak truly, I had
+always enjoyed my visits. But when the news came that, for the sake of
+the dear lady's health, the Kennions were starting for Bermuda, in the
+middle of December, it did not strike us desolate. On the contrary
+Barbara clapped her hands in undisguised glee.
+
+"It will do mother no end of good, and we can give Susan a real
+Christmas of her own."
+
+So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to have a
+roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a widowed cousin of
+mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children; and we sent out
+invitations to the _ban_ and _arrière ban_ of the county's juvenility,
+to say nothing of that of London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having
+accounted satisfactorily for Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope
+in a Christian spirit, of our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be
+with us. Why not ask his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion
+affection for each other. Then there was Liosha. Both she and Jaffery
+met in Susan's heart, and it was Susan's Christmas. With Liosha would
+come Mrs. Considine, admirable and lonely woman. We trusted to luck and
+to Mrs. Considine's urbane influence for amenable relations between
+Liosha and Euphemia Chayne. With Jaffery in the house, Adrian and Doria
+must come. Last Christmas they had spent in the country with old Mrs.
+Boldero; old Mrs. Boldero was, therefore, summoned to Northlands. In the
+lightness of our hearts we invited Mr. Jornicroft. After the letter was
+posted my spirits sank. What in the world would we do with ponderous old
+man Jornicroft? But in the course of a few posts my gloom was lightened
+by a refusal. Mr. Jornicroft had been in the habit for many years of
+spending Christmas at the King's Hotel, Hastings, and had already made
+his arrangements.
+
+"Who else is there?" asked Barbara.
+
+"My dear," said I. "This is a modest country house, not an International
+Palace Hotel. Including Eileen's children and their governess and nurse
+and Doria's maid, we shall have to find accommodation for fifteen
+people."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said. "We can't do it."
+
+"Count up," said I.
+
+I lit a cigar and went out into the winter-stricken garden, and left her
+reckoning on her fingers, with knitted brow. When I returned she greeted
+me with a radiantly superior smile.
+
+"Who said it couldn't be done? I do wish men had some kind of practical
+sense. It's as easy as anything."
+
+She unfolded her scheme. As far as my dazed wits could grasp it, I
+understood that I should give up my dressing-room, that the maids should
+sleep eight in a bed, that Franklin, our excellent butler, should perch
+in a walnut-tree and that planks should be put up in the bath-rooms for
+as many more guests as we cared to invite.
+
+"That is excellent," said I, "but do you realise that in this house
+party there are only three grown men--three ha'porth of grown men" (I
+couldn't forbear allusiveness) "to this intolerable quantity of women
+and children?"
+
+"But who is preventing you from asking men, dear? Who are they?"
+
+I mentioned my old friend Vansittart; also poor John Costello's son, who
+would most likely be at a loose end at Christmas, and one or two others.
+
+"Well have them, dear," said Barbara.
+
+So four unattached men were added to the party. That made nineteen. When
+I thought of their accommodation my brain reeled. In order to retain my
+wits I gave up thinking of it, and left the matter to Barbara.
+
+We were going to have a mighty Christmas. The house was filled with
+preparations. Susan and I went to the village draper's and bought
+beautifully coloured cotton stockings to hang up at her little cousins'
+bedposts. We stirred the plum pudding. We planned out everything that we
+should like to do, while Barbara, without much reference to us, settled
+what was to be done. In that way we divided the labour. Old Jaffery,
+back from China, came to us on the twentieth of December, and threw
+himself heart and soul into our side of the work. He took up our life
+just as though he had left it the day before yesterday--just the same
+sun-glazed hairy red giant, noisy, laughter-loving and voracious. Susan
+went about clapping her hands the day he arrived and shouting that
+Christmas had already begun.
+
+The first thing he did was to clamour for Adrian, the man of fame. But
+the three Bolderos were not coming till the twenty-fourth. Adrian was
+making one last glorious spurt, so Doria said, in order to finish the
+great book before Christmas. We had not seen much of them during the
+autumn. Trivial circumstances had prevented it. Susan had had measles. I
+had been laid up with a wrenched knee. One side happened to be engaged
+when the other suggested a meeting. A trumpery series of accidents.
+Besides, Adrian, with his new lease of health and inspiration, had
+plunged deeper than ever into his work, so that it was almost impossible
+to get hold of him. On the few occasions when he did emerge from his
+work-room into the light of friendly smiles, he gave glowing accounts of
+progress. He was satisfying his poet's dreams. He was writing like an
+inspired prophet. I saw him at the beginning of December. His face was
+white and ghastly, the furrow had deepened between his brows, and the
+strained squint had become permanent in his eyes. He laughed when I
+repeated my warnings of the spring. Small wonder, said he, that he did
+not look robust; virtue was going from him into every drop of ink. He
+could easily get through another month.
+
+"And then"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"my boy--you shall see! It
+will be worth all the _enfantement prodigieux_. You thought I was going
+off my chump, you dear old fuss-box. But you were wrong. So did
+Doria--for a week or two. Bless her! she's an artist's wife in ten
+million."
+
+"Have you thought of a title?" I asked.
+
+"'God'," said he. "Yes--'God'--short like that. Isn't it good?"
+
+I cried out that it was in the worst possible taste. It would offend. He
+would lose his public. The Non-conformists and Evangelicals would be
+frightened by the very name. He lost his temper and scoffed at my Early
+Victorianism. "Little Lily and her Pet Rabbit" was the kind of title I
+admired. He was going to call it "God."
+
+"My dear fellow, call it what you please," said I, anxious to avoid a
+duel of plates and glasses, for we were lunching on opposite sides of a
+table at his club.
+
+"I please to call it," said he, "by the only conceivable title that is
+adequate to such a work." Then he laughed, with a gleam of his old
+charm, and filled up my wine glass. "Anyhow, Wittekind, who has the
+commercial end of things in view, thinks it's ripping." He lifted his
+glass. "Here's to 'God.'"
+
+"Here's to the new book under a different name," said I.
+
+When I told Barbara about this, she rather agreed with Wittekind. It all
+depended on the matter and quality of the book itself.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said I, abhorrent of dissension, "thank Heaven the
+wretched composition's nearly finished."
+
+On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
+offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine. Jaffery
+met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the hour before
+bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in which neither my
+wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor myself were allowed to
+participate. When nurses sounded the retreat, our two Brobdingnagians
+appeared in the drawing-room, radiant, and dishevelled, with children
+sticking to them like flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side
+of Jaffery, unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman
+against physical man, with three children--two in her generous arms and
+one on her back--to his mere pair--that I realised, with the shock that
+always attends one's discovery of the obvious, the superb Olympian
+greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six feet to his six feet
+two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way of burly men. She held
+herself as erect as a redwood pine. The depth of her bosom, in its calm
+munificence, defied the vast, thick heave of his shoulders. Her lips
+were parted in laughter shewing magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one
+could read all the mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her
+hair was anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins.
+Her barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted, just
+for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they stood, male
+and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern garb. Clap a
+pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight suit of chain mail,
+moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache,
+his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress
+Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a
+gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under
+autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity--it
+was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the Götterdämmerung.
+
+I can only speak according to the impression produced by their entrance
+on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling lady of plump
+unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy, could not understand
+it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes, she saw nothing more in
+Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and considered Liosha far too big for
+a drawing-room.
+
+When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery surveyed
+with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the fire. Then in
+his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the arm.
+
+"They're too grown up for us, Liosha. Let's leave 'em. Come and I'll
+teach you how to play billiards."
+
+So off they went, to the satisfaction of Barbara and myself. Nothing
+could be better for our Christmas merriment than such relations of
+comradeship. We had the cheeriest of dinners that evening. If only, said
+Jaffery, old Adrian and Doria were with us. Well, they were coming the
+next day, together with Euphemia and the four unattached men. As I said
+before, I had given up enquiring into the lodging of this host, but
+Barbara, doubtless, as is her magic way, had caused bedrooms and beds to
+smile where all had been blank before. She herself was free from any
+care, being in her brightest mood; and when Barbara gave herself up to
+gaiety she was the most delicious thing in the wide world.
+
+In the morning the shadow fell. About eleven o'clock Franklin brought me
+a telegram into the library where Jaffery and I were sitting. I opened
+it.
+
+"_Terrible calamity. Come at once. Boldero_."
+
+I passed it to Jaffery. "My God!" said he, and we stared at each other.
+Franklin said:
+
+"Any answer, sir?"
+
+"Yes. 'Boldero. Coming at once.' And order the car round
+immediately--for London. Also ask Mrs. Freeth kindly to come here. Say
+the matter's important." Franklin withdrew. "It's Adrian," said I, my
+mind rushing back to my horrible apprehensions of the summer.
+
+"Or Doria. I understood--" He waved a hand.
+
+"Then Barbara must come."
+
+"She would in any case. It may be Adrian, so I'll come too, if you'll
+let me."
+
+Let the great, capable fellow come? I should think I would. "For
+Heaven's sake, do," said I.
+
+Barbara entered swinging housewifely keys.
+
+"I'm dreadfully busy, dear. What is it?"
+
+Then she saw our two set faces and stopped short. Her quick eyes fell on
+the telegram which Jaffery had put down in the arm of a couch, and
+before we could do or say anything, she had snatched it up and read it.
+She turned pale and held her little body very erect.
+
+"Have you ordered the car?"
+
+"Yes. Jaffery's coming with us."
+
+"Good, I'll get on my coat. Send Eileen to me. I must tell her about
+house things."
+
+She went out. Jaffery laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.
+
+"What a wonder of a wife you've got!"
+
+"I don't need you to tell me that," said I.
+
+We went downstairs to put on our coats and then round to the garage to
+hurry up the car.
+
+"There's some dreadful trouble at Mr. Boldero's," I said to the
+chauffeur. "You must drive like the devil."
+
+Barbara, veiled and coated, met us at the front door. She has a trick of
+doing things by lightning. We started; Barbara and Jaffery at the back,
+I sideways to them on one of the little chair seats. We had the car
+open, as it was a muggy day. . . . It is astonishing how such trivial
+matters stick in one's mind. . . . We went, as I had ordained, like the
+devil.
+
+"Who sent that telegram?" asked Barbara.
+
+"Doria," said I.
+
+"I think it's Adrian," said Jaffery.
+
+"I think," said Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's mother.
+Either of the others would have said something definite. Ah!" she smote
+her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with spinal marrow and no
+backbone to hold it!"
+
+We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas traffic in
+the town clearing magically before us. Sometimes a car on an errand of
+life or death is recognised, given way to, like a fire engine.
+
+"What makes you so dead sure something's happened to Adrian?" Jaffery
+asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.
+
+Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears. Ever
+since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his
+novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I had given
+of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had mentioned his
+pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office, his bombastic
+rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of the Snows, and, all
+that being part and parcel of our old Adrian, we had laughed. Six months
+before I would have told Jaffery quite a different story. But now that
+Adrian had practically won through, what was the good of reviving the
+memory of ghastly apprehensions?
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "There's something behind all this."
+
+I told him. It took some time. We sped through Slough and Hounslow, and
+past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as heavy as our
+hearts.
+
+"In plain words," said Jaffery, "it's G.P.--General Paralysis of the
+Insane."
+
+"That's what I fear," said I.
+
+"And you?" He turned to Barbara.
+
+"I too. Hilary has told you the truth."
+
+"But Doria! Good God! Doria! It will kill her!"
+
+Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery's great raw hand. Only
+at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear gloves.
+
+"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to pieces
+now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."
+
+Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance
+in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double
+line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially
+organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean,
+narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able. Then
+through Chiswick, over Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London.
+All London to cross. Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was
+smitten by a blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a
+hundred yards ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer
+yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in
+startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.
+Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with
+light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
+roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black
+things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of
+colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and
+yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous,
+glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of
+mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by
+the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the
+outer a herd of subfuse brown. And in the roadway, through the
+translucent olive, the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts
+mightily and dashingly charioted.
+
+The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the mansions in
+St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule, and the
+hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened the car-door
+and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's face that he had
+been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as constant visitors of the
+Bolderos.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Don't you know, sir?"
+
+"No."
+
+He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his news,
+and bent forward and whispered to me:
+
+"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."
+
+I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of
+the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible
+account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous
+telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was all I
+could think of. The only coherent remark I heard the man make was that
+it was a dreadful thing to happen at Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand
+tight and did not say a word. The next phase I remember only too
+vividly. When the flat door opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was
+like a curtain being lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as
+we entered we were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of
+anæsthetics, disinfectants--I know not what--greeted us.
+
+The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew down the
+corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards emerged a
+professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into Doria's room.
+From the spare room came for a moment an elderly woman whom we did not
+know. The study door was flung wide open--I noticed that the jamb was
+splintered. From the drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We
+entered and found Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara
+sat by her and took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell
+us nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went out.
+He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at seeing us.
+
+"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical man is
+apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is there a Mrs.
+Freeth here?"
+
+"Yes. My wife," said I.
+
+"Thank goodness--" He drew a breath. "There's no one here capable of
+doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other woman."
+
+Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.
+
+"Mrs. Boldero is very ill--as ill as she can be. Of course you were
+aware of her condition--well--the shock has had its not very uncommon
+effect."
+
+"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.
+
+"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know nothing--I
+was summoned and found a man lying dead on the floor in that room"--he
+pointed to the study--"and a woman in a dreadful state. I've only had
+time to make sure that the poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me
+something about them?"
+
+So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who Adrian
+Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world and a bit of
+the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I don't know, for
+beating against the walls of my head was the thought that Adrian lay
+there in the room where I had seen the strange woman, lifeless and
+stiff, with the laughing eyes forever closed and the last mockery gone
+from his lips. Just then the woman appeared again. The young doctor
+beckoned to her and said a few words. Jaffery and I followed her into
+the death-chamber, leaving the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood
+and looked at all that was left of Adrian.
+
+But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I really
+knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the mansions
+then told us. But that little more I will set down here.
+
+For the past few days he had been working early and late, scarcely
+sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at five, had risen
+sleepless at seven, and having dressed and breakfasted had locked
+himself in his study. The very last page, he told Doria, was to be
+written. He was to come down to us for Christmas, with his novel a
+finished thing. At ten o'clock, in accordance with custom, when he began
+to work early, the maid came to his door with a cup of chicken-broth.
+She knocked. There was no reply. She knocked louder. She called her
+mistress. Doria hammered . . . she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror
+grips a woman. She sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din
+to awaken--well--all but the dead. The man forced the door--hence the
+splinters on the jamb--and there they found Adrian, in the great bare
+room, hanging horribly over his writing chair, with not a scrap of paper
+save his blotting-pad in front of him. He must have died almost as soon
+as he had reached his study, before he had time to take out his
+manuscript from the jealous safe. That this was so the harassed doctor
+afterwards affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination
+of the dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death--a clot
+of blood on the brain. . . .
+
+To go back . . . They found him dead. And then arose an unpicturable
+scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid woman, on the point of
+starting for a Christmas visit, took charge of the situation, sent for
+the doctor, despatched the telegram to us, and with the help of the
+porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile
+mass of sodden hysteria. Much that was fascinating and feminine in
+Adrian came from this amiable and incapable lady.
+
+We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and soda--we
+needed it--and talked of the catastrophe. As yet, of course, we knew
+nothing of the clot of blood. Presently Barbara came in and put her
+hands on my shoulders.
+
+"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your club.
+Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from Northlands, and
+will look after things with Eileen. And put off Euphemia and the others,
+if you can."
+
+And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with such
+joyous anticipation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria hovering on
+the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on a Christmas eve
+in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was Christmas Day. The
+day after, Boxing Day. The day after that, Sunday. The whole world was
+dead. And all those awful days the thin yellow fog that was not fog but
+mere blight of darkness hung over the vast city.
+
+God spare me such another Christmastide.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried
+Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother
+had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country
+cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. Doria still lay
+in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the
+stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds that strike a note of agony
+through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to
+knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her.
+
+We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and appointing
+Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the
+child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis XV cabinet
+in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a
+solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We
+found his own personal bills and receipts filed, his old letters tied up
+in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his
+lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk
+of a careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
+Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
+intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry alone,
+because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from
+impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.
+
+All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been
+found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we had placed
+the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The
+Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing
+that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered
+the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it
+locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his
+unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women,
+who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion,
+hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed,
+professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an
+inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and
+household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
+strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living,
+the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand
+it over to the publisher.
+
+So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered
+the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the
+blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating
+yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the
+morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The
+stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the
+electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its
+scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went
+to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in
+the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three
+different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter
+the quill had scrawled "God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass
+ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an
+eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to
+hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its
+heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed
+from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
+of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.
+
+"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed
+look. "We'll have our work cut out."
+
+"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as
+you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."
+
+Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose, ragged
+piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets
+unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite
+manuscript; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes,
+fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible
+memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.
+"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah
+steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude
+drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking
+over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.
+
+"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his
+beard.
+
+"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great
+relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were
+turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained
+Adrian's whimsy.
+
+"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh
+at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an
+incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish
+away, and we'll look at the second shelf."
+
+The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were
+more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a
+couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent
+scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen
+stories.
+
+"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery,
+standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous
+wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had
+pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting
+in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.
+
+"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
+found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."
+
+We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
+could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.
+
+"It will take weeks to fix it up."
+
+"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
+old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."
+
+In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
+going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
+beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or
+four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a
+dozen headed "Chapter I."
+
+"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.
+
+I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I
+examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a
+coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.
+
+"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"
+
+He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in
+brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.
+
+"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.
+
+"Thank God!" said I.
+
+He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet
+with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a
+white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written
+inscription:
+
+"The Diamond Gate. A Novel--by Thomas Castleton."
+
+"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two
+we both stood stock-still.
+
+The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily
+flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's--Tom Castleton, the one genius
+of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.
+There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too
+familiar--as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom
+Castleton from Adrian.
+
+Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.
+
+There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond
+Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian
+had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man,
+but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.
+
+We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands
+and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we
+ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are
+times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We
+found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The
+apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we
+examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into
+an awful certainty.
+
+The great epoch-making novel did not exist.
+
+It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no
+possibility of existing.
+
+"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in his
+great, hoarse bass.
+
+"God knows," said I.
+
+But even as I spoke, I knew.
+
+I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned
+Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to
+shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I
+was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and
+hugged me kindly.
+
+"Go and get warm," said he.
+
+"But this?" I pointed to the litter.
+
+"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."
+
+He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I
+crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet
+and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that
+morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just
+as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose
+some story in mitigation of the tragedy.
+
+Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down
+on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
+hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the
+shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse
+and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the
+yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of
+turning on the lights.
+
+"What have you done?" I asked.
+
+"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll bring a
+portmanteau and take it away."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Leave that to me," said he.
+
+What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was very
+glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with the
+reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as
+he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself
+like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he was a professional
+demigod. He reassured me further.
+
+"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he
+broke the silence.
+
+"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in God's
+name?"
+
+And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the cold grip
+of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was none too
+consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks,
+which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in
+terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his
+offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he
+had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture.
+
+Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not. Least of
+all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the revelation of
+his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in
+perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian. With all his faults,
+his poses, his superficialities, his secrecies, his egotisms, I never
+dreamed of him as aught but a loyal and honourable gentleman. When I
+think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul.
+What does one man know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was
+right: "We mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable
+faith in Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast
+with conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
+them part of our very selves.
+
+Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place
+made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral
+sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the
+manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his hands. Undoubtedly he was to
+arrange for its publication. Castleton's appointment to the
+professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I well remember,
+necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he
+sailed. Why did not Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the
+manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a
+question of despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were
+not parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
+characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From
+that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years,
+in his easy way, he struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for
+Doria, he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent
+to Wittekind, the publisher of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till
+later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript?
+That was what Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with
+morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
+queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
+relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence--that is the
+only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
+explain the sustained act of folly.
+
+And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
+gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
+remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
+Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
+the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
+looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
+merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
+ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
+what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
+woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
+novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
+casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
+himself to do heretofore, he had done.
+
+As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
+stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
+examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
+of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
+"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
+capacity.
+
+When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
+He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
+beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
+was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
+must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
+mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
+practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
+room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
+intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
+wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
+the condemned cell.
+
+As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
+of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
+spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
+mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
+few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a
+novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
+never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
+insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
+but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
+genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
+critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
+All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
+little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
+by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
+which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
+a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
+human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
+have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
+were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
+poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
+matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
+the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
+like, but the essential quality of the artist.
+
+And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
+months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
+never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
+such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
+life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
+and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
+became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
+told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
+wondrous book. The pity of it!
+
+How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
+to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
+would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
+the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
+he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
+sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
+impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
+out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
+should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No
+wonder he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
+accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills for
+whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for
+the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate God was
+merciful at last. He killed him.
+
+Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire--the ship-logs that Adrian
+loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and what-not, gave green and
+crimson and lavender flames.
+
+"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he said. "A
+war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of
+hell. But this sample I haven't struck before and it's the worst of the
+lot. My God! and only the day before yesterday I took him to be
+married."
+
+"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked hairs
+out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy of China,
+which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you had no idea of
+time or space."
+
+He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.
+
+"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the child
+stillborn--"
+
+I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me;
+that of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his
+eyes: "They'll both be born together."
+
+I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I said. "Both
+stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter, the more
+shudderingly awful it is."
+
+Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.
+
+"And she at the point of death--to complete the tragedy," he said below
+his breath.
+
+Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.
+
+"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried with a
+startling quaver in his deep voice.
+
+"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the best
+thing you can wish for her?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Isn't it obvious? She recovers--she will, most probably, recover;
+Jephson said so this morning--she comes back to life to find what? The
+shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's
+better that she should die now."
+
+Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his
+eyes blazed.
+
+"What do you mean--shattering of idols?"
+
+"She is bound to learn the truth."
+
+He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp,
+so that I winced with pain.
+
+"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim
+suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told
+her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of
+passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched
+fists,--the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and
+ceiling of the fog-darkened room--I shrank into my chair, for he seemed
+not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same
+deep, shaken voice.
+
+"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand."
+His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."
+
+"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."
+
+"You swear you've seen it?"
+
+"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.
+
+He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair,
+and walked for a little about the room.
+
+"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself. It's a
+matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you understand clearly
+what I mean?"
+
+"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself
+to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it can't last
+forever."
+
+Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the steel of
+his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's enemy.
+
+"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
+something out of nothing."
+
+"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've seen it,
+and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it
+matter to you what becomes of it?"
+
+"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole
+matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and
+trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you?"
+
+"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
+responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
+choose. But you've seen the outside of it."
+
+He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled a
+memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy.
+Then he turned on me.
+
+"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul
+of what you have seen this day?"
+
+I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for? But
+you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must know."
+
+He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile:
+
+"You and Barbara are one," said he.
+
+Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from
+his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheet of the
+blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God: A Novel: By
+Adrian Boldero."
+
+"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a touch of
+frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that Doria emerged
+from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they allowed me to visit
+her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost in search of a human
+occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she looked such a pitiful scrap,
+all hair and eyes. She smiled and held droopingly out to me the most
+fragile thing in hands I have ever seen.
+
+"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."
+
+"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for things to
+find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have already made
+the discovery."
+
+She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I love it
+in the spring. The dancing daffodils--"
+
+"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.
+
+"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause. "At
+first I longed to die--that was why my recovery was so slow. But
+now--odd, isn't it?"
+
+"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how great
+it is," I replied gently.
+
+"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."
+
+I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much the same.
+In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious aspiration. If it gives
+them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't they have it?
+But in Doria's case, its utterance gave me a kind of stab in the heart.
+By way of reply I patted her poor little wrist sympathetically.
+
+"When will the book be out?" she asked.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.
+
+"I suppose they're busy printing it."
+
+"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.
+
+"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time. It won't
+do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"
+
+"I will," said I.
+
+I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded
+ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor
+child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the
+subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could
+not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know
+the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave
+him Doria's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing.
+He had become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the
+disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands.
+
+I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the
+best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town;
+yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished
+chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as
+I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor-omnibuses without an
+overcoat.
+
+After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his pipe
+thoughtfully--we were in the smoking-room of a club (not the Athenæum)
+to which we both belonged--and then he roared out:
+
+"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"Well"--he grinned a little--"I'm not exactly a kind of sick-room
+flower."
+
+"I think you ought to see her--you're as much trustee and executor as I
+am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-racking
+questions."
+
+"All right, I'll go," he said.
+
+The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book
+would be published as soon as possible.
+
+"When will that be?" she asked.
+
+Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.
+
+"Is it in the printer's hands?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Why?"
+
+He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but here
+and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together, which
+Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript. He himself
+was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical task of revision.
+
+"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could not be
+given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so
+why are you taking all this time over it?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.
+
+Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please
+Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she
+complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up
+Adrian's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting
+the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara
+did her best to soothe her; but we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad
+start.
+
+A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came
+across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known
+for some years--originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer
+of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss
+our common friend.
+
+"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while.
+
+"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.
+
+"Yes. Can't make him out."
+
+"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."
+
+"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a shock,
+is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a wilderness and
+roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be persuaded to leave it."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to
+send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as well."
+
+"All this is news to me," said I.
+
+"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans, wild
+tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways,
+finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal
+conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is butter and honey to
+Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up
+with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!"
+
+At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I could
+not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate
+vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till
+three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot
+seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it
+was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the
+meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.
+The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission,
+the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model
+special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
+ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task
+after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest
+political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and
+honourable position on the paper.
+
+"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,"
+said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't
+tell him that we wouldn't."
+
+It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a
+man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred
+to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's
+Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a
+solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I
+did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in
+the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker's to give an order
+concerning Susan's riding-boots (_vide_ diary) and drove home to dinner,
+to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account
+of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the
+contented and inoffensive man.
+
+A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in
+Westminster in the forenoon--I had come up to town on business--I
+mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A
+dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I
+found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe
+in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere
+former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once
+comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did not seem to mind. The remains of
+breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear.
+Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth.
+
+"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"
+
+His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather. When the
+alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It was a hole
+for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its abominable suffocation.
+
+"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."
+
+This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+"I understood you could have gone to Persia."
+
+He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know that?"
+
+"Arbuthnot--" I began.
+
+"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by telling
+you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head!"
+
+"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You might
+hurt him."
+
+"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue quiet?"
+
+He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful anathema.
+Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any of you to know
+anything about it."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"Because I didn't."
+
+"But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?"
+
+He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and collecting a
+litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a legging from a sofa,
+pitched it into a corner.
+
+"Here. Sit down."
+
+I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying the
+half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the
+comfortable home from Harrod's Stores that Barbara had prescribed; and
+he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the heads of
+game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London Repository. It
+was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage.
+
+"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink."
+
+I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country
+gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half past
+eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar
+circumstances.
+
+"I'm going to have one anyway!"
+
+He disappeared and presently reëntered with a battered two-handled
+silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy
+of Cambridge days, which he always carried about with him on no matter
+what lightly equipped expedition--it is always a matter of regret to me
+that Jaffery, as I have mentioned before, missed his seat in the
+Cambridge boat; but when one despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it
+is found the central feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such
+as used to protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from
+the priggish judgment of university authority?--he reëntered, with this
+vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught and wiped his
+moustache with his hand.
+
+"Better have some. I've got a cask in the bedroom."
+
+"Good God!" said I, aghast. "What else do you keep there? A side of
+bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?"
+
+Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his
+bedroom.
+
+Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long, lean,
+puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the
+deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.
+
+"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a
+cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of
+your life in not going out to Persia."
+
+He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard; and,
+turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife, and Susan
+my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed
+towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate me.
+
+"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian proposition," said
+he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window at the
+infinitely reaching landscape of the chimney pots of south London, their
+grey smoke making London's unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of
+the March sky. "Just hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning
+round my neck I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which
+was very wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of
+the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away
+and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with
+white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band of
+topaz and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the immemorable
+smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle of the harness
+and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of the drivers, and in
+his heart the certainty of plucking out the secret from the soul of this
+strange land. . . .
+
+At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair enquired
+politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as the Persian
+journey was concerned the palaver was ended. He did not intend to give
+me his reasons for staying in England and I could not demand them more
+insistently. At any rate I had discovered the cause of his grumpiness.
+What creature of Jaffery's temperament could be contented with a soft
+bed in the centre of civilisation, when he had the chance of sleeping in
+verminous caravanserais with a saddle for pillow? In spite of his
+amazing predilections, Jaffery was very human. He would make a great
+sacrifice without hesitation; but the consequences of the sacrifice
+would cause him to go about like a bear with a sore head.
+
+And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having been
+admitted to her bedside, he went there every day. Flowers and fruit he
+had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a grape for Doria
+failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a pumpkin. Now he brought
+the offerings personally in embarrassing bulk. One offering was a
+gramophone which nearly drove her mad. Even in its present stage of
+development it offends the sensitive ear; but in its early days it was
+an instrument of torturing cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen
+strains music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he
+came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence
+of ravished senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and
+recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don't think the
+gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's unspoken
+message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes the thing
+played and sending him forth in quest of records of recondite and
+"unrecorded" music, she succeeded in mitigating the terror. To the
+present moment, however, I don't think Jaffery has realised that she had
+a higher æsthetic equipment than the hypnotised fox-terrier in the
+advertisement. . . . Jaffery also bought her puzzles and funny penny
+pavement toys and gallons of eau-de-cologne (which came in useful), and
+expensive scent (which she abominated), and stacks of new novels, and a
+fearsome machine of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of
+which an invalid could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the
+same time. The only thing he did not give her--the thing she craved more
+than all--was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's book.
+
+Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of Persia.
+But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have
+afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Despatched suddenly to that
+vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to
+revise on the journey: the convoy could have been attacked by a horde of
+Kurds or such-like desperadoes, all could have been slain save a
+fortunate handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an
+important political document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would
+have hated Jaffery forever after; but his chivalrous aim would have been
+accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple way
+out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to sacrifice
+his career and remain in London so as to buoy Doria up with false hope,
+all the time praying God to burn down St. Quentin's Mansions (where he
+lived) and Adrian's portmanteau of rubbish and himself all together.
+
+Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft stepped in and
+carried her to the south of France. Barbara and Jaffery and myself saw
+her off by the afternoon train at Charing Cross. She was to rest in
+Paris for the night and the next day, and proceed the following night to
+Nice. She looked the frailest thing under the sun. Her face was
+startling ivory beneath her widow's headgear. She had scarcely strength
+to lift her head. Mr. Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her
+comfort--an ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid
+compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's wedding,
+Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted her
+feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from the
+carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her tenderly on
+her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude she thanked him
+with much graciousness. He bent over her--we were standing at the door
+and could not choose but hear:
+
+"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second and
+took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You get well
+and strong."
+
+He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her
+shoulder--half her little body it seemed to be--and emerging from the
+compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm
+of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached Jornicroft.
+
+"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get into a
+smoker somewhere or the other."
+
+"But, my dear sir"--exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some amazement--"it's
+awfully kind, but why should you?"
+
+"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She can't put
+her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at every stage of
+the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned clumsy fellow handle
+her. I'll see her into the Nice train to-morrow night--perhaps I'll go
+on to Nice with you and fix her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I
+will. I shan't worry you. You won't see me, except at the right time.
+Don't be afraid."
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must confess,
+did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he had no more
+intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had ourselves.
+
+"I can't permit it--it's too kind--there's no necessity--we'll get on
+all right!" spluttered Mr. Jornicroft.
+
+"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take any
+risks."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--it's absurd--you haven't any luggage."
+
+"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested the
+impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the Encyclopædia
+Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to do with it?" His roar
+could be heard above the din of the hurrying station. "I don't want
+_luggage_." The humour of the proposition appealed to him so mightily
+that he went off into one of his reverberating explosions of mirth.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering--"Don't you worry about that."
+
+"But have you enough on you--it's an expensive journey--of course I
+should be most happy--"
+
+Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and beckoned
+to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the station
+master.
+
+"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"
+
+The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."
+
+"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a ticket
+now?"
+
+"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send him a
+wire."
+
+"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing now and
+going to Nice by the Côte d'Azur Express to-morrow night. And see after
+a seat for me, will you?"
+
+"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."
+
+The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his hands
+stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a mountainous child. We
+were all impressed by his lordly command of the railway systems of
+Europe. It was a question of credit, of course, but neither Mr.
+Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor myself could have undertaken that
+journey with a few loose shillings in his possession. For the first time
+since Adrian's death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.
+
+And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an overcoat
+travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than to save Doria's
+sacred little body from being profaned by the touch of ruder hands.
+
+Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer from train
+to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant march up the
+stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took the first train
+back straight through to London.
+
+He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of grumpiness
+on his jolly face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our
+feet--the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an
+unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but
+a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same.
+The admirable Mrs. Considine got married. A retired warrior, a recent
+widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that
+his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (_on avait
+fait continent à part_, as the French might say) during that period, a
+Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant correspondent,
+had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queen's Gate and,
+in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the admirable and unresisting
+lady. It was a matter of special license, and off went the tardily happy
+pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes.
+
+It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said Barbara. She
+thought her--no; perhaps she didn't think her--God alone knows the
+convolutions of feminine mental processes--but she proclaimed her
+anyhow--an unscrupulous woman.
+
+"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that boarding-house."
+
+"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp--I admit it's deplorable taste to change a
+name of such gentility as Considine for that of Jupp, but it isn't
+unscrupulous--Mrs. Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission
+from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the rest of her life."
+
+"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was the one
+person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what she's done for
+her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for those two old faggots
+marrying, they ought to be ashamed of themselves."
+
+Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter. Liosha
+remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's indignation
+could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine and bring her
+back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We consulted Jaffery, who as
+Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted us. Jaffery pulled a long face
+and smiled ruefully. For the first time he realised--in spite of tragic
+happenings--the comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of
+two young, well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the
+world to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too
+swore lustily at the defaulting duenna.
+
+"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.
+
+"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I.
+"Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."
+
+"That's the devil of it," he growled.
+
+"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to look after
+before you've done with this existence!"
+
+His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and saddle me
+with Barbara, I'll punch your head."
+
+He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed Barbara.
+
+"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense. What
+shall I do?"
+
+Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.
+
+I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting at the
+boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the elegant
+"_bonbonnière_" of a chamber known as the "boudoir." There was a great
+deal of ribbon and frill and photograph frame and artful feminine touch
+about it, which Liosha and, doubtless, many other inmates thought
+mightily refined.
+
+Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade us be
+seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could not have
+been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp) herself. That
+maligned lady had performed her duties during the past two years with
+characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may remark that Liosha's
+table-manners and formal demeanour were now irreproachable. Mrs.
+Considine had also taken up the Western education of the child of twelve
+at the point at which it had been arrested, and had brought Liosha's
+information as to history, geography, politics and the world in general
+to the standard of that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she
+had developed in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing,
+on her emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary
+colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver harmonies.
+Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's stockyard vocabulary,
+erasing words and expressions that might offend Queen's Gate and
+substituting others that might charm; and she had done it with a touch
+of humour not lost on Liosha, who had retained the sense of values in
+which no child born and bred in Chicago can be deficient.
+
+"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she said
+pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."
+
+"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.
+
+"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said Jaffery.
+
+"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had interfered
+with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a stone and
+everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but I've been
+taught you don't do things like that in South Kensington."
+
+"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"
+
+"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"
+
+"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.
+
+"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"
+
+"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."
+
+"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look after
+myself by this time? What do you take me for?"
+
+I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery, in his
+tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed the point
+altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about with, say to
+restaurants and theatres."
+
+"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her eyes.
+"Don't you worry!"
+
+"All the more reason for a dragon."
+
+"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I talk to
+a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and you're not
+going to find another like her in a hurry. Besides--I had sense enough
+to see that she was going to teach me things. But I don't want to be
+taught any more. I've learned enough."
+
+"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you, dear," said
+Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection against--well, any
+pretty young woman living alone is liable to chance impertinence and
+annoyance."
+
+Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to annoy me. He
+wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"--Mrs. Jardine was the keeper
+of the boarding-house--"she'll tell you a thing or two about my being
+able to keep men from annoying me."
+
+Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights
+on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up
+in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen
+who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a
+peculiarly deferential attitude towards Liosha.
+
+"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you know."
+
+"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why not take
+on the job yourself?"
+
+"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine joke.
+
+"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an air of
+seriousness.
+
+"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a hand to
+the frills and ribbons.
+
+"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the advantages
+and refining influences of a first-class English home."
+
+He pivoted round. "Oh, you be--"
+
+"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look after
+Liosha more than you do--"
+
+He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he write?
+Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting on?
+
+"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara asked
+sternly.
+
+He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in a lapse
+from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and I noticed
+just the faintest little twitching of her lip.
+
+"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner against
+his will."
+
+"But--God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I never thought
+of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a barbarian, my dear girl,
+just like yourself. If you wanted to be taken out, why on earth didn't
+you say so?"
+
+Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue out."
+
+Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away puzzled.
+There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's tone. He turned
+again and approached her with a smiling face.
+
+"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of thing,
+Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this
+evening and do a theatre afterwards."
+
+"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."
+
+Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent.
+Jaffery frowned.
+
+"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."
+
+I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had frowned and
+spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise her with a
+cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose in her throat
+and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned splendidly,
+quivering.
+
+"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon. And"--alas for
+the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's training--"I'm going to do as I
+damn well like."
+
+Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I
+exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey
+a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery pulled out
+pouch and pipe and shook his head.
+
+"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.
+
+"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the dunderheaded
+male."
+
+"I did nothing to cause these heroics."
+
+"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."
+
+"I didn't," he protested.
+
+I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so.
+Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely.
+
+"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper
+subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."
+
+"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is
+confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."
+
+"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."
+
+"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for
+pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."
+
+"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot
+who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I
+know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my
+hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It's all this
+infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."
+
+"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was
+a remarkable phenomenon--a generalisation which includes woman in
+fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."
+
+"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't
+want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm rather fond
+of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if
+it hadn't been that poor old Prescott--you know what I mean--I gave up
+thinking of her in that way at once--and now I just want to be
+friends--we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and, if I had
+thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . . But what I
+can't stand is these modern neurotics--"
+
+"You called them heroics--"
+
+"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every
+modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're taught it's
+correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have 'em."
+
+"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"
+
+Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where
+she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always
+treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the
+stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family
+as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the
+majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would
+like to know which of Jaff Chayne's ancestors had died out of their
+feather beds.
+
+"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian Mutiny, and
+his father in the Zulu War."
+
+Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne had no
+right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman
+over her. She was a free woman--she wouldn't go out to dinner with Jaff
+Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him; at which renewed
+declaration she burst into fresh weeping and wished she were dead. As a
+guardian of young and beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a
+success.
+
+Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the
+paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such other
+lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in front of
+Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the
+fit had subsided. Then she spoke.
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a silly
+schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn't
+announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."
+
+"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her grievance.
+
+"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking
+knife that lay on a little table--it was the same weapon that she had
+lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger." She threw it on the girl's
+lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a message for Mr. Chayne to come up.
+As soon as he enters you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it
+into me. Then if you like you can go downstairs and stick it into
+Hilary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to
+you, you'll feel a silly ass--such a silly ass that you'll forget to
+stick it into yourself."
+
+Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat
+little chip out of a chair-back.
+
+"What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the materials.
+
+Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha obeyed
+meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.
+
+"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now you look
+better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself beside Liosha and
+putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the way to deal with men.
+You must learn. They're only overgrown babies. Listen."
+
+And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the
+duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the
+serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor
+any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of
+belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her
+sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little
+private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions
+conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had dragged a softly
+swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said serenely:
+
+"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with pleasure. But
+the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way."
+
+I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her
+rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all very
+well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong: they
+were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was Liosha, who had
+once asked him to beat her, doing the same--woman was a more curious
+phenomenon than ever.
+
+"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he with a
+touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully good of you
+to come."
+
+She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the delicate
+little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the
+incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to
+seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We
+rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:
+
+"But we've settled nothing about a remplaçante for Mrs. Considine."
+
+"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No one can
+replace Mrs. Considine."
+
+I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently Jaffery's
+theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and, to judge by the
+faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission
+unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her independence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved with
+extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that of Mrs.
+Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal interpretation
+of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffery,
+lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth except for the
+purpose of shovelling in food, which he did, in astounding quantity.
+From what both of us gathered afterwards--and gleefully we compared
+notes--they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been
+entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he
+desired facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took
+him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an
+overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her finger
+and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all the time that
+he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat
+tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite; which was a pity,
+for the maître d'hôtel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant
+host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than
+a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she
+could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one
+after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It
+was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her _Fraises
+Diane_--vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow
+impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the
+summers of all the hills--because she would have given her soul to sit
+beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a
+tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every
+mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the
+world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English
+world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the
+well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected
+that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English
+civilisation, equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her
+Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few
+hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
+male companions. She also reflected--and for the reflection not Mrs.
+Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible--that to
+the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight,
+she counted no more than a pig or a cow--her instinctive similes, you
+must remember, were pastoral--or that peculiar damfool of a sister of
+his, Euphemia.
+
+When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one
+another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
+super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
+thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
+dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence
+and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the
+least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to
+the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery played host in the orthodox
+manner, and Liosha acknowledged attentions with a courtesy equally
+orthodox. But how much happier they both would have been on a bleak
+mountain-side eating stew out of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy
+failed to exercise mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in
+their own awful correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical
+comedy or a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have
+expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have been
+less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the play had
+caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an ironical title,
+which stupefied them with depression.
+
+When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate to open
+to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a most
+enjoyable evening.
+
+"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if you
+will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.
+
+So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance, and the
+week after that, and so on until it became a grim and terrifying
+fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the Eternal
+Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard to smother
+her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's prescription for
+the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce of it was that though
+in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown, she could not for the life
+of her regard him as a baby. So it came to pass that an unnatural pair
+continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great
+content of the high gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who
+looked on.
+
+"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled,
+one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of
+her."
+
+"That's a pity," said I.
+
+"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she looks
+so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with all the other
+women."
+
+I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your friends if
+you know how to set to work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It was a gorgeous April day--one of those days when young Spring in
+madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could
+assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but
+through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender
+leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the lilac, the swelling of
+the hawthorn buds, the pathetic immature barrenness of the walnuts.
+
+And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in their
+hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in their
+topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale butterfly here
+and there accomplished its early day, and queen wasps awakened from
+their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the tiniest winter-palaces in the
+world, sped like golden arrow tips to and from the homes they had to
+build alone for the swarms that were to come. The flower beds shone gay
+with tulips and hyacinths; in the long grass beyond the lawn and under
+the trees danced a thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped
+up in furs lay Doria on a long cane chair.
+
+She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had prophesied,
+for her full strength had not yet returned, but there she was among
+them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as though they were dancing
+in her honour. She was, however, restored to health; the great circles
+beneath her eyes had disappeared and a tinge of colour shewed beneath
+her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the first sunbonnet of the year, sat
+Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . . . Lord! It scarcely seemed two years
+since Jaffery came from Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his
+arms and was struck all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So
+thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty
+yards, away. And once again--pleasant self repetition of
+history--Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had spent a night
+at her father's house and had come down to us the evening before to
+complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go straight to the flat in
+St. John's Wood and begin her life anew with Adrian's beloved ghost, and
+she had issued orders to servants to have everything in readiness for
+her arrival, but Barbara had intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man
+of limited sympathies and brutal common sense. All of us, including
+Jaffery, who seemed to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only
+equalled by that of a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah
+as to the way to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of
+tragic memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had
+indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the home
+of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in peace with
+the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of Holies in which
+Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by vulgar tread? Our
+suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything that could arise from
+earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things. We could only prevail upon
+her to postpone her return to the flat until such time as she was
+physically strong enough to grapple with changed conditions.
+
+The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were bending over a
+book on Doria's knee--_Les Malheurs de Sophie_, which Susan, proud of
+her French scholarship, had proposed to read to Doria, who having just
+returned from France was supposed to be the latest authority on the
+language. I noticed that the severity of this intellectual communion was
+mitigated by Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little
+haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all of a
+sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the landscape
+(framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a huge and familiar
+figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this on the ground, rushed up
+to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung Susan in the air and kissed
+her, and was still laughing and making the welkin ring--that is to say,
+making a thundering noise--when I, having sped across the lawn, joined
+the group.
+
+"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"
+
+"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an earlier train.
+No good staying in town on such a morning. Besides--" He glanced at
+Doria in significant aposiopesis.
+
+"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked,
+pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why
+didn't you leave it to be called for?"
+
+"This? This little _sachet_?" He lifted it up by one finger and grinned.
+
+Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are strong!"
+
+Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift the thing
+an inch from the ground with both her hands.
+
+"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I felt as
+if I had been picked up by an iron crane."
+
+Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical
+strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen Jaffery in a
+nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from his saddle and
+wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one in each hand, and
+dash their heads together over his horse's neck. But that is the sort of
+story that Jaffery himself never told.
+
+Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had caught
+sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.
+
+"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great hand
+towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South. The
+sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh? Remember
+when we started for Nice?"
+
+He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with as much
+pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.
+
+"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.
+
+By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near distance, I
+hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is the one
+disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise happy season,
+Barbara expects me to be something between a scene-shifter and a
+Furniture Removing Van.
+
+The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we settled down.
+Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He
+held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers.
+
+"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting tenderness
+in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much longer."
+
+"Is it at the printer's?"
+
+"It's printed."
+
+Barbara and I gave each a little start--we looked at Jaffery, who was
+taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at each other. What on
+earth did the man mean?
+
+"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be flooded
+with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it up with
+Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."
+
+"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it necessary? I
+mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"
+
+"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to pass the
+proofs."
+
+Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't presume to do
+such a thing."
+
+"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.
+
+And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open the hasps
+of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs
+fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which he deposited on
+Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids fluttered as she
+fingered the precious thing. For a moment we thought she was going to
+faint. There was breathless silence. Even Susan, who had been left out
+in the cold, let the black kitten leap from her knee, and aware that
+something out of the ordinary was happening, fixed her wondering eyes on
+Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more
+reason. Of what manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed
+proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in
+the assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of
+despair?
+
+Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened her eyes
+and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long proofs. At
+once she sat bolt upright.
+
+"'_The Greater Glory_.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His title was
+'_God_.' Who has dared to change it?"
+
+[Illustration: He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs.]
+
+Her eyes flashed; her little body quivered. She flamed an incarnate
+indignation. For some reason or other she turned accusingly on me.
+
+"I knew nothing of the change," said I, "but I'm very glad to hear of it
+now."
+
+Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of what
+Jaffery had been doing with the book.
+
+"Wittekind wouldn't have the old title," cried Jaffery eagerly. "The
+public are very narrow minded, and he felt that in certain quarters it
+might be misunderstood."
+
+"Wittekind told dear Adrian that he thought it a perfect title."
+
+"Our dear Adrian," said I, pacifically, "was a man of enormous
+will-power and perhaps Wittekind hadn't the strength to stand up against
+him."
+
+"Of course he hadn't," exclaimed Doria. "Of course he hadn't when Adrian
+was alive: now Adrian's dead, he thinks he is going to do just as he
+chooses. He isn't! Not while I live, he isn't!"
+
+Jaffery looked at me from beneath bent brows and his eyes were turned to
+cold blue steel.
+
+"Hilary!" said he, "will you kindly tell Doria what we found on Adrian's
+blotting pad--the last words he ever wrote?"
+
+What he desired me to say was obvious.
+
+"Written three or four times," said I, "we found the words: 'The Greater
+Glory: A Novel by Adrian Boldero.'"
+
+"What has become of the blotting pad?"
+
+"The sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a lot of
+other unimportant papers."
+
+"And I came across further evidence," said Jaffery, "of his intention to
+rename the novel."
+
+Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "I should
+like to have had Adrian's last words," she whispered. Then bringing
+herself back to earth, she begged Jaffery's pardon very touchingly.
+Adrian's implied intention was a command. She too approved the change.
+"But I'm so jealous," she said, with a catch in her voice, "of my dear
+husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm sure you've done everything
+that was right and good, Jaffery." She held out the great bundle and
+smiled. "I pass the proofs."
+
+Jaffery took the bundle and laid it again on her lap. "It's awfully good
+of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But you can keep this
+set. I've got another, with the corrections in duplicate."
+
+She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips in a
+timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back.
+
+"I can't read it. I daren't read it. If Adrian had lived I shouldn't
+have seen it before it was published. He would have given me the finally
+bound book--an advance copy. These things--you know--it's the same to me
+as if he were living."
+
+The tears started. She rose; and we all did the same.
+
+"I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara dear. I'd rather be
+alone." She put her arm round my small daughter. "Perhaps Susan will see
+I don't break my neck across the lawn."
+
+Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and holding on to Susan, who was
+mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly towards the
+house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the bedroom door,
+she had lingered for a moment outside and had heard Auntie Doria crying
+like anything.
+
+Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous draught of
+proofs, advanced, a female David, up to Goliath Jaffery.
+
+"Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a graven
+image and be mystified in my own house. Will you have the goodness to
+explain?"
+
+Jaffery looked down on her, his head on one side.
+
+"Explain what?"
+
+"That!"
+
+She pointed to the proofs of which I had possessed myself and was
+eagerly scanning. Unblenching he met her gaze.
+
+"That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Boldero, which I, as his
+literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough
+manuscript, but he had no time to read it."
+
+They looked at one another for quite a long time.
+
+"Is that all you're going to tell me?"
+
+"That's all."
+
+"And all you're going to tell Hilary?"
+
+"Telling Hilary is the same as telling you."
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"And telling you is the same as telling Hilary."
+
+"By no manner of means," said Barbara tartly. She took him by the
+sleeve. "Come and explain."
+
+"I've explained already," said Jaffery.
+
+Barbara eyed him like a syren of the cornfields. "I'm going to dress a
+crab for lunch. A very big crab."
+
+Jaffery's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile. Barbara could
+dress crab like no one else in the world. She herself disliked the taste
+of crab. I, a carefully trained gastronomist, adored it, but a Puckish
+digestion forbade my consuming one single shred of the ambrosial
+preparation. Doria would pass it by through sheer unhappiness. And it
+was not fit food for Susan's tender years. Old Jaff knew this. One
+gigantic crab-shell filled with Barbara's juicy witchery and flanked by
+cool pink, meaty claws would be there for his own individual
+delectation. Several times before had he taken the dish, with a "One
+man, one crab. Ho! ho! ho!" and had left nothing but clean shells.
+
+"I'm going to dress this crab," said Barbara, "for the sake of the
+servants. But if you find I've put poison in it, don't blame me."
+
+She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Jaffery laughed,
+sank into a chair and tugged at his pipe.
+
+"I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing," said he.
+
+"Why?" I asked looking up from the proofs.
+
+"It's not quite up to the standard of 'The Diamond Gate.'"
+
+"I shouldn't suppose it was," said I drily.
+
+"Wittekind's delighted anyhow. It's a different _genre_; but he says
+that's all the better."
+
+Susan emerged from my study door on to the terrace.
+
+"My good fellow," said I, "yonder is the daughter of the house,
+evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read this
+wonderful novel and don't want to be disturbed till lunch."
+
+The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan finding herself in
+undisputed possession took him off to remote recesses of the kitchen
+garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile I went on reading, very
+much puzzled. Naturally the style was not that of "The Diamond Gate,"
+which was the style of Tom Castleton and not of Adrian Boldero. But was
+what I read the style of Adrian Boldero? This vivid, virile opening?
+This scene of the two derelicts who hated one another, fortuitously
+meeting on the old tramp steamer? This cunning, evocation of smells,
+jute, bilge water, the warm oils of the engine room? This expert
+knowledge so carelessly displayed of the various parts of a ship? How
+had Adrian, man of luxury, who had never been on a tramp steamer in his
+life, gained the knowledge? The people too were lustily drawn. They had
+a flavour of the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces; a deep-lunged
+folk. So that I should not be interrupted I wandered off to a secluded
+nook of the garden down the drive away from the house and gave myself up
+to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident
+following incident, every trait of character presented objectively in
+fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen pictures of grim scenes
+faultless in their definition and restraint. There was a girl in it, a
+wild, clean-limbed, woodland thing who especially moved my admiration.
+The more I read the more fascinated did I become, and the more did I
+doubt whether a single line in it had been written by Adrian Boldero.
+
+After a long spell, I took out my watch. It was twenty past one. We
+lunched at half-past. I rose, went towards the house and came upon
+Jaffery and Susan. The latter I despatched peremptorily to her
+ablutions. Alone with Jaffery, I challenged him.
+
+"You hulking baby," said I, "what's the good of pretending with me? Why
+didn't you tell me at once that you had written it yourself?"
+
+He looked at me anxiously. "What makes you think so?"
+
+"The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First," I
+continued, as he made no reply but stood staring at me in ingenuous
+discomfort, "you couldn't have got this out of poor Adrian's mush;
+secondly, Adrian hadn't the experience of life to have written it;
+thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive articles in _The Daily
+Gazette_ and have little difficulty in recognising the hand of Jaffery
+Chayne."
+
+"Good Lord!" said he. "It isn't as obvious as all that?"
+
+I laughed. "Then you did write it?"
+
+"Of course," he growled. "But I didn't want you to know. I tried to get
+as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here"--he gripped my
+shoulder--"if it's such a transparent fraud, what the blazes is going
+to happen?"
+
+To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position, having
+peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world had the
+faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming book would be
+received without shadow of question as the work of the author of "_The
+Diamond Gate_." The difference of style and treatment would be
+attributed to the marvellous versatility of the dead genius. . . .
+Jaffery's brow began to clear.
+
+"What do you think of it--as far as you've gone?"
+
+My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my appreciation. He
+positively blushed and looked at me rather guiltily, like a schoolboy
+detected in the act of helping an old woman across the road.
+
+"It's awful cheek," said he, "but I was up against it. The only
+alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and take
+the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I had written about half of
+it all in bits and pieces about three or four years ago and put it
+aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one day and read it and it
+seemed rather good, so, having the story in my head, I set to work."
+
+"And that's why you didn't go to Persia?"
+
+"How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on the
+back of a beastly camel!"
+
+He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of a laugh.
+
+"I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up; couldn't
+get along. I must have spent a week, night after night, staring at a
+blank sheet of paper. I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew
+and was going the way of Adrian. By George, it taught me something of
+the Hades the poor fellow must have passed through. I've been in pretty
+tight corners in my day and I know what it is to have the cold fear
+creeping down my spine; but that week gave me the fright of my life."
+
+"I wish you had told me," said I, "I might have helped. Why didn't you?"
+
+"I didn't like to. You see, if this idea hadn't come off, I should have
+looked such a stupendous ass."
+
+"That's a reason," I admitted.
+
+"And I didn't tell you at first because you would have thought I was
+going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could write a
+novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the impossible, like
+Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to death and you would
+have put me off."
+
+Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We hurried to
+the dining-room. Jaffery sat down before a gigantic crab.
+
+"Is it all right?" he asked.
+
+"Doria has interceded for you," said Barbara. "You owe her your life."
+
+Doria smiled. "It's the least I could do for you."
+
+Jaffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed himself in
+crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said:
+
+"Hilary has read half the book."
+
+"What do you think of it?" Barbara asked.
+
+I repeated my dithyrambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone.
+
+"I do wish you could see your way to read it," said Jaffery.
+
+"I would give my heart to," said Doria. "But I've told you why I can't."
+
+"Circumstances alter cases," said I, platitudinously. "In happier
+circumstances you would have been presented with the novelist's fine,
+finished product. As it happens, Jaffery has had to fill up little gaps,
+make bridges here and there. I'm sure if you had been well enough," I
+added, with a touch of malice, for I had not quite forgiven his leaving
+me in the dark, "Jaffery would have consulted you on many points."
+
+I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make upon her.
+Although I had reassured Jaffery, I could, scarcely conceive the
+possibility of the book being taken as the work of Adrian.
+
+"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it. You
+weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree with
+Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are so jolly
+clumsy."
+
+Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be justified?"
+
+"Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."
+
+So it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study and
+demanded the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom, where she
+remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It was right that
+she should know what was going to be published under Adrian's name.
+
+In Jaffery's presence, I disclosed to Barbara the identity of the
+author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me before lunch,
+with, perhaps, a little more shamefacedness. Were it not for reiteration
+upon reiteration of the same things in talk, life would be a stark
+silence broken only by staccato announcement of facts. At last Barbara's
+eyes grew uncomfortably moist. Impulsively she flew to Jaffery and put
+her arms round his vast shoulders--he was sitting, otherwise she could
+not have done it--and hugged him.
+
+"You're a blessed, blessed dear," she said; and ashamed of this
+exhibition of sentiment she bolted from the room.
+
+Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of
+billiards.
+
+To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room before
+dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen since lunch; an
+arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can imagine a Tanagra
+figure in black and white ivory. Her face, however, was a passion of
+excitement.
+
+"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't know
+till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things he
+describes--he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God! If only
+he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands before her eyes and
+dashed them swiftly away--"Jaffery has done his best, poor fellow. But
+oh! the bridges he speaks of--they're so crude, so crude! I can see
+every one. The murder--you remember?"
+
+It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three or four
+splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing was done.
+Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.
+
+"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.
+
+"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's
+horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to the
+imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and spoiled it.
+And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, where Fenton
+finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of London musical comedy. Adrian
+never wrote it. It's the sort of claptrap he hated. He has often told me
+so. Jaffery thought it was necessary to explain Ellina in the next
+chapter, and so in his dull way, he stuck it in."
+
+That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a low dive
+on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing seen, somewhat
+journalistic, I admit--but such as very few journalists could give.
+
+"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.
+
+"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man that had
+been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I don't know the
+difference between Adrian's work and that of a penny-a-liner like
+Jaffery?"
+
+The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and took him
+by the lapels of his dress coat.
+
+"I've read it. It's a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do want it to
+be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear--I know you've done all that
+mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But it isn't your fault if
+you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you,
+yourself, said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you--oh!--I loathe
+hurting you, dear Jaffery--but it's all the world, all eternity to
+me--couldn't you get one of Adrian's colleagues--one of the famous
+people"--she rattled off a few names--"to look through the proofs and
+revise them--just in honour of Adrian's memory? Couldn't you, dear
+Jaffery?" She tugged convulsively at the poor old giant's coat. "You're
+one of the best and noblest men who ever lived or I couldn't say this to
+you. But you understand, don't you?"
+
+Jaffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have slapped it
+physically and it would have worn the same dazed, paralysed lack of
+expression.
+
+"My life," said he, in a queer toned voice, that wasn't Jaffery's at
+all, "my life is only an expression of your wishes. I'll do as you say."
+
+"It's for Adrian's sake, dear Jaffery," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face, from the
+roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to wipe
+therefrom all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the sunny
+Reubens-like features that we all loved.
+
+"But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the book's
+worthy of Adrian?"
+
+"Oh, I do," she cried passionately. "I do. It's a work of genius. It's
+Adrian in all his maturity, in all his greatness!"
+
+The door opened.
+
+"Dinner is served, madam," said Franklin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's outburst, he
+fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After what he had done
+for her, said I, given up one of the great chances of his career,
+carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her a present of a
+brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from shame, she ought to
+go on her knees and pray God to shower blessings on his head. As it was,
+she deserved whipping.
+
+Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass--he has an Eastern
+habit of, facile vituperation--and roared about the drawing-room. The
+ladies, be it understood, had retired.
+
+"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You haven't the
+intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know I've written the
+rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she thinks I've spoiled it.
+She's perfectly justified. For the little footling services I rendered
+her on the journey, she's idiotically grateful--out of all proportion.
+As for Persia, she knows nothing about it--"
+
+"She ought to," said I.
+
+"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.
+
+"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as you're
+satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."
+
+It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and however
+understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined towards
+them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through all their
+bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would be dead in a
+week.
+
+"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor girl's
+mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying out of this
+ghastly farce."
+
+"I do, my dear chap."
+
+"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could--a labour of love. But
+it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work--which she thinks is Adrian's. To
+keep up the deception I had to crab it and say that the faults were
+mine. Naturally she believes me."
+
+"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and Adrian's
+memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and moral
+balance--what then?"
+
+"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you suppose
+I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"
+
+I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of
+saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect.
+Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second
+husband--stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her taking
+one--is but an indifferent hero to the widow who spends her life in
+burning incense before the shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We
+can't say these things to our friends. We expect them to have common
+sense as we have ourselves. But we don't, and--for the curious reason,
+based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can
+appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular
+woman--we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who
+pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to
+sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly
+disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other
+hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. In any and every case,
+however, we entirely fail to comprehend why, if Neæra is obdurate, our
+swain does not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
+Amaryllis.
+
+I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt somewhat
+impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was, casting the
+largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by
+the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to
+intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of
+it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing
+them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have
+said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not,
+and there's an end on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery,
+although--or was it because?--I recognised the bald fact that he was in
+love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.
+
+You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick you?" and
+he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned to touch my
+unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the world are you to do,
+save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your cigar? This I did. I also
+found amusement in comparing his meek wooing, like that of an early
+Italian amorist, with his rumbustious theories as to marriage by capture
+and other primitive methods of bringing woman to heel.
+
+Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick (when
+Barbara wasn't looking--for Barbara had read her a lecture on the polite
+treatment of trustees and executors) and made him more her slave than
+ever. He fetched and carried. He read poetry. He was Custodian of the
+Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was damp. He shielded her from over-rough
+incursions on the part of Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany
+of Saint Adrian. He sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her
+and hold figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch
+them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides,
+Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during which,
+touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of tender
+regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one could wish to
+meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one else, the smile
+into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt that, in her way and as
+far as her Adrian-bound emotional temperament permitted, she felt
+grateful to Jaffery. She also felt safe in his company. He was like a
+great St. Bernard dog, she declared to Barbara.
+
+These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a
+letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval,
+Jaffery had sent the proofs.
+
+"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly different
+from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its largeness of
+conception and the perfection of its kind. The alteration of a single
+word would spoil it. If an alien hand is there, it is imperceptible."
+
+At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He tossed the
+letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.
+
+"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't it? I
+do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through. This ought
+to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"
+
+"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."
+
+But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain--and how could a work
+of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible,
+had touched it?--was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came
+downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little
+knitting of the brow before which his welcoming smile faded.
+
+"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the letter.
+"Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to recognise the merits
+of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed of the critical faculty."
+
+"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me to send
+him the novel?"
+
+"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria, after the
+way of women.
+
+"And he hasn't any?"
+
+"Read the thing again."
+
+Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well, what's to be
+done now?"
+
+"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original manuscript.
+Where is it?"
+
+Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied convincingly.
+
+"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've destroyed it."
+
+"I thought everything was typed nowadays."
+
+"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an advocate
+of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I wanted to rush
+the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see why I should pamper
+them with type. Have you the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," said Doria.
+
+"Well--don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.
+
+For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought up his
+daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary life. To my
+great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.
+
+"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions for the
+manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's gone. I'm not
+unreasonable."
+
+"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers in the
+drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made Jaffery submit
+his careful editing to an expert, and you're honourably bound to accept
+the expert's verdict."
+
+"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a flash of
+her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty to keep to my
+own opinion."
+
+Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face as he
+did in moments of perplexity.
+
+"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.
+
+"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."
+
+"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco--not
+tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's encomium had aroused the
+artist's pride in his first-born. An altered word would spoil the book.
+"My dear girl," said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath
+which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very
+gently, "the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man
+of common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us
+do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as
+much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a thundering mess of it."
+
+Doria made a little gesture--a bit of a shrug--a bit of a resigned
+flicker of her hands.
+
+"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a woman
+with nobody to turn to"--she smiled with her lips, but there was no
+coordination of her eyes--"as I said before, I pass the proofs."
+
+She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving
+Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"
+
+He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the
+threshold.
+
+"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to her morbid
+vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it birth. You know
+better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you send those proofs
+straight back to the publisher. If you let her persuade you to change
+one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll tell her the whole thing,
+and damn the consequences!"
+
+My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest sense.
+They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She would no more
+think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or a baby's neck.
+
+"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said Jaffery.
+"But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying brute."
+
+"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped Barbara.
+"The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree. It's only the
+exceptional woman that can take command."
+
+I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly
+sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.
+
+"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold
+politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden
+chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open
+a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with
+a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove
+with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a
+question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have
+reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a
+little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal
+to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor
+old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
+of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
+masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
+direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian--for Jaffery is too
+splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once
+living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to
+these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation,
+deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and
+Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things,
+could, with little difficulty, divine the passionate struggle between
+love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty
+that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly
+appetited gentleman.
+
+You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am
+not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a
+barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty son of Pantagruel
+forced into the incongruous rôle of Sir Galahad. . . . During the term
+of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At
+last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more,
+permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his
+manners.
+
+The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited
+Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by
+an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night.
+But on Saturday evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for
+permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house,
+the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was
+Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's
+friend, and of course came back to us and speculated as to who and what
+this Mr. Fendihook might be.
+
+"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.
+
+"It would scarcely have been polite."
+
+We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I don't
+like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a vast deal
+too much."
+
+"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus started
+an old argument.
+
+On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the car, a
+two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and perceived
+between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly buttoned Burberry
+coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the middle of which
+projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha out.
+
+"This is Mr. Fendihook."
+
+"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.
+
+I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my
+chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by
+Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings and
+revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily attired. I
+know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against a black and
+white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a gold ring.
+
+"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good one, on
+which he had retained the band.
+
+"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."
+
+"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of all
+right here."
+
+"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha. "Ah,
+Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We followed. Mr.
+Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little shock, that he had
+kept on his gloves.
+
+"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of a blow
+would do our fair friend good."
+
+Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath the
+motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he preceded
+me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure in the middle
+of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round appreciatively and
+again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open French window.
+
+"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our friends? The
+long and the short of it, aren't they?"
+
+He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn. I told
+him their names.
+
+"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always talking
+about, her guardian or something."
+
+"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late husband."
+
+"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear, signified
+"Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his cigar. "Introduce
+me." And as I accompanied him across the lawn--"There's nothing like
+knowing everybody--getting it over at once. Then one feels at home."
+
+"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said I.
+
+"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I did." And
+the amazing creature patted me on the back.
+
+I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself delighted
+to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as conversation did not
+start spontaneously, he once more looked around, nodded at the landscape
+approvingly, and once more said "Tiptop!"
+
+"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford to retire
+and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a desirable
+residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's country house."
+
+"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?" queried
+Doria.
+
+He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."
+
+I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.
+
+Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running up.
+
+"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and say how
+d'ye do, Gwendoline."
+
+Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under the
+chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the image of
+her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the bowl of his pipe
+in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on some puzzling insect.
+
+"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor asked.
+
+"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a garden
+bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to affect my
+nerves. He peeled them off.
+
+"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried. "Catch!"
+
+He made a feint of throwing them.
+
+"Haven't you caught 'em?"
+
+"No."
+
+She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were empty.
+
+"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He flicked
+a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a ball and
+threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it gone to?"
+
+Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept forward
+fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards a flower
+bed.
+
+"Why, there it is!"
+
+He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the handkerchief hung
+limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.
+
+"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.
+
+"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever talked to
+angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."
+
+He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into the
+central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not in the
+best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught the coins
+announced their intention of sticking to them. But threats of reporting
+to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the coins dropped and jingled
+in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded him as she would a god.
+
+"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day long."
+
+He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap caught it
+in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed white strong
+teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"
+
+"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.
+
+"Two hours a day solid year in and year out--not that trick alone, of
+course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you know who I
+am--I'm the One and Only Ras Fendihook--Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and
+General Variety Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"
+
+We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.
+
+"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically. "You've never
+heard of me--and perhaps you two gentlemen are big bugs in your own
+line--and I've never heard of you. But anyhow, I never asked you, Mr.
+Chayne, to catch my gloves."
+
+"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on Susan.
+
+"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."
+
+And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the wash-leather
+gloves.
+
+"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the matinée
+performance."
+
+Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."
+
+"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the little
+one."
+
+He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour came the
+shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought Barbara flying out
+of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The yelping ceased. Mr. Ras
+Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria, Jaffery and I looked at one
+another in mutual and dismayed comprehension.
+
+"Old pal," quoted Doria.
+
+I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for his
+sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"
+
+"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a lot he
+called me."
+
+"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently. "He's--he's
+_marvelious_!"
+
+"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't express
+him."
+
+"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as mummy
+will let you."
+
+I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of that
+suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon until it
+was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved over and over
+again a tense situation. To the guest in her house Barbara was the
+perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of convention raged fury
+with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer social animal for what he
+is and suck the honey from his flowers of unconventionality. She had
+never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a butler when offered a second
+helping of pudding. She had never dreamed of the possibility of a
+strange table-neighbour laying his hand on hers and requesting her to
+"take it from me, my dear." It sent awful shivers down her spine to hear
+my august self alluded to as her "old man." She looked down her nose
+when, to the apoplectic joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest
+behaviour at meals), he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato
+into the air, caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her
+smile was that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic
+listener when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To
+her confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the
+personalities of the World of Variety.
+
+"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said
+confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off with
+that contortionist--you know who I mean--handsome chap--what's his
+name?--oh, of course you know him."
+
+My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a K.C.B.,
+assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!
+
+"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied pathetically.
+
+"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo! You must
+have heard of Romeo."
+
+I sniggered--I couldn't help it--at Barbara's face. He went on with his
+reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I, though displeased with
+Liosha for introducing such an incongruous element into my family
+circle, took the rational course of deriving from the fellow
+considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done the same as myself,
+had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian weighed heavily upon
+him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly. Doria, like my wife, I
+could see was shocked. The only two who, beside myself, enjoyed our
+guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan was nine years old and a meal
+at which a guest broke her whole decalogue of table manners at once--to
+say nothing of the performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange
+into nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently
+extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother--was a feast of
+memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha, pupil
+of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud Albanian
+chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How could she admire
+this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line, peculiarly
+accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She sat by my side,
+grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she had bestowed on us.
+She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his anecdotes, she urged him on
+to further exhibition of prowess, and in a magnificent way appeared
+unconscious of the presence at the table of her trustee and would-be
+dragon, Jaffery Chayne.
+
+After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to Mr.
+Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery, having invited
+Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having declined, with a
+polite smile, on the ground that her best Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown
+was not suitable for country roads, went off by himself in dudgeon.
+Barbara took Liosha aside and cross-examined her on the subject of Mr.
+Fendihook and as far as hospitality allowed signified her
+non-appreciation of the guest. After a time I took him into the billiard
+room, Susan following. As he was a brilliant player, giving me one
+hundred and fifty in two hundred and running out easily before I had
+made thirty, he found less excitement in the game than in narrating his
+exploits and performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things
+with the billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and
+balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I think
+that day he must have gone through his whole répertoire.
+
+The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's first words
+to Liosha were:
+
+"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"
+
+"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.
+
+He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day. But
+sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."
+
+He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee was
+rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something
+unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who was
+established on the terrace.
+
+"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked cheerfully.
+
+Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused, explaining
+that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view of the
+excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank tea in the
+afternoon.
+
+"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"
+
+The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara--"And may I drink to the
+success of that promising little affair"--he jerked a backward
+thumb--"between our pippy friend and the charming widow?"
+
+Barbara had passed the gasping stage.
+
+"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now, had made
+strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same relation of trustee
+to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs. Prescott."
+
+But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck! Here's to
+him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."
+
+He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not respond.
+A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her hand showed
+white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace, where she found
+Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet. And this is what
+happened.
+
+"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll excuse
+me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is yours. I have
+business to talk."
+
+Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my dear girl.
+I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha. As soon as they
+were out of earshot, she said:
+
+"Are you going to marry her?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Doria."
+
+Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic mood.
+
+"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your own
+business."
+
+"All right," she retorted, "I will."
+
+"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you. What do you
+mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"
+
+"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very clever
+and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."
+
+"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.
+
+They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast, they
+found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden.
+Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.
+
+"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery continued.
+
+"How dare you speak so of my friend?"
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend. And
+you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"
+
+"Shan't!" said Liosha.
+
+"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with him."
+
+There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said the same
+things over and over again. Both had worked themselves into a fury.
+
+"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."
+
+"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you mind
+yours."
+
+"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace
+yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."
+
+"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up magnificently.
+"Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man living? You insult
+me."
+
+"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed fool of
+herself--and you more than most."
+
+"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she taunted,
+and flung an arm in the direction of the house.
+
+Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."
+
+"And you leave me alone."
+
+They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned, marched
+superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through, slammed it
+in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive quarrel, free from all
+subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in Jaffery's veins. If he could have
+given her a good sound thrashing he would have been a happy man. This
+accursed civilisation paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing
+at whiskers and beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in
+the middle of the lawn.
+
+"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never bring him
+here again."
+
+"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight before
+her.
+
+"Well, ask him."
+
+"I will. Hilary!"
+
+At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook had been
+discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of widowhood to a
+quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed and bright-eyed
+Juno.
+
+"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"
+
+"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.
+
+Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been conscious of
+storms. I took her hand.
+
+"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated that it
+is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate ramifications--"
+
+"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"--I hesitated--"not quite the kind of
+person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."
+
+"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a pattern, like
+little tin soldiers."
+
+"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it goes."
+
+"Oh, go on--" Jaffery interrupted.
+
+"But--" I continued.
+
+"You'd rather not see him again?"
+
+"No," roared Jaffery.
+
+"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me. "You
+and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"
+
+I still held her hand, which was growing moist--and I suppose mine was
+too--and I didn't like to drop it, for fear of hurting her feelings. I
+gave it a great squeeze. It was very difficult for me. Personally, I
+enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and prodigiously accomplished scion of a
+vulgar race. As a mere bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should
+have taken him joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my
+microscope and studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that
+there was of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan
+who did not count, he was--I admit, deservedly--an object of loathing.
+So I squeezed Liosha's hand.
+
+"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that he's
+not quite a gentleman."
+
+"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."
+
+She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor advisedly. She
+had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before a breeze.
+
+"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."
+
+Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.
+
+"We must hook it!"
+
+Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"
+
+"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very kind.
+But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for the
+evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."
+
+"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.
+
+Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained with a
+learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the pink, fleshy
+face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered away
+down the drive.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.
+
+"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"
+
+"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.
+
+"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to dine among
+all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"
+
+"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria. "I should
+think it was rather a rise in the social scale."
+
+And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save the
+puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his interest in
+Liosha.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the reviewers and
+made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a legitimate successor
+to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit of Tom Castleton. The
+contrast was so extraordinary, so inexplicable. It was generally
+concluded that no writer but Adrian Boldero, in the world's history, had
+ever revealed two such distinct literary personalities as those that
+informed the two novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused
+universal wonder. His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained
+by English letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the
+new book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals,
+knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the press.
+In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius; for, after
+all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can put your finger
+on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom Castleton's work possessed;
+Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater Glory" vibrated with life, it was
+wide and generous, it was a capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond
+Gate," it could not rank with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David
+Copperfield." I say this in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but
+merely to present his work in true proportion. Published under his own
+name it would doubtless have received recognition; probably it would
+have made money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic
+reception it enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name
+of Adrian Boldero.
+
+Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had succeeded
+beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs of the woman he
+loved. He had also astonished himself enormously.
+
+"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that I'm not a
+mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap with brains,
+and"--he turned over a bundle of press-cuttings--"and 'poetic fancy' and
+'master of the human heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of
+things' and 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.'
+Ho! ho! ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
+years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
+complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling like
+blazes."
+
+It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
+ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
+spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His poorer
+human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now Adrian's
+restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria there would open
+a new life in which, with the past behind her, she could find a glory in
+the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom
+responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when
+Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the
+ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings
+of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever
+he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or
+perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
+Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
+reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
+blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
+reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to write on
+Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it and that of
+Jaffery Chayne?
+
+One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.
+
+"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery sacrificed
+his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together
+Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you
+treat him as if he were a dog."
+
+Doria protested. "I don't. I _am_ grateful. I don't know what I should
+do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can't
+alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work; and when I hear those
+very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied."
+
+"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by yourself,"
+said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be sane and civil."
+
+"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't the wife
+of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you again."
+
+"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and you know
+it."
+
+Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little eyrie
+in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever leaving it.
+Arbuthnot of _The Daily Gazette_ satirically enquiring whether he wanted
+a job or still yearned for a season in Mayfair he consigned, in his
+grinning way, to perdition. Change was the essence of holiday-making,
+and this was his holiday. It was many years since he had one. When he
+wanted a job he would go round to the office.
+
+"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want to keep
+your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring us up."
+
+Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he liked.
+
+The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may
+have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I dismissed the
+excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club,
+assuming my most sceptical manner.
+
+"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after her."
+
+"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound health,
+perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does want a man's
+advice, she can always turn to me."
+
+"And there's Liosha."
+
+"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable of
+looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very definitely
+to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any more interesting
+evenings out lately?"
+
+"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her off that
+low-down bounder."
+
+"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with him."
+
+He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of the
+argument.
+
+"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction, "she
+can't marry him."
+
+"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"
+
+"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar is
+married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four wives in
+fact--oh, a dreadful hound--but only one real one with a wedding ring,
+and she lives up in the north with a pack of children."
+
+"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a villain."
+
+He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was not
+Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I agreed
+with him.
+
+"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as to look
+after her."
+
+"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company. She'll
+get a bad name."
+
+"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you devoting
+his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of mischief is too
+preposterous. Try me with something else."
+
+Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was writing
+another book.
+
+He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to know. He was
+getting along famously. He had had the story in his head for a long
+time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline very picturesquely.
+Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the development of the man
+Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had happened. The born novelist
+had just discovered himself and clamoured for artistic self-expression.
+He was writing this book just because he could not help it, finding
+gladness in the mere work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and
+letting himself go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become
+of it when written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a
+matter. Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new
+novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as closely as
+"Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be the deuce to
+pay. If he published it under his own name, he would render himself
+liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from the dead author of
+"The Greater Glory," and so complicate this already complicated web of
+literary theft; and if he threw sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria
+to enable him to publish under Adrian's name, he would be performing the
+task of the altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.
+
+Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his novel,
+looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and enjoying the
+society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds of passage like
+himself, who happened to be passing through London. Being a man of
+modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food, he found his small
+patrimony and the savings from his professional earnings quite adequate
+for amenable existence. When he wanted healthy, fresh air he came down
+to us to see Susan; when he wanted anything else he went to see Doria,
+which was almost daily.
+
+Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and Penates
+consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting,
+she entered the awful room--neither servants nor friends were allowed to
+cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay
+in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy
+tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave,
+over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his
+coöperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent
+sculptor for a bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time,
+she bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion of
+Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. . . .
+And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign behests without a murmur
+and without a hint that he desired reward for his servitude. But, to
+those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed,
+to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who
+knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not
+last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one
+should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find
+august recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was
+not devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted
+everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery for his
+meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct must have
+revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath the exterior
+of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For one thing, she
+considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity perhaps blinded her
+judgment. At all events she did not realise that a change was bound to
+come in their relations. It came, inevitably.
+
+One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St. John's Wood
+flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of queer isolation
+from the world below, and from the strange world masked behind the vast
+superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said
+something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He
+also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest
+might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer
+laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a
+little sensuous charm. Doria replied sentimentally:
+
+"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of cliff, with
+the sea-gulls wheeling about it--bringing messages from the sunset lands
+across the blue, blue sea--" Poor dear! She forgot that sea lit by a
+westering sun is of no colour at all and that the blue water lies to the
+east; but no matter; Jaffery, drinking in her words, forgot it likewise.
+"Away from everything," she continued, "and two people who loved--with a
+great, great love--"
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down Maida
+Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted--the ripeness of youth
+and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained her ivory cheek--you
+will find the exact simile in Virgil. She was too desirable for
+Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in his chair--they were sitting
+face to face, so that he had his back to the motor omnibuses--and put
+his great hand on her knee.
+
+"Why not we two?"
+
+It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish--what you please; but every
+man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion
+connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration
+was made, without shadow of mistake.
+
+Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset and gulls
+and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from before her eyes,
+and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff Chayne.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You know very well what I mean."
+
+He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The three-foot
+balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles. She put out a
+hand.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so nervous."
+
+He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as if she
+had dealt him a slap in the face.
+
+"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I want
+you and I'll never be happy till I get you."
+
+She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.
+
+"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"
+
+"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.
+
+"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward glance.
+
+"Not with an obstinate devil like me."
+
+He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.
+
+"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the
+drawing-room.
+
+He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a footling
+balcony. What do you take me for?"
+
+"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave elf facing
+horrible ogre--and, either by chance or design, her hand touched and
+held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph of her late husband.
+
+"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.
+
+"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's memory
+when you say such things to me?"
+
+"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to the
+free woman he loves."
+
+"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."
+
+"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."
+
+"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of you,"--his blue
+eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his hands, but heedless she
+went on--"yes, mean and base and despicable of you to wish to betray
+him. Adrian--"
+
+"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and listen
+to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual disgusts and
+sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real live man who would
+walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail body in his great grasp,
+and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught up by a dynamo. "My love for
+you has nothing whatever to do with Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as
+one man can be to another, living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary
+and Barbara. But I want you. I've wanted you since the first moment I
+set eyes on you. You've got into my blood. You're going to love me.
+You're going to marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."
+
+He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely. She did
+not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were white and her
+face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And unconscious that
+his grip was giving her physical pain he continued:
+
+"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I heard you
+were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting. But, by
+God!"--and, not knowing what he did, he shook her backwards and
+forwards--"I'll not go on waiting for ever. You--you little bit of
+mystery--you little bit of eternity--you--you--ah!"
+
+With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not counted
+on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning, and she fell,
+knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp of horror and in an
+instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa, and on his knees beside
+her, with remorse oversurging his passion, behaved like a penitent fool,
+accusing himself of all the unforgivable savageries ever practised by
+barbaric male. Doria, who was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed
+to the door.
+
+"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."
+
+Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of
+reaction.
+
+"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."
+
+She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you out, but
+if Adrian was alive--Ha! ha! ha!--" she laughed with a touch of
+hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren rascal--how do you dare to think
+you can take the place of a man like Adrian?"
+
+[Illustration: "Go! You are nothing but a brute."]
+
+The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her up
+bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I would hold a
+cat or a rabbit.
+
+"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference between a man
+and a--"
+
+Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might have
+struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.
+
+"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going to hurt
+you."
+
+He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the lover who
+woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have thrown away
+his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed. Doria proved to
+Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration and nervous collapse,
+that she would never set eyes again upon the unqualifiable savage by
+whom her holiest sentiments had been outraged and her person
+disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a blood-curdling story into
+semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short work of her contention that
+Jaffery ought to have respected her as he would have respected the wife
+of a living friend, characterising it as morbid and indecent nonsense;
+and with regard to the physical violence she declared that it would have
+served her right had he smacked her.
+
+"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband, be
+faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man comes
+along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an honourable
+way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months all a man has
+to give, and then, when he tells you what you've known perfectly well
+all along, treat him as if he were making shameful proposals to
+you--especially a man like Jaffery; I have no patience with you."
+
+Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No one
+understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was aware. But
+when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery Chayne, she really
+thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore Barbara, rather angry at
+being brought up to London on a needless errand, involving loss of
+dinner and upset of household arrangements, administered a
+sleeping-draught and bade her wake in the morning in a less idiotic
+frame of mind.
+
+"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me later--to "behave
+like a cat" is her way of signifying a display of the vilest phases of
+feminine nature--"but I couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal
+of sense. It isn't as if I had never warned her about the way she has
+been treating Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian--I'm
+sick of his name--and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"
+
+This she said during a private discussion that night on the whole
+situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she returned to
+Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the first time in his
+life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent dinner, imploring me to
+tell him whether he should enlist for a soldier, or commit suicide, or
+lie prone on Doria's doormat until it should please her to come out and
+trample on him. He seemed rather surprised--indeed a trifle hurt--that
+neither of us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not
+Doria's--especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside of the
+scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about the
+drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.
+
+"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both of you,
+she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You--'a barren
+rascal'--you? Good God!"
+
+He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must take this
+from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on her. He
+oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He was a savage
+unfit for the society of any woman outside a wigwam.
+
+"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to bed.
+Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."
+
+The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I could not
+exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless, and with a large
+disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent him a suit of my
+meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same purpose.
+
+He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria and was
+denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned unopened. He passed
+a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose end in London during the
+height of the season. In despair he went to _The Daily Gazette_ office
+and proclaimed himself ready for a job. But for the moment the earth was
+fairly calm and the management could find no field for Jaffery's special
+activities. Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable
+weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of the
+proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the newspaper
+office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a disturber of traffic.
+Then he came down to Northlands for a while, where, for want of
+something to do, he hired himself out to my gardener and dug up most of
+the kitchen garden. His usual occupation of romping with Susan was gone,
+for she lay abed with some childish ailment which Barbara feared might
+turn into German measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or
+eating or sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless
+mood. At nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases
+wherein he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer
+the most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying
+with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when a
+merciful Providence gave him something definite to think about.
+
+It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my dressing-room
+when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding admittance, rushed in, clad
+in bath gown and slippers, flourishing a letter.
+
+"Read that."
+
+I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:
+
+     "Dear Jaff Chayne,
+
+     "As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm going
+     to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook--"
+
+I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."
+
+"He is. Read on."
+
+     "We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married at
+     Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an Albanian
+     it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in England, and
+     I would have to give up half my money to Government. But in France,
+     owing to different laws, I can get married without any fuss at all.
+     I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a lawyer, so it's all
+     right. I suppose when I am married you won't be my trustee any
+     more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and thank you for
+     all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and Barbara and
+     Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is Erasmus, but
+     you will when you know him better.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "LIOSHA PRESCOTT."
+
+The amazing epistle took my breath away.
+
+"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.
+
+"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look signified that
+it was he who intended to cause it.
+
+"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.
+
+"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He must have
+once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."
+
+I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of pity for
+our poor deluded Liosha.
+
+"We must get her out of this."
+
+"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."
+
+I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the room where
+she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in cap and
+peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with lather crinkling
+over one-half of my face, held first an indignation meeting, and then a
+council of war.
+
+"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He couldn't
+offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing bigamy, and I
+know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement; so he has invented
+this poisonous plot to get her out of England."
+
+"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said Barbara.
+
+"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?" asked
+Jaffery.
+
+I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but Barbara's
+eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws and
+formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the fact that,
+not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be sold to a young
+Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming to haggle over her
+price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in telling her wild fables
+of English life. Her ignorance in many ways was abysmal. Once having
+seen a photograph in the papers of the King in a bowler-hat she
+expressed her disappointment that he wore no insignia of royalty; and
+when I consoled her by saying that, by Act of Parliament, the King was
+obliged to wear his crown so many hours a day and therefore wore it
+always at breakfast, lunch and dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted
+my assurance with the credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara
+rebuked me for taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry
+indeed. How was she to know when and where not to believe me?
+
+"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any kind of
+plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a full account of
+it is a proof."
+
+"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled. "If
+Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."
+
+"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara. "She
+thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you know."
+
+"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said I.
+
+"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick knitting
+of the brow.
+
+"Precisely," said I.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with the fellow
+already?"
+
+"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."
+
+He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while Barbara
+discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard to Liosha.
+
+Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.
+
+"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday. Fendihook left
+last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."
+
+We regarded each other in dismay.
+
+"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from moustache
+downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When he was puzzled
+he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why should he leave the
+boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you. Because his London engagement
+was over and he had to put in a week's engagement at some provincial
+music-hall. Theatrical folks always travel on Sunday. If he was still
+working in London and wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have
+chosen Sunday. We can easily see by the advertisements in the morning
+paper. His London engagement was at the Atrium."
+
+"I've got the _Daily Telegraph_ here," said Barbara.
+
+She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken condition to
+which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest search among the
+ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement page. The attractions at
+the Atrium were set out fully; but the name of Ras Fendihook did not
+appear.
+
+"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where did she
+write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown pocket.
+"Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday afternoon. So
+she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was written on her own
+note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address, and then held it up
+before us. "See anything queer about this?"
+
+We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."
+
+"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come along. I can
+tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I seem to be a bit
+of an ass. Besides--you'll come, won't you?"
+
+"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."
+
+"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be prepared to
+come to Havre--all over France, if necessary."
+
+"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast coolness of
+the proposal.
+
+"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."
+
+"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave Susan."
+
+"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you can't."
+He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."
+
+"Where?" I asked, stupidly.
+
+"Wherever I take you."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--" I remonstrated.
+
+He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack his bag,
+and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."
+
+He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.
+
+"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by yourself?"
+
+"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me and I met
+the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help me to save a
+woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find somebody else."
+
+"Of course I'll come," said I.
+
+"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a breakfast."
+
+He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman heroes
+rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy, bellowing
+fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the normal tones of
+the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.
+
+I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that we should
+be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other people's lives?"
+
+She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's just
+because we've done nothing--nothing otherwise to justify our existence.
+We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and Susan. If we didn't
+take a share of other people's troubles we should die of congestion of
+the soul."
+
+I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the steady
+vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at a moment's
+notice for anywhere--perhaps Havre, perhaps Marseilles, perhaps
+Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which wouldn't suit
+me--anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving Jaffery might choose to
+ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with my translation of
+Firdusi. . . .
+
+"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin to put in
+an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs.
+Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately done
+black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we were
+calling in question the moral character of her establishment. She did
+not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone. She was not in
+the habit of putting such enquiries to her guests.
+
+"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on Thursday. It was
+not my business to associate the two departures in any way."
+
+By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an old
+client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had been
+touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come without much
+ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms, paid her bill and
+departed with her trunks.
+
+"When did she give notice to leave you?"
+
+"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then she came
+with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things were packed
+and ready to be brought downstairs."
+
+"What address did she give to the cabman?"
+
+Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter. Jaffery
+repeated his question.
+
+"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.
+
+I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded it as the
+most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on me.
+
+"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying instructions--covering up
+her tracks. When she got to Westminster she told the driver to cross the
+bridge--and what railway station is the other end of the bridge?"
+
+"Waterloo," said I.
+
+"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from Southampton
+the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny, believe me."
+
+I said no more.
+
+The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his pocket.
+
+"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this
+district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."
+
+"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.
+
+"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was something
+fishy about it."
+
+"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne, and I'm
+surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my character. I had a
+short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday enclosing four other letters
+which she asked me to stamp and post, as I owed her fourpence change on
+her bill."
+
+"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.
+
+"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.
+
+"But the postmark on the envelope."
+
+She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been destroyed.
+
+"Then where is she?" I asked.
+
+"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at once."
+
+So after a visit to my bankers--for I am not the kind of person to set
+out for Santa Fé de Bogotà with twopence halfpenny in my pocket--and
+after a hasty lunch at a restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient
+disgust--"Why the dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if
+we're to fool about wasting time over lunch?"--but as I explained, if I
+don't have regular meals, I get a headache--and after having made other
+sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase of a toothbrush,
+an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin, admirable fellow that
+he is, invariably forgets to put into my case, we started for
+Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth Road we went, through
+Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the Surrey Downs rolling warm in
+the sunshine, through Farnham, through grey, dreamy Winchester, past St.
+Cross, with its old-world almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill
+and down to Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a
+quarter. Jaffery drove.
+
+We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the various
+places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in Southampton.
+We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the Royal, the Star, the
+Dolphin, the Polygon--and found no trace of the runaways. Jaffery
+interviewed officials at the stations and docks, dapper gentlemen with
+the air of diplomatists, tremendous fellows in uniform, policemen,
+porters, with all of whom he seemed to be on terms of familiar
+acquaintance; but none of them could trace or remember such a couple
+having crossed by the midnight boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were
+their names down on the list of those who had secured berths in advance
+for this Saturday night.
+
+"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not displeased at
+my masterful friend's failure.
+
+"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly means
+that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on Monday. If it
+was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've only to wait and
+catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement, which is possible, he
+and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that case we'll cross ourselves
+and track them down."
+
+"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I murmured.
+
+"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement he must
+be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must be working in
+the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place besides this is
+Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only seventeen miles."
+
+"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
+comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to dine
+at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the car drove
+off.
+
+"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."
+
+"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow night's
+boat."
+
+"There isn't one on Sundays."
+
+"Then Monday night's boat."
+
+"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet him on
+the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down on my leg
+above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I should like to
+take you on an expedition. It would do you a thundering lot of good."
+
+We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of enquiries
+as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining Southsea could we find
+a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook, and still less of the obscure
+Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel. We dined very well. On that I
+insisted--without much expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me
+for a Sybarite and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on
+account of succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
+excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we felt
+that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it so
+gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back to
+Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on the
+off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to catch the
+Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I cheerfully
+contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre. And as Jaffery
+(also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining me with juicy
+stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt equal to any
+dare-devil adventure.
+
+We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
+South-Western Hotel--the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our uncertainty
+as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain.
+Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and
+obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was
+nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of
+darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid
+illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers--"St.
+Malo"--"Cherbourg"--"Jersey"--"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the
+Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and
+stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a stick at its master's
+feet.
+
+One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants
+swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the
+aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms
+encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all
+seemed alike--just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct,
+like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all
+around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures
+mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the
+slither and thud of trunks being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail
+of the packed wedge disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I
+went to the aft gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had
+seen Fendihook or Liosha.
+
+A second train produced results equally barren.
+
+There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We went
+aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.
+
+My method of travel has always been to arrange everything beforehand
+with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains and boats I have
+thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear therefore that there were
+no berths free and that we should have to pass the night either on the
+windy deck or in the red-plush discomfort of the open saloon caused me
+not unreasonable dismay. I had to choose and I chose the saloon.
+Jaffery, of course, chose the raw winds of heaven. All night I did not
+get a wink of sleep. There was a gross fellow in the next section of
+red-plush whose snoring drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long
+after they had cleared away the remains of supper from the long central
+table chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
+world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the popping
+of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three a minute. I
+understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the human brain. I
+devised exquisite means of removing him from a nauseated world. Then
+there was a lamp which swung backwards and forwards and searched my
+eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I covered them.
+
+What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife and child
+and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got out to sea.
+There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of
+stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly hate a ship to do. And I
+was fully dressed and it seemed as if all the tender parts of my body
+were tied up with twine. What was I doing in this galley?
+
+When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning over me and
+all was deathly still.
+
+"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is there a
+fog?"
+
+"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of Havre."
+
+"What time is it?" I asked.
+
+"Half-past six."
+
+"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said I, lying
+down again.
+
+He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.
+
+The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck of
+Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.
+
+"What a ghastly night!"
+
+"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped over
+twenty miles."
+
+There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate numbers
+on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the companion
+onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the releasing gangway.
+I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans. The sky was overcast.
+It was very cold. The universe had an uncared-for, unswept appearance,
+like a house surprised at dawn, before the housemaids are up. The forced
+appearance of a well-to-do philosopher at such an hour was nothing less
+than an outrage. I glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and
+turned down its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool
+thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in
+charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I
+glanced over my shoulder.
+
+"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.
+
+At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us
+turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's
+eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm. Her
+eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then she
+turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just beyond
+the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even further away.
+The gangway was fixed and the movement of the conglomerate mass began.
+Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.
+
+"There's the brute waiting for her."
+
+And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a smile on
+his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the foot of the
+gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence, sought us anxiously
+with his gaze; then with an air of bravado waved his hat--a hard white
+felt--and cried out: "Cheer O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and
+linking his arm through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers
+hurrying across the stones to the custom-sheds.
+
+"Stop," Jaffery roared.
+
+They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook would
+have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the stream into a
+clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us. When we had struggled
+our slow way down and reached the quay she advanced a few steps looking
+very terrible in her wrath.
+
+"How dare you follow me?"
+
+"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an imperious
+gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the stern of the
+boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging, and a sergeant de
+ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.
+
+"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I didn't
+play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play dragon with
+a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."
+
+"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said jauntily.
+
+"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone. "You
+know very well why I'm here."
+
+"Jaff Chayne--" Liosha began.
+
+He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."
+
+"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."
+
+"He has got to tell me, not you."
+
+"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said Fendihook, with
+sudden nastiness.
+
+"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."
+
+"How are you going to do it?"
+
+Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter--"
+
+"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?" snarled
+Fendihook.
+
+"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."
+
+"Sure," said Liosha.
+
+"And are you going to marry this lady?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Why didn't you marry her in England?"
+
+"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here--we don't want any of
+your interference." And she planted herself by the side of her abductor,
+glaring defiance at Jaffery.
+
+Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and an
+Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and would
+forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little skunk!"
+
+The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked swiftly at
+Fendihook.
+
+"Wasn't it true what you told me?"
+
+"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in England as
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+She paid no attention to me.
+
+"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.
+
+Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that rot
+seriously, you silly cuckoo?"
+
+Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly. For the
+first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her candid mind.
+
+"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise to marry
+her in France."
+
+"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"
+
+"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."
+
+"Who says I can't?"
+
+"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."
+
+"I've divorced her."
+
+"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing. I've
+found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character."
+
+Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes
+burning.
+
+"He's married already--" she gasped.
+
+"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."
+
+Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for
+Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round
+Fendihook's throat.
+
+"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron strength.
+Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as white as a sheet.
+I tapped him on the arm.
+
+"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if you don't
+want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a scared look,
+"you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You had better stick
+to the sort you're accustomed to."
+
+"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."
+
+"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne. With my
+own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like and"--I made an
+expressive gesture--"throw him clean away."
+
+"Right O!" said he.
+
+He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck me. I
+overtook him.
+
+"Where are you staying in Havre?"
+
+He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know for?"
+
+"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be if we
+chanced upon the same hotel."
+
+"I'm staying at the Phares--the swagger one on the beach near the
+Casino."
+
+"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye, old pal," said he.
+
+He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.
+
+I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood
+unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down.
+Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but
+now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation.
+
+"Let her go!" I whispered.
+
+Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without moving
+her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have known exactly
+what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat helplessly.
+
+"_Monsieur_," said a voice close by, and we saw our little blue-bloused
+porter. He explained that he had been seeking us everywhere. If we did
+not make haste we would lose the Paris train.
+
+I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not pressed for
+time; but this little outside happening broke the situation.
+
+"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said Jaffery.
+
+She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground a
+leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
+extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.
+
+"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.
+
+"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides, we'll have
+to stay the night."
+
+"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."
+
+"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."
+
+An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she wore
+cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly unconcerned with
+such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken face to all the world. I
+felt intensely sorry for her. She realised now from what a blatant
+scoundrel she had been saved; but she still bitterly resented our
+intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped naked walking between
+them"--that was her primitive account later of her state of mind.
+
+"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."
+
+She nodded, without looking at me.
+
+"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."
+
+She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but she
+remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
+mechanically to her declarations.
+
+On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the cheery sun
+had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a glorious day. The
+luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took an open cab and rattled
+through the narrow flag-paved streets of the harbour quarter of the
+town. As we emerged into a more spacious thoroughfare, suddenly from a
+gaudy column at the corner flared the name of Ras Fendihook. I caught
+the heading of the _affiche_: "Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery
+was solved. Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left
+London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an
+engagement out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question:
+"Why Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
+of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had eyes
+for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We passed another
+column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early
+hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni's was flung.
+We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to
+be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit déjeuner downstairs.
+Liosha left us without saying a word.
+
+Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good _café au lait_, gladdened
+by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning's work, quite a
+different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the
+sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before. My urbane dismissal of
+Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory. The glow of conscious heroism
+warmed me, even like last night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind.
+After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and
+sending up to Liosha's room a bunch of red roses we bought at a
+florist's hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the
+matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his
+pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding
+of its _sous_, it is what you will. But it lives a spacious,
+out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like
+provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks abroad. It indulges in
+its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is intensely conscious of
+family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom. It is not Sundayfied
+into our vacuous boredom. It clings to the picturesque, in which it
+finds its dignified delight. The little soldier clad in blue tunic and
+red trousers struts along with his _fiancée_ or _maîtresse_ on his arm;
+the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the
+cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks
+syrup at a neighbouring table in your café. The work-girls, even on
+Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly
+street. The curé in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday
+happens not to be the _jour de repos hebdomadaire_ ordained by law, in
+their blue _sarreau_; the peasants from outlying villages--the men in
+queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
+dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black,
+with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and
+greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous
+cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an
+inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with
+their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned
+waiters standing by café tables--all these types are distinct, picked
+out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the
+stage is dressed.
+
+So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day,
+I replied:
+
+"Sit here."
+
+"Don't you want to see the place?"
+
+"The place," said I, "is parading before us."
+
+"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."
+
+"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in
+a mood for jaunts."
+
+"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her.
+Oh, that swine of a blighter!"
+
+His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth
+time we went over the story.
+
+"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go
+back to the boarding-house."
+
+"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."
+
+"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary,
+there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew
+the right way to take her."
+
+The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I
+assented to Jaffery's proposition.
+
+"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish
+gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and
+honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock
+for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled
+herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."
+
+And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us
+past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman
+would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to
+soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her
+into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in
+fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid
+figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white
+gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the
+morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her
+lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.
+
+We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.
+
+"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."
+
+We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked
+steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.
+
+"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."
+
+"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather
+indiscreet."
+
+"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.
+
+"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your
+breakfast?"
+
+She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she
+have now? I sent a waiter for café-au-lait and a brioche and lectured
+her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a
+smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism
+with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for
+the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the
+little tray and the _verseur_ poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
+her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.
+
+"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We
+watched the London trains carefully."
+
+"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to
+bed at once."
+
+"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you
+doing at Southsea?"
+
+"Staying with Emma--Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick
+that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her
+to put me up."
+
+"So that's why you went on Thursday?"
+
+"That's why."
+
+"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
+Considine--I mean Mrs. Jupp--into your confidence?"
+
+"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to
+Havre--to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff
+Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."
+
+We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue
+that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday
+for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no
+Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris.
+Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from
+London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy
+out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His
+fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to
+accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst
+of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of
+his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
+worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage
+back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway
+network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into
+the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure
+he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left
+penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp
+swallowed her up forever.
+
+For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul
+must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had
+guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey.
+Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his
+instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit
+of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be
+posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to
+the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to
+Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.
+
+She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon
+the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all
+day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the
+town from his swagger hotel on the _plage_, we carried out Jaffery's
+proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight
+from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of
+fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged
+needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
+grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
+sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a
+deep breath.
+
+"Oh, let us all come and live here."
+
+We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the
+fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few
+belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to
+the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch
+at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and
+afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery
+was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing,
+and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended
+solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy
+gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled
+her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
+sipped _crême de menthe_ with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a
+naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds
+itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away.
+Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet--or
+rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of
+blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her
+wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the
+first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a
+spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy--she was
+dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
+immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the
+same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing
+and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.
+
+To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's
+category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many
+restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his
+benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile
+exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl
+it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be
+felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At
+Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand
+to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and
+ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would
+have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with
+grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the
+deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.
+
+It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the
+fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The
+smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed
+conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery
+suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the
+edge of the inspiring cliffs?
+
+"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he
+throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."
+
+Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick
+ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the
+wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought
+of the Winged Victory.
+
+"I'm not a bit tired," she said.
+
+But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists,
+she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary
+to his desires?" and settled down beside him.
+
+So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea
+and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a
+steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny
+golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact
+giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke
+the spell.
+
+"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed
+him."
+
+Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.
+
+"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.
+
+"I did strike him once."
+
+"Oh?" said I.
+
+"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the
+details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But
+she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I
+was an honest woman and talked about marriage."
+
+Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear,"
+said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders--it was the full shrug of the un-English
+child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away.
+"He was so funny."
+
+"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
+remonstrance.
+
+"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was
+different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much.
+You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave
+like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to
+dinner."
+
+Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."
+
+"What can I say?"--she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't
+to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think
+it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into
+the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say
+it was not ladylike--but he--he did not say so. He laughed. His friends
+used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off
+my stays"--she threw out her hands largely--"ouf!"
+
+"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.
+
+"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd
+of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big
+difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low
+voice.
+
+I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for
+her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can
+understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some
+moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new
+white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible
+something--something, for want of a better word, like a ripple--sweep
+through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her
+neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.
+
+"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.
+
+She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and
+clutched his shoulder.
+
+"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
+understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
+prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
+breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
+hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."
+
+Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
+spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.
+
+"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
+forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
+words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
+Chayne, the mountains of Albania."
+
+"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
+remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"
+
+She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
+swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
+now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
+I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
+things."
+
+"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.
+
+"And what have you done?"
+
+"I've broken out of prison and run away."
+
+"That's what I did," said Liosha.
+
+Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
+her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.
+
+"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
+comes to."
+
+No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
+had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
+wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
+restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
+him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
+given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
+been so kind to me."
+
+"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
+as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
+beads."
+
+"So do I," said Liosha.
+
+I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
+chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
+consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment
+afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of
+babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to
+my feet and pursued them.
+
+"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the
+decencies of civilised life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+"_Arrêtez! 'Arrêtez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.
+
+We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The
+chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and
+disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side
+to side of the Boulevard Maritime.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in
+characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and
+laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking
+fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a
+curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he
+carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having
+subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.
+
+"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the
+door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at
+Tortoni's."
+
+Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took
+off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed
+manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a
+stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next
+Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established
+himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
+Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the
+partition. The car started.
+
+"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From
+Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports
+thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"
+
+"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
+"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."
+
+"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."
+
+"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.
+
+"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.
+
+"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
+"He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."
+
+"Remember that night off Vigo?"
+
+"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
+go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
+time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
+responsible for the saving of his ship.
+
+"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.
+
+"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.
+
+"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
+included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."
+
+Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
+holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
+side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
+hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
+from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
+It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
+thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
+violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
+desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
+two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.
+
+"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"
+
+"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
+grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
+ship."
+
+He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
+entertainment of a pretty woman.
+
+"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.
+
+"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
+doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
+that I love the sea."
+
+With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
+Restaurant and Café Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
+thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
+enjoying the Sunday afternoon _apéritif_.
+
+"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
+crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
+Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
+table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
+I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
+chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
+was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain
+Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink
+than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an
+appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.
+
+"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with
+yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"
+
+"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross
+Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."
+
+"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.
+
+I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese
+East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."
+
+"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.
+
+"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda
+into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me,
+exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his
+drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us--for he was not a
+spontaneously communicative man--that he now had a very good command:
+steamship _Vesta_, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but
+sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he
+had ever set eyes on.
+
+"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."
+
+Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.
+
+"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"
+
+"Yes, worse luck."
+
+"Why worse luck?" I asked.
+
+"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.
+
+Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar
+before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden
+at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.
+
+"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.
+
+Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
+Chayne?"
+
+Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth
+showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his
+hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder--"Why not? You and I. Out of this
+rotten civilisation?"
+
+Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I.
+I thought he was going mad.
+
+"Would you like it?" he asked.
+
+"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her
+face.
+
+Captain Maturin leaned forward.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly
+there's no accommodation for ladies."
+
+Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
+sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
+did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
+any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
+cabin? There's always one."
+
+"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."
+
+Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
+his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
+crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
+very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
+and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.
+
+"Let us have a private palaver about this."
+
+They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
+Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
+disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:
+
+"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"
+
+"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.
+
+"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
+her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
+hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."
+
+I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
+craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.
+
+"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
+believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
+another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
+in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
+Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
+food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
+sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
+a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
+seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
+always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
+see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
+does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
+about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
+misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
+suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and
+always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the
+wind--to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods
+catching fire, and the wheezing mediæval boilers bursting and sending
+you all to glory--"
+
+I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on
+hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed
+interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:
+
+"I should love it! I should love it!"
+
+"But it's lunatic," said I.
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But the proprieties."
+
+She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out
+her hands towards me.
+
+"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff
+Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari
+to London?"
+
+"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"
+
+It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to
+defensive sombreness admitted its significance.
+
+"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same."
+She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.
+"If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any
+difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara
+that."
+
+"I will do so--" said I.
+
+"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not
+going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over
+another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the
+proprieties"--she snapped her fingers--"they be--they be anything'd!"
+
+To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank
+the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the
+manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
+anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.
+
+"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will
+always be in the way."
+
+"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.
+
+We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now
+about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by
+the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.
+
+"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands
+the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and
+North and South Amerikee,' come."
+
+"But this is midsummer madness," said I.
+
+"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously
+caught a waiter by the arm. "_Même chose pour tout le monde_." He
+flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it?
+The _Vesta_ isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No
+luxuries. I hope you understand."
+
+"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.
+
+"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you
+mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as
+one of the crew?"
+
+"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the
+binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."
+
+"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
+incredulity.
+
+"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux
+aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.
+
+"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.
+
+"The _what_?" I asked.
+
+"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me
+have dunnage."
+
+"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a
+parrot in a cage."
+
+Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light
+mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to
+become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we passed through the customs this
+morning?"
+
+"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his
+third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him
+along? I told him he'd come in useful."
+
+"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man,
+give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
+They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be
+arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of
+expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _petite
+vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier
+voyage--'_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka_'?"
+
+"Four months," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in
+time."
+
+I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
+difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
+nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates
+belonging to a woman who is not my wife.
+
+There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the
+others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins
+and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated
+argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them
+from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with
+excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of
+thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so
+tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and
+apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted
+mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Café-Restaurant,
+where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not
+one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a
+schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might
+have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or
+cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
+clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
+plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table,
+after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the
+information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to
+Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it
+more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the
+performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty;
+but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in
+Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of
+having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman
+of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
+finery, who was sitting next to him.
+
+Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before
+turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's
+outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new
+deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts,
+he would see to their adequate reception.
+
+"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he,
+with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and
+clamping in a steamer's machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes
+filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour--"There's still
+time."
+
+"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all
+my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."
+
+If I am not urbane, I am nothing.
+
+He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
+rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy
+process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the
+trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to
+Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the
+hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain
+upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
+middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and
+respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in
+a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
+and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner
+recesses of the hotel.
+
+Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in
+France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with
+traditions of _le flègme britannique_; but there was not much _flègme_
+about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.
+
+There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after
+her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively
+artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there
+was the bill to pay. We sat down again.
+
+"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one
+of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of
+getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner
+instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."
+
+I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in
+those terms to Liosha."
+
+"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
+cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.
+
+"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."
+
+"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I
+contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
+But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short
+of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the
+morning."
+
+"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."
+
+"Give them to me now," said I.
+
+He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up,
+some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should
+crop up."
+
+He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document,
+which I put into my letter case.
+
+"And what about letters?"
+
+"Don't want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the
+plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right
+again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a
+schedule of dates."
+
+"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.
+
+"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only
+one woman in the world."
+
+"Let us have a final drink," said I.
+
+We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.
+
+When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her
+way to Madagascar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County
+of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
+I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am
+not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my
+person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot
+keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and
+Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer
+containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so
+forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
+desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are
+trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My
+other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any
+rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying
+on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a
+freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case
+wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on
+my arrival at Northlands.
+
+"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this
+thing."
+
+But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept
+the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to
+the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's
+flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.
+
+"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not
+going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."
+
+"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable
+length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it.
+If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the
+topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description
+you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly
+miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."
+
+I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship
+_Vesta_.
+
+As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's
+Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be
+a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened
+myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the
+small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery
+left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of
+housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an
+hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal
+appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his
+books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos,
+of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
+and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care
+upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which
+reposed--most useful piece of furniture--in the middle of the
+hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the
+place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention
+on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the
+tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one
+drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it
+into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the
+original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper
+and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer
+of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his
+bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and
+looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed
+two photographs on his dressing-table--one of his mother, whom I
+remembered, and, one of Doria--these I laid face downwards so that the
+light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from
+beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling
+paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark
+alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was
+nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour
+and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the
+drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat,
+summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter
+with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow
+that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a
+friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
+labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and
+myself had, at least, one thing in common--videlicet, the keyless habit.
+I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden
+_trait-d'union_. Now I had found it.
+
+And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial
+Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the _Vesta_. The
+weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the
+meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about
+cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west
+coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard
+enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a
+matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a
+short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips
+considerably later--for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to
+the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe--they had made
+their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they
+apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the
+deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been
+procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to
+pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their
+communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so
+happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us,"
+wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid
+fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her
+hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just
+imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing
+in wet and dirt. . . .
+
+About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all
+too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit
+since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us
+once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.
+She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the
+terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that
+she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her
+reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.
+Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his
+constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now
+that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
+neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.
+After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she
+admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He
+had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a
+beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill
+Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and
+Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?
+
+"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
+morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
+disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back
+in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One
+would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."
+
+"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."
+
+"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a
+man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that
+dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What
+respectable woman--well, what honest woman, according to the term of the
+lower classes--would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"
+
+"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry
+her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question
+of marriage or anything else between them."
+
+"_Sancta simplicitas!_" She shook her head from side to side and looked
+at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The
+best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the
+type."
+
+"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.
+
+She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her
+ready sureness:
+
+"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among
+literary people."
+
+"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."
+
+"You're as bemused as Barbara."
+
+"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied
+an individual, which you haven't."
+
+She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way--Paul and
+Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"
+
+"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it--what the dickens does it matter
+to you?"
+
+"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.
+
+"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious
+intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished
+him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If
+he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't
+he? What would it have to do with you?"
+
+"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting
+on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more
+insulting."
+
+"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had
+swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She
+was eaten up with jealousy.
+
+"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being
+always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what
+they've got to say for themselves."
+
+She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and
+ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a
+matter of perfect indifference to me."
+
+I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
+Jaffery's--practically--last words to me were: 'There's only one woman
+in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to
+prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"--with the tips of
+her fingers she brushed my hair--"you really are a simple old dear!"
+
+"All the same--" I began.
+
+"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I
+didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you
+have one."
+
+She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down _Les Fleurs du
+Mal_. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.
+
+Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline.
+It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back
+again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not
+only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him
+would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another
+story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned
+her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She
+regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough,
+with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
+back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would
+treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my
+conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact
+that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously
+jealous of Liosha.
+
+It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara
+and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I
+would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a
+mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on
+the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We
+revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled
+with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our
+faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every
+August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and
+other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
+marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
+nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.
+
+Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having
+subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the
+normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands,
+coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were
+given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and
+swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with
+paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had
+struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera,
+had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side
+by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could
+not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
+Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake,
+had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the
+trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in
+disgraceful fringes.
+
+"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
+anything but utterly miserable."
+
+"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.
+
+"Well, it's her own skin."
+
+"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.
+
+What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last
+word.
+
+The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards
+Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted
+flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her
+father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a
+series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its
+sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her
+unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she
+asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity
+rather than indifference.
+
+Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's
+list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from
+the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did
+the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on
+this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation
+swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these
+nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on
+public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to
+remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory
+was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her.
+Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold
+enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any
+longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do
+his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
+"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a
+tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how
+could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to
+his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not
+let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily
+assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar
+number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of
+far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a
+beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and
+tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to
+be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.
+
+"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
+executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after
+his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."
+
+Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have
+asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would
+have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook,
+and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been
+the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out
+with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.
+
+"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might
+have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."
+
+A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an
+_édition de luxe_ of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like
+Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and
+illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of
+copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one
+of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the
+commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul
+would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn
+list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an _édition
+de luxe_ of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth
+while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author,
+surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally
+sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied
+by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer.
+Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden
+aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an _édition de
+luxe_. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other
+sales showed signs of exhaustion.
+
+"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he
+sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
+woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
+her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
+he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
+but you. Do advise me."
+
+I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
+a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
+It ran:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."
+
+I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
+mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
+right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.
+
+But I have regretted that telegram ever since.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
+quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
+_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
+thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
+correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
+Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
+preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
+abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
+found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
+journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
+hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
+University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
+hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
+scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
+writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
+Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
+gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
+was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
+descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
+professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
+with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
+satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
+Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
+plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre
+come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish
+hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with
+the naïveté of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of
+dates and addresses--I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
+certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or
+horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I
+could give him but little comfort.
+
+Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken
+chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to
+reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores
+of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to
+picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul
+clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a
+deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions
+and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual
+promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the
+dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha,
+was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch
+of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy,
+bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
+relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
+life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence
+for having been spared so dreadful an experience.
+
+Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have
+their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual
+enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract
+from one of his letters:
+
+"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time.
+Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you
+sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha.
+Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that
+was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived
+all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore.
+She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing
+gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the
+wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work
+you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health
+and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of
+her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep
+her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as
+cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the
+cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about
+their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody
+has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What
+do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering
+blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly
+imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling.
+They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them,
+these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst
+and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a
+kind of freemasonry between them.
+
+"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The
+first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at
+the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The
+mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then
+he came up to Liosha--you and Barbara should have seen her--it was
+sultry, not a breath of air--and she just had on a thin bodice open at
+her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was
+bareheaded.
+
+"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'
+
+"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the
+skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed
+Juno; you know her way.
+
+"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'
+
+"'Enjoyment--!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came
+over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying
+to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'
+
+"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman--what you would
+call a Swede--a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the
+worse for wear. Liosha says:
+
+"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'
+
+"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'
+
+"'What was it all about?'
+
+"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that
+mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him
+a ----, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."
+
+It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe
+me, they were enough to annoy anybody.
+
+"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck
+for a minute.'
+
+"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.
+
+"'What's the matter?'
+
+"Why did you call Petersen a ----?' she asked pleasantly and
+word-perfect.
+
+"'Cos he is one.'
+
+"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you
+both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of
+it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't
+shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again,
+I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'
+
+"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have
+consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had
+attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in
+perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In
+either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls
+the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex
+told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on,
+placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair.
+They felt that if she were drawn into a mêlée she would use a knife with
+the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced
+interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you
+remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making
+the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men
+looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at
+the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At
+last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
+without looking at him.
+
+"'All right, mate.'
+
+"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo,
+missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft
+the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck
+towards me, as pleased as Punch."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.
+
+Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in
+full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African
+continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of
+Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these
+travel-pictures in articles to _The Daily Gazette_, which, supplemented
+by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to
+read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape
+Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other
+apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing
+copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter
+entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty
+_Vesta_ wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
+disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and
+making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.
+If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I
+remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to
+microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and
+imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you
+exactly what was taken out of the _S.S. Vesta_ and what was put into
+her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To
+do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
+transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter
+of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called
+comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it.
+Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On
+one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by
+glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a
+derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are
+lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with
+greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the
+cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.
+And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter,
+by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
+unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I
+cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of
+men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You
+must imagine, I say, the _S.S. Vesta_ repeating this monotonous
+performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper,
+all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
+scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
+fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du propriétaire_,
+among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
+the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
+Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
+children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
+yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
+which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
+story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
+relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
+chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
+out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
+best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
+residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
+this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
+away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
+word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
+Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
+his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
+Liosha.
+
+As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
+put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
+letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
+were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
+central figure in many a picture.
+
+Here, I say, is another extract:
+
+     "Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
+     worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
+     after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
+     and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
+     I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
+     settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
+     I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
+     tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
+     managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
+     shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in
+     another long stretch. . . .
+
+     "She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
+     the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
+     wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
+     his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
+     I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
+     strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
+     and again, when it's my watch--I'm on the starboard watch, you
+     know--I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands
+     for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.
+     And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts,
+     and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her
+     face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
+     deck--and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a
+     woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of
+     bacon and eggs--my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of
+     fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early
+     morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the
+     Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the
+     good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your
+     nose up at it--but you've never been hungry in your life! and there
+     hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the
+     permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our
+     comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's
+     a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
+     spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
+     cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.
+
+     "Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
+     result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
+     considered the matter gravely.
+
+     "'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
+     luck so far, have I?'
+
+     "I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'
+
+     "'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said.
+     'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to
+     meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'
+
+     "She rose--we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light--and leaned
+     over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her.
+     She was silent for a bit. Then she said:
+
+     "'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry
+     a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat
+     me--and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'
+
+     "She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
+     talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
+     who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
+     would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
+     Honest--I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great
+     Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as
+     decent a sort as you please."
+
+It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon
+gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's
+interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells
+us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and
+second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful
+attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind
+which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's
+toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and
+Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of
+the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more--with
+a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created
+Liosha.
+
+Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:
+
+     "A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria.
+     If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought
+     some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach
+     home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough
+     only on the outside.
+
+     "Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her
+     by the donkey-man. . . ."
+
+There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long
+account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company
+including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and
+navigation. But you see--he switches off at once to Liosha and the
+trivial records of the humdrum day.
+
+At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the
+Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:
+
+     "Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can
+     scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
+     dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
+     rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
+     ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
+     a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
+     shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
+     colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
+     straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
+     packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
+     mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
+     had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
+     straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
+     port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
+     turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
+     other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
+     inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
+     didn't like it; no one liked it.
+
+     "When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and
+     began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering
+     crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five
+     degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting
+     both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to
+     catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I
+     know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the
+     rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my
+     feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid
+     daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me?
+     Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and
+     looked just like a man. I roared:
+
+     "'Clear out. This is no place for you.'
+
+     "'I'm coming. Go along down.'
+
+     "She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as much
+     of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.
+
+     "'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'
+
+     "Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What the
+     this, that and the other were we waiting for?
+
+     "'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'
+
+     "'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn soon
+     make you,' cried Andrews.
+
+     "He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of the
+     cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of devils. He
+     was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of courtesy, but at
+     the moment he didn't care who went down into the hold, or who was
+     killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted and the crazy
+     old tub didn't go down.
+
+     "So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down we
+     were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
+     peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
+     some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
+     quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
+     able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
+     huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
+     quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
+     they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
+     know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
+     muscles about to snap--queer feeling that--and I think I'm about as
+     tough as they make 'em.
+
+     "Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight
+     of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
+     you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
+     running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got
+     jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were
+     knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know
+     what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of
+     the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He
+     looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the
+     iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along,
+     barging into everything--it was blowing half a gale--and once I
+     fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
+     and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
+     cook, sick of fever--I think he's a blighted malingerer--was the
+     only creature there. I routed him out, in the dim mephitic place
+     reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in his charge. Then I
+     went back through the drenching seas to the hatch. There was just
+     enough room for a man's body to squeeze through down the ladder. I
+     went down into the same hell-broth of sweat and confusion. The
+     ground you stood upon might have been the back of a super-Titanic
+     butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent term. It was a helpless
+     scuttering surge of men and vast wooden cubes. Most of the men had
+     torn off their upper garments and fought half naked, the sweat
+     glistening on their skins in the feeble light. Soon the heat became
+     unbearable and I too tore off jersey and shirt. Liosha joined me
+     and we worked together without speaking. Her long thick hair had
+     come down and she had hastily tied it in a knot, just as you might
+     tie a knot in a towel, and she had thrown off things like everybody
+     else and only a flimsy cotton, sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's
+     called, drenched through and sticking to her, made a pretence of
+     covering her from her waist.
+
+     "You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
+     your time--if you could--for the roll, and push and then scramble
+     with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out of the way
+     of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with fantastic
+     murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring of the
+     storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller
+     lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every
+     plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.
+
+     "We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast, and
+     were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
+     anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
+     twilight--just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down the
+     ladder where the hatch was open,--hanging on to edges and corners
+     of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave, vibrated
+     in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus of
+     cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand clear!'
+     Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I stumbled
+     and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding crate,
+     two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung aside,
+     to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by
+     the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing
+     the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the
+     deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood
+     streaming from her head.
+
+     [Illustration: Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung
+     aside.]
+
+     "In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of another
+     fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before realised the
+     appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her bunk aft; I
+     sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances from the
+     ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far she was
+     injured. . . .
+
+     "Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
+     But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
+     lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
+     skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
+     A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
+     her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
+     clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
+     hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
+     seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
+     I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
+     about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
+     refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."
+
+And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit of a
+scrawl from Liosha--her complete account of the incident:
+
+     "We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo go
+     loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the head
+     and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it gave
+     me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."
+
+Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to them.
+Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event in the
+amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved by a woman
+at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how heroic in action and
+how magnanimous in after modesty, does not forget it either. Although he
+had been credited (to his ingenuous delight) by reviewers of "The
+Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's
+nature, I have never met a more dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings
+with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on
+Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.
+
+     "Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last _Vesta_ letters,
+     "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I
+     take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her.
+     And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has
+     adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great,
+     spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns
+     Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's
+     ways are wonderful but weird."
+
+He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
+epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
+motherliness.
+
+"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of
+country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The
+morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and
+called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very
+pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle,
+arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's
+account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her
+solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man
+who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different
+kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
+at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when
+tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes
+also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I
+recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many
+puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's
+personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to
+town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more
+psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my
+stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to
+lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with
+Doria.
+
+Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking
+terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer
+office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian Boldero, doors
+flew open, and Doria marched straight away into Wittekind's comfortably
+furnished private room. Wittekind himself, tall, loose-limbed,
+courteous, the least tradesman-like person you can imagine, rose to
+receive her. For some reason or the other, or more likely against
+reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug little man hiding crafty
+eyes behind spectacles; but here he was, obviously a man of good
+breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly and gave her to understand
+that she was the one person in the world whom he had been longing to
+meet. And the office was not a sort of human _charcuterie_ hung round
+with brains of authors for sale, but a quiet, restful place to which
+valuable prints on the walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an
+air of distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
+bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old armchair
+with a beautiful back--she was sensitive to such things--and spoke of
+Adrian as of his own blood brother. She had not anticipated such warmth
+of genuine feeling, or so fine an appreciation of her Adrian's work.
+
+"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only to you in
+my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep your
+husband's memory green. But it is green, thank goodness. How do I know?
+By two signs. One that people wherever the English language is spoken
+are eagerly reading his books--I say reading, because you deprecate the
+purely commercial side of things; but you must forgive me if I say that
+the only proof of all their reading is the record of all their buying.
+And when people buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they
+also discuss him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
+advertisement and an _édition de luxe_. But it is only the little man
+that needs the big drum."
+
+"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an _édition de luxe_ would be
+such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care a bit about the money,"
+she went on with a splendid disregard of her rights that would have sent
+a shiver down the incorporated back of the Incorporated Society of
+Authors, "I'm only too willing to contribute towards the expense. Please
+understand me. It's a tribute and a monument."
+
+"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said Wittekind.
+
+"But my husband--"
+
+"--isn't dead," said he.
+
+"Oh!" said Doria. "Then--"
+
+"The time for your _édition de luxe_ is not yet."
+
+"Yet? But--you don't think Adrian's work is going to die?"
+
+She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.
+
+"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that he is
+among the immortals. But an _édition de luxe_ now would be a wanton _Hic
+jacet_."
+
+All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business
+from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of
+Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her
+account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul--or across
+whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained
+to immobility.
+
+"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr. Wittekind,"
+she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to leave Adrian's
+reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come to see you before."
+"I wish you had," said he.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but--"
+
+"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's a
+splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."
+
+"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.
+
+"Well--so prompt."
+
+"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
+unconscionable time," said Doria.
+
+"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do. Your
+husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled together.
+He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time, although it was a
+labour of love."
+
+"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind," she
+cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see exactly
+what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried! Why do your
+printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"
+
+"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays. They print
+from a typed copy."
+
+"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original manuscript."
+
+Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero. From two
+typed copies--one in England and one in America."
+
+"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you Adrian's
+original manuscript with his revisions."
+
+"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I read the
+typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your husband's manuscript."
+
+"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's manuscript."
+
+"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."
+
+Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great dark eyes
+grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand on the writing
+desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was sitting. He rose, too.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
+manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're making
+some extraordinary mistake."
+
+"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."
+
+Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow me."
+
+He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me at
+once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this. Mr. Forest
+is my literary adviser--everything goes through his hands."
+
+They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember the
+Boldero manuscripts?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"
+
+"Typescript."
+
+"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original manuscript?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"
+
+"I'm sure it hasn't."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Forest."
+
+The reader retired.
+
+"You see," said Wittekind.
+
+"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate' and 'The
+Greater Glory'?"
+
+"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of knowing."
+
+"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers and
+destroyed by the printers."
+
+"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling misunderstanding.
+Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a distinguished man--and a man of
+unblemished honour. A word or two will clear up everything."
+
+"He's in Madagascar."
+
+"Then wait till he comes back."
+
+Doria insisted--and who in the world can blame her for insisting?
+
+"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm not--not to the
+extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne has told me definitely
+that those two manuscripts came to your office, that the books were
+printed from them and that they were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour--and I have also
+given you independent testimony--that no manuscript of your husband's
+has ever entered this office."
+
+"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
+destroyed?"
+
+"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the proofs.
+Typed copy may or may not be returned."
+
+"But autograph copy is valuable?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of money?"
+
+"Quite a lot of money."
+
+"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"
+
+"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne would be
+incapable."
+
+"And you've never seen any of it?"
+
+"I've given you my word of honour."
+
+"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.
+
+"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.
+
+She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.
+
+"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You have
+nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She looked up
+at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give explanations. In
+the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's memory in your hands--to
+keep green, as you say"--tears came into her eyes--"and you will, won't
+you?"
+
+The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent over her,
+still holding her hand.
+
+"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers have our
+ideals--and our purest is to distribute through the world the works of a
+man of genius."
+
+So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on urgent
+business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full of the
+virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a full
+account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations of
+Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for having
+counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have thrown every
+possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I ought to have
+foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one weak spot in our web
+of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven by necessity from the
+paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault.
+Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I
+have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in
+mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and
+suspicious cross-examination.
+
+"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"
+
+"Yes," I lied.
+
+"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," I lied again.
+
+"Was it among Adrian's papers?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the printers,
+he destroyed it."
+
+"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has also
+got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want them for?"
+
+"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer, because I
+don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know nothing whatever
+about them."
+
+"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done for me,"
+said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know something."
+
+From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of view, she
+was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful. If she had
+brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts
+and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge
+would have flayed me alive. . . . Put yourself in her place for a
+minute--God knows I tried to do so hard enough--and you will see the
+logic of her position, all through. She was not a woman of broad human
+sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole
+being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life;
+it was concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
+flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to bear
+with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had happened to cloud
+her faith. She had come up against many incomprehensible things: the
+delay in publication of Adrian's book; the change of title; the burning
+of Adrian's last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures
+that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo
+of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the
+literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them--not without
+protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of
+things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her
+outrageously. I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.
+
+But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor Barbara do? We
+sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while
+Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library,
+inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts. And I dared
+not know anything at all about them. She had every reason to reproach
+me.
+
+Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame Hilary.
+When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special
+department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's management of
+financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side
+of things. It has worked very well. This silly muddle about the
+manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."
+
+"But it does matter," cried Doria.
+
+And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by
+the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of
+her passionate self craved their possession. We argued futilely, as
+people must, who haven't the ghost of a case.
+
+"But why has Jaffery lied?"
+
+"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again perjuring
+myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me. As I've told
+you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went through together.
+We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.' Possibly," said I, with a
+despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it
+with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it,
+and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer's. Now that I
+remember, he did say something of the kind."
+
+"Yes, he did," said Barbara.
+
+Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're merely
+saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see through you"--I
+have already apologised to you for our being the unconvincing liars that
+we were--"you know nothing more about it than I do. You ought to, as
+I've already said. But you don't. In fact, you know considerably less.
+Shall I tell you where the manuscripts are at the present moment?"
+
+"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who has come
+to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine how utterly
+wearied we were with the whole of the miserable business. "Let us wait
+till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very long."
+
+"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't condemn a
+man without a hearing?"
+
+Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend. And
+when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful than when
+she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then she gets really
+angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."
+
+I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem to
+detect anything particularly wrong about it.
+
+"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't do
+anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at that."
+
+"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I don't want
+to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can help. But that's
+where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of them"--and she pointed to the
+key of Jaffery's flat hanging with its staring label against my library
+wall.
+
+Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to Jaffery. But
+again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our heads and demanded
+Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their
+existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind
+of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable
+that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable
+that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
+therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
+satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we
+confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious dealings. If it
+were only to gain time in order to think and consult, we had to refer
+her to the absent Jaffery.
+
+"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a deuce of a
+mess."
+
+"I'm afraid we are."
+
+"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs, with no
+thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig and about
+anything outside our nice comfortable sty."
+
+"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.
+
+"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm roused."
+
+We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the disastrous
+topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and discussed the modern
+tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on being in the forefront of
+progress, and found no dramatic salvation outside the most advanced
+productions of the Incorporated Stage Society. I pleaded for beauty,
+which she called wedding-cake. She pleaded for courage and truth in the
+presentation of actual life, which I called dull and stupid photography
+which any dismal fool could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely
+profitless argument.
+
+"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to your silly
+old early Victorian platitudes!"
+
+"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own home by
+one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."
+
+So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If only, I
+thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a fascinating
+little person she might be. And I understood how it had come to pass
+that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her so desperately.
+
+The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the planting of
+some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs, came through my
+library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried to her.
+
+"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying to
+lunch."
+
+No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara, was
+waiting to take her to the station.
+
+"I'll see you into the train," said I.
+
+"Oh, please don't trouble."
+
+"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the slope to the
+front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin with the luggage.
+Doria and I drove to the station. For the few minutes before the train
+came in we walked up and down the platform. She was in high spirits,
+full of jest and laughter. An unwonted flush in her cheeks and a
+brightness in her deep eyes rendered her perfectly captivating.
+
+"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such a long
+time," I said.
+
+The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good in the
+world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de Jouvence for
+weary people."
+
+That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a
+short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for
+our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever
+before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we
+had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had
+been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned
+me from my contemplative occupation.
+
+"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.
+
+"Have you written to Rogers?"
+
+Rogers was a plumber.
+
+"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a letter
+from a clean-minded man."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to be
+unusable."
+
+"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this household
+in his awful hands?"
+
+"He does."
+
+"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."
+
+"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to have
+done it three days ago."
+
+So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
+conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I turned
+in my chair, holding it up in my hand.
+
+"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"
+
+I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice that the
+pipes--". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes on the wall, "what
+has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"
+
+There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it, impertinently
+and nakedly bright. The labelled key had vanished.
+
+"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.
+
+I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the household
+from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in frantic search,
+and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses and wives and
+children to help, only to discover that I have had the wretched object
+in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is Barbara to this wolf-cry
+that if I came up to her without my head and informed her that I had
+lost it, she would be profoundly sceptical.
+
+But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I declared, "and
+I saw it this morning."
+
+"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant you it was
+there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our attention to it."
+
+"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met in a
+sudden stare.
+
+"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"
+
+"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to me in the
+garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally animated and
+demonstrative at the station--your sex's little guileful way ever since
+the world began. She had the stolen key about her. She's going straight
+to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those manuscripts."
+
+"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them, because
+they don't exist."
+
+"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
+everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up in
+the place!"
+
+"Do you mean--?" she cried aghast.
+
+"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."
+
+"I'll come with you," said Barbara.
+
+So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to London. We
+alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter came out to
+receive us.
+
+"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"
+
+"No, sir, not to my knowledge."
+
+We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a strain.
+
+"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.
+
+"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said I.
+
+[Illustration: And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.]
+
+"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the porter.
+
+"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her ready
+common-sense, took me aside and whispered:
+
+"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with us?"
+
+In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney that
+Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.
+
+"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."
+
+"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."
+
+We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered
+the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug,
+lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows,
+it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken
+little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she
+scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and
+snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole
+fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon
+straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy
+and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and
+speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she
+fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are
+written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.
+
+We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
+revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to Northlands. It
+was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct foresaw madness if we
+took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her father's house, her natural
+refuge, was equally impossible. For what explanation could we have given
+to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors
+to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of
+diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy;
+which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
+gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:
+
+"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to go. I
+can't ask father--and I can't go back home. It would drive me mad."
+
+Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
+flat--haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable Presence,
+the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented country
+bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To save her
+reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the
+chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew.
+Further attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara
+could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the
+temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by
+disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken
+likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has
+the secret--but she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
+uncertainty.
+
+Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I, when I
+went through the place in order to make arrangements for closing it
+altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the condemned cell where
+Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been sacrosanct; not a thing had
+been disturbed; there was the iron safe empty, but yet a grim receptacle
+of abominable secrets; the quill pen, its point stained with idle ink,
+lay on the office writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there
+under a clump of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in
+the corner stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a
+syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
+even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated
+it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had
+affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the
+cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting
+despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. But now
+Doria knew. He had lost her love, the rock on which he had built his
+hope of salvation. He was damned to eternity. It is the supreme and
+unspeakable horror of eternal life that you cannot dash your head
+against a wall and plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful
+Presence of Adrian was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly
+walls. . . .
+
+I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again. Of
+course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not have
+slept in that flat for anything in the world.
+
+I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in
+order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had
+ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old
+portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I
+did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the tragic
+lumber to Northlands, and having made a bonfire in a corner of the
+kitchen garden, burned the whole lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the
+evidence of Adrian's guilt, I could not at the time imagine. It was only
+later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn
+the papers in his flat, because he had no fire--only the electric
+radiator. You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six
+thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his
+idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his
+next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
+cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and
+throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two
+voyages that year--if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage--at a
+moment's notice. In each case he had not had occasion to call at his
+chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made. As for
+discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to
+discover them? Such friends as he had would never pry into his private
+concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole
+matter to them was unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's
+Mansions, he considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that
+he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That I
+bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to
+destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long time I felt
+the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms. If I had been
+a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I
+have always prided myself on being--not the last word, for that would
+not be consonant with my natural modesty--but, say, the penultimate word
+of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
+ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
+brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other's
+bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless
+fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to
+anybody.
+
+The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great
+fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever
+set Humpty-Dumpty up again.
+
+Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
+interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. _Moi qui
+vous parle_, I have read all of them; and I like them. I have even seen
+some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the Agamemnon given by
+the boys of Bradfield College, in their model open-air Greek theatre,
+built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat gripped from beginning to end
+by the tremendous drama. I am not talking foolishly. I know as much as
+the ordinary man need know about Greek tragedy. But in spite of
+Aristotle (who ought to have been strangled at birth, like all other
+bland doctrinaires--and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none
+been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the
+pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a bison was
+clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not draw for
+nuts)--in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the theorists, I assert
+that, as far as my experience goes, in the ordinary wary modern life to
+which we are accustomed, doom and inevitableness do not matter a hang.
+If we have any common-sense we can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course,
+if a woman marries a congenital idiot there are bound to be
+ructions--here we are entering the domain of pathology, which is as
+doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent.
+of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The
+history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of
+coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist
+that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to
+look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an
+Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is
+another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I
+do not desire to discuss the subject. I only maintain that, had it not
+been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret would never have been discovered
+a second time. I cannot see any doom about it. A series of sheer, silly
+accidents on the part of Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to
+face with these incriminating papers. As for her having gained access
+to the flat without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation
+on her part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken
+some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable
+stairs.
+
+I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles; but in
+view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What useful purpose
+would have been served? He would have left the steamship _Vesta_ and
+travelled post-haste overland, dragging with him a resentful Liosha, and
+rushed like a mad bull into an upheaval in which he could have no place.
+We had arranged by correspondence that, after he had parted from the
+good Captain Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to
+leave Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with
+her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be far
+better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their lunatic
+adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at Northlands to break
+the disastrous tidings. It would give us time to watch Doria and see
+what direction the resultant of the forces now tearing her soul would
+take.
+
+"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I can't be
+bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended for a year."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a great
+pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax, and she
+had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered the
+apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and hugged
+her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a few silly
+words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room fire, and rushed
+out into the garden and cut the last poor lingering autumn roses, and,
+returning, cast them into her lap. And we talked hard about the roses;
+and I told her which were Madame Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de
+Salisbury, and which Frau Karl Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady
+Hillingdon. We did not refer at all to unhappy things.
+
+It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the veil of
+her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any fool could
+have divined it. Together with far less shattering of idols has many a
+woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor Doria's case it was
+not only the shattering of idols.
+
+"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I can't
+go on living here for ever."
+
+"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and you're only
+just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets. Why do you want
+to go?"
+
+We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp morning and
+the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their leaves around us in
+a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen lay sodden on the grass
+borders. Here and there a surviving blossom of antirrhinum swaggered
+among its withered brethren as if to maintain the illusion of summer. A
+partridge or two whirred across the path from copse to meadow. The
+gentle sadness of the autumn day had moved her to discourse on the
+mutability of mundane things. Hence, by chain of association, I suppose,
+her sudden remark.
+
+"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the dreamy
+peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such a long
+time--for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad pet--biting the
+hand that fed me."
+
+I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.
+
+"It's true. While the three of you--you and Barbara and Jaffery--were
+doing for me what has never been done for another human being, I was all
+the time snarling and snapping. I can't make out how you can bear the
+sight of me." She clenched her hands and straightened her arms down
+tense. "The thought of it scorches me," she cried suddenly.
+
+"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we understood it
+all. How could we blame you?"
+
+We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods to whom
+human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion on which to
+tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the father of lies. I
+am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was a warm-hearted
+philanthropist, who has never received due credit, and that the devil
+having seized hold of his discovery perverted it to his own diabolical
+uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing that devils, whether they
+promote ancient Gehennas or modern companies, have been doing since the
+world began.
+
+"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The horrible
+things I said and did--the ghastliness of it--"
+
+"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let this
+mere fringe of tragedy worry you."
+
+She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most
+unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.
+
+"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening irritation?
+The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it doesn't kill. And for
+some reason"--she threw out her little gloved hands--"the big thing
+hasn't killed me--it has paralysed me. The springs of feeling"--she
+clutched her bosom--"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I
+can't explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone
+through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up
+altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you call
+it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for the
+torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an appealing
+touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean to go on in this
+wild way. I thought I had a better hold on myself."
+
+"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to one who
+has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of Adrian."
+
+She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the gravel path.
+I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a few paces, before
+either of us spoke.
+
+"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to unburden. There
+never was an Adrian."
+
+"There was indeed," said I, warmly.
+
+"Yours. Not mine."
+
+"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.
+
+She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great eyes
+gleamed black ice.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+I went straight to bed-rock.
+
+"He was the father of your dead child," said I.
+
+Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the drive. "I
+can only thank God that the child didn't live."
+
+Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to hold
+Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till now when I
+heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know that she had
+never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate directness.
+
+"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.
+
+"I am as God made me."
+
+"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake--in order to get you."
+
+She dismissed the argument with a gesture.
+
+"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable torment of
+those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at creation."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we turned
+and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:
+
+"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain out,--his when he
+was alive--and mine now. The thought of it will freeze my soul for all
+eternity. I can't tell you what I feel." She cast out her hands
+imploringly to the autumn fields. "I pity him as I would pity some one
+remote from me--a criminal whom I might have seen done to death by awful
+tortures. It's a matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all
+the understanding. But I can't find the pardon."
+
+"That will come," said I.
+
+"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."
+
+Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to argue
+about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her point of
+view, she was mercilessly right.
+
+"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all this time
+I've been living, first on stolen property and now on charity--Jaffery's
+charity--and he hasn't even had a word of thanks. Quite the contrary."
+Again she laughed the shrill, dead laugh. "You see, I must go home--to
+my father's--I'm strong enough now--and start my life, such as it is,
+all over again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money.
+Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."
+
+"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's not the
+man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you don't like to
+keep the money--I appreciate your feelings--you can devote it to
+philanthropic purposes."
+
+"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this fraud--this false
+reputation--to go on forever?"
+
+"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by throwing
+such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody living were
+suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's no reason to
+blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."
+
+"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the secret?" she
+asked anxiously.
+
+"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else," said I.
+
+"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things public,
+I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the disgrace."
+
+"To poor Adrian," said I.
+
+She flashed a quick, defiant glance.
+
+"To me."
+
+"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He
+sinned--the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it. He's
+expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not yours,
+that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so irrevocably wrapped up
+in him"--I pursued my advantage--"that you feel yourself a partner in
+his guilt. Which means that you love him still."
+
+She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her shoulder. Then,
+all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an agony of sobs and
+tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and put my arm round her
+and let her sob herself out.
+
+After that we did not speak of Adrian.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous voyage.
+
+     "Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us
+     Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to all.
+
+     "JAFFERY."
+
+Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in his
+proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading than to
+make a détour through London. Rooms were got ready. In the one destined
+for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of trunks which the Great
+Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time. The next day I took the car
+to Reading and waited for the train.
+
+From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a moment
+afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier, redder
+than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook me in his
+lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and Liosha all rocked
+and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and, before I could recover,
+Liosha threw her arms round my neck and kissed me. A porter who picked
+up my hat restored me to mental equipoise. Then I looked at them, and
+anything more splendid in humanity than that simple, happy pair of
+gigantic children I have never seen in my life. I, too, felt the
+laughter of happiness swell in my heart, for their gladness at the sight
+of me was so true, so unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed
+aloud foolishly. It is good to be loved, especially when you've done
+nothing particular to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two
+loved me.
+
+"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.
+
+"Magnificent," said I.
+
+She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a gipsy
+swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health. When I had
+parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of soft increase
+in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh had hardened down
+into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her splendour. And there
+seemed to be more authority in her radiant face and a new masterfulness
+and a quicker intelligence in her brown eyes. I noticed that it was she
+who first broke away from the clamour of greeting and gave directions as
+to the transport of their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail
+of his eye; then turned to me with a bass chuckle.
+
+"We're a sort of Jaff Chayne and Co., according to her, and she thinks
+she's managing director. Ho! ho! ho!" He put his arm round my shoulder
+and suddenly grew serious. "How's everybody?"
+
+"Flourishing," said I.
+
+"And Doria?"
+
+"At Northlands."
+
+"She knows I'm coming?"
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+Liosha joined us, accompanied by a porter, carrying their exiguous
+baggage. We walked to the exit, without saying much, and settled
+ourselves in the limousine, my guests in the back seat, I on one of the
+little chairs facing them. We started.
+
+"My dear old chap," said I, leaning forward. "I've got something to tell
+you. I didn't like to write about it. But it has got to be told, and I
+may as well get it over now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a subdued and half-scared Jaffery who greeted Barbara and Susan
+at our front door. The jollity had gone out of him. He was nothing but a
+vast hulk filled with self-reproach. It was his fault, his very grievous
+and careless fault for having postponed the destruction of the papers,
+and for having left them loose and unsecured in his rooms. He all but
+beat his breast. If Doria had died of the shock his would be the blame.
+He saluted Barbara with the air of one entering a house of mourning.
+
+"You mustn't look so woe-begone," she said. "Something like this was
+bound to happen. I have dreaded it all along--and now it has happened
+and the earth hasn't come to an end."
+
+We stood in the hall, while Franklin divested the visitors of their
+outer wraps and trappings.
+
+"And, Liosha," Barbara continued, throwing her arms round as much of
+Liosha as they could grasp--she had already kissed her a warm
+welcome--"it's a shame, dear, to depress you the moment you come into
+the place. You'll wish you were at sea again."
+
+"I guess not," said Liosha. "I know now I'm among folks who love me.
+Isn't that true, Susan?"
+
+"Daddy loves you and mummy loves you and I adore you," cried Susan.
+
+Whereupon there was much hugging of a spoiled monkey.
+
+We went upstairs. At the drawing-room door Barbara gave me one of her
+queer glances, which meant, on interpretation, that I should leave her
+alone with Jaffery for a few minutes so that she could pour the balm of
+sense over his remorseful soul, and that in the meantime it would be
+advisable for me to explain the situation to Liosha. Aloud, she said,
+before disappearing:
+
+"Your old room, Liosha, dear--you'll find everything ready."
+
+In order to carry out my wife's orders, I had to disentangle Susan from
+Liosha's embrace and pack her off rueful to the nursery. But the promise
+to seat her at lunch between the two seafarers brought a measure of
+consolation.
+
+"Come into the library, Liosha," said I, throwing the door open. I
+followed her and settled her in an armchair before a big fire; and then
+stood on the hearthrug, looking at her and feeling rather a fool. I
+offered her refreshment. She declined. I commented again on her fine
+physical appearance and asked her how she was. I drew her attention to
+some beautiful narcissi and hyacinths that had come from the greenhouse.
+The more I talked and the longer she regarded me in her grave, direct
+fashion, the less I knew how to tell her, or how much to tell her, of
+Doria's story. The drive had been a short one, giving time only for a
+narration of the facts of the discovery. Liosha, although accepting my
+apology, had sat mystified; also profoundly disturbed by Jaffery's
+unconcealed agitation. Her life with him during the past four months had
+drawn her into the meshes of the little drama. For her own sake, for
+everybody's sake, we could not allow her to remain in complete
+ignorance. . . . I gave her a cigarette and took one myself. After the
+first puff, she smiled.
+
+"You want to tell me something."
+
+"I do. Something that is known only to four people in the world--and
+they're in this house."
+
+"If you tell me, I guess it'll be known only to five," said Liosha.
+
+To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to insult
+truth itself.
+
+"All right," said I. "You'll be the fifth and last." And then, as simply
+as I could, I told her all there was to know. She grasped the literary
+details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found afterwards that the
+long months of the voyage had not been entirely taken up with the
+cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there had been long
+stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things under heaven, and
+aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her mental horizon had
+broadened prodigiously through constant association with a cultivated
+man. . . . When I reached the point in my story where Jaffery gave up
+the Persian expedition, she gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips
+worked in their familiar quiver.
+
+"He must have loved her to do that," she said in a low voice.
+
+I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous affair, the
+more was I convinced that it would he better for her to understand
+clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria. You see, I knew all along,
+as all along I hope I have given you to understand--ever since the day
+when she asked him to beat her with a golf-stick--that the poor girl
+loved Jaffery, heart and soul. I knew also that she made for herself no
+illusions as to Jaffery's devotion to Doria. On that point her words to
+me at Havre had left me in no doubt whatever. But since Havre all sorts
+of extraordinary things had happened. There had been their intimate
+comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few
+months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards
+Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional
+subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel to tell her of
+the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man
+she loved and the other woman. But her unflinching bravery and her great
+heart demanded it. And as I told her, walking nervously about the room,
+she followed me with her steadfast eyes.
+
+"So that's why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me."
+
+"I suppose so," said I.
+
+"If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her out of
+the window."
+
+"I dare say. But you wouldn't have been Jaff Chayne."
+
+"That's true," she assented. "No man like him ever walked the earth. And
+how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I can't imagine."
+
+"Her head was full of another man, you see."
+
+"Oh yes, I see," she said with a touch of contempt. "And such a man! You
+were fond of him I know. But he was a sham. He used to look on me, I
+remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the Zoological Gardens. It
+never occurred to him that I had sense. He was a fool."
+
+Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she had ever
+expressed an opinion regarding Adrian. We had assumed that, having
+touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy figure in her
+mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned us, she had viewed
+him with entire indifference. But her keen feminine brain had picked out
+the fatal flaw in poor Adrian's character, the shallow glitter that made
+us laugh and the want of vision from which he died.
+
+"Go on," said Liosha.
+
+I continued. In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for setting
+Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She understood. False
+gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped, had for a time the
+mystifying power of concealing their falsehood. And during that time
+they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus, flaming Joves to poor
+mortal Semeles. Liosha quite understood.
+
+I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard,
+uncomprehending, in the car.
+
+"And that's how it stands," said I.
+
+I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I turned aside
+and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for a while, resting
+her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her deep tones:
+
+"Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!"
+
+Tears flooded her eyes.
+
+"By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature."
+
+"I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose. "I guess I must have a
+clean up before lunch," and she made for the door.
+
+I looked at my watch. "You just have time," said I.
+
+I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in front of the
+fire. Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the serene young
+barbarian who had come to us two and a half years before blandly
+characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she would not let her buy
+a stocked chicken incubator and take it to the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie
+wolf from the noble Great Dane. Her nature had undergone remarkable
+developments. As Jaffery had prophesied at Havre, she treated things in
+a big way, and she had learned restraint, not the restraint of
+convention, for not a convention would have stopped her from doing what
+she chose, but the restraint of self-discipline. And she had learned
+pity. A year ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every
+woman's reason for hating. A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in
+her heart. If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family
+had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks before
+her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt whether she
+would have cut off one single head.
+
+A tap at the window aroused me. It was Jaffery in the rain, which had
+just begun to fail, seeking admittance. I let him in.
+
+"This is an awful business, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+From which I gather that for once Barbara's soothing had been of little
+avail.
+
+"Have you seen Doria yet?" I asked.
+
+He shook his head. "Barbara is with her. She's coming in to lunch."
+
+At the anti-climax, I smiled. "That shews she's not quite dead yet."
+
+But to Jaffery it was no smiling matter. "Look here, Hilary," he said
+hoarsely, "don't you think it would be better for me to cut the whole
+thing and go away right now?"
+
+"Go away--?" I stared at him. "What for?"
+
+"Why should I force myself on that poor, tortured child? Think of her
+feelings towards me. She must loathe the sound of my name."
+
+"Jaff Chayne," said I, "I believe you're afraid of mice."
+
+He frowned. "What the blazes do you mean?"
+
+"You're in a blue funk at the idea of meeting Doria."
+
+"Rot," said Jaffery.
+
+But he was.
+
+Franklin summoned us to luncheon. We went into the drawing-room where
+the rest of our little party were assembled, Susan and her governess,
+Liosha, Barbara and Doria. Doria stepped forward valiantly with
+outstretched hand, looking him squarely in the face.
+
+"Welcome back, Jaffery. It's good to see you again."
+
+Jaffery grew very red and bending over her hand muttered something into
+his beard.
+
+"You'll have to tell me about your wonderful voyage."
+
+"There was nothing so wonderful about it," said Jaffery.
+
+That was all for the moment, for Barbara hustled us into the
+dining-room. But the terrible meeting that both had dreaded was over.
+Nobody had fainted or shed tears; it was over in a perfectly well-bred
+way. At lunch Susan, between Liosha and Jaffery, became the centre of
+attention and saved conversation from constraint.
+
+To Doria, who had lingered at Northlands, in order to lose no time in
+setting herself right with Jaffery,--her own phrase--the ordinary table
+small-talk would have been an ordeal. As it was, she sat on my left,
+opposite Liosha, lending a polite ear to the answers to Susan's eager
+questions. The child had not received such universal invitation to
+chatter at mealtime since she had learned to speak. But, in spite of her
+inspiring assistance, a depressing sense of destinies in the balance
+pervaded the room, and we were all glad when the meal came to an end.
+Susan, refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to
+the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship _Vesta_. Barbara
+and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I, after a
+perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for a while on
+different things, the child's robustious health, the garden, the
+weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal fashion as
+assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought downstairs. At last
+Barbara said:
+
+"I must go and write some letters."
+
+And I said: "I'm going to have my afternoon nap."
+
+Both the others cried out with simultaneous anxiety and scarlet faces:
+
+"Oh, don't go, Barbara, dear."
+
+"Can't you cut the sleep out for once?"
+
+"I must!" said Barbara.
+
+"No," said I.
+
+And we left our nervous ogre and our poor little elf to fight out
+between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps it was
+cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come to mutual
+understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had the afternoon
+before them. It was pouring with rain. They had nothing else to do. In
+order that they should be undisturbed, Barbara had given orders that we
+were not at home to visitors. Besides, we were actuated by motives not
+entirely altruistic. If I seem to have posed before you as a
+noble-minded philanthropist, I have been guilty of careless
+misrepresentation. At the best I am but a not unkindly, easy-going man
+who loathes being worried. And I (and Barbara even more than myself) had
+been greatly worried over our friends' affairs for a considerable
+period. We therefore thought that the sooner we were freed from these
+worries the better for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts
+against their joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.
+
+"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going to
+happen?"
+
+"She'll marry him, of course."
+
+"She won't," said I.
+
+"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."
+
+"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that young
+woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against Jaffery."
+
+"If," she said. "But you haven't."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"All right," said Barbara.
+
+We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to become of
+Liosha?"
+
+Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."
+
+"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall be."
+
+"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.
+
+"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
+drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity and
+realised failure; the woman--as it seemed to me, smoking reflectively in
+my library armchair, for sleep was impossible--the woman in the calm of
+desperation. The man who had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to
+shield her from harm, who lavished on her all the devotion and
+tenderness of his simple heart; the woman who owed him her life, and,
+but for fool accident and her own lack of faith in him, would still be
+owing him the twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not
+met, or exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
+John's Wood flat, when he had told her that he loved her, and by the
+sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the ground;
+since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and contempt,
+when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed him into fury;
+when, white with realisation that the secret was about to escape from
+his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had gone blindly into the
+street. Now facing each other for the first time after many months, they
+remembered all too poignantly that parting. The barren rascal who stood
+before her was the man who had written every word of Adrian's triumphant
+second novel, and had given it to her out of the largesse of his love.
+And he had borne with patience all her imperious strictures and had
+obeyed all her crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her--quixotically
+fooled her, it is true--but fooled her as never woman had been fooled in
+the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren rascal, all the
+time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never had he uttered one
+disparaging word. And he had secured the insertion of a life of Adrian
+in the next supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography; and he
+had helped her to set up that staring white marble monument in Highgate
+Cemetery, with its lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested
+in such a Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through
+Hell-fire. No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No
+wonder the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
+And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she was
+alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she stood face to
+face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose loving hand had
+unwittingly kindled that burning torment?
+
+The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had plucked
+out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she regard the
+man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt, the contempt of
+pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I could not take my mind
+off those two closeted together. What was happening? Again and again I
+went over the whole disastrous story. What would be the end? I wearied
+myself for a long, long time with futile speculation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering lip and
+tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by my side and
+buried her head on the arm of the chair and began to cry wretchedly.
+
+"My dear, my dear," said I, bewildered by this tornado of misery. "My
+dear," said I, putting an arm round her shoulders, "what is the matter?"
+
+"I'm a fool," she wailed. "I know I'm a fool, but I can't help it. I
+went in there just now. I didn't know they were there. Susan's music
+mistress came and I had to go out of the nursery--and I went into the
+drawing-room. Oh, it's hard, Hilary, dear--it's damned hard."
+
+"My poor Liosha," said I.
+
+"There doesn't seem to be a place in the world for me."
+
+"There's lots of places in our hearts," I said as soothingly as I could.
+But the assurance gave her little comfort. Her body shook.
+
+"I wish the cargo had killed me," she said.
+
+I waited for a little, then rose and made her sit in my chair. I drew
+another near her.
+
+"Now," said I. "Tell me all about it."
+
+And she told me in her broken way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She walked into the drawing-room thinking to find Barbara. Instead, she
+sailed into a surging sea of passion. Doria crouched on a sofa hiding
+her face--the flame, poor little elf in the Nessus shirt, had been
+lapping her round, and with both hands outstretched she motioned away
+Jaffery who stood over her.
+
+"Don't touch me, don't touch me! I couldn't bear it!" she cried; and
+then, aware of Liosha's sudden presence, she started to her feet. Liosha
+did not move. The two women glared at each other.
+
+"What do you mean by coming in here?" cried Doria.
+
+"You had better leave us, Liosha," said Jaffery sombrely.
+
+But Liosha stood firm. The spurning of Jaffery by Doria struck a chord
+of the heroic that ran through her strange, wild nature. If this man she
+loved was not for her, at least no other woman should scorn him. She
+drew herself up in her full-bosomed magnificence.
+
+"Instead of telling him not to touch you, you little fool, you ought to
+fall at his feet. For what he has done for you, you ought to steal the
+wide world and give it to him. And you refuse your footling little
+insignificant self. If you had a thousand selves, they wouldn't be
+enough for him."
+
+"Stop!" shouted Jaffery.
+
+She wheeled round on him. "Hold your tongue, Jaff Chayne. I guess I've
+the right, if anybody has, to fix up your concerns."
+
+"What right?" Doria demanded.
+
+"Never mind." She took a step forward. "Oh, no; not that right! Don't
+you dare to think it. Jaff Chayne doesn't care a tinker's curse for me
+that way. But I have a right to speak, Jaff Chayne. Haven't I?"
+
+Jaffery's mind went back to the Bedlam of the slithering cargo. He
+turned to Doria.
+
+"Let her say what she wants."
+
+"I want nothing!" cried Liosha. "Nothing for myself. Not a thing! But I
+want Jaff Chayne to be happy. You think you know all he has done for
+you, but you don't. You don't know a bit. They offered him thousands of
+pounds to go to Persia, and he would have come back a great man, and he
+didn't go because of you."
+
+"Persia? I never heard of that," said Doria.
+
+"The job didn't suit me," Jaffery growled.
+
+"And you told her all about it?"
+
+"No, he didn't," said Liosha. "Hilary told me to-day."
+
+"I take your word for it," said Doria coldly. "It only shows that I'm
+under one more obligation than I thought to Mr. Chayne."
+
+From what I could gather, the word "obligation" infuriated Liosha. She
+uttered an avalanche of foolish things. And Jaffery (for what is man in
+a woman's battle but an impotent spectator?) looked in silence from one:
+to the other; from the little ivory, black and white Tanagra figure to
+the great full creature whom he had seen, but a few days ago, with the
+salt spray in her hair and the wind in her vestments. And at last she
+said:
+
+"If I were a woman like you and wouldn't marry a man who loved me like
+Jaff Chayne, and who had done for me all that Jaff Chayne had done for
+you, I'd pray to God to blast me and fill my body with worms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then she burst out of the room, and, like a child seeking
+protection, came and threw herself down by my side.
+
+What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me up till
+three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he poured into
+his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in embarrassing
+silence, until Doria spoke:
+
+"She misunderstood--when she came in. Quite natural. It was your touch
+of pity that I couldn't bear. I wasn't repelling you, as she seemed to
+think."
+
+"It cut me to the heart to see you in such grief," said Jaffery. "I only
+thought of comforting you."
+
+"I know." She sat on a chair by the window and looked out at the pouring
+rain.
+
+"Tell me," she said, without turning round, "what did she mean by saying
+she had the right to interfere in your affairs?"
+
+"She saved my life at the risk of her own," replied Jaffery.
+
+"I see. And you saved my life once; so perhaps you have rights over
+me."
+
+"That would be damnable!" he cried. "Such a thought has never entered my
+head."
+
+"It is firmly fixed in mine," said Doria.
+
+She sat for a while, with knitted brows deep in thought. Jaffery stood
+dejectedly by the fire, his hands in his pockets. Presently she rose.
+
+"Besides saving my life and doing for me the things I know, there must
+be many things you've done for me that I never heard of--like this
+sacrifice of the Persian expedition. Liosha was right. I ought to go on
+my knees to you. But I can't very well do that, can I?"
+
+"No," replied Jaffery, scrabbling at whiskers and beard. "That would be
+stupid. You mustn't worry about me at all. Whatever I did for you, my
+dear, I'd do a thousand times over again!"
+
+"You must have your reward, such as it is. God knows you have earned
+it."
+
+"Don't talk about rights or rewards," said he. "As I've said repeatedly
+this afternoon, I've forfeited even your thanks."
+
+"And I've said I forgive you--if there's anything to forgive," she
+smiled, just a little wearily. "So that is wiped out. All the rest
+remains. Let us bury all past unhappiness between us two."
+
+"I wish we could. But how?"
+
+"There is a way."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"You make things somewhat hard for me. You might guess. But I'll tell
+you. Liosha again was right. . . . If you want me still, I will marry
+you. Not quite yet; but, say, in six months' time. You are a
+great-hearted, loyal man"--she continued bravely, faltering under his
+gaze--"and I will learn to love you and will devote my life to making
+you happy."
+
+She glanced downwards with averted head, awaiting some outcry of
+gladness, surrendering herself to the quick clasp of strong arms. But
+no outcry came, and no arms clasped. She glanced up, and met a stricken
+look in the man's eyes.
+
+For Jaffery could not find a word to utter. A chill crept about his
+heart and his blood became as water. He could not move; a nightmare
+horror of dismay held him in its grip. The inconceivable had happened.
+He no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted his thoughts for
+over two years, for whom he had made quixotic sacrifices, for whom he
+had made a mat of his great body so that she should tread stony paths
+without hurt to her delicate feet, was his now for the taking--nobly
+self-offered--and with all the world as an apanage he could not have
+taken her. The phenomenon of sex he could not explain. Once he had
+desired her passionately. The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired
+his blood. He had fought with beasts. He had wrestled with his soul in
+the night watches. He had loved her purely and sweetly, too. But now, as
+she stood before him, recoiling a little from his fixed stare of pain,
+though she had suffered but little loss in beauty and in that of her
+which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that he
+desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the idealised love
+he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams. Not that he would not
+still do her infinite service. The pathos of her broken life moved him
+to an anguish of pity. For her soothing he would give all that life held
+for him, save one thing--which was no longer his to give. Another man
+glib of tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an
+abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He could
+not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life. His nature was
+too primitive. He could only stare in spellbound affright at the icy
+barrier that separated him from Doria.
+
+"I see," she said tonelessly, moving slowly away from him. "Your
+feelings have changed. I am sorry."
+
+Then he found power of motion and speech. He threw out his arms. "My
+God, dear, forgive me!" he groaned, and sat down and clutched his head
+in his hands. She returned to the window and looked out at the rain. And
+there she fought with her woman's indignant humiliation. And there was a
+long, dead silence, broken only by the faintly heard notes of Susan's
+piano in the nursery and the splash of water on the terrace.
+
+Presently all that was good in Doria conquered. She crossed the room and
+laid a light hand on Jaffery's head. It was the finest moment in her
+life.
+
+"One can't help these things. I know it too well. And no hearts are
+broken. So it's all for the best."
+
+He groaned again. "I didn't know. I'd like to shoot myself."
+
+She smiled, conscious of feminine superiority. "If you did, I should
+die, too. I tell you, it's all for the best. I love you as I never loved
+you before. I usen't to love you a little bit. But I should have had to
+learn to love you as a wife--and it might have been difficult."
+
+A moment afterwards she appeared in the library, serenely
+matter-of-fact. Liosha started round in her chair and looked defiantly
+at her rival.
+
+"Would both of you mind coming into the drawing-room for a minute?"
+
+We followed her. She held the door, which I was about to shut, and left
+it open. Before Jaffery had time to rise at our entrance, I caught sight
+of him sitting as she had left him, great clumps of his red hair
+sticking through his fingers. His face was a picture of woe. I can
+imagine nothing more like it than that of a conscience smitten lion.
+Doria ran her arm through mine and kept me near the doorway.
+
+"I've asked Jaffery to marry me," she said, in a steady voice, "and he
+doesn't want to. It's because he loves a much better woman and wants to
+marry her."
+
+Then while Jaffery and Liosha gasped in blank astonishment, she swung me
+abruptly out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
+
+"There," she said, and flung up her little bead, "what do you think of
+that?"
+
+"Magnificent," said I, "but bewildering. Did Jaffery really--?"
+
+In a few words, she put me into possession of the bare facts.
+
+"I'm not sorry," she added. "Sometimes I love Jaffery--because he's so
+lovable. Sometimes I hate him--because--oh, well--because of Adrian. You
+can't understand."
+
+"I'm not altogether a fool," said I.
+
+"Well, that's how it is. I would have worn myself to death to try to
+make him happy. You believe me?"
+
+"I do indeed, my dear," I replied. And I replied with unshakable
+conviction. She was a woman who once having come under the domination of
+an idea would obey it blindly, ruthlessly, marching straight onwards,
+looking neither to right nor left. The very virtue that had made her
+overcruel to him in the past would have made her overkind to him in the
+future. Unwittingly she had used a phrase startlingly true. She would
+have worn herself to death in her determination to please. Incidentally
+she would have driven him mad with conscientious dutifulness.
+
+"He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she said. "But
+we needn't speak of it any more. I'm not the woman for him. Liosha is.
+It's all over. I'm glad. At any rate, I've made atonement--at least,
+I've tried--as far as things lay in my power."
+
+I took both her hands, greatly moved by her courage.
+
+"And what's going to happen to you, my dear?"
+
+"Now that all this is straight," she replied, with a faint smile, "I can
+turn round and remake my life. You and Barbara will help."
+
+"With all our hearts," said I.
+
+"It won't be so hard for you, ever again, I promise. I shall be more
+reasonable. And the first favour I'll ask you, dear Hilary, is to let me
+go this afternoon. It would be a bit of a strain on me to stay."
+
+"I know, my dear," I said. "The car is at your service."
+
+"Oh, no! I'll go by train."
+
+"You'll do as you're told, young woman, and go by car."
+
+At this rubbishy speech, the tears, for the first time, came into her
+eyes. She pulled down my shoulders--I am rather lank and tall--and
+kissed me.
+
+"You're a dear," she said, and went off in search of Barbara.
+
+I returned to my library, rang the bell, and gave orders for the
+chauffeur to stand at Mrs. Boldero's disposal. Then I sat down at a
+loose end, very much like a young professional man, doctor or
+estate-agent, waiting for the next client. And like the young
+professional man at a loose end, I made a pretence of looking through
+papers. Presently I became aware that I only had to open a window in
+order to summon a couple of clients at once. For there in the gathering
+November dusk and in the rain--it had ceased pouring, but it was
+drizzling, and therefore it was rain--I saw our pair of delectable
+savages strolling across the wet, sodden lawn, in loverlike proximity,
+for all the world as though it were a flowery mead in May. I might have
+summoned them, but it would have been an unprofessional thing to do.
+Instead, I drew my curtains and turned on the light, and continued to
+wait. I waited a long time. At last Barbara rushed in.
+
+"Doria's ready."
+
+"You've heard all about it?" She nodded. "I said there would be no
+marriage," I remarked blandly.
+
+"You said she wouldn't marry him. I said she would. And so she would, if
+he had let her. I know you're prepared to argue," she said, rather
+excitedly, "but it's no use. I was right all the time."
+
+I yielded.
+
+"You're always right, my dear," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell you
+about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the
+drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still sore,
+and childishly anxious that I should not account him a traitor and a
+scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human touch, told me, as I
+have already stated, over and over again, until I yawned for weariness
+in the small hours of the morning, what had taken place in his
+staggering interview with Doria; but as regards Liosha, he was shyly
+evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a very simple affair. She had told
+me bluntly that when the two men, Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the
+scene of Balkan desolation in which she was the central figure, Jaffery
+was the one who caused her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way
+she had loved him ever since that extraordinary moment. And though
+Jaffery has never confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as
+Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, _sans le savoir_, so, without knowing it,
+was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from Northlands in
+Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. _Quien sabe?_ But he imagined
+himself to be in love with a moonbeam. And the moonbeam shot like a
+glamorous, enchanted sword between him and Liosha, and kept them apart
+until the moment of dazed revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam
+was merely a pale, earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien
+to his every instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from
+the goddess of his idolatry.
+
+[Illustration: There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as
+war correspondent. Liosha is there, too.]
+
+That is how I explain--and I have puzzled my head into aching over any
+other possible explanation--the attitude of Jaffery towards Liosha on
+the _Vesta_ voyage. Well, my conjectures are of not much value. I have
+done my best to put the facts, as I know them, before you; and if you
+are interested in the matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's
+content. "Look here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my
+mind to new conditions, "what about your new novel?"
+
+He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you going to
+finish it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born novelist?"
+
+"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"
+
+"I don't," said I.
+
+He walked about the library in his space--occupying way.
+
+"I'm going to tear the damned thing up! I'm never going to write a novel
+again. I cut it out altogether. It's the least I can do for her."
+
+"Isn't that rather quixotic?" I asked.
+
+"Suppose it is. What have you to say against it?"
+
+"Nothing," said I.
+
+"Well, keep on saying it," replied Jaffery, with the steel flash in his
+eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were married. Our vicar performed the ceremony. I gave the bride
+away. Liosha revealed the feminine kink in her otherwise splendid
+character by insisting on the bridal panoply of white satin, veil and
+orange blossoms. I confess she looked superb. She looked like a Valkyr.
+A leather-visaged war correspondent, named Burchester, whom I had never
+seen before, and have not seen since, acted as best man. Susan, tense
+with the responsibilities of office, was the only bridesmaid. Mrs. Jupp
+(late Considine) and her General were our only guests. Doria excused
+herself from attendance, but sent the bride a travelling-case fitted
+with a myriad dazzling gold-stoppered bottles and a phantasmagoria of
+gold-mounted toilette implements.
+
+And then they went on their honeymoon. And where do you think they went?
+They signed again on the steamship _Vesta_. And Captain Maturin gave
+them his cabin, which is more than I would have done, and slept, I
+presume, in the dog-hole. And they were as happy as the ship was
+abominable.
+
+Now, as I write, there is a war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is
+there as the correspondent of _The Daily Gazette_. Liosha is there, too,
+as the inseparable and peculiarly invaluable companion of Jaffery
+Chayne. They live impossible lives. But what has that got to do with you
+or me? They like it. They adore it. A more radiantly mated pair the
+earth cannot produce. Their two-year-old son is learning the practice of
+the heroic virtues at Cettinje, while his parents loaf about
+battlefields in full eruption.
+
+"Poor little mite!" says Barbara.
+
+But I say:
+
+"Lucky little Pantagruel!"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14669 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14669 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="Frontispiece" id=
+"Frontispiece"></a> <a href="images/001.jpg"><img src=
+"images/001.jpg" width="45%" alt="" title="" /></a><br />
+<b>It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with<br />
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (<i><a href="#page165">See
+page 165</a></i>)</b>
+<br /></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>JAFFERY</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>WILLIAM J. LOCKE</h2>
+<div class="center">ILLUSTRATIONS BY<br />
+F. MATANIA<br />
+<br />
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY<br />
+<br />
+1915<br />
+<br />
+Press of<br />
+J.J. Little &amp; Ives Company<br />
+New York, U.S.A.</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>TO MY WIFE</h2>
+<p>This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial
+affection I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many
+happy hours and many dreams that we have shared.</p>
+<p>You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago,
+with the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I
+wrote. You remember the excitement of ending it before the
+Christmas of 1913; so that we could start with free consciences,
+early in the New Year, on our Egyptian journey.</p>
+<p><i>C'est bien loin, tout cela</i>! War overtook it in its serial
+course; and now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an
+expression of the moods and fancies almost of a past
+incarnation.</p>
+<p>These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to
+people our home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real,
+as big-hearted as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet
+sometimes they seem still to live. . . . While correcting the final
+proofs we have been tempted to modify the end, to bring the story
+of Jaffery more or less up to date; but we have felt that any
+addition would be out of key, so far are we from that happy
+Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last words.</p>
+<p>Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over
+there, across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his
+soldier's work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And
+don't you feel that one day he will come again and we shall hear
+his mighty voice thundering across the lawn. . . ?</p>
+<p>W.J.L.</p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><b>CHAPTER XX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXV"><b>CHAPTER XXV</b></a></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td align='right'>Facing</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td align='right'>Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>extraordinary sureness and gentleness</td>
+<td align='right'><i><a href=
+"#Frontispiece">Frontispiece</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i064.jpg">64</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i080.jpg">78</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i190.jpg">186</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>"Go! You're nothing but a brute"</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i234.jpg">228</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i308.jpg">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>heap of a woman</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i325.jpg">316</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i361.jpg">350</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="center">THE<br />
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE<br />
+YEAR-BOOK<br />
+<br />
+A <i>bon-mot</i> for each day in<br />
+every year, selected from<br />
+this popular author's works.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net</i></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<p>I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend,
+Jaffery Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following
+account of that dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say
+that I have been egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A
+man of my somewhat urbane and dilettante temperament does not do
+these things without being worried into them. I had the
+inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my wife), and she agreed, at
+the time, dutifully, that I ought to record our friend Jaffery's
+doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the first suggestion,
+the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the "egging on" is
+merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene
+insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge,
+all the facts of the story&mdash;although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian
+Boldero and poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the
+imbroglio, counted themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor
+wretch (a man must get home somewhere), was in the nursery; and
+that, finally, if she had been taught English grammar and spelling
+at school, she would have dispensed entirely with my pedantic
+assistance and written the story herself. Anyhow, man-like, I am
+broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't very much matter.
+Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I know they are
+one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so futile a
+thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
+self-appointed and fantastic task.</p>
+<p>But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that
+if it had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
+half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
+confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only
+to a man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to
+a man. On the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister
+women and her brother men which, but for her, would never reach a
+man's ears. So by combining the information obtained from our
+family encyclop&aelig;dia under the feminine heading of China with
+that obtained under the masculine heading of Philosophy, I can,
+figuratively speaking, like the famous student, issue my treatise
+on Chinese Philosophy.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago,
+when the parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves
+wantonly to the sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as
+I sat at my table, with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which
+I caught with the tail of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance,
+my quiet outlook on greenery and colour was obscured by a human
+form. I may mention that my study-table is placed in the bay of a
+window, on the ground floor. It is a French window, opening on a
+terrace. Beyond the parapet of the terrace, the garden, with its
+apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its lawn, its beds of tulips,
+its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts of other pleasant
+things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron railings
+separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow, when
+she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
+in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious
+cow. Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I
+digress. . . .</p>
+<p>I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife.
+She looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair
+<i>blond comme les bl&eacute;s</i>, and her mocking cornflower blue
+eyes, and her mutinous mouth, which has never yet (after all these
+years) assumed a responsible parent's austerity. She wore a fresh
+white dress with coquettish bits of blue about the bodice. In her
+hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper, the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i>, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.</p>
+<p>"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"</p>
+<p>She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal
+of spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and
+laburnum, that I put down my pen and I smiled.</p>
+<p>"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."</p>
+<p>"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand
+Meeting, next month, of the Hafiz Society."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Barbara, "why Hafiz always makes me think of
+sherbet."</p>
+<p>I remonstrated, waving a dismissing hand.</p>
+<p>"If that's all you've got to say&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't."</p>
+<p>She crossed the threshold, stepped in, swished round the end of
+my long oak table and took possession of my library. I wheeled
+round politely in my chair.</p>
+<p>"Then, what is it?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Have you read the paper this morning?"</p>
+<p>"I've glanced through the <i>Times</i>," said I.</p>
+<p>She patted her handful of bedclothing and let fall a blanket and
+a bed-spread or two&mdash;("Look at my beautifully, orderly folded
+<i>Times</i>," said I, with an indicatory gesture) She looked and
+sniffed&mdash;and shed Vallombrosa leaves of the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> about the library until she had discovered the page
+for which she was searching. Then she held a mangled sheet before
+my eyes.</p>
+<p>"There!" she cried, "what do you think of that?"</p>
+<p>"What do I think of what?" I asked, regarding the acre of
+print.</p>
+<p>"Adrian Boldero has written a novel!"</p>
+<p>"Adrian?" said I. "Well, my dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is
+capable of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He
+might write a sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth
+or steal the tin cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be
+still the same beautiful, charming, futile Adrian."</p>
+<p>Barbara pished and insisted. "But this is apparently a wonderful
+novel. There's a whole column about it. They say it's the most
+astounding book published in our generation. Look! A work of
+genius."</p>
+<p>"Rubbish, darling," said I, knowing my Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Take the trouble to read the notice," said Barbara, thrusting
+the paper at me in a superior manner.</p>
+<p>I took it from her and read. She was right. Somebody calling
+himself Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond
+Gate," which a usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to
+be a work of genius. He sketched the outline of the story,
+indicated its peculiar wonder. The review impressed me.</p>
+<p>"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else&mdash;not our
+Adrian."</p>
+<p>"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"</p>
+<p>"Thousands," said I.</p>
+<p>She pished again and tossed her pretty head.</p>
+<p>"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all
+about it."</p>
+<p>She departed through the library door into the recesses of the
+house where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of
+my presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied
+my thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the
+more I read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of
+"The Diamond Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same
+person.</p>
+<p>You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom
+Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after
+the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one
+another's shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the
+quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals
+and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed
+with admirable lack of reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged
+one another pretty accurately and remained devoted friends. There
+were other men, of course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and
+each of us had our little separate circle; we did not form a mutual
+admiration society and advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive,
+Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a
+quiet way, we recognised our quadruple union of hearts, and talked
+amazing rubbish and committed unspeakable acts of lunacy and
+dreamed impossible dreams in a very delightful, and perhaps
+unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our middle and late
+thirties&mdash;all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien
+grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He was
+the son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to
+talk to us of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as
+though they were haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied
+him! And he was forever writing plays which he read to us; which
+plays, I remember, were always on the verge of being produced by
+Irving. We believed in him firmly. He alone of the little crew had
+a touch of genius.</p>
+<p>Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and
+would certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to
+discipline and, because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from
+the University at the beginning of his third year, certainly did
+not show a sign of it. Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote
+poems for the Cambridge Review, and became Vice-President of the
+Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy waistcoats, and shuddered
+at Dickens because his style was not that of Walter Pater. For
+myself, Hilary Freeth&mdash;well&mdash;I am a happy nonentity. I
+have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
+accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few
+founder's shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium,
+enable me to gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the
+other three mattered. They were definite&mdash;Jaffery, blatantly
+definite; Adrian Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively
+definite; Tom Castleton, romantically definite. And poor old Tom
+was dead. Dear, impossible, feckless fellow. He took a first class
+in the Classical Tripos and we thought his brilliant career was
+assured&mdash;but somehow circumstances baffled him; he had a
+terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking pupils, acting,
+free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the meanwhile,
+died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He secured
+a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
+us&mdash;Jaffery and Adrian and I&mdash;saw him off at Southampton.
+He never reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old
+Tom!</p>
+<p>So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking
+out at my Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to
+the old days and then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I
+flourished, a comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing
+something idiotically desperate somewhere or the other&mdash;he was
+a war-correspondent by trade (as regular an employment as that of
+the maker of hot-cross buns), and a desperado by
+predilection&mdash;I had not heard from him for a year; and now
+Adrian&mdash;if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
+he&mdash;had written an epoch-making novel.</p>
+<p>But Adrian&mdash;the precious, finnikin Adrian&mdash;how on
+earth could he have written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond
+doubt he was a clever fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the
+Law Tripos and had done well in his Bar examination. But after
+fourteen years or so he was making twopence halfpenny per annum at
+his profession. He made another three-farthings, say, by selling
+elegant verses to magazines. He dined out a great deal and spent
+much of his time at country houses, being a very popular and
+agreeable person. His other means of livelihood consisted of an
+allowance of four hundred a year made him by his mother. Beyond the
+social graces he had not distinguished himself. And now&mdash;</p>
+<p>"It <i>is</i> Adrian," cried my wife, bursting into the library.
+"I knew it was. He has had several other glorious reviews which we
+haven't seen. Isn't it splendid?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes danced with loyalty and gladness. Now that I too knew
+it was our Adrian I caught her enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>"Splendid," I echoed. "To think of old Adrian making good at
+last! I'm more than glad. Telephone at once, dear, for a copy of
+the book."</p>
+<p>"Adrian is bringing one with him. He's coming down to dine and
+stay the night. He said he had an engagement, but I told him it was
+rubbish, and he's coming."</p>
+<p>Barbara had a despotic way with her men friends, especially with
+Adrian and Jaffery, who, each after his kind, paid her very pretty
+homage.</p>
+<p>"And now, I've got a hundred things to do, so you must excuse
+me," said Barbara&mdash;for all the world as if I had invited her
+into my library and was detaining her against her will.</p>
+<p>My reply was smilingly ironical. She disappeared. I returned to
+Hafiz. Soon a bumble-bee, a great fellow splendid in gold and black
+and crimson, blundered into the room and immediately made furious
+racket against a window pane. Now I can't concentrate my mind on
+serious things, if there's a bumble-bee buzzing about. So I had to
+get up and devote ten minutes to persuading the dunderhead to leave
+the glass and establish himself firmly on the piece of paper that
+would waft him into the open air and sunlight. When I lost sight of
+him in the glad greenery I again came back to my work. But two
+minutes afterwards my little seven year old daughter, rather the
+worse for amateur gardening, and holding a cage of white mice in
+her hand, appeared on the threshold, smiled at me with refreshing
+absence of apology, darted in, dumped the white mice on an open
+volume of my precious Turner Macan's edition of Firdusi, and
+clambering into my lap and seizing pencil and paper, instantly
+ordained my participation in her favourite game of "head, body and
+legs."</p>
+<p>An hour afterwards a radiant angel of a nurse claimed her for
+purposes of ablution. I once more returned to Hafiz. Then Barbara
+put her head in at the door.</p>
+<p>"Haven't you thought how delighted Doria will be?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't," said I. "I've more important things to think
+about."</p>
+<p>"But," said Barbara, entering and closing the door with soft
+deliberation behind her and coming to my side&mdash;"if Adrian
+makes a big success, they'll be able to marry."</p>
+<p>"Well?" said I.</p>
+<p>"Well," said she, with a different intonation. "Don't you
+see?"</p>
+<p>"See what?"</p>
+<p>It is wise to irritate your wife on occasion, so as to manifest
+your superiority. She shook me by the collar and stamped her
+foot.</p>
+<p>"Don't you care a bit whether your friends get married or
+not?"</p>
+<p>"Not a bit," said I.</p>
+<p>Barbara lifted the Macan's Firdusi, still suffering the
+desecration of the forgotten cage of white mice, onto my manuscript
+and hoisted herself on the cleared corner of the table.</p>
+<p>"Doria is my dearest friend. She did my sums for me at school,
+although I was three years older. If it hadn't been for us, she and
+Adrian would never have met."</p>
+<p>"That I admit," I interrupted. "But having started on the path
+of crime we're not bound to pursue it to the end."</p>
+<p>"You're simply horrid!" she cried. "We've talked for years of
+the sad story of these two poor young things, and now, when there's
+a chance of their marrying, you say you don't care a bit!"</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, rising, "what with you and Adrian and a
+bumble-bee and the child and two white mice, and now Doria, my
+morning's work is ruined. Let us go out into the garden and watch
+the starlings resting in the walnut trees. Incidentally we might
+discuss Doria and Adrian."</p>
+<p>"Now you're talking sense," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So we went into the garden&mdash;and discussed the formation
+next autumn of a new rose-bed.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>By the afternoon train came Adrian, impeccably vestured and
+feverish with excitement. Two evening papers which he brandished
+nervously, proclaimed "The Diamond Gate" a masterpiece. The book
+had been only out a week&mdash;(we country mice knew nothing of
+it)&mdash;and already, so his publisher informed him, repeat orders
+were coming in from the libraries and distributing agents.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind, my publisher, declares it's going to be the biggest
+thing in first novels ever known. And though I say it as shouldn't,
+dear old Hilary,"&mdash;he clapped me on the shoulder&mdash;"it's a
+damned fine book."</p>
+<p>I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his
+manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a
+smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had
+conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured
+me in the shade. At one leap he had mounted to planes beyond our
+dreams. All this his attitude betokened. He removed the hand from
+my shoulder and flourished it in a happy gesture.</p>
+<p>"My fortune's made," he cried.</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow," I asked, "why have you sprung this
+surprise on us? I had no idea you were writing a novel."</p>
+<p>He laughed. "No one had. Not even Doria. It was on her account I
+kept it secret. I didn't want to arouse possible false hopes. It's
+very simple. Besides, I like being a dark horse. It's exciting.
+Don't you remember how paralysed you all were when I got my First
+at Cambridge? Everybody thought I hadn't done a stroke of
+work&mdash;but I had sweated like mad all the time."</p>
+<p>This was quite true, the sudden brilliance of the end of
+Adrian's University career had dazzled the whole of his
+acquaintance. Barbara, impatient of retrospect, came to the
+all-important point.</p>
+<p>"How does Doria take it?"</p>
+<p>He turned on her and beamed. He was one of those dapper,
+slim-built men who can turn with quick grace.</p>
+<p>"She's as pleased as Punch. Gave it to old man Jornicroft to
+read and insisted on his reading it. He's impressed. Never thought
+I had it in me. Can't see, however, where the commercial value of
+it comes in."</p>
+<p>"Wait till you show him your first thumping cheque," sympathised
+my wife.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to," he exclaimed boyishly. "I might have done it
+this afternoon. Wittekind was off his head with delight and if I
+had asked him to give me a bogus cheque for ten thousand to show to
+old man Jornicroft, he would have written it without a murmur."</p>
+<p>"How much did he really write a cheque for this afternoon?" I
+asked, knowing (as I have said before) my Adrian.</p>
+<p>Barbara looked shocked. "Hilary!" she remonstrated.</p>
+<p>But Adrian laughed in high good humour. "He gave me a hundred
+pounds on account."</p>
+<p>"That won't impress Mr. Jornicroft at all," said I.</p>
+<p>"It impressed my tailor, who cashed it, deducting a quarter of
+his bill."</p>
+<p>"Do you mean to say, my dear Adrian," I questioned, "that you
+went to your tailor with a cheque for a hundred pounds and said, `I
+want to pay you a quarter of what I owe you, will you give me
+change?'"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"But why didn't you pass the cheque through your banking account
+and post him your own cheque?"</p>
+<p>"Did you ever hear such an innocent?" he cried gaily. "I wanted
+to impress him, I did. One must do these things with an air. He
+stuffed my pockets with notes and gold&mdash;there has never been
+any one so all over money as I am at this particular
+minute&mdash;and then I gave him an order for half-a-dozen suits
+straight away."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" I cried aghast. "I've never had six suits of clothes
+at a time since I was born."</p>
+<p>"And more shame for you. Look!" said he, drawing my wife's
+attention to my comfortable but old and deliberately unfashionable
+raiment. "I love you, my dear Barbara, but you are to blame."</p>
+<p>"Hilary," said my wife, "the next time you go to town you'll
+order half-a-dozen suits and I'll come with you to see you do it.
+Who is your tailor, Adrian?"</p>
+<p>He gave the address. "The best in London. And if you go to him
+on my introduction&mdash;Good Lord!"&mdash;it seemed to amuse him
+vastly&mdash;"I can order half-a-dozen more!"</p>
+<p>All this seemed to me, who am not devoid of a sense of humour
+and an appreciation of the pleasant flippancies of life, somewhat
+futile and frothy talk, unworthy of the author of "The Diamond
+Gate" and the lover of Doria Jornicroft. I expressed this opinion
+and Barbara, for once, agreed with me.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Let us be serious. In the first place you oughtn't to
+allude to Doria's father as 'old man Jornicroft.' It isn't
+respectful."</p>
+<p>"But I don't respect him. Who could? He is bursting with money,
+but won't give Doria a farthing, won't hear of our marriage, and
+practically forbids me the house. What possible feeling can one
+have for an old insect like that?"</p>
+<p>"I've never seen any reason," said Barbara, who is a brave
+little woman, "why Doria shouldn't run away and marry you."</p>
+<p>"She would like a shot," cried Adrian; "but I won't let her. How
+can I allow her to rush to the martyrdom of married misery on four
+hundred a year, which I don't even earn?"</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch. "It's time, my friends," said I, "to dress
+for dinner. Afterwards we can continue the discussion. In the
+meanwhile I'll order up some of the '89 Pol Roger so that we can
+drink to the success of the book."</p>
+<p>"The '89 Pol Roger?" cried Adrian. "A man with '89 Pol Roger in
+his cellar is the noblest work of God!"</p>
+<p>"I was thinking," Barbara remarked drily, "of asking Doria to
+spend a few days here next week."</p>
+<p>"All I can say is," he retorted, with his quick turn and smile,
+"that you are the Divinity Itself."</p>
+<p>So, a short time afterwards, a very happy Adrian sat down to
+dinner and brought a cultivated taste to the appreciation of a now,
+alas! historical wine, under whose influence he expanded and told
+us of the genesis and the making of "The Diamond Gate."</p>
+<p>Now it is a very odd coincidence, one however which had little,
+if anything, to do with the curious entanglement of my friend's
+affairs into which I was afterwards drawn, but an odd coincidence
+all the same, that on passing from the dining room with Adrian to
+join Barbara in the drawing room, I found among the last post
+letters lying on the hall table one which, with a thrill of
+pleasure, I held up before Adrian's eyes.</p>
+<p>"Do you recognise the handwriting?"</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried he. "It's from Jaffery Chayne. And"&mdash;he
+scanned the stamp and postmark&mdash;"from Cettinje. What the deuce
+is he doing there?"</p>
+<p>"Let us see!" said I.</p>
+<p>I opened the letter and scanned it through; then I read it
+aloud.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Dear Hilary,</p>
+<br />
+<p>"A line to let you know that I'm coming back soon. I haven't
+quite finished my job&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"What was his job?"</p>
+<p>"Heaven knows," I replied. "The last time I heard from him he
+was cruising about the Sargasso Sea."</p>
+<p>I resumed my reading.</p>
+<p>"&mdash;for the usual reason, a woman. If it wasn't for women
+what a thundering amount of work a man could get through.
+Anyhow&mdash;I'm coming back, with an encumbrance. A wife. Not my
+wife, thank Olympus, but another man's wife&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Poor old devil!" cried Adrian. "I knew he would come a mucker
+one of these days!"</p>
+<p>"Wait," said I, and I read&mdash;</p>
+<p>"&mdash;poor Prescott's wife. I don't think you ever knew
+Prescott, but he was a good sort. He died of typhoid. Only quaggas
+and yaks and other iron-gutted creatures like myself can stand
+Albania. I'm escorting her to England, so look out for us. How's
+everybody? Do you ever hear of Adrian? If so, collar him. I want to
+work the widow off on him. She has a goodish deal of money and is a
+kind of human dynamo. The best thing in the world for Adrian."</p>
+<p>Adrian confounded the fellow. I continued&mdash;</p>
+<p>"Prepare then for the Dynamic Widow. Love to Barbara, the fairy
+grasshopper&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Who's that?"</p>
+<p>"My daughter, Susan Freeth. The last time he saw her, she was
+hopping about in a green jumper&mdash;Barbara would give you the
+elementary costume's commercial name."</p>
+<p>"&mdash;and yourself," I read. "By the way, do you know of a
+granite-built, iron-gated, portcullised, barbicaned, really
+comfortable home for widows?</p>
+<p>Yours, Jaffery."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Without waiting for comment from Adrian, I went with the letter
+into the drawing room, he following. I handed it to Barbara, who
+ran it through.</p>
+<p>"That's just like Jaffery. He tells us nothing."</p>
+<p>"I think he has told us everything," said I.</p>
+<p>"But who and what and whence is this lady?"</p>
+<p>"Goodness knows!" said I.</p>
+<p>"Therefore, he has told us nothing," retorted Barbara. "My own
+belief is that she's a Brazilian."</p>
+<p>"But what," asked Adrian, "would a lone Brazilian female be
+doing in the Balkans?"</p>
+<p>"Looking for a husband, of course," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>And like all wise men when staggered by serene feminine
+asseveration we bowed our heads and agreed that nothing could be
+more obvious.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<p>Some weeks passed; but we heard no more of Jaffery Chayne. If he
+had planted his widow there, in Cettinje, and gone off to Central
+Africa we should not have been surprised. On the other hand, he
+might have walked in at any minute, just as though he lived round
+the corner and had dropped in casually to see us.</p>
+<p>In the meantime events had moved rapidly for Adrian. Everybody
+was talking about his book; everybody was buying it. The rare
+phenomenon of the instantaneous success of a first book by an
+unknown author was occurring also in America. Golden opinions were
+being backed by golden cash. Adrian continued to draw on his
+publishers, who, fortunately for them, had an American house.
+Anticipating possible alluring proposals from other publishers,
+they offered what to him were dazzling and fantastic terms for his
+next two novels. He accepted. He went about the world wearing
+Fortune like a halo. He achieved sudden fame; fame so widespread
+that Mr. Jornicroft heard of it in the city, where he promoted (and
+still promotes) companies with monotonous success. The result was
+an interview to which Adrian came wisely armed with a note from his
+publisher as to sales up to date, and the amazing contract which he
+had just signed. He left the house with a father's blessing in his
+ears and an affianced bride's kisses on his lips. The wedding was
+fixed for September. Adrian declared himself to be the happiest of
+God's creatures and spent his days in joy-sodden idleness. His
+mother, with tears in her eyes, increased his allowance.</p>
+<p>The book that created all this commotion, I frankly admit, held
+me spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most
+enthusiastic reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I
+had ever read. It was a modern high romance of love and pity, of
+tears iridescent with laughter, of strong and beautiful though
+erring souls; it was at once poignant and tender; it vibrated with
+drama; it was instinct with calm and kindly wisdom. In my humility,
+I found I had not known my Adrian one little bit. As the shepherd
+of old who had a sort of patronizing affection for the
+irresponsible, dancing, flute-playing, goat-footed creature of the
+woodland was stricken with panic when he recognised the god, so was
+I convulsed when I recognised the genius of my friend Adrian. And
+the fellow still went on dancing and flute-playing and I stared at
+him open-mouthed.</p>
+<p>Mr. Jornicroft, who was a widower, gave a great dinner party at
+his house in Park Crescent, in honour of the engagement. My wife
+and I attended, fishes somewhat out of water amid this brilliant
+but solid assembly of what it pleased Barbara to call
+"merchantates." She expressed a desire to shrink out of the glare
+of the diamonds; but she wore her grandmother's pearls, and, being
+by far the youngest and prettiest matron present, held her own with
+the best of them. There were stout women, thin women, white-haired
+women, women who ought to have been white-haired, but were not;
+sprightly and fashionable women; but besides Barbara, the only
+other young woman was Doria herself.</p>
+<p>She took us aside, as soon as we were released from the formal
+welcome of Mr. Jornicroft, a thickset man with a very bald head and
+heavy black moustache.</p>
+<p>"The sight of you two is like a breath of fresh air. Did you
+ever meet with anything so stuffy?"</p>
+<p>Now, considering that all these prosperous folks had come to do
+her homage I thought the remark rather ungracious.</p>
+<p>"It's apt to be stuffy in July in London," I said.</p>
+<p>She laid her hand on Barbara's wrist and pointed at me with her
+fan.</p>
+<p>"He thinks he's rebuking me. But I don't care. I'm glad to see
+him all the same. These people mean nothing but money and
+music-halls and bridge and restaurants&mdash;I'm so sick of it. You
+two mean something else."</p>
+<p>"Don't speak sacrilegiously of restaurants, even though you are
+going to marry a genius," said I. "There is one in Paris to which
+Adrian will take you straight&mdash;like a homing bird."</p>
+<p>"Wherever Adrian takes me, it will be beautiful," she said
+defiantly.</p>
+<p>My little critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly
+adorable in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly
+made, with dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a
+sensitive nose and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried
+her head high and, for so diminutive a person, appeared vastly
+important.</p>
+<p>Adrian, released from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles,
+to greet us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion
+to Barbara and my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from
+strict monogamy dealt me a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is
+only one man in the universe worthy of being so regarded by a
+woman; and he is oneself. Every true-minded man will agree with me.
+She was inordinately proud of him; proud too of herself in that she
+had believed in him and given him her love long before he became
+famous. Adrian's eyes softened as they met the glance. He turned to
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"It's in a crowd like this that she looks so mysterious&mdash;an
+Elemental; but whether of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, I shall spend
+my life trying to discover."</p>
+<p>The faintest flush possible mounted to that pure ivory-white
+cheek of hers. She laughed and caught me by the arm.</p>
+<p>"I must carry you to Lady Bagshawe&mdash;you're taking her in to
+dinner. Her husband is Master of the Organ-Grinders'
+Company&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"No, no, Doria," said I.</p>
+<p>"&mdash;Well, it's some city company&mdash;I don't
+know&mdash;and she is a museum of diseases and a gazetteer of cure
+places. Now you know where you are."</p>
+<p>She led me to Lady Bagshawe. Soon afterwards we trooped down to
+dinner, during which I learned more of my inside than I knew
+before, and more of that of Lady Bagshawe than any of her most
+fervent adorers in their wildest dreams could have ever hoped to
+ascertain; during which, also, I endeavoured to convince an
+unknown, but agreeable lady on my left that I did not play polo,
+whereat, it seemed, her eight brothers were experts; and that Omar
+Khayyam was a contemporary not of the Prophet Isaiah, but of
+William the Conqueror. As for the setting&mdash;I am not an
+observant man&mdash;but I had an impression of much gold and silver
+and rare flora on the table, great gold frames enclosing (I doubt
+not) costly pictures on the walls, many desirable jewels on
+undesirable bosoms, strong though unsympathetic masculine faces,
+and such food and drink as Lucullus, poor fellow, did not live long
+enough to discover.</p>
+<p>When the ladies retired, and we moved up towards our host, I
+found myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile
+depravity of a gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard,
+the other arguing on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian
+loan. A vacant chair happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in
+hand, came round the table and sat down.</p>
+<p>"How are you getting on?"</p>
+<p>"Well," said I. "Very well." I sipped my port. I recognised
+Cockburn 1870.</p>
+<p>"You seemed rather at a loose end."</p>
+<p>"When one has 1870 port to drink," said I, "why fritter away its
+flavour in vain words?"</p>
+<p>"It is damned good port," Adrian admitted.</p>
+<p>"Earth holds nothing better," said I.</p>
+<p>We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us. I
+confess that I rather surrendered myself to the wine. A little
+taper for cigarettes happened to be in front of me; I held my glass
+in its light and lost myself in the wine's pure depths of mystery
+and colour; and my mind wandered to the lusty sunshine of
+"Lusitanian summers" that was there imprisoned. I inhaled its
+fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and spacious generosity. Wine,
+like bread and oil&mdash;"God's three chief words"&mdash;is a thing
+of itself&mdash;a thing of earth and air and sun&mdash;one of the
+great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the
+eyes of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern
+Italy has its fascination for me, in that it is essentially
+something apart from the dust and empty racket of the world; how
+much more then this radiant vintage suddenly awakened from its
+slumber in the darkness of forty years. So I mused, as I think an
+honest man is justified in musing, soberly, over a great wine, when
+suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's face. He too was musing; but
+musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed to have swept his face
+and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his half-emptied glass,
+with the short stem of which his fingers were nervously toying.
+There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine flowed over the
+cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came back,
+manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to Mr.
+Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
+wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as
+one might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee
+came and liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found
+myself in heart to heart conversation with my neighbour on the
+right, a florid, simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's
+Sheriff of the City of London, whose consuming ambition was to
+become a member of the Athen&aelig;um Club. When I informed him
+that I was privileged to enter that Valley of Dry Bones&mdash;my
+late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous Master of
+Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions, I
+think, before I was born&mdash;my sugar broker almost fell at my
+feet and worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were
+overrun with Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of
+episcopicide to no avail, he refused to be disillusioned. I told
+him that on the occasion of my last visit to the
+Megatherium&mdash;Thackeray, I explained&mdash;a Royal Academician,
+with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate "The
+Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the
+austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room
+story which was current at my preparatory school&mdash;and that in
+the library I ran into an equally desolate, though even less
+familiar Archdeacon, who seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and
+never let me go until he had impressed upon my mind the name and
+address of the only man in London who could cut clerical gaiters.
+But the simple child of sugar would have his way. There was but one
+Valhalla in London, and it was built by Decimus Burton.</p>
+<p>After that we joined the ladies for an unimportant half hour or
+so, and then Barbara and I took our leave. As we were motoring
+home&mdash;we live some thirty miles out of London&mdash;we
+discussed the dinner party, according to the way of married folks,
+home-bound after a feast, and I mentioned the trivial incident of
+Adrian and the broken glass. Why should his face have been so
+haggard when he had everything to make him happy?</p>
+<p>"He was thinking of Mr. Jornicroft's previous insulting
+behaviour."</p>
+<p>"How do you know?"</p>
+<p>"He told me," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I never knew Adrian to be seriously vindictive," said I.</p>
+<p>"It strikes me, my dear," replied Barbara, taking my hand, "that
+you are an old ignoramus."</p>
+<p>And this from a woman who actively glories in not knowing how
+many "r's" there are in "harassed."</p>
+<p>She nestled up to me. "We're not going abroad in August, are
+we?"</p>
+<p>"What?" I cried, "leave the English country during the only part
+of the year that is not 'deformed with dripping rains or withered
+by a frost'? Certainly not."</p>
+<p>"But we did last year, and the year before."</p>
+<p>"Pure accident. The year before, Susan was recovering from the
+measles and you had some pretty frocks which you thought would look
+lovely at Dinard. And last year you also had some frocks and
+insisted that Houlgate was the only place where Susan could avoid
+being stricken down by scarlet-fever."</p>
+<p>"Anyhow," said my wife, "we're not going away this year, for
+I've fixed up with Doria and Adrian to spend August at
+Northlands."</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me so at once? Why did you ask me whether
+we were going away?"</p>
+<p>"Because I knew we weren't," she answered.</p>
+<p>In putting two questions at the same time, I blundered. The
+first was a poser and might have elicited some interesting
+revelation of feminine mental process. In forlorn hope I repeated
+it.</p>
+<p>"Why, I've told you, stupid," said Barbara. "You've no objection
+to their coming, have you?"</p>
+<p>"Good Lord, no. I'm delighted."</p>
+<p>"From the way you've argued, any one would have thought you
+didn't want them."</p>
+<p>Outraged by the illogic, I gasped; but she broke into a
+laugh.</p>
+<p>"You silly old Hilary," she said. "Don't you see that Doria must
+get her trousseau together and Adrian must find a house or a flat,
+that has to be decorated and furnished, and the poor child hasn't a
+mother or any sensible woman in the world to look after her but
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I see," said I, "that you intend having the time of your
+life."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>My prevision proved correct. In August came the engaged couple
+and every day Barbara took them up to town and whirled them about
+from house-agent to house-agent until she found a flat to suit
+them, and then from emporium to emporium until she found furniture
+to suit the flat, and from raiment-vendor to raiment-vendor until
+she equipped Doria to suit the furniture. She used to return almost
+speechless with exhaustion; but pantingly and with the glaze of
+victory in her eyes, she fought all her battles o'er again and told
+of bargains won. In the meantime had it not been for Susan, I
+should have lived in the solitude of an anchorite. We spent much
+time in the garden which we (she less conscious of irony than I)
+called our desert island. I was Robinson Crusoe and she was Man
+Friday, and on the whole we were quite happy; perhaps I should have
+been happier in a temperature of 80&deg; in the shade if I had not
+been forced to wear the Polar bear rug from the drawing-room in
+representation of Crusoe's goatskins. I did suggest that I should
+be Robinson Crusoe's brother, who wore ordinary flannels, and that
+she should be Woman Wednesday. But Susan saw through the subterfuge
+and that game didn't work. One afternoon, however, Barbara,
+returning earlier than usual, caught us at it and expressing horror
+and indignation at the uses to which the bearskin was put,
+metaphorically whipped me and sent me to bed as being the elder of
+the naughty ones. After that we played at fairies in a glade, which
+was much cooler.</p>
+<p>It was in the evenings that I was loneliest; for then Barbara
+went early to bed, and the lovers strolled about together in the
+moonlight. With the intention, half-malicious, half-pitiful, of
+filling up my time, Doria taught me a new and complicated Patience.
+Then finally, when Doria, having spent a couple of polite minutes
+in the drawing-room, had retired, and when I was tired out from the
+strain of the day and half-asleep through weariness, Adrian would
+mix himself the longest possible brandy and soda, light the longest
+possible cigar and try to keep me up all night listening to his
+conversation.</p>
+<p>At last, one Friday evening, while I was engaged in my forlorn
+and unprofitable game, the butler entered the drawing-room with
+unperturbed announcement:</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne on the telephone, sir."</p>
+<p>I sent the card table flying amid the wreckage of my lay-out and
+rushed to the telephone.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! That you, Jaff?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, old man. Very much me. A devil of a lot of me. How are
+you?"</p>
+<p>His strong bass boomed through the receiver. I have always found
+a queer comfort in Jaffery's voice. It wraps you round about in
+thundering waves. We exchanged the commonplaces of delighted
+greeting. I asked:</p>
+<p>"When did you arrive?"</p>
+<p>"A couple of days ago."</p>
+<p>"Why on earth didn't you let me know at once?"</p>
+<p>I heard him laugh. "I'll tell you when I see you. By the way,
+can Barbara have me for the week-end?"</p>
+<p>This was like Jaffery. Most men would have asked me, taking
+Barbara for granted.</p>
+<p>"Barbara would have you for the rest of time," said I. "And so
+would Susan. I'll expect you by the 11 o'clock train."</p>
+<p>"Right," said he.</p>
+<p>"And, I say!"</p>
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+<p>"Talking of fair ladies&mdash;what about&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, Hell!" came Jaffery's great voice. "She's here right
+enough."</p>
+<p>"Where?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"The Savoy. So is Euphemia&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother
+as a little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape.</p>
+<p>"Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?"</p>
+<p>"She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears.</p>
+<p>"Why not bring her down with Euphemia?"</p>
+<p>"I want a couple of days off. I want a good quiet time, with no
+female women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as
+you know, I love to distraction."</p>
+<p>"But will Euphemia be all right with her?"</p>
+<p>I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the
+"problem" was.</p>
+<p>"Right as rain. Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow
+night to a lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City
+Temple on Sunday. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone
+system of Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and
+merciless. Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been
+allowed to converse further I might have told him that another
+female woman, Doria Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he
+might not have come. Jaffery was always a queer fish where women
+were concerned. Not a chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean
+fish, now hot, now cold. I have seen him shrink like a sensitive
+plant in the presence of an ingenue of nineteen and royster in
+Pantagruelian fashion with a mature member of the chorus of the
+Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly, a scared Joseph, from
+the allurements of the charming wife of a Right Honourable Sir
+Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in front of an
+obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street. I do
+not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating
+that my dear old Jaffery had no morals. He had&mdash;lots of them.
+He was stuffed with them. But what they were, neither he nor I nor
+any one else was ever able to define. As a general rule, however,
+he was shy of strange women, and to that category did Doria
+belong.</p>
+<p>When the lovers came in I told them my news. Adrian expressed
+extravagant delight. A little tiny cloud flitted over Doria's
+brow.</p>
+<p>"Shall I like him?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"You'll adore him," cried Adrian.</p>
+<p>"I'll try to, dear, because he seems to mean so much to you. Are
+you going up to town with us to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>"There's only a morning's fitting at a dressmaker&mdash;no place
+for me," he laughed. "I'll stay and welcome old Jaffery."</p>
+<p>Again the most transient of tiny little clouds. But I could not
+help thinking that if Jaffery had been a woman instead of a mere
+man, there would have been a thunderstorm.</p>
+<p>When we were alone Adrian threw himself into a chair.</p>
+<p>"Women are funny beings," he said. "I do believe Doria is
+jealous of old Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"You have every reason to be proud," said I, "of your
+psychological acumen."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p>A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of
+the train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of
+great sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his
+turn, shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck
+wondering heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself
+between us, linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down
+the quiet country platform. A porter followed with his
+suit-case.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"</p>
+<p>"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.</p>
+<p>"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople&mdash;you
+remember Robson of Pembroke&mdash;fussy little
+cock-sparrow&mdash;he'd just come from England and was full of it.
+You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"</p>
+<p>Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release
+himself and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub
+himself ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.</p>
+<p>"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the
+subway. "Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em.
+That's the pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives
+and families. I'm coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter.
+How are they?"</p>
+<p>I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station
+yard, where his eye fell upon a familiar object.</p>
+<p>"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"</p>
+<p>The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient,
+ancient car, the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment
+(together with the impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not
+allow me to sell. It had been a splendid thing in those far-off
+days. It kept me in health. It made me walk miles and miles along
+unknown and unfrequented roads. In the aggregate I must have spent
+months of my life doing physical culture exercises underneath it.
+You got into it at the back; it was about ten feet high, and you
+started it at the side by a handle in its midriff. But I loved it.
+It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and insulted
+it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go. But
+Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
+rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
+adventure.</p>
+<p>"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I
+don't keep a fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the
+donkey-cart. Get in and don't be so fastidious&mdash;unless you're
+afraid&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no
+attempt to enter the car.</p>
+<p>"Barbara gone away?"</p>
+<p>I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed
+by Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly
+unconcealed.</p>
+<p>"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
+business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."</p>
+<p>His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
+Northlands without Barbara&mdash;" He shook his head.</p>
+<p>We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though
+she choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were
+half way up the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who
+later on harnessed the donkey to her and pulled her into the
+motor-house. We dismounted, however, in the drive. A tiny figure in
+a blue smock came scuttling over the sloping lawn. The next thing I
+saw was the small blue patch somewhere in the upland region of
+Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth from him idiotic exclamations
+which are not worth chronicling, accompanied by a duet of bass and
+treble laughter. Then he set her astride of his bull neck and
+pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to hold.</p>
+<p>"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.</p>
+<p>She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish
+shock in her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an
+elephant with a robin on his head, unconscious of her weight. We
+mounted to the terrace in front of the house and having established
+my guests in easy chairs, I went indoors to order such drink as
+would be refreshing on a sultry August noon. When I returned I
+found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee, questioning Adrian, after
+the manner of a primitive savage, on the subject of "The Diamond
+Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity, dazzling our
+simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.</p>
+<p>"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked
+Jaffery. "Do you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a
+pen and jab it into a piece of paper, and&mdash;tchick!&mdash;up
+comes a golden sovereign every time he does it."</p>
+<p>Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she
+commanded.</p>
+<p>"I haven't got a pen," said he.</p>
+<p>"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
+Jaffery's knee.</p>
+<p>Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father
+of a feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I
+think, rather tactfully.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old
+daddy hasn't got one."</p>
+<p>"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have
+you got one?"</p>
+<p>"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a
+golden pen in your mouth."</p>
+<p>The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his
+face and a doll in his mouth&mdash;the Archangel Gabriel, commonly
+known as Gabs, and so termed on account of his archi-angelic
+disposition, a hideous mongrel with a white patch over one eye and
+a brown patch over the other, with the nose of a collie and the
+legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a fox-terrier, whose
+mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold assertion that
+he was a Zanzibar bloodhound&mdash;the lucky advent of this
+pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from
+the somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the
+rescue or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to
+it to explain the mystery of the golden pen.</p>
+<p>"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said
+I, waving a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic
+widow?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene
+and sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll
+tell you about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar
+way, showing two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between
+the hair on lip and chin.</p>
+<p>"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What
+were you doing in Albania, for instance?"</p>
+<p>"Prospecting," said he.</p>
+<p>"In what&mdash;gold, coal, iron?"</p>
+<p>"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of
+these days&mdash;and one of these days very soon&mdash;in the
+Balkans. From Scutari to Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming
+triangle&mdash;it's going to be a battlefield. The war
+correspondent who goes out there not knowing his ground will be a
+silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So poor old
+Prescott&mdash;you must know Prescott of Reuter's?&mdash;anyhow
+that was the chap&mdash;poor old Prescott and I went out exploring.
+When he pegged out with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his
+widow down at Cettinje where I have some pals, and started out
+again on my own. That's all."</p>
+<p>He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always
+had to provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his
+throat.</p>
+<p>"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your
+adventures," said Adrian.</p>
+<p>Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if
+you'll give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and
+white handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.</p>
+<p>But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and
+for the next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his
+wanderings. He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his
+experiences, even those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the
+laughter got into his speech, so that many amusing episodes were
+told in the roars of a hilarious lion.</p>
+<p>Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
+Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
+front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door,
+appeared to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and
+almost hugged her. And there they stood holding on to each other's
+hands and smiling into each other's faces and saying how well they
+looked, regardless of the fact that they were blocking the way for
+Doria, who remained in the car, I had to move them on with the
+reminder that they had the whole week-end for their effusions.
+Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to Doria then, for the first
+time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery blinked at her oddly as
+he held her little gloved fingers in his enormous hand. And,
+indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very striking object to
+come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's vision, with her
+chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath which her
+great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white face.</p>
+<p>She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then
+after a fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so
+much of you."</p>
+<p>He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze
+of admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's
+waist. The ladies went indoors to take off their things,
+accompanied by Adrian, who wanted a lover's word with Doria on the
+way. Jaffery followed her with his eyes until she had disappeared
+at the corner of the hall-stairs. Then he took me by the arm and
+led me up towards the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Doria Jornicroft," said I.</p>
+<p>"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my
+life."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I
+with a laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged
+to Adrian."</p>
+<p>He dropped my arm. "Do you mean&mdash;she's going to marry
+him?"</p>
+<p>"Next month," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not
+enlighten me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The
+most pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce
+didn't you tell me before?"</p>
+<p>"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought
+we would give you as long a respite as possible."</p>
+<p>"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that
+Adrian's fianc&eacute;e was knocking around I'd have lumped her in
+my heart with Barbara and Susie."</p>
+<p>"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.</p>
+<p>His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy
+old Adrian getting married!"</p>
+<p>"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get
+married. I'm married."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you&mdash;you were born to be married," he said
+crushingly.</p>
+<p>"And so are you," I retorted.</p>
+<p>"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in
+petticoats, whom I should have to swear to love, honour and
+obey&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears
+obedience."</p>
+<p>"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"</p>
+<p>His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
+adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her
+tail in the air and scampered away, in terror.</p>
+<p>"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor,
+you can always cut them when you like."</p>
+<p>"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends
+and makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I
+know 'em? They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to
+Rio."</p>
+<p>He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage
+as an institution. It was most useful and salutary&mdash;apparently
+because it provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions
+wherein to exist. The multitude of harmless, necessary males (like
+myself) were doomed to it. But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to
+which he belonged, whose untamable and omni-concupiscent essence
+kept them outside the dull conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen
+hundred women at once, scattered within the regions of the seven
+circumferential seas. He loved them all. Woman as woman was the joy
+of the earth. It was only the silly spectrum of civilisation that
+broke Woman up into primary colours&mdash;black, yellow, brunette,
+blonde&mdash;he damned civilisation.</p>
+<p>"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one
+would think you were a devil of a fellow."</p>
+<p>"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory,
+or rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of
+those men who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs
+with air, who must get out into the wilds if they're to
+live&mdash;God! I'd sooner be snowed up on a battlefield than smirk
+at a damned afternoon tea-party any day in the week! If I want a
+woman, I like to take her by her hair and swing her up behind me on
+the saddle and ride away with her&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"</p>
+<p>"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But
+that's my attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would
+be for me to tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of
+a thing in petticoats."</p>
+<p>"You're a blessed innocent," said I.</p>
+<p>Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined
+us on the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his
+philosophy, caught him by the shoulders and shook him in
+pain-dealing exuberance. Old Adrian was going to be married. He
+wished him joy. Yet it was no use his wishing him joy because he
+already had it&mdash;it was assured. That exquisite wonder of a
+girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially lucky devil. He,
+Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .</p>
+<p>"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to
+you," said I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and
+swung her up behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her.
+It's a little way Jaffery has."</p>
+<p>In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face,
+Jaffery grew red.</p>
+<p>"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy
+that he was.</p>
+<p>And I shut up&mdash;not because he commanded, but because
+Barbara, like spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at
+noontide, appeared on the terrace.</p>
+<p>Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy
+Jaffery and Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they
+should sit next each other. He helped the child to impossible
+viands, much to my wife's dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories
+of Bulgaria, somewhat to her puzzledom, but wholly to her delight.
+But when he proposed to fill her silver mug (which he, as
+godfather, had given her on her baptism) with the liquefied dream
+of Paradise that Barbara, <i>sola mortalium</i>, can prepare,
+consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and borage
+and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
+Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the
+crystal jug of joy poised in his hand.</p>
+<p>"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"</p>
+<p>"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your
+mother's hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child
+and fill up your own glass."</p>
+<p>"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
+Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer
+holiday!"</p>
+<p>At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing
+a handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to
+some cold beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he
+declined. No Christian butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After
+a longish absence he returned to the table with half the joint on
+his plate. Susan regarded it wide-eyed.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an
+audible whisper.</p>
+<p>"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle
+Adrian, if I don't get enough to eat!"</p>
+<p>"And Aunt Doria?"</p>
+<p>Again he reddened&mdash;but he turned to Doria and bowed.</p>
+<p>"In my quality of ogre only&mdash;a <i>bonne bouche</i>," said
+he.</p>
+<p>It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan
+began the inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some
+dereliction with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to
+speak, hustled out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology
+for his Gargantuan appetite discoursed on the privations of travel
+in uncivilised lands. A lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine
+and a hazelnut for dinner. We were to fancy the infinite
+accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he devoured cold beef and
+talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof interest of one
+who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a new kind of
+hippopotamus.</p>
+<p>The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which
+faces due east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the
+elbow and swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which
+the remaining three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought
+he was out of earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My
+wife, with the responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe
+knitted in her brow, discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I,
+to whom the quality of the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his
+wife were to dry themselves and that of the sheets between which
+their housemaid was to lie, were matters of black and awful
+indifference, gave my more worthily applied attention to one of a
+new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its merits but
+lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
+pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when
+Jaffery's voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the
+discriminating nicety out of my head. I lazily shifted my position
+and watched the pair.</p>
+<p>"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic
+and all that," Jaffery was saying&mdash;his light word about an
+ogre at lunch was not a bad one; sitting side by side on the low
+parapet they looked like a vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine
+black-haired elf&mdash;she had taken off her hat&mdash;engaged in a
+conversation in which the elf looked very much on the
+defensive&mdash;"and you're always tracking down motives to their
+roots, and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of
+things&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual
+woman's nature, the blatant universalist has his points."</p>
+<p>"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like
+a dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against
+glass panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches
+off. Do you see what I'm driving at?"</p>
+<p>Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away
+his corona corona&mdash;a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and
+ninety-nine men out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had
+religiously preserved two inches of ash on his)&mdash;and hauled
+out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could not hear what she said. When
+she had finished, he edged a span nearer.</p>
+<p>"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple
+sort of savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian
+complications of feeling. I've had in my life"&mdash;he stuck pouch
+and pipe on the stone beside him&mdash;"I've had in my life just a
+few men I've loved&mdash;I don't count women&mdash;men&mdash;men
+I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one cares for
+people?"</p>
+<p>She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.</p>
+<p>"The latest was poor Prescott&mdash;he has just pegged
+out&mdash;you'll hear soon enough about Prescott. There was Tom
+Castleton&mdash;has Adrian told you about Castleton&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>Again she shook her head.</p>
+<p>"He will&mdash;of course&mdash;a wonder of a fellow&mdash;up
+with us at Cambridge. He's dead. There only remains Hilary, our
+host, and Adrian."</p>
+<p>As far as I could gather&mdash;for she spoke in the ordinary
+tones of civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression
+that he was whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest
+bull&mdash;as far as I could gather, she said:</p>
+<p>"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than
+Mr. Freeth and Adrian."</p>
+<p>"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't.
+If I was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no
+prospect of earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and
+say, 'Keep me for the rest of my life'&mdash;and they would do
+it"</p>
+<p>"And would you do the same for either of them?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and
+towered over her.</p>
+<p>"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
+children's children."</p>
+<p>He sat down again in confusion at having been led into
+hyperbole. But he took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands,
+somewhat to her alarm&mdash;for, in her world, she was not
+accustomed to gigantic males laying unceremonious hold of
+her&mdash;</p>
+<p>"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this&mdash;that
+if Adrian's wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go
+away and cut my throat"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
+willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends;
+whereupon he caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the
+terrace towards us, shouting out his news.</p>
+<p>"I've fixed it up with Doria"&mdash;he turned his head&mdash;"I
+can call you Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission&mdash;what else
+could she do? "We're going to be friends. And I say, Barbara,
+they'll want a wedding-present. What shall I give 'em? What would
+you like?"</p>
+<p>The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had
+followed demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for
+from the drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who
+marched up straight to Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"A lady to see you, sir"</p>
+<p>"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"</p>
+<p>He stared at Franklin, in dismay.</p>
+<p>"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put
+her down at the back entrance. She would not give her name."</p>
+<p>"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+<p>"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of
+a desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the
+slip."</p>
+<p>Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"</p>
+<p>Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:</p>
+<p>"The dynamic widow," said he.</p>
+<p>"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She
+has no business to come running after you like this. She must be
+taught manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"</p>
+<p>She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing,
+thereby demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her
+own house.</p>
+<p>Presently Franklin reappeared.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Prescott," said he.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p>That there should have been in the uncommon-tall young woman of
+buxom stateliness and prepossessing features, attired (to the mere
+masculine eye) in quite elegant black raiment&mdash;a thing called,
+I think, a picture hat, broad-brimmed with a sweeping ostrich
+feather, tickled my especial fancy, but was afterwards reviled by
+my wife as being entirely unsuited to fresh widowhood&mdash;what
+there should have been in this remarkable Junoesque young person
+who followed on the heels of Franklin to strike terror into
+Jaffery's soul, I could not, for the life of me, imagine. In the
+light of her personality I thought Barbara's <i>coup de
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i> rather cruel. . . . Of course Barbara
+received her courteously. She, too, was surprised at her outward
+aspect, having expected to behold a fantastic personage of comic
+opera.</p>
+<p>"I am very pleased to see you, Mrs. Prescott."</p>
+<p>Liosha&mdash;I must call her that from the start, for she exists
+to me as Liosha and as nothing else&mdash;shook hands with Barbara,
+making a queer deep formal bow, and turned her calm, brown eyes on
+Jaffery. There was just a little quarter-second of silence, during
+which we all wondered in what kind of outlandish tongue she would
+address him. To our gasping astonishment she said with an
+unmistakable American intonation: "Mr. Chayne, will you have the
+kindness to introduce me to your friends?"</p>
+<p>I broke into a nervous laugh and grasped her hand "Pray allow
+me. I am Mr. Freeth, your much honoured host, and this is my wife,
+and . . . Miss Jornicroft . . . and Mr. Boldero. Mr. Chayne has
+been deceiving us. We thought you were an Albanian."</p>
+<p>"I guess I am," said the lady, after having made four
+ceremonious bows, "I am the daughter of Albanian patriots. They
+were murdered. One day I'm going back to do a little murdering on
+my own account."</p>
+<p>Barbara drew an audible short breath and Doria instinctively
+moved within the protective area of Adrian's arm. Jaffery, with
+knitted brow, leaned against one of the posts supporting the old
+wistaria arbour and said nothing, leaving me to exploit the
+lady.</p>
+<p>"But you speak perfect English," said I.</p>
+<p>"I was raised in Chicago. My parents were employed in the
+stockyards of Armour. My father was the man who slit the throats of
+the pigs. He was a dandy," she said in unemotional tones&mdash;and
+I noticed a little shiver of repulsion ripple through Barbara and
+Doria. "When I was twelve, my father kind of inherited lands in
+Albania, and we went back. Is there anything more you'd like to
+know?"</p>
+<p>She looked us all up and down, rather down than up, for she
+towered above us, perfectly unconcerned mistress of the situation.
+Naturally we made mute appeal to Jaffery. He stirred his huge bulk
+from the post and plunged his hands into his pockets.</p>
+<p>"I should like to know, Liosha," said he, in a rumble like
+thunder, "why you have left my sister Euphemia and what you are
+doing here?"</p>
+<p>"Euphemia is a damn fool," she said serenely. "She's a freak.
+She ought to go round in a show."</p>
+<p>"What have you been quarrelling about?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"I never quarrel," she replied, regarding him with her calm
+brown eyes. "It is not dignified."</p>
+<p>"Then I repeat, most politely, Liosha&mdash;what are you doing
+here?"</p>
+<p>She looked at Barbara. "I guess it isn't right to talk of money
+before strangers."</p>
+<p>Barbara smiled&mdash;glanced at me rebukingly. I pulled forward
+a chair and invited the lady to sit&mdash;for she had been standing
+and her astonishing entrance had flabbergasted ceremonious
+observance out of me. Whilst she was accepting my belated courtesy,
+Barbara continued to smile and said:</p>
+<p>"You mustn't look on us as strangers, Mrs. Prescott. We are all
+Mr. Chayne's oldest and most intimate friends."</p>
+<p>"Do tell us what the row was?" said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Liosha took calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a
+pleasant-faced and by no means an antagonistic assembly&mdash;even
+Doria's curiosity lent her a semblance of a sense of
+humour&mdash;she relaxed her Olympian serenity and laughed a
+little, shewing teeth young and strong and exquisitely white.</p>
+<p>"I am here, Jaff Chayne," she said, "because Euphemia is a damn
+fool. She took me this morning to your big street&mdash;the one
+where all the shops are&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"My dear lady," said Adrian, "there are about a hundred miles of
+such streets in London."</p>
+<p>"There's only one&mdash;" she snapped her fingers, recalling the
+name&mdash;"only one Regent Street, I ever heard of," she replied
+crushingly. "It was Regent Street. Euphemia took me there to shew
+me the shops. She made me mad. For when I wanted to go in and buy
+things she dragged me away. If she didn't want me to buy things why
+did she shew me the shops?" She bent forward and laid her hand on
+Barbara's knee. "She must he a damn fool, don't you think so?"</p>
+<p>Said Barbara, somewhat embarrassed:</p>
+<p>"It's an amusement here to look at shops without any idea of
+buying."</p>
+<p>"But if one wants to buy? If one has the money to buy?&mdash;I
+did not want anything foolish. I saw jewels that would buy up the
+whole of Albania. But I didn't want to buy up Albania. Not yet. But
+I saw a glass cage in a shop window full of little chickens, and I
+said to Euphemia: 'I want that. I must have those chickens.' I
+said, 'Give me money to go in and buy them.' Do you know, Jaff
+Chayne, she refused. I said, 'Give me my money, my husband's money,
+this minute, to buy those chickens in the glass cage.' She said she
+couldn't give me my husband's money to spend on chickens."</p>
+<p>"That was very foolish of her," said Adrian solemnly, "for if
+there's one thing the management of the Savoy Hotel love, it's
+chicken incubators. They keep a specially heated suite of
+apartments for them."</p>
+<p>"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not.
+She knows less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She
+refused. I saw an automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me
+to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he will give me the money.' He asked where Mr.
+Jaff Chayne was. I said he was staying with Mr. Freeth, at
+Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not a fool like Euphemia. I
+remember. I left Euphemia standing on the sidewalk with her mouth
+open like that"&mdash;she made the funniest grimace in the
+world&mdash;"and the automobile brought me here to get some money
+to buy the chickens." She held out her hand to Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Confound the chickens," he cried. "It's the taxi I'm thinking
+of&mdash;ticking out tuppences, to say nothing of the mileage.
+Liosha," said he, in a milder roar, "it's no use thinking of buying
+chickens this afternoon. It's Saturday and the shops are shut. You
+go home before that automobile has ticked out bankruptcy and ruin.
+Go back to the Savoy and make your peace with Euphemia, like a good
+girl, and on Monday I'll talk to you about the chickens."</p>
+<p>She sat up straight in her chair.</p>
+<p>"You must take me somewhere else. I've got no use for
+Euphemia."</p>
+<p>"But where else can I take you?" cried Jaffery aghast.</p>
+<p>"I don't know. You know best where people go to in England.
+Doesn't he?" She included us all in a smile.</p>
+<p>"But you must go back to Euphemia till Monday, at any rate."</p>
+<p>"And she has arranged such a nice little programme for you,"
+said Adrian. "A lecture on Tolstoi to-night and the City Temple
+to-morrow. Pity to miss 'em."</p>
+<p>"If I saw any more of Euphemia, I might hurt her," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord!" said Jaffery. "But you must go somewhere." He turned
+to me with a groan. "Look here, old chap. It's awfully rough luck,
+but I must take her back to the Savoy and mount guard over her so
+that she doesn't break my poor sister's neck."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"How far would you go?" Adrian asked politely, with the air of
+one seeking information.</p>
+<p>"Oh, shut up, you idiot," Jaffery turned on him savagely. "Can't
+you see the position I'm in?"</p>
+<p>"I'm very sorry you're angry, Jaff Chayne," said Liosha with a
+certain kind dignity. "But these are your friends. Their house is
+yours. Why should I not stay here with you?"</p>
+<p>"Here? Good God!" cried Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady
+manners.</p>
+<p>"The very thing," said I.</p>
+<p>Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I
+protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument
+continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to
+entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm.</p>
+<p>"But why shouldn't they have me? When a stranger asks for
+hospitality in Albania he is invited to walk right in and own the
+place. Is it refused in England?"</p>
+<p>"Strangers don't ask," growled Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It would make life much more pleasant if they did," said
+Barbara, smiling. "Mrs. Prescott, this bear of a guardian or
+trustee or whatever he is of yours, makes a terrible
+noise&mdash;but he's quite harmless."</p>
+<p>"I know that," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"He does what I tell him," the little lady continued, drawing
+herself up majestically beside Jaffery's great bulk. "He's going to
+stay here, and so will you, if you will so far honour us."</p>
+<p>Liosha rose and bowed. "The honour is mine."</p>
+<p>"Then will you come this way&mdash;I will shew you your
+room."</p>
+<p>She motioned to Liosha to precede her through the French window
+of the drawing-room. Before disappearing Liosha bowed again. I
+caught up Barbara.</p>
+<p>"My dear, what about clothes and things?"</p>
+<p>"My dear," she said, "there's a telephone, there's a taxi,
+there's a maid, there's the Savoy hotel, and there's a train to
+bring back maid and clothes."</p>
+<p>When Barbara takes command like this, the wise man effaces
+himself. She would run an Empire with far less fuss than most
+people devote to the running of a small sweet-stuff shop. I smiled
+and returned to the others. Jaffery was again filling his huge
+pipe.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>Adrian burst out laughing "But she's immense, your widow! The
+most refreshing thing I've seen for many a day. The way she clears
+the place of the cobwebs of convention! She's great. Isn't she,
+Doria?"</p>
+<p>"I can quite understand Mr. Chayne finding her an uncomfortable
+charge."</p>
+<p>"Thank you," said Jaffery, with rather unnecessary vehemence. "I
+knew you would be sympathetic." He dropped into a chair by her
+side. "You can't tell what an awful thing it is to be responsible
+for another human being."</p>
+<p>"Heaps of people manage to get through with it&mdash;every
+husband and wife&mdash;every mother and father."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but not many poor chaps who are neither father nor husband
+are responsible for another fellow's grown-up widow."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled. "You must find her another husband."</p>
+<p>"That's a great idea. Will you help me? Before I knew of
+Adrian's great good fortune, I wrote to Hilary&mdash;ho! ho! ho!
+But we must find somebody else."</p>
+<p>"Has she any money?" asked Doria, who smiled but faintly at the
+jocular notion of a Liosha-bound Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Prescott left her about a thousand a year. He was pretty well
+off, for a war-correspondent."</p>
+<p>"I don't think she'll have much difficulty. Do you know," she
+added, after a moment or two of reflection, "if I were you, I would
+establish her in a really first-class boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"Would that be a good way?" Jaffery asked simply.</p>
+<p>She nodded. "The best. She seems to have fallen foul of your
+sister."</p>
+<p>"The dearest old soul that ever lived," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"That's why. I'm sure I know your sister perfectly. The daughter
+of an Albanian patriot who used to kill pigs in Chicago&mdash;why,
+what can your poor sister do with her? Your sister is much older
+than you, isn't she?"</p>
+<p>"Ten years. How did you guess?"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled with feminine wisdom. "She's the gentlest maiden
+lady that ever was. It's only a man that could have thought of
+saddling her with our friend. Well&mdash;that's impossible. She
+would be the death of your sister in a week. You can't look after
+her yourself&mdash;that wouldn't be proper."</p>
+<p>"And it would be the death of me too!" said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"You can't leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the
+poor woman would die of boredom. The only thing that remains is the
+boarding-house."</p>
+<p>Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen
+Goth receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.</p>
+<p>"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."</p>
+<p>"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not
+displayed enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.</p>
+<p>So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on
+the mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
+exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective
+hearts. Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and
+hungry convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could
+hold her own; she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to
+the type for whom vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had
+made no vows, save of loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided
+they are kept, are perfectly consistent with a man's falling
+hopelessly, despairingly in love with his friend's affianced bride.
+And, as far as Barbara and myself have been able to make out, it
+was during this intimate talk that Jaffery fell in love with Doria.
+Of course, what the French call <i>le coup de foudre</i>, the
+thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had first beheld Doria
+alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise the stupefying
+effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at her little
+feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.</p>
+<p>The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a
+hitherto undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed,
+beetle-browed ogress of a wife. Why he married her has never been
+told. Why the mortal male whom we meet for the first time at a
+dinner party has married the amazing mortal female sitting
+somewhere on the other side of the table is an insoluble mystery,
+and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we expect to know
+about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of matrimony is
+concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The ogre
+marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
+love&mdash;and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised
+as humdrum, there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever
+told again in the world worth the hearing&mdash;we have quite a
+different condition of affairs. Did you ever hear of an ogre
+sighing himself to a shadow for love of a gap-toothed ogress? No.
+He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending his ogress-wife to
+Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin princess. There
+he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a wraith of a
+creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and stars. He
+stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy, feathery
+tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand. Its
+touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his
+arm. He has a mighty respect for her. He could take her up in his
+fingers and eat her like a quail&mdash;the one satisfactory method
+of eating a quail is unfortunately practised only by
+ogres&mdash;but he does not want to eat her. He goes on his knees,
+and invites her to chew any portion of him that may please her
+dainty taste. In short he makes the very silliest ass of himself,
+and the elfin princess, who of course has come into contact with
+the Real Beautiful Young Man of the Story Books, won't have
+anything to do with the Ogre; and if he is more rumbustious than he
+ought to be, generally finds a way to send him packing. And so the
+poor Ogre remains, planted there. The Fairy Tales, I remark again,
+are very true in demonstrating that the Ogre loves the elf and not
+the Ogress. But all the same they are deucedly unsympathetic
+towards the poor Ogre. The only sympathetic one I know is Beauty
+and the Beast; and even that is a mere begging of the question, for
+the Beast was a handsome young nincompoop of a Prince all the
+time!</p>
+<p>Barbara says that this figurative, allusive adumbration of
+Jaffery's love affair is pure nonsense. Anything less like an ogre
+than our overgrown baby of a friend it would he impossible to
+imagine. But I hold to my theory; all the more because when Adrian
+and I returned from our stroll round the garden, we found Jaffery
+standing over her, legs apart, like a Colossus of Rhodes, and
+roaring at her like a sucking dove. I noticed a scared,
+please-don't-eat-me look in her eyes. It was the ogre (trying to
+make himself agreeable) and the princess to the life.</p>
+<p>Presently tea was brought out, and with it came Barbara, a quiet
+laugh about her lips, and Liosha, stately and smiling. My wife to
+put her at her ease (though she had displayed singularly little
+shyness), after dealing with maid and taxi, had taken her over the
+house, exhibited Susan at tea in the nursery, and as much of
+Doria's trousseau as was visible in the sewing-room. The
+approaching marriage aroused her keen interest. She said very
+little during the meal, but smiled embarrassingly on the engaged
+pair. Jaffery stood glumly devouring cucumber sandwiches, till
+Barbara took him aside.</p>
+<p>"She's rather a dear, in spite of everything, and I think you're
+treating her abominably."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grew scarlet beneath the brick-coloured glaze.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't treat any woman abominably, if I could help it."</p>
+<p>"Well, you can help it&mdash;" and taking pity on him, she
+laughed in his face. "Can't you take her as a joke?"</p>
+<p>He glanced quietly at the lady. "Rather a heavy one," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow come and talk to us and be civil to her. Imagine she's
+the Vicar's wife come to call."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's elementary sense of humour was tickled and he broke
+out into a loud guffaw that sent the house cat, a delicate
+mendicant for food, scuttling across the lawn. The sight of the
+terror-stricken animal aroused the rest of the party to harmless
+mirth.</p>
+<p>"Tell me, Mrs. Prescott," said Adrian, "was he allowed to do
+that in Albania?"</p>
+<p>"I guess there aren't many things Jaff Chayne can't do in
+Albania," replied Liosha. "He has the <i>bessas</i> that carry him
+through and he's as brave as a lion."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you like brave men?" said Doria.</p>
+<p>"A woman who married a coward would be a damn
+fool&mdash;especially in Albania. I guess there aren't many in my
+mountains."</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell us about your mountains," said Barbara
+pleasantly.</p>
+<p>"And at the same time," said I, "Jaff might let us hear his
+story. That is to say if you have no objection, Mrs. Prescott."</p>
+<p>"With us," said Liosha, "the guest is expected to talk about
+himself; for if he's a guest he's one of the family."</p>
+<p>"Shall I go ahead then?" asked Jaffery, "and you chip in
+whenever you feel like it?"</p>
+<p>"That would be best," replied Liosha.</p>
+<p>And having lit a cigarette and settled herself in her
+deck-chair, she motioned to Jaffery to proceed. And there in the
+shade of the old wistaria arbour, surrounded by such dainty
+products of civilisation as Adrian (in speckless white flannels and
+violet socks) and the tea-table (in silver and egg-shell china)
+this pair of barbarians told their tale.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p>It is some years now since that golden August afternoon, and my
+memory of the details of the story of Liosha as told by Jaffery and
+illustrated picturesquely by the lady herself is none of the most
+precise. Incidentally I gathered, then and later in the
+smoking-room from Jaffery alone, a prodigious amount of information
+about Albania which, if I had imprisoned it in writing that same
+evening as the perfect diarist is supposed to do, would have been
+vastly useful to me at the present moment. But I am as a diarist
+hopelessly imperfect. I stare, now, as I write, at the bald,
+uninspiring page. This is my entry for Aug. 4th, 19&mdash;.</p>
+<p>"Weighed Susan. 4 st. 3.</p>
+<p>"Met Jaffery at station.</p>
+<p>"Albanian widow turned up unexpectedly after lunch. Fine woman.
+Going to be a handful. Staying week-end. Story of meeting and
+Prescott marriage.</p>
+<p>"Promised Susan a donkey ride. Where the deuce does one get
+donkeys warranted quiet and guaranteed to carry a lady? <i>Mem:</i>
+Ask Torn Fletcher.</p>
+<p>"<i>Mem:</i> Write to Launebeck about cigars."</p>
+<p>Why I didn't write straight off to Launebeck about the cigars,
+instead of "mem-ing" it, may seem a mystery. It isn't. It is a
+comfortable habit of mine. Once having "mem-ed" an unpleasant thing
+in my diary, the matter is over. I dismiss it from my mind. But to
+return to Liosha&mdash;I find in my entry of sixty-two words
+thirty-five devoted to Susan, her donkey and the cigars, and only
+twenty-seven to the really astonishing events of the day. Of course
+I am angry. Of course I consult Barbara. Of course she pats the
+little bald patch on the top of my head and laughs in a superior
+way and invents, with a paralysing air of verity, an impossible
+amplification of the "story of meeting and Prescott marriage." And
+of course, the frivolous Jaffery, now that one really wants him, is
+sitting astride of a cannon, and smoking a pipe and, notebook and
+pencil in hand, is writing a picturesque description of the
+bungling decapitation by shrapnel of the general who has just been
+unfolding to him the whole plan of the campaign, and consequently
+is provokingly un-getatable by serious persons like myself<a name=
+"FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class=
+"fnanchor">[A]</a>.</p>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href=
+"#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Hilary is
+writing at the end of the late Balkan war.&mdash;W.J.L.</p>
+</div>
+<p>So for what I learned that day I must trust to the elusive
+witch, Memory. I have never been to Albania. I have never wanted to
+go to Albania. Even now, I haven't the remotest desire to go to
+Albania. I should loathe it. Wherever I go nowadays, I claim as my
+right bedroom and bath and viands succulent to the palate and
+tender to the teeth. My demands are modest. But could I get them in
+Albania? No. Could one travel from Scutari to Monastir in the same
+comfort as one travels from London to Paris or from New York to
+Chicago? No. Does any sensible man of domestic instincts and
+scholarly tastes like to find himself halfway up an inaccessible
+mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed desperadoes in
+fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of pistols, daggers
+and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical demonstration
+with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with a mania
+of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your repose,
+to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call the
+flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They
+were made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other
+irresponsible phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit,
+as windscreens and water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can
+assume very pretty colours, owing to varying atmospheric
+conditions; and the more jagged and unenticing they are, the
+greater is their specious air of stupendousness. . . . At any rate
+they are hindrances to convenient travel and so I go among them as
+little as possible.</p>
+<p>To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and
+Liosha, Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to
+live in. It is divided into three religious sects, then re-divided
+into heaven knows how many tribes. What it will be when it gets
+autonomy and a government and a parliament and picture-palaces no
+one yet knows. But at the time when my two friends met it was in
+about as chaotic a condition as a jungle. Some tribes acknowledged
+the rule of the Turk. Others did not. Every mountainside had a
+pretty little anarchical system of its own. Every family had a
+pretty little blood feud with some other family. Accordingly every
+man was handy with knife and gun and it was every maiden's dream to
+be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel in the
+neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
+prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he
+lived, I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been
+betrothed years before. The price her father demanded was high. Not
+only did he hold a notable position on his mountain, but he had
+travelled to the fabulous land of America and could read and write
+and could speak English and could handle a knife with peculiar
+dexterity. Again, Liosha was no ordinary Albanian maiden. She too
+had seen the world and could read and write and speak English. She
+had a will of her own and had imbibed during her Chicago childhood
+curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine independence. Being
+beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize bride worth (in
+her father's eyes) her weight in gold.</p>
+<p>It was to try to reduce this excessive valuation that the young
+cutthroat visited his father's house. During the night two
+families, one of whom had a feud with the host and another with the
+guest, each attended by an army of merry brigands, fell upon the
+sleeping homestead, murdered everybody except Liosha, who managed
+to escape, plundered everything plunderable, money, valuables,
+household goods and live stock, and then set fire to the house and
+everything within sight that could burn. After which they marched
+away singing patriotic hymns. When they had gone Liosha crept out
+of the cave wherein she had hidden, and surveyed the scene of
+desolation.</p>
+<p>"I tell you, I felt just mad," said Liosha at this stage of the
+story.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>I remember Barbara and Doria staring at her open-mouthed.
+Instead of fainting or going into hysterics or losing her wits at
+the sight of the annihilation of her entire kith and
+kin&mdash;including her bridegroom to be&mdash;and of her whole
+worldly possessions, Liosha "felt just mad," which as all the world
+knows is the American vernacular for feeling very angry.</p>
+<p>"It was enough to turn any woman into a raving lunatic," gasped
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Guess it didn't turn me," replied Liosha contemptuously.</p>
+<p>"But what did you do?" asked Dora.</p>
+<p>"I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with
+that crowd." She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i064.jpg" id="i064.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/064.jpg"><img src="images/064.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.</b></div>
+<p>"And that's where we came in, don't you see?" interposed Jaffery
+hastily.</p>
+<p>You can imagine the scene. The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red
+and hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain
+path on ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of
+despair where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.</p>
+<p>Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form
+acquaintance. She told her story to the two horror-stricken men.
+British instinct cried out for justice. They would take her
+straight to the Vali or whatever authority ruled in the wild land,
+so that punishment should be inflicted on the murderers. But she
+laughed at them. It would take an army to dislodge her enemies from
+their mountain fastnesses. And who could send an army but the
+Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his head over the
+massacre of a few Christians? As for a local government, the
+<i>mallisori</i>, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any. The
+Englishmen swore softly. Liosha nodded her head and agreed with
+them. What was to be done? The Englishmen, alter giving her food
+and drink which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place
+where she could find relations or friends. Again she laughed
+scornfully.</p>
+<p>"All my relations lie there"&mdash;she pointed to the smoking
+ruins. "And I have no friends. And as for your escorting
+me&mdash;why I guess it would be much more use my escorting
+you."</p>
+<p>"And where would you escort us?"</p>
+<p>"God knows," she said.</p>
+<p>Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world,
+homeless and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were
+responsible to God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who
+spoke the English of the stockyards of Chicago. Again what was to
+be done? They could take her back to Scutari, whence they had come,
+in the hope of finding a Roman Catholic sisterhood. The proposal
+evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm. Liosha being convinced that they
+would turn her into a nun&mdash;the last avocation in the world she
+desired to adopt. Her simple idea was to go out to America, like
+her father, return with many bags of gold and devote her life to
+the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of her enemies.
+When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she replied that
+she would work in the packing-houses like her mother. But how, they
+asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago? "It must
+come from you!" she said. And the men looked at each other, feeling
+mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves.
+Then, being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she
+asked them what they were doing in Albania. They explained. They
+were travellers from England, wandering for pleasure through the
+Balkans. They had come from Scutari, as far as they could, in a
+motor-car. Liosha had never heard of a motor-car. They described it
+as a kind of little railway-engine that didn't need rails to run
+upon. At the foot of the mountains they had left it at a village
+inn and bought the ragged ponies. They were just going ahead
+exploring.</p>
+<p>"Do you know the way?" she asked with a touch of contempt.</p>
+<p>They didn't.</p>
+<p>"Then I guess I'll guide you. You pay me wages every day until
+you're tired and I'll use the money to go out to Chicago." And
+seeing them hesitate, she added: "No one's going to hurt me. A
+woman is safe in Albania. And if I'm with you, no one will hurt
+you. But if you go on by yourselves you'll very likely get
+murdered."</p>
+<p>Fantastic as was her intention, they knew that, as far as they
+themselves were concerned, she spoke common-sense. So it came to
+pass that Liosha, having left them for a few moments to take grim
+farewell of the charred remains of her family lying hidden beneath
+the smouldering wreckage, returned to them with a calm face,
+mounted one of the ponies and pointing before her, led the way into
+the mountains.</p>
+<p>Now, if old Jaff would only sit down and write this absurd
+Odyssey in the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to
+me, he would produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But
+he never will. As a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few
+Westerners have done and learned useful bits of language and made
+invaluable friends, and although he appreciated the journey's
+adventurous and humorous side, it did not afford him complete
+satisfaction. A day or two after their start, Prescott began to
+shew signs of peculiar interest in their guide. In spite of her
+unquestioning readiness to shoulder burdens, Prescott would run to
+relieve her. Liosha has assured me that Jaffery did the
+same&mdash;and indeed I cannot conceive Jaffery allowing a female
+companion to stagger along under a load which he could swing onto
+his huge back and carry like a walnut. To go further&mdash;she
+maintains that the two quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation
+of her labours, so much so, that often before they had ended their
+quarrel, she had performed the task in dispute. This of course
+Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was there, paid to do certain
+things, and she had to do them. The way Prescott spoiled her and
+indulged her, as though she were a little dressed-up cat in a
+London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman accustomed to
+throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head, was simply
+sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's
+infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. Jaffery
+talked (not before Liosha, but to Adrian and myself, that night,
+after the ladies had gone to bed) as if the girl had woven a Vivien
+spell around his poor friend. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's
+way. . . .</p>
+<p>At all events, whether Jaffery was jealous or not, it is certain
+that Prescott fell wildly, blindly, overwhelmingly in love with
+Liosha. Considering the close intimacy of their lives; considering
+that they were in ceaseless contact with this splendid creature,
+untrammelled by any convention, daughter of the earth, yet chaste
+as her own mountain winds; and considering that both of them were
+hot-blooded men, the only wonder is that they did not fly at each
+other's throats, or dash in each other's heads with stones, after
+the fashion of prehistoric males. It is my well-supported
+conviction, however, that Jaffery, honest old bear, seeing his
+comrade's very soul set upon the honey, trotted off and left him to
+it, and made pretence (to satisfy his ursine conscience) of
+growling his sarcastic disapproval.</p>
+<p>"The devil of it was," he declared that night, with a sweep of
+his arm that sent a full glass of whiskey and soda hurtling across
+space to my bookshelves and ruining some choice bindings&mdash;"the
+devil of it was," said he, after expressing rueful contrition,
+"that she treated him like a dog, whereas I could do anything I
+liked with her. But she married him."</p>
+<p>Of course she married him. Most Albanian young women in her
+position would have married a brave and handsome Englishman of
+incalculable wealth&mdash;even if they had not Liosha's ulterior
+motives. And beyond question Liosha had ulterior motives. Prescott
+espoused her cause hotly. He convinced her that he was a power in
+Europe. As a Reuter correspondent he did indeed possess power. He
+would make the civilised world ring with this tale of bloodshed and
+horror. He would beard Sultans in their lairs and Emperors in their
+dens. He would bring down awful vengeance on the heads of her
+enemies. How Sultans and Emperors were to do it was as obscure as
+at the horror-filled hour of their first meeting. But a man
+vehemently in love is notoriously blind to practical
+considerations. Prescott put his life into her hands. She accepted
+it calmly; and I think it was this calmness of acceptance that
+infuriated Jaffery. If she had been likewise caught in the
+whirlpool of a mad passion, Jaffery would have had nothing to say.
+But she did not (so he maintained) care a button for Prescott, and
+Prescott would not believe it. She had promised to marry him. That
+ideal of magnificent womanhood had promised to marry him. They were
+to be married&mdash;think of that, my boy!&mdash;as soon as they
+got back to Scutari and found a British Consul and a priest or two
+to marry them. "Then for God's sake," roared Jaffery, "let us trek
+to Scutari. I'm fed up with playing gooseberry. The Giant
+Gooseberry. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>So they shortened their projected journey and, making a circuit,
+picked up the motor-car&mdash;a joy and wonder to Liosha. She
+wanted to drive it&mdash;over the rutted wagon-tracks that pass for
+roads in Albania&mdash;and such was Prescott's infatuation that he
+would have allowed her to do so. But Jaffery sat an immovable
+mountain of flesh at the wheel and brought them safely to Scutari.
+There arrangements were made for the marriage before the British
+Vice-Consul. On the morning of the ceremony Prescott fell ill. The
+ceremony was, however, performed. Towards evening he was in high
+fever. The next morning typhoid declared itself. In two or three
+days he was dead. He had made a will leaving everything to his
+wife, with Jaffery as sole executor and trustee.</p>
+<p>This sorry ending of poor Prescott's romance&mdash;I never knew
+him, but shall always think of him as a swift and vehement
+spirit&mdash;was told very huskily by Jaffery beneath the wistaria
+arbour. Tears rolled down Barbara's and Doria's cheeks. My wife's
+sympathetic little hand slid into Liosha's. With her other hand
+Liosha fondled it. I am sure it was rather gratitude for this
+little feminine act than poignant emotion that moistened Liosha's
+beautiful eyes.</p>
+<p>"I haven't had much luck, have I?"</p>
+<p>"No, my poor dear, you haven't," cried Barbara in a gush of
+kindness.</p>
+<p>In the course of a few weeks to have one's affianced husband
+murdered and one's legal though nominal husband spirited away by
+disease, seemed in the eyes of my gentle wife to transcend all
+records of human tragedy. Very soon afterwards she made a pretext
+for taking Liosha away from us, and I had the extraordinary
+experience of seeing my proud little Barbara, who loathes the
+caressive insincerities prevalent among women, cross the lawn with
+her arm around Liosha's waist.</p>
+<p>The rest of the bare bones of the story I have already told you.
+Jaffery, after burying his poor comrade, took ship with Liosha and
+went to Cettinje, where he entrusted her to the care of old friends
+of his, the Austrian Consul and his wife, and made her known as the
+widow of Prescott of Reuter's to the British diplomatic
+authorities. Then having his work to do, he started forth again, a
+heavy-hearted adventurer, and, when it was over, he picked up
+Liosha, for whom Frau von Hagen had managed to procure a stock of
+more or less civilised raiment, and brought her to London to make
+good her claim, under Prescott's will, to her dead husband's
+fortune.</p>
+<p>Now this is Jaffery all over. Put him on a battlefield with guns
+going off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of
+a herd of crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation,
+and will telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of
+the born journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life,
+which a child of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and
+he is scared to death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for
+instance, when he arrived in London, or any other sensible woman,
+say, like Frau von Hagen of Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a
+timid maiden lady of forty-five, from her tea-parties and
+Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge Wells, and plants
+her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this disconcerting
+product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady was at her
+wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born baby or
+a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to this
+type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
+the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing
+the fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.</p>
+<p>"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
+day&mdash;they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk
+before dinner&mdash;"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi!
+My dear Jaffery! And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the
+girl to church, why not her own church, the Brompton Oratory or
+Farm Street?"</p>
+<p>"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship&mdash;she
+still calls it Popish, poor dear&mdash;to save her soul alive, or
+anybody else's soul," replied Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara.
+"She's even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal.
+I'll see to Liosha."</p>
+<p>Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous
+of her, but he couldn't dream of it.</p>
+<p>"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And
+there's Franklin. Come to dinner."</p>
+<p>"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha,
+who sat on my right, refreshingly free in her table manners
+(embarrassingly so to my most correct butler), was equally free in
+her speech. She provided me with excellent entertainment. I learned
+many frank truths about Albanian women, for whom, on account of
+their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed the most scathing
+contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, were full size.
+Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
+disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
+grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
+great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth
+Century product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue
+Laundry, merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha,
+for all her yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise
+annoy her enemies, did not greatly regret the loss of the
+distinguished young Albanian cutthroat who was her affianced. Had
+he lived she would have spent the rest of her days in saying, like
+Melisande, "I am not happy." She would have been an instrument of
+pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving drudge, while he went
+triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among the scattered
+Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a whole-hearted
+detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that the
+death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that
+it might have done.</p>
+<p>You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian,
+wanted to run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds
+of civilisation. His daughter (woman the world over) was all for
+hunting. He had spent twenty years in America. By a law of
+gravitation, natural only in that Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago,
+he had come across an Albanian wife. . . .</p>
+<p>Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me
+tell you a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery
+Chayne or Liosha&mdash;except perhaps to shew that there is no
+reason why a Tierra del Fuegan foundling should not run across his
+long-lost brother on Michigan Avenue, and still less reason why
+Albanian male should not meet Albanian female in Armour's
+stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged on, as I said
+on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't see why I
+should not put into them anything I choose.</p>
+<p>An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received
+a representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to
+interview him. The interviewer was a typical American reporter,
+blue-eyed, high cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung,
+courteous, intensely alive, desirous to get to the heart of my
+friend's mystery, and charmingly responsive to his frank welcome.
+They talked. My friend, to give the young man his story, discoursed
+on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of the conglomeration of all
+the races under Heaven. To point his remarks and mark his contrasts
+he used the words "we English" and "you Americans." After a time
+the young man smiled and said: "But am not an American&mdash;at
+least I'm an American citizen, but I'm not a born American."</p>
+<p>"But," cried my friend, "you're the essence of America."</p>
+<p>"No," said the young man, "I'm an Icelander."</p>
+<p>Thus it was natural for Liosha's father to find an Albanian wife
+in Chicago. She too was superficially Americanised. When they
+returned to Albania with their purely American daughter, they at
+first found it difficult to appear superficial Albanians. Liosha
+had to learn Albanian as a foreign language, her parents and
+herself always speaking English among themselves. But the call of
+the blood rang strong in the veins of the elders. Robbery and
+assassination on the heroic scale held for the man an irresistible
+attraction, and he acquired great skill at the business; and the
+woman, who seems to have been of a lymphatic temperament, sank
+without murmuring into the domestic subjection into which she had
+been born. It was only Liosha who rebelled. Hence her complicated
+attitude towards life, and hence her entertaining talk at the
+dinner table.</p>
+<p>I enjoyed myself. So, I think, did everybody. When the ladies
+rose, Jaffery, who was nearest the door, opened it for them to pass
+out, Barbara, the last, lingered for a second or two and laid her
+hand on Jaffery's arm and looked up at him out of her teasing blue
+eyes.</p>
+<p>"My dear Jaff," she said, "what kind of a dinner do you eat when
+you <i>are</i> hungry?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p>Barbara having freed Jaffery from immediate anxieties with
+regard to Liosha, easily persuaded him to pay a longer visit than
+he had proposed. A telephonic conversation with a first distracted,
+then conscience-smitten and then much relieved Euphemia had for
+effect the payment of bills at the Savoy and the retreat of the
+gentle lady to Tunbridge Wells. Liosha remained with us, pending
+certain negotiations darkly carried on by my wife and Doria in
+concert. During this time I had some opportunity of observing her
+from a more philosophic standpoint and my judgment was&mdash;I will
+not say formed&mdash;but aided by Barbara's confidential
+revelations. When not directly thwarted, she seemed to be
+good-natured. She took to Susan&mdash;a good sign; and Susan took
+to her&mdash;a better. Finding that her idea of happiness was to
+sprawl about the garden and let the child run over her and inveigle
+her into childish games and call her "Loshie" (a disrespectful mode
+of address which I had all the pains in the world in persuading
+Barbara to permit) and generally treat her as an animate instrument
+of entertainment, we smoothed down every obstacle that might lie in
+this particular path to beatitude. So many difficulties were
+solved. Not only were we spared the problem of what the deuce to do
+with Liosha during the daytime, but also Barbara was able to send
+the nurse away for a short and much needed holiday. Of course
+Barbara herself undertook all practical duties; but when she
+discovered that Liosha experienced primitive delight in bathing
+Susan&mdash;Susan's bath being a heathen rite in which ducks and
+fish and swimming women and horrible spiders played orgiac parts,
+and in getting up at seven in the morning&mdash;("Good God! Is
+there such an hour?" asked Adrian, when he heard about it)&mdash;in
+order to breakfast with Susan, and in dressing and undressing her
+and brushing her hair, and in tramping for miles by her side while
+with Basset, her vassal, in attendance, Susan rode out on her pony;
+when Barbara, in short, became aware of this useful infatuation,
+she pandered to it, somewhat shamelessly, all the time, however,
+keeping an acute eye on the zealous amateur. If, for instance,
+Liosha had picked a bushel of nectarines and had established
+herself with Susan, in the corner of the fruit garden, for a
+debauch, which would have had, for consequence, a child's funeral,
+Barbara, by some magic of motherhood, sprang from the earth in
+front of them with her funny little smile and her "Only
+one&mdash;and a very ripe one&mdash;for Susan, dear Liosha." And in
+these matters Liosha was as much overawed by Barbara as was
+Susan.</p>
+<p>This, I repeat, was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she
+would have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my
+child was naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She
+was <i>rarissinia avis</i> in the lands of small girls&mdash;one of
+the few points on which Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement.
+No one could have helped falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in
+the case of Liosha, who was an out-of-the-way, incalculable sort of
+creature&mdash;it was a good sign. Perhaps, considering the short
+period during which I had her under close observation, it was the
+best sign. She had grievous faults.</p>
+<p>One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, Barbara burst into
+my dressing-room.</p>
+<p>"Reynolds has given me notice."</p>
+<p>"Oh," said I, not desisting (as is the callous way of husbands
+the world over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of my
+tie. "What for?"</p>
+<p>"Liosha has just gone for her with a pair of scissors."</p>
+<p>"Horrible!" said I, getting the ends even. "I can imagine
+nothing more finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat
+with nail scissors, especially when the subject is unwilling."</p>
+<p>Barbara pished and pshawed. It was no occasion for levity.</p>
+<p>"I agree," said I. The dressing hour is the calmest and most
+philosophic period of the day.</p>
+<p>Barbara came up to me blue eyed and innocent, and with a
+traitorous jerk, undid my beautiful white bow.</p>
+<p>"There, now listen."</p>
+<p>And I, dilapidated wretch, had to listen to the tale of crime.
+It appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a
+ready-made gown&mdash;a model gown I believe is the correct
+term&mdash;insisted on her being properly corseted. Liosha,
+agonisingly constricted, rebelled. The maid was obdurate. Liosha
+flew at her with a pair of scissors. I think I should have done the
+same. Reynolds bolted from the room. So should I have done. I
+sympathised with both of them. Reynolds fled to her mistress, and,
+declaring it to be no part of her duty to wait on tigers, gave
+notice.</p>
+<p>"We can't lose Reynolds," said I.</p>
+<p>"Of course we can't."</p>
+<p>"And we can't pack Liosha off at a moment's notice, so as to
+please Reynolds."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you're too wise altogether," said my wife, and left me to
+the tranquil completion of my dressing.</p>
+<p>Liosha came down to dinner very subdued, after a short, sharp
+interview with Barbara, who, for so small a person, can put on a
+prodigious air of authority. As a punishment for bloodthirsty
+behaviour she had made her wear the gown in the manner prescribed
+by Reynolds; and she had apologised to Reynolds, who thereupon
+withdrew her notice. So serenity again prevailed.</p>
+<p>In some respects Liosha was very childish. The receipt of
+letters, no matter from whom&mdash;even bills, receipts and
+circulars&mdash;gave her overwhelming joy and sense of importance.
+This harmless craze, however, led to another outburst of ferocity.
+Meeting the postman outside the gate she demanded a letter. The man
+looked through his bundle.</p>
+<p>"Nothing for you this morning, ma'am."</p>
+<p>"I wrote to the dressmaker yesterday," said Liosha, "and you've
+got the reply right there."</p>
+<p>"I assure you I haven't," said the postman.</p>
+<p>"You're a liar," cried Liosha, "and I guess I'm going to
+see."</p>
+<p>Whereupon Liosha, who was as strong as a young horse, sprang to
+death-grapple with the postman, a puny little man, pitched him onto
+the side of the road and calmly entered into felonious possession
+of His Majesty's mails. Then finding no letter she cast the whole
+delivery over the supine and gasping postman and marched
+contemptuously into the house.</p>
+<p>The most astonishing part of the business was that in these
+outbreaks of barbarity she did not seem to be impelled by blind
+rage. Most people who heave a postman about a peaceful county would
+do so in a fit of passion, through loss of nerve-control. Not so
+Liosha. She did these things with the bland and deadly air of an
+inexorable Fate.</p>
+<p>The perspiration still beads on my brow when I think of the
+cajoling and bribing and blustering and lying I had to practise in
+order to hush up the matter. As for Liosha, both Jaffery and I
+rated her soundly. I explained loftily that not so many years ago,
+transportation, lifelong imprisonment, death were the penalties for
+the felony which she had committed.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i080.jpg" id="i080.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/080.jpg"><img src="images/080.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.</b></div>
+<p>"You ought to have a jolly good thrashing," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes
+of angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall
+table and handed it to the red-bearded giant.</p>
+<p>"I guess I do," she said. "Beat me."</p>
+<p>And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her
+at her word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing
+without a murmur. What was one to do with such a woman?</p>
+<p>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek.
+Gradually she raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was
+startled to see the most extraordinary doglike submission. He
+frowned portentously and shook his head. Her lips worked, and after
+a convulsive sob or two, she threw herself on the ground, clasped
+his knees, and to our dismay burst into a passion of weeping.
+Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture, like a fairy
+tornado, released us from our embarrassing position. She
+annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.</p>
+<p>"Oh, go away, both of you, go away!"</p>
+<p>So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.</p>
+<p>Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very
+pleasantly. Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight
+(it was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course.
+Adrian and Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to
+justify my position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard
+at a Persian Grammar. Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime
+arranging for Liosha's future. Her organising genius had brought
+Doria's suggestion as to the First Class London Boarding House into
+the sphere of practical things. The Boarding House idea alone would
+not work; but, combine it with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran
+on wheels.</p>
+<p>"Even you," said Barbara, as though I were a sort of
+Schopenhauer, a professional disparager of her sex&mdash;"even you
+have a high opinion of Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>I had. Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine. She was
+not very beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very
+angelic or very anything&mdash;but she was one of those women of
+whom everybody has a high opinion. The impoverished widow of an
+Indian soldierman, with a son soldiering somewhere in India, she
+managed to do a great deal on very small means. She was a woman of
+the world, a woman of character. She knew how to deal with people
+of queer races. Heaven indicated her for appointment by Barbara as
+Liosha's duenna in the Boarding House. Mrs. Considine, herself
+compelled to live in these homes for the homeless, gladly accepted
+the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who happened then
+to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away, so to
+speak, with her contract in her pocket. It was part of the
+programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha's
+education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil
+into her a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and
+gradually root out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to
+death. It was a capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of
+a smile, in which, seeing Barbara's shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I
+suppressed the irony.</p>
+<p>When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most
+care-free fellow alive. His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude
+towards Liosha changed. He established himself as fellow slave with
+her under the whip of Susan's tyranny. It did one good to see these
+two magnificent creatures sporting together for the child's, and
+incidentally their own, amusement. For the first time during their
+intercourse they met on the same plane.</p>
+<p>"She's really quite a good sort," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more
+touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed
+so anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
+puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
+herself to read him little lectures.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him
+one day.</p>
+<p>"Do you think I am?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said
+apologetically&mdash;"when there's one for me to do. And when there
+isn't I kind of prepare myself for the next. For instance I've got
+to keep myself always fit."</p>
+<p>"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
+superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self
+that matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of
+self-development. If a human being is the same at the end of a year
+as he was at the beginning he has made no spiritual progress."</p>
+<p>Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived,"
+said he.</p>
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+<p>"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from
+one year's end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent,
+and so, that I don't live."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every
+one must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the
+conscious striving after spiritual progress is so
+necessary&mdash;and you seem to put it aside. It is such waste of
+life."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.</p>
+<p>She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see&mdash;well,
+what do you do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make
+notes about them in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the
+future. When you come across anything to kill, you kill it. It also
+pleases you to come across anything that calls for an exercise of
+strength. When there is a war or a revolution or anything that
+takes you to your real work, as you call it, you've only got to go
+through it and report what you see."</p>
+<p>"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every
+chap that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign.
+And it isn't every chap that can <i>see</i> the things he ought to
+write about. That's when the training comes in."</p>
+<p>Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession,
+my dear Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the
+Alpha and Omega of things? Don't you see? The real life is
+intellectual, spiritual, emotional. What are your ideals?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools of eyes
+lay the spirituality that made her a mystery so sacred. He, great
+hulking fellow, was a gross lump of clay. Ideals?</p>
+<p>"I don't suppose I have any," said he.</p>
+<p>"But you must. Everybody has, to a certain extent."</p>
+<p>"Well, to ride straight and tell the truth&mdash;like the
+ancient Persians, I suppose it was the Persians&mdash;anyway it's a
+sort of rough code I've got."</p>
+<p>"Have you read Nietzsche?" she asked suddenly.</p>
+<p>He frowned perplexedly. "Nietzsche&mdash;that's the mad superman
+chap, isn't it? No. I've not read a word."</p>
+<p>"I do wish you would. You'll find him so exhilarating. You might
+possibly agree with a lot of what he says. I don't. But he sets you
+thinking."</p>
+<p>She sketched her somewhat prim conception of the Nietzschean
+philosophy, and after listening to it in dumb wonder, he promised
+to carry out her wishes. So, when I came down to my library that
+evening dressed for dinner, I found him, still in morning clothes,
+with "Thus Spake Zarathustra" on his knees, and a bewildered
+expression on his face.</p>
+<p>"Have you read this, Hilary?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I.</p>
+<p>"Understand it?"</p>
+<p>"More or less."</p>
+<p>"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria
+understands it too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he
+rose ponderously and looked down on me with serious
+eyes&mdash;"what the Hell is it all about?"</p>
+<p>I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before
+rushing up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time
+to expound a philosophic system."</p>
+<p>Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression
+and the Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the
+essentials of life, we should have been met with bellows of rude
+and profane derision. I don't believe he had even roughly
+considered what kind of an individuality he had, still less
+enquired into the state of his spiritual being. But the flip of a
+girl he professed so much to despise came along and reduced him to
+a condition of helpless introspection. I cannot say that it lasted
+very long. Psychology and metaphysics and &aelig;sthetics lay
+outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his own
+simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it
+an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual
+superiority. On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the
+subtler mental qualities, videlicet his similitude of the
+bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a
+subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with
+savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of
+tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life.
+He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a
+successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with
+Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.</p>
+<p>Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had
+laughed over him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had
+guessed (with Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt,
+found in his humility something pathetic which was lost to Adrian.
+The latter only saw the blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews
+and sinews, at the mercy of anything in petticoats, from Susan
+upward. I disagreed. He was not at the mercy of Liosha.</p>
+<p>"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library,
+Jaffery having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about
+in mortal terror of her?"</p>
+<p>"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an
+abominable nuisance&mdash;a millstone round his neck&mdash;a
+responsibility&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too
+probable huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and
+Doria he knows he's safe&mdash;spared the worst&mdash;so he yields
+and they pick him up&mdash;look at him and stand him on his head
+and do whatever they darn well like to him; but with Liosha he
+knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued, after having lit a
+cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his way. With
+Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of
+marriage or nothing."</p>
+<p>"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon
+think of marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."</p>
+<p>"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal
+funk lest his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her
+pedestal and with resistless hands take him away and marry
+him."</p>
+<p>"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the
+day," said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of
+observation."</p>
+<p>For some unaccountable reason Adrian's pale face flushed
+scarlet. He broke out vexedly:</p>
+<p>"I don't see what my imaginative work has got to do with the
+trivialities of ordinary life. As a matter of fact," he added,
+after a pause, "the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and
+it's the same imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with
+Jaffery and this unqualifiable lady."</p>
+<p>"All right, my dear man," said I, pacifically. "Probably you're
+right and I'm wrong. I was only talking lightly. And speaking of
+imagination&mdash;what about your next book?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, damn the next book," said he, flicking the ash off his
+cigarette. "I've got an idea, of course. A jolly good idea. But I'm
+not worrying about it yet."</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He threw his cigarette into the grate. How, in the name of
+common sense, could he settle down to work? Wasn't his head full of
+his approaching marriage? Could he see at present anything beyond
+the thing of dream and wonder that was to be his wife? I was a
+cold-blooded fish to talk of novel-writing.</p>
+<p>"But you'll have to get into it sometime or other," said I.</p>
+<p>"Of course. As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down
+to a normal life in the flat."</p>
+<p>"What does Doria think of the new idea?"</p>
+<p>Thousands who knew him not were looking forward to Adrian
+Boldero's new book. We, who loved him, were peculiarly interested.
+Somehow or other we had not touched before so intimately on the
+subject. To my surprise he frowned and snapped impatient
+fingers.</p>
+<p>"I haven't told Doria anything about it. It isn't my way. My
+work's too personal a thing, even for Doria. She understands. I
+know some fellows tell their plots to any and everybody&mdash;and
+others, if they don't do that, lay bare their artistic souls to
+those near and dear to them. Well, I can't. A word, no matter how
+loving, of adverse criticism, a glance even that was not
+sympathetic would paralyse me, it would shatter my faith in the
+whole structure I had built up. I can't help it. It's my nature. As
+I told you two or three months ago, it has always been my instinct
+to work in the dark. I instanced my First at Cambridge. How much
+more powerful is the instinct when it's a question of a vital
+created thing like a novel? My dear Hilary, you're the man I'm
+fondest of in the world. You know that. But don't worry me about my
+work. I can't stand it. It upsets me. Doria, heart of my heart and
+soul of my soul, has promised not to worry me. She sees I must be
+free from outside influences&mdash;no matter how closely
+near&mdash;but still outside. And you must promise too."</p>
+<p>"My dear old boy," said I, somewhat confused by this impassioned
+exposition of the artistic temperament, "you've only got to express
+the wish&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I know," said he. "Forgive me." He laughed and lit another
+cigarette. "But Wittekind and the editor of <i>Fowler's</i> in
+America&mdash;I've sold him the serial rights&mdash;are shrieking
+out for a synopsis. I'm damned if I'm going to give 'em a synopsis.
+They get on my nerves. And&mdash;we're intimate enough friends, you
+and I, for me to confess it&mdash;so do our dearest Barbara and old
+Jaff, and you yourself, when you want to know how I'm getting on.
+Look, dear old Hilary"&mdash;he laughed again and threw himself
+into an armchair&mdash;"giving birth to a book isn't very much
+unlike giving birth to a baby. It's analogical in all sorts of
+ways. Well, some women, as soon as the thing is started, can talk
+quite freely&mdash;sweetly and delicately&mdash;I haven't a word to
+say against them&mdash;to all their women friends about it. Others
+shrink. There's something about it too near their innermost souls
+for them to give their confidence to anyone. Well, dear old
+Hilary&mdash;that's how I feel about the novel."</p>
+<p>He spoke from his heart. I understood&mdash;like Doria.</p>
+<p>"Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls it 'the sorrowful, great
+gift,'" said I. "We who haven't got it can only bow to those who
+have."</p>
+<p>Adrian rose and took a few strides about the library.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I've been talking a lot of inflated nonsense. It
+must sound awfully like swelled head. But you know it isn't, don't
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Don't he an idiot," said I. "Let us talk of something
+else."</p>
+<p>We did not return to the subject.</p>
+<p>In the course of time came Mrs. Considine to carry off Liosha to
+the First Class Boarding House which she had found in Queen's Gate.
+Liosha left us full of love for Barbara and Susan and I think of
+kindly feeling for myself. A few days afterwards Jaffery went off
+to sail a small boat with another lunatic in the Hebrides. A little
+later Doria and Adrian went to pay a round of short family visits
+beginning with Mrs. Boldero. So before August was out, Barbara and
+Susan and I found ourselves alone.</p>
+<p>"Now," said I, "I can get through some work."</p>
+<p>"Now," said Barbara, "we can run over to Dinard."</p>
+<p>"What?" I shouted.</p>
+<p>"Dinard," she said, softly. "We always go. We only put it off
+this year on account of visitors."</p>
+<p>"We definitely made up our minds," I retorted, "that we weren't
+going to leave this beautiful garden. You know I never change my
+mind. I'm not going away."</p>
+<p>Barbara left the room, whistling a musical comedy air.</p>
+<p>We went to Dinard.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p>There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by
+writing descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so
+many pebbly facts into such a small compass. They know the names of
+everybody who attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of
+poor relations. With the cold accuracy of an encyclop&aelig;dia,
+and with expert technical discrimination, they mention the various
+fabrics of which the costumes of bride and bridesmaids were
+composed. They catalogue the wedding presents with the correct
+names of the donors. They remember what hymns were sung and who
+signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the honeymoon.
+They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
+departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their
+accounts naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be
+faithful records of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word
+that brings a scene before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are
+never collected and published in book form.</p>
+<p>Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria
+and Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away
+and presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This
+is a full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in
+useful some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in
+bodily."</p>
+<p>I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end
+it in despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure
+up to my mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it
+back to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.</p>
+<p>And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as
+legally and irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of
+a distinguished congregation assembled in a fashionable London
+church could marry them. Of what actually took place I have the
+confused memory of the mere man. I know that it was magnificent.
+All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft were splendidly united.
+Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria, dark eyed, without
+a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek, looked more
+elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was best man,
+vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by the
+altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
+set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
+mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . .
+. Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and
+shook hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude
+of one accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving
+from church to reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox
+manner of the superior husband, at the modern wedding.</p>
+<p>"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic
+of marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and
+never knew his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring
+but the symbol of the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the
+expression of a hope for a prolific union? The satin slipper tied
+on to the carriage or thrown after it? Good luck? No such thing. It
+was once part of the marriage ceremony for the bridegroom to tap
+the wife with a shoe to symbolise his assertion of and her
+acquiescence in her entire subjection."</p>
+<p>"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara
+sweetly. "Did you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."</p>
+<p>I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do
+with the subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"</p>
+<p>She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course
+not."</p>
+<p>Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.</p>
+<p>It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in
+Park Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage.
+He had been very hearty and booming all the time, the human
+presentment of a devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great
+laugh thundering cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected
+the heterogeneous gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and
+pursy lips vibrated into smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have
+never attended, and I am sure it was nothing but Jaffery's
+pervasive influence that infused vitality into the deadly and
+decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich Silenic
+personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of
+Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and
+apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail
+of Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had
+managed to make a journalistic reputation as a great war and
+foreign correspondent. Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an
+inch or two aside. I saw him mingle with an alien crowd, and, by
+what On the surface appeared to be sheer brute full-bloodedness,
+compel them to his will. The wedding was not to be a hollow clang
+of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all hearts. In order
+that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be memorable he had
+instinctively put out the forces that had carried him unscathed
+through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men. He
+could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had
+started the working of the sap of life.</p>
+<p>As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an
+Elizabethan spaciousness. . . . There was no hugger-mugger escape
+of travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal
+progress through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of
+the Ceremonies, exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted
+them to their glittering carriage and pair&mdash;and, unconscious
+of anthropological truth, threw the slipper of woman's humiliation.
+The carriage drove off amid the cheers of the multitude. Jaffery
+stood and watched it until it disappeared round the curve. In my
+eagerness to throw the unnecessarily symbolic rice I had followed
+and stayed a foot or two away from him; and then I saw his face
+change&mdash;just for a few seconds. All the joyousness was
+stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists
+of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and
+unclenched themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly
+he gulped something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me
+by the shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you
+wish you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or
+Honolulu&mdash;wherever you chose without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He
+linked his arm in mine, and said in what he thought was a whisper:
+"For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to find a real drink."</p>
+<p>We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons
+were set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda
+and poured it down his throat.</p>
+<p>"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.</p>
+<p>"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his
+frock coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me
+a suit of armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."</p>
+<p>I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see
+that transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the
+discomfort of the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with
+the swallowing of the huge jorum of alcohol.</p>
+<p>Of course I told Barbara all about it&mdash;it is best to
+establish your wife in the habit of thinking you tell her
+everything&mdash;and she was more than usually gentle to Jaffery.
+We carried him down with us to Northlands that afternoon, calling
+at his club for a suit-case. In the car he tucked a very tired and
+comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his great arm. There was
+something pathetically tender in the gathering of the child to him.
+Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the harmonics of
+chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were alone
+together, she said with tears very near her eyes:</p>
+<p>"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"</p>
+<p>"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the
+tongue of an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still
+earth-bound."</p>
+<p>The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her
+hand.</p>
+<p>"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love
+you."</p>
+<p>For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is
+praise indeed.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are
+going to be happy?"</p>
+<p>"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two
+people can possibly be."</p>
+<p>She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were
+both of them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods.
+I avowed absolute agreement.</p>
+<p>"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if
+Jaffery had come along first and there had been no question of
+Adrian. Would they have been happy?"</p>
+<p>Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you
+satisfied? You have made one match&mdash;you, and you'll pardon me
+for saying so, not Heaven&mdash;and now you want to unmake it and
+make a brand-new hypothetical one."</p>
+<p>"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."</p>
+<p>I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain,
+kissed her and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled,
+conscious of triumph over me.</p>
+<p>During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the
+part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his
+homelessness&mdash;she had an eerie way of treading on delicate
+ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn. That was his home. He
+had no possessions.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got
+about three hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London
+Repository, to say nothing of skins and as fine a collection of
+modern weapons as you ever saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up
+style to-morrow."</p>
+<p>"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a
+dinner plate or a fork?"</p>
+<p>"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be
+called for in all the shops of London."</p>
+<p>He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture.
+I laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a
+thousand pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of
+household clutter, he certainly is that household clutter's
+potential owner. Between us we developed this incontrovertible
+proposition.</p>
+<p>"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's
+Stores and purchase a comfortable home?"</p>
+<p>"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for
+the interior of China the day after to-morrow."</p>
+<p>"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.</p>
+<p>"The interior of China?" I re&euml;choed, with masculine
+definiteness.</p>
+<p>"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into
+hysterics if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me,
+Barbara. It would do him a thundering lot of good."</p>
+<p>At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately.
+I need not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the
+interior of China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long
+he would be away.</p>
+<p>"A year or two," he replied casually.</p>
+<p>"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no
+conception of time and space."</p>
+<p>"A couple of years pass pretty quick," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"So does a lifetime," said I.</p>
+<p>Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the
+amenities of civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again.
+In vain he pleaded his job, the valuable copy he would send to his
+paper. I proved to him it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he
+could not understand why we should be startled by the announcement
+that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to lose
+himself for a couple of years in Crim Tartary.</p>
+<p>"Suppose I sprang a thing like that on you," said I. "Suppose I
+told you I was starting to-morrow morning for the South Pole. What
+would you say?"</p>
+<p>"I should say you were a liar. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>In his mirth he rubbed his hands and feet together like a
+colossal fly. The joke lasted him for the rest of the evening.</p>
+<p>So, the next morning Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as
+ever I get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We
+felt sad; not only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something
+in the quiet backwater of our life, but also because we knew that
+he went away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was
+not sheer <i>Wanderlust</i> that had driven him into the
+wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping from the
+unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he betook himself
+would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . . It was
+just as well he had gone, said Barbara.</p>
+<p>A man of intense appetites and primitive passions, like Jaffery,
+for all his loyalty and lovable childishness, was better away from
+the neighbour's wife who had happened to engage his affections. If
+he lost his head. . . .</p>
+<p>I had once seen Jaffery lose his head and the spectacle did not
+make for edification. It was before I was married, when Jaffery,
+during his London sojourn, had the spare bedroom in a set of rooms
+I rented in Tavistock Square. At a florist's hard by, a young
+flower seller&mdash;a hussy if ever there was one&mdash;but
+bewitchingly pretty&mdash;carried on her poetical avocation; and of
+her did my hulking and then susceptible friend become ragingly
+enamoured. I repeat, she was a hussy. She had no intention of
+giving him more than the tip of her pretty little shoe to kiss; but
+Jaffery, reading the promise of secular paradise in her eyes, had
+no notion of her little hard intention. He squandered himself upon
+her and she led him a dog's life. Of course I remonstrated, argued,
+implored. It was like asking a hurricane politely not to blow. Her
+name I remember was Gwenny. One summer evening she had promised to
+meet him outside the house in Tavistock Square&mdash;he had
+arranged to take her to some Earl's Court Exhibition, where she
+could satiate a depraved passion for switch-backs, water-chutes and
+scenic railways. At the appointed hour Jaffery stood in waiting on
+the pavement. I sat on the first floor balcony, alternately reading
+a novel and watching him with a sardonic eye. Presently Gwenny
+turned the corner of the square&mdash;our house was a few doors
+up&mdash;and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the
+square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in
+the height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously
+accompanied by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young
+man; his arm was round her waist, and her arm was around his, in
+the approved enlinkment of couples in her class who are keeping
+company, or, in other words, are, or are about to be, engaged to be
+married. A curious shock vibrated through Jaffery's frame. He
+flamed red. He saw red. Gwenny shot a supercilious glance and
+tossed her chin. Jaffery crossed the road and barred their path. He
+fished in his pocket for some coins and addressed the scrubby man,
+who, poor wretch, had never heard of Jaffery's existence.</p>
+<p>"Here's twopence to go away. Take the twopence and go away. Damn
+you&mdash;take the twopence."</p>
+<p>The man retreated in a scare.</p>
+<p>"Won't you take the twopence? I should advise you to."</p>
+<p>Anybody but a born fool or a hero would have taken the twopence.
+I think the scrubby man had the makings of a hero. He looked up at
+the blazing giant.</p>
+<p>"You be damned!" said he, retreating a pace.</p>
+<p>Then, suddenly, with the swiftness of a panther, Jaffery sprang
+on him, grasped him in the back by a clump of clothes&mdash;it
+seemed, with one hand, so quickly was it done&mdash;and hurled him
+yards away over the railings. I can still see the flight of the
+poor devil's body in mid air until it fell into a holly-bush. With
+another spring he turned on the paralysed Gwenny, caught her up
+like a doll and charged with her now screaming violently against
+the shut solid oak front door. A flash of instinct suggested a
+latchkey. Holding the girl anyhow, he fumbled in his pocket. It was
+an August London evening. The Square was deserted; but at Gwenny's
+shrieks, neighbouring windows were thrown up and eager heads
+appeared. It was very funny. There was Jaffery holding a squalling
+girl in one arm and with the other exploring available pockets for
+his latchkey. I had one of the inspirations of my life. I rushed
+into my bedroom, caught up the ewer from my washstand, went out
+onto the extreme edge of the balcony and cast the gallon or so of
+water over the heads of the struggling pair. The effect was
+amazing. Jaffery dropped the girl. The girl, once on her feet, fled
+like a cat. Jaffery looked up idiotically. I flourished the empty
+jug. I think I threatened to brain him with it if he stirred. Then
+people began to pour out of the houses and a policeman sprang up
+from nowhere. I went down and joined the excited throng. There was
+a dreadful to-do. It cost Jaffery five hundred pounds to mitigate
+the righteous wrath of the young man in the holly-bush, and save
+himself from a dungeon-cell. The scrubby young man, who, it
+appeared, had been brought up in the fishmongering trade, used the
+five hundred pounds to set up for himself in Ealing, where very
+shortly afterwards Gwenny joined him, and that, save an enduring
+ashamedness on the part of Jaffery, was the end of the matter.</p>
+<p>So, if Jaffery did lose his head over Doria, there might be the
+devil to pay. We sighed and reconciled ourselves to his exile in
+Crim Tartary. After all, it was his business in life to visit the
+dark places of the earth and keep the world informed of history in
+the making. And it was a business which could not possibly be
+carried on in the most cunningly devised home that could be
+purchased at Harrod's Stores.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p>In the course of time Adrian and Doria returned from Venice,
+their heads full of pictures and lagoons and palaces, and took
+proud possession of their spacious flat in St. John's Wood. They
+were radiantly happy, very much in love with each other. Having
+brought a common vision to bear upon the glories of nature and art
+which they had beheld, they were spared the little squabbles over
+matters of &aelig;sthetic taste which often are so disastrous to
+the serenity of a honeymoon. Touchingly they expounded their views
+in the first person plural. Even Adrian, whom I must confess to
+have regarded as an unblushing egotist, seldom delivered himself of
+an egotistical opinion. "We don't despise the Eclectics," said he.
+And&mdash;"We prefer the Lombardic architecture to the purely
+Venetian," said Doria. And "we" found good in Italian wines and
+"we" found nothing but hideousness in Murano glass. They were,
+therefore, in perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The
+only difference I could see between them was that Adrian loved to
+wallow in the comfort of a club or another person's house, but
+insisted on elegant austerity in his own home, whereas Doria loved
+elegant austerity everywhere. So they had a pure Jacobean entrance
+hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire bedroom, and as far as I
+could judge by the barrenness of the apartment, a Spartan study for
+Adrian.</p>
+<p>On our first visit, they triumphantly showed us round the
+establishment. We came last to the study.</p>
+<p>"No really fine imaginative work," said Adrian, with a wave of
+the hand indicating the ascetic table and chair, the iron safe, the
+bookcase and the bare walls&mdash;"no really fine imaginative work
+can be done among luxurious surroundings. Pictures distract one's
+attention, arm-chairs and sofas invite to sloth. This is my ideal
+of a novelist's workshop."</p>
+<p>"It's more like a workhouse," said Barbara, with a shiver. "Or a
+condemned cell. But even a condemned cell would have a plank bed in
+it."</p>
+<p>"You don't understand a bit," said Doria, with a touch of
+resentment at adverse criticism of her paragon's idiosyncrasies,
+"although Adrian has tried to explain it to you. It's specially
+arranged for concentration of mind. If it weren't for the necessity
+of having something to sit upon and something to write at and a few
+necessary reference books and a lock-up place, we should have had
+nothing in the room at all. When Adrian wants to relax and live his
+ordinary human life, he only has to walk out of the door and there
+he is in the midst of beautiful things."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I quite see, dear," said Barbara, with a familiar little
+flash in her blue eyes. "But do you think a leather seat for that
+hard wooden chair&mdash;what the French call a
+<i>rond-de-cuir</i>&mdash;would very greatly impair the poor
+fellow's imagination?"</p>
+<p>"It might be economical, too," said I, "in the way of saving
+shininess!&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Adrian laughed. "It does look a bit hard, darling," said he.</p>
+<p>"We'll get a leather seat to-day," replied Doria.</p>
+<p>But she did not smile. Evidently to her the spot on which Adrian
+sat was sacrosanct. The room was the Holy of Holies where mortal
+man put on immortality. Flippant comment sounded like blasphemy in
+her ears. She even grew somewhat impatient at our lingering in the
+august precincts, although they had not yet been consecrated by
+inspired labour. Their unblessed condition was obvious. On the
+large library table were a couple of brass candlesticks with fresh
+candles (Adrian could not work by electric light), a couple of
+reams of scribbling paper, an inkpot, an immaculate blotting pad,
+three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's whimsies to write
+always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an office
+stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this last
+monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination
+and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road,
+but not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of
+challenge from Doria, I forebore to make ignorant criticism.</p>
+<p>In the bedroom while Barbara was putting on her veil and
+powdering her nose (this may be what grammarians call a <i>hysteron
+proteron</i>&mdash;but with women one never can tell)&mdash;Doria
+broke into confidences not meet for masculine ears.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"Oh, darling," she cried, looking at Barbara with great
+awe-stricken eyes, "you can't tell what it means to be married to a
+genius like Adrian. I feel like one of the Daughters of Men that
+has been looked upon by one of the Sons of God. It's so strange. In
+ordinary life he's so dear and human&mdash;responsive, you know, to
+everything I feel and think&mdash;and sometimes I quite forget he's
+different from me. But at others, I'm overwhelmed by the thought of
+the life going on inside his soul that I can never, never
+share&mdash;I can only see the spirit that conceived 'The Diamond
+Gate'&mdash;don't you understand, darling?&mdash;and that is even
+now creating some new thing of wonder and beauty. I feel so little
+beside him. What more can I give him beyond what I have given?"</p>
+<p>Barbara took the girl's tense face between her two hands and
+smiled and kissed her.</p>
+<p>"Give him," said she, "ammoniated quinine whenever he
+sneezes."</p>
+<p>Then she laughed and embraced the Heavenly One's wife, who, for
+the moment, had not quite decided whether to feel outraged or not,
+and discoursed sweet reasonableness.</p>
+<p>"I should treat your genius, dear, just as I treat my stupid old
+Hilary."</p>
+<p>She proceeded to describe the treatment. What it was, I do not
+know, because Barbara refused to tell me. But I can make a shrewd
+guess. It's a subtle scheme which she thinks is hidden from me; but
+really it is so transparent that a babe could see through it. I,
+like any wise husband, make, however, a fine assumption of
+blindness, and consequently lead a life of unruffled comfort.</p>
+<p>Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my
+doubts. Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old
+Hilary's chair and worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent
+wife and I've no fault to find with her; but she has never done
+that, and she is the last woman in the world to counsel any wife to
+do it. Personally, I should hate to be worshipped. In worship hours
+I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a sense of congruity can
+imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship would bore me to
+paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as the new
+hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more he
+was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration
+he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette&mdash;a way
+which Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown
+with the grape on Mount Cithaeron&mdash;and a way of exhaling a
+cloud of smoke, holier than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of
+the adorer, which moved me at once to envy and exasperation.</p>
+<p>Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either
+in their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands
+than in St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of
+upholstered furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox
+on his tongue and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while
+Doria, chin on palm, and her great eyes set on him, drank in all
+the wonder of this miraculous being.</p>
+<p>I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the
+man."</p>
+<p>Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of
+view. . . .</p>
+<p>"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking.
+When she has turned him into the idiot&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.</p>
+<p>"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"</p>
+<p>"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I.
+"The unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole
+consistency."</p>
+<p>Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but
+found none, the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a
+while and then, quickly, a smile replaced the frown.</p>
+<p>"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she
+said sweetly.</p>
+<p>I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates
+of a torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she
+vanished from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned
+high-falutin' phrase is the best description I can give of the
+elusive uncapturable nature of this wife of mine. It is a pity that
+she has so little to do with the story of Jaffery which I am trying
+to relate, for I should like to make her the heroine. You see, I
+know her so well, or imagine I do, which comes to the same thing,
+and I should love to present you with a solution, of this
+perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled conundrum that is
+Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a <i>raisonneur</i> in
+the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the background.
+<i>Paullo majora canamus</i>. Let us come to the horses.</p>
+<p>All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha. As deputies for
+the absent trustee we received periodical reports from the
+admirable Mrs. Considine, and entertained both ladies for an
+occasional week-end. On the whole, her demeanour in the Queen's
+Gate boarding-house was satisfactory. At first trouble arose over a
+young curly haired Swiss waiter who had won her sympathy in the
+matter of a broken heart. She had entered the dining-room when he
+was laying the table and discovered him watering the knives and
+forks with tears. Unaccustomed to see men weep, she enquired the
+cause. He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a woeful tale of a
+faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and well-to-do. He had
+looked forward to marry her at the end of the year, and to pass an
+unruffled life in the snugness of the <i>delicatessen</i> shop
+which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had
+announced her engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among
+the chitterlings and liver-sausages was shattered. Herr Gott! what
+was he to do? Liosha counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and
+assassination of his rival. To kill another man for her was the
+surest way to a woman's heart. The waiter approved the scheme, but
+lacked the courage&mdash;also the money to go to Neuchatel. Liosha,
+espousing his cause warmly, gave him the latter at once. The former
+she set to work to instil into him. She waylaid him at odd corners
+in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and sought to
+inspire him with the true Balkan spirit. She even supplied him with
+an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp. At last, the poor craven,
+finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the
+mistress of the boarding-house protection against his champion.
+Mrs. Considine, called into consultation, was informed that Mrs.
+Prescott must either cease from instigating the waiters to commit
+murder or find other quarters. Liosha curled a contemptuous
+lip.</p>
+<p>"If you think I'm going to have anything more to do with the
+little skunk, you're mistaken."</p>
+<p>And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room,
+approached her with the tray, she waved him off.</p>
+<p>"See here," she said calmly, "just you keep out of my way or I
+might tread on you."</p>
+<p>Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the
+genteel assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole
+difficulty by bolting from the house, never to return.</p>
+<p>When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter,
+Liosha shrugged her shoulders and laughed.</p>
+<p>"I guess," she said, "if a man loves a woman strongly enough to
+cry for her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted
+in, without being told."</p>
+<p>"But you don't seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to
+take the life of a human being," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I can understand how you feel," Liosha admitted. "But I don't
+feel about it the same as you. I've been brought up different."</p>
+<p>"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father
+made his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished
+with the pigs he took on humans who displeased him."</p>
+<p>"And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she
+extracted a promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a
+knife into anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so
+doing.</p>
+<p>But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace,
+Liosha led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house. If she
+now and then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits
+and free expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them
+a chronic topic of conversation. A large though somewhat scornful
+generosity also established her in their esteem. She would lend or
+give anything she possessed. When one of the forlorn and
+woollen-shawled old maids fell ill, she sat up of nights with her,
+and in spite of her ignorance of nursing, which was as vast as that
+of a rhinoceros, magnetised the fragile lady into well-being. I
+think she was fairly happy. If London had been situated amid gorges
+and crags and ravines and granite cliffs she would have been
+completely so. She yearned for mountains. Mrs. Considine to satisfy
+this nostalgia took her for a week's trip to the English Lakes. She
+returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for unimportant
+undulations, and declaring her preference for London. So in London
+she remained.</p>
+<p>In these early stages of our acquaintance with Liosha, she
+counted in our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even
+in the crises of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not
+rob us of our night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy
+personality whose quaint vagaries afforded us constant amusement
+than as an intense human soul. The working out of her destiny did
+not come within the sphere of our emotional sympathies like that of
+Adrian and Doria. The latter were of our own kind and class, bound
+to us not only by the common traditions of centuries, but by ties
+of many years' affection. It is only natural that we should have
+watched them more closely and involved ourselves more intimately in
+their scheme of things.</p>
+<p>The first fine rapture of house-pride having grown calm, the
+Bolderos settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life
+tempered by the amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian
+worked, Doria read Dante and attended performances of the
+Intellectual Drama; when Adrian relaxed, she cooked dainties in a
+chafing dish and accompanied him to Musical Comedy. They
+entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out into cultivated
+society. The Art of Life, they declared, was to catch atmosphere,
+whatever that might mean. Adrian explained, with the gentle pity of
+one addressing himself to the childish intelligence.</p>
+<p>"It's merely the perfect freedom of mental adaptation. To
+discuss pragmatism while eating oysters would be destructive to the
+enjoyment afforded by the delicate sense of taste, whereas, to let
+one's mind wander from the plane of philosophic thought when
+preparing for a Hauptmann or a Strindberg play would lead to
+nothing less than the disaster of disequilibrium."</p>
+<p>Saying this he caught my cold, unsympathetic gaze, but I think I
+noticed the flicker of an eyelid. Doria, however, nodded, in
+wide-eyed approval. So I suppose they really did practise between
+themselves these modal gymnastics. They were all of a piece with
+the "atmospheres" evoked in the various rooms of the flat. To
+Barbara and myself, comfortable Philistines, all this appeared
+exceeding lunatic. But every married couple has a right to lay out
+its plan of happiness in its own way. If we had made taboo of
+irrelevant gossip between the acts of a serious play our evening
+would have been a failure. Theirs would have been, and, in fact,
+was a success. Connubial felicity they certainly achieved: and what
+else but an impertinence is a criticism of the means?</p>
+<p>Easter came. They had been married six months. "The Diamond
+Gate" had been published for nearly a year and was still selling in
+England and America. Adrian flourishing his first half-yearly
+cheque in January had vowed he had no idea there was so much money
+in the world. He basked in Fortune's sunshine. But for all the
+basking and all the syllabus of the perfect existence, and all his
+unquestionable love for Doria, and all her worship for him together
+with its manifestation in her admirable care for his material
+well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began to strike me as
+a man lacking some essential of happiness. They spent a week or so
+with us at Northlands. Adrian confessed dog-weariness. His looks
+confirmed his words. A vertical furrow between the brows and a
+little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair
+moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face. In
+moments of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a
+squint, appeared in his blue eyes. He was no longer debonair, no
+longer the lightly laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox
+seeing flippancy in the Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in
+Little Tich. He was morose and irritable. He had acquired a nervous
+habit of secretly rubbing his thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips
+when Doria, in her pride, spoke of his work, which amounted almost
+to ill-breeding. It was only late at night during our last smoke
+that he assumed a semblance of the old Adrian; and by that time he
+had consumed as much champagne and brandy as would have rendered
+jocose the prophet Jeremiah.</p>
+<p>He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From
+Doria we learned the cause. For the last three months he had been
+working at insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight
+he breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic
+workroom and remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he
+began a three-hour spell of work. At night a four hours'
+spell&mdash;from nine to one, if they had no evening engagement,
+from midnight to four o'clock in the morning if they had been
+out.</p>
+<p>"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of
+this maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't
+let him do it. He is killing himself."</p>
+<p>"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting
+out creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous
+novelists whom I meet at the Athen&aelig;um have told me so
+themselves. Even prodigious people like Sir Walter Scott and
+Zola&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist
+must be a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why&mdash;those two
+that you've mentioned&mdash;they slung out stuff by the bucketful.
+It didn't matter to them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the
+rhythm and the balance and the beauty of every sentence he
+writes&mdash;to say nothing of the subtlety of his analysis and the
+perfect drawing of his pictures. My dear, good people"&mdash;she
+threw out her hands in an impatient gesture&mdash;"you don't know
+what you're talking about. How can you? It's impossible for you to
+conceive&mdash;it's almost impossible even for me to
+conceive&mdash;the creative workings of the mind of a man of
+genius. Four hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four
+hours a day is stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But
+you can't imagine that work like Adrian's is to be done in this
+dead mechanical way."</p>
+<p>"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My
+admiration for Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I
+repeat that no human brain since the beginning of time has been
+capable of spinning cobwebs of fancy for twelve hours a day, day in
+and day out for months at a time. Look at your husband. He has
+tried it. Does he sleep well?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Has he a hearty appetite?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Is he a light-hearted, cheery sort of chap to have about the
+place?"</p>
+<p>"He's naturally tired, after his winter's work," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"He's played out," said I, "and if you are a wise woman, you'll
+take him away for a couple of months' rest, and when he gets back,
+see that he works at lower pressure."</p>
+<p>Doria promised to do her best; but she sighed.</p>
+<p>"You don't realise Adrian's iron will."</p>
+<p>Once more I recognised with a shock that I did not know my
+Adrian. I used to think one could blow the thistledown fellow about
+whithersoever one pleased. Of the two, Doria seemed to have
+unquestionably the stronger will-power.</p>
+<p>"Surely," said I, "you can twist him round your little
+finger."</p>
+<p>Doria sighed again&mdash;and a wanly indulgent smile played
+about her lips.</p>
+<p>"You two dear people are so sensible, that it makes me almost
+angry to see how you can't begin to understand Adrian. As a man, of
+course I have a certain influence over him. But as an
+artist&mdash;how can I? He's a thing apart from me altogether. I
+know perfectly well that thousands of artists' wives wreck their
+happiness through sheer, stupid jealousy of their husbands' art.
+I'm not such a narrow-minded, contemptible woman." She threw her
+little head up proudly. "I should loathe myself if I grudged one
+hour that Adrian gave to his work instead of to me."</p>
+<p>This time Barbara and I sighed, for we realised how vain had
+been our arguments. Our considerably greater knowledge of life, our
+stark common-sense, our deep affection for Adrian counted as naught
+beside the fact that we had no experience whatever in the rearing
+of a genius.</p>
+<p>That word "genius" came too often from Doria's lips. At first it
+irritated me; then I heard it with morbid detestation. In the
+course of a more or less intimate conversation with Adrian, I let
+slip a mild expression of my feelings. He groaned
+sympathetically.</p>
+<p>"I wish to heaven she wouldn't do it," said he. "It puts a man
+into such a horrible false position towards himself. It's beautiful
+of her, of course&mdash;it's her love for me. But it gets on my
+nerves. Instead of sitting down at my desk with nothing in my mind
+but my day's work to slog through, I hear her voice and I have to
+say to myself, 'Go to. I am a genius. I mustn't write like any
+common fellow. I must produce the work of a genius.' It really
+plays the devil with me."</p>
+<p>He walked excitedly about the library, flourishing a cigar and
+scattering the ash about the carpet. I am pernicketty in a few ways
+and hate tobacco ash on my carpet; every room in the house is an
+arsenal of ash trays. In normal mood Adrian punctiliously observed
+the little laws of the establishment. This scattering of cigar ash
+was a sign of spiritual convulsion.</p>
+<p>"Have you explained the matter to Doria?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He halted before me performing his new uncomfortable trick of
+slithering thumb over finger tips.</p>
+<p>"No," he snapped. "How can I?"</p>
+<p>I replied, mildly, that it seemed to be the simplest thing in
+the world. He broke away impatiently, saying that I couldn't
+understand.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, though what there was to understand in so
+elementary a proposition goodness only knows. I was beginning to
+resent this perpetual charge of non-intelligence.</p>
+<p>"I think we had better clear out," he said. "I'm only a damned
+nuisance. I've got this book of mine on the brain"&mdash;he held up
+his head with both hands&mdash;"and I'm not a fit companion for
+anybody."</p>
+<p>I adjured him in familiar terms not to talk rubbish. He was here
+for the repose of country things and freedom from day-infesting
+cares. Already he was looking better for the change. But I could
+not refrain from adding:</p>
+<p>"You wrote 'The Diamond Gate' without turning a hair. Why should
+you worry yourself to death about this new book?"</p>
+<p>When he answered I had the shivering impression of a wizened old
+man speaking to me. The slight cast I had noticed in his blue eyes
+became oddly accentuated.</p>
+<p>"'The Diamond Gate,'" he said, peering at me uncannily, "was
+just a pretty amateur story. The new book is going to stagger the
+soul of humanity."</p>
+<p>"I wish you weren't such a secretive devil," said I. "What's the
+book about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It will do
+you good."</p>
+<p>I put my arm round his shoulders and my hand gave him an
+affectionate grip. My heart ached for the dear fellow, and I
+longed, in the plain man's way, to break down the walls of reserve,
+which like those of the Inquisition Chamber, I felt were closing
+tragically upon him.</p>
+<p>"Come, come," I continued. "Get it out. It's obvious that the
+thing is suffocating you. I'll tell nobody&mdash;not even that
+you've told me&mdash;neither Doria nor Barbara&mdash;it will be the
+confidence of the confessional. You'll be all the better for it.
+Believe me."</p>
+<p>He shrugged himself free from my grasp and turned away; his
+nervous fingers plucked unconsciously at his evening tie until it
+was loosened and the ends hung dissolutely over his shirt
+front.</p>
+<p>"You're very good, Hilary," said he, looking at every spot in
+the room except my eyes. "If I could tell you, I would. But it's an
+enormous canvas. I could give you no idea&mdash;" The furrow
+deepened between his brows&mdash;"If I told you the scheme you
+would get about the same dramatic impression as if you read, say,
+the letter R, in a dictionary. I'm putting into this novel," he
+flickered his fingers in front of me&mdash;"everything that ever
+happened in human life."</p>
+<p>I regarded him in some wonder.</p>
+<p>"My dear fellow," said I, "you can't compress a Liebig's Extract
+of Existence between the covers of a six-shilling novel."</p>
+<p>"I can," said he, "I can!" He thumped my writing table, so that
+all the loose brass and glass on it rattled. "And by God! I'm going
+to do it."</p>
+<p>"But, my dearest friend," I expostulated, "this is absurd. It's
+megalomania&mdash;<i>la folie des grandeurs</i>."</p>
+<p>"It's the divinest folly in the world," said he.</p>
+<p>He threw a cigar stump into the fireplace and poured himself out
+and drank a stiff whisky and soda. Then he laughed in imitation of
+his familiar self.</p>
+<p>"You dear prim old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going
+to come straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and
+twentieth centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. And
+now, good-night."</p>
+<p>He laughed, waved his arm in a cavalier gesture and went from
+the room, slamming the door masterfully behind him.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p>We kept the unreasonable pair at Northlands as long as we could,
+doing all that lay in our power to restore Adrian's idiotically
+impaired health. I motored him about the county; I took him to
+golf, a pastime at which I do not excel; and I initiated him into
+the invigorating mysteries of playing at robbers with Susan. We
+gave a carefully selected dinner-party or two, and accepted on his
+behalf a few discreet invitations. At these
+entertainments&mdash;whether at Northlands or elsewhere&mdash;we
+caused it to be understood that the lion, being sick, should not be
+asked to roar.</p>
+<p>"It's so trying for him," said Doria, "when people he doesn't
+know come up and gush over 'The Diamond Gate'&mdash;especially now
+when his nerves are on edge."</p>
+<p>On the occasion of our second dinner-party, the guests having
+been forewarned of the famous man's idiosyncrasies, no reference
+whatever was made to his achievements. We sat him between two
+pretty and charming women who chattered amusingly to him with what
+I, who kept an eye open and an ear cocked, considered to be a very
+subtly flattering deference. Adrian responded with adequate
+animation. As an ordinary clever, well-bred man of the world he
+might have done this almost mechanically; but I fancied that he
+found real enjoyment in the light and picturesque talk of his two
+neighbours. When the ladies left us, he discussed easy politics
+with the Member for our own division of the County. In the
+drawing-room, afterwards, he played a rubber at bridge, happened to
+hold good cards and smiled an hour away. When the last guest
+departed, he yawned, excused himself on the ground of healthy
+fatigue and went straight off to bed. Barbara and I congratulated
+ourselves on the success of our dinner-party. The next day Adrian
+went about as glum as a dinosaur in a museum, and conveyed, even to
+Susan's childish mind, his desire for solitude. His hang-dog
+dismalness so affected my wife, that she challenged Doria.</p>
+<p>"What in the world is the matter with him, to-day?"</p>
+<p>Doria drew herself up and flashed a glance at Barbara&mdash;they
+were both little bantams of women, one dark as wine, the other fair
+as corn. If ever these two should come to a fight, thought I who
+looked on, it would be to the death.</p>
+<p>"Your friends are very charming, my dear, and of course I've
+nothing to say against them; but I was under the impression that
+every educated person in the English-speaking world knew my
+husband's name, and I consider the way he was ignored last night by
+those people was disgraceful."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear Doria," cried Barbara, aghast, "we thought that
+Adrian was having quite a good time."</p>
+<p>"You may think so, but he wasn't. Adrian's a gentleman and plays
+the game; but you must see it was very galling to him&mdash;and to
+me&mdash;to be treated like any stockbroker&mdash;or
+architect&mdash;or idle man about town."</p>
+<p>"You are unfortunate in your examples," said I, intervening
+judicially. "Pray reflect that there are architects alive whose
+artistic genius is not far inferior to Adrian's."</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean," she snapped.</p>
+<p>"No, we don't, dear," said Barbara dangerously. "We think you're
+a little idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. We took the
+trouble to tell every one of those people that Adrian hated any
+reference to his work, and like decent folk they didn't refer to
+it. There&mdash;now round upon us."</p>
+<p>The pallor deepened a shade in Doria's ivory cheek.</p>
+<p>"You have put me in the wrong, I admit it. But I think it would
+have been better to let us know."</p>
+<p>What could one do with such people? I was inclined to let them
+work out their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but
+Barbara decided otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree
+of lunacy as warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain
+duty to look after them. So we continued to look after our genius
+and his worshipper, and we did it so successfully that before he
+left us he recovered his sleep in some measure, and lost the
+squinting look of strain in his eyes.</p>
+<p>On the morning of their departure I mildly counselled him to
+temper his fine frenzy with common-sense.</p>
+<p>"Knock off the night work," said I.</p>
+<p>He frowned, fidgeted with his feet.</p>
+<p>"I wish to God I hadn't to work at all," said he. "I hate it!
+I'd sooner be a coal-heaver."</p>
+<p>"Bosh!" said I. "I know that you're an essentially idle beggar;
+but you're as proud as Punch of your fame and success and all that
+it means to you."</p>
+<p>"What does it mean after all?"</p>
+<p>"If you talk in that pessimistic way," I said, "you'll make me
+cry. Don't. It means every blessed thing in the world to you. At
+any rate it has meant Doria."</p>
+<p>"I suppose that's true," he grunted. "And I suppose I am
+essentially idle. But I wish the damned thing would get written of
+its own accord. It's having to sit down at that infernal desk that
+gets on my nerves. I have the same horrible apprehension of
+it&mdash;always have&mdash;as one has before a visit to the
+dentist, when you know he's going to drill hell into you."</p>
+<p>"Why do you work in such a depressing room?" I asked. "If I were
+shut up alone in it, I would stick my nose in the air and howl like
+a dog."</p>
+<p>"Oh, the room's all right," said he. Then he looked away
+absently and murmured as if to himself, "It isn't the room."</p>
+<p>"Then what is it?" I persisted.</p>
+<p>He turned with a dreary sort of smile. "It's the born butterfly
+being condemned to do the work of the busy bee."</p>
+<p>A short while afterwards we saw them drive off and watched the
+car disappear round the bend of the drive.</p>
+<p>"Well, my dear," said I, "thank goodness I'm not a man of
+genius."</p>
+<p>"Amen!" said Barbara, fervently.</p>
+<p>As soon as they had settled down in their flat, Adrian began to
+work again, in the same unremitting fashion. The only concession he
+made to consideration of health was to go to bed immediately on his
+return from dinner-parties and theatres instead of spending three
+or four hours in his study. Otherwise the routine of toil went on
+as before. One afternoon, happening to be in town and in the
+neighbourhood of St. John's Wood, I called at the flat with the
+idea of asking Doria for a cup of tea. I also had in my pocket a
+letter from Jaffery which I thought might interest Adrian. The maid
+who opened the door informed me that her mistress was out. Was Mr.
+Boldero in? Yes; but he was working.</p>
+<p>"That doesn't matter," said I. "Tell him I'm here."</p>
+<p>The maid did not dare disturb him. Her orders were absolute. She
+could not refuse to admit me, seeing that I was already in the
+hall; but she stoutly refused to announce me. I argued with the
+damsel.</p>
+<p>"I may have business of the utmost importance with your
+master."</p>
+<p>She couldn't help it. She had her orders.</p>
+<p>"But, my good Ellen," said I&mdash;the minx had actually been in
+our service a couple of years before!&mdash;"suppose the place were
+on fire, what would you do?"</p>
+<p>She looked at me demurely. "I think I should call a policeman,
+sir."</p>
+<p>"You can call one now," said I, "for I'm going to announce
+myself. Don't tell me I'll have to walk over your dead body first,
+for it won't do."</p>
+<p>I know it is not looked upon as a friendly act to interrupt a
+man in his work and to disregard the orders given to his servants,
+but I was irritated by all this Grand Llama atmosphere of
+mysterious seclusion. Besides, I had been walking and felt just a
+little hot and dusty and thirsty, and I felt all the hotter,
+dustier and thirstier for my argument with Ellen.</p>
+<p>"I'll announce myself," I said, and marched to the door of
+Adrian's study. It was locked. I rapped at the door.</p>
+<p>"Who's there?" came Adrian's voice.</p>
+<p>"Me. Hilary."</p>
+<p>"What's the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I happen to be a guest under your roof," said I, with a touch
+of temper.</p>
+<p>"Wait a minute," said he.</p>
+<p>I waited about two. Then the door was unlocked and opened and I
+strode in upon Adrian who looked rather pale and dishevelled.</p>
+<p>"Why the deuce," said I, "did you keep me hanging about like
+that?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry," he replied. "But I make it a fixed rule to put away
+my work"&mdash;he waved a hand towards the safe&mdash;"whenever
+anybody, even Doria, wants to come into the room."</p>
+<p>I glanced around the cheerless place. There were no traces of
+work visible. Save that the quill pens and blotting pad were inky,
+his library table seemed as immaculate, as unstained by toil, as it
+did on the occasion of my first visit.</p>
+<p>"You needn't have made all that fuss," said I. "I only dropped
+in for a second or two. I wanted to ask for a drink and to show you
+a letter from Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Jaffery!" He smiled. "How's the old barbarian getting
+on?"</p>
+<p>"Tremendously. He's the guest of a Viceroy and living in
+sumptuousness. Read for yourself."</p>
+<p>I took from my pocket letter and envelope. Now I am a man who
+keeps few letters and no envelopes. The second post bringing
+Jaffery's epistle had just arrived when I was leaving Northlands
+that morning, and it was but an accident of haste that the envelope
+had not been destroyed. I took the opportunity of tearing it up
+while Adrian was reading. With the pieces in my hand, I peered
+about the room.</p>
+<p>"What are you looking for?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Your waste-paper basket."</p>
+<p>"Haven't got such a thing."</p>
+<p>I threw my litter into the grate.</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to pander to the curiosity of housemaids," he
+replied rather irritably.</p>
+<p>"What do you do with your waste paper, then?"</p>
+<p>"Never have any," he said, with his eyes on Jaffery's
+letter.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" I cried. "Do you pigeon-hole bills and
+money-lenders' circulars and second-hand booksellers' catalogues
+and all their wrappers?"</p>
+<p>He folded up the letter, took me by the arm and regarded me with
+a smile of forced patience.</p>
+<p>"My dear Hilary, can't you ever understand that this room is
+just a workshop and nothing else? Here I think of nothing but my
+novel. I would as soon think of conducting my social correspondence
+in the bathroom. If you want to see the waste-paper basket where I
+throw my bills and unanswered letters from duchesses, and the
+desk&mdash;I share it with Doria&mdash;where I dash off my
+brilliant replies to money-lenders, come into the drawing-room.
+There, also, I shall be able to give you a drink."</p>
+<p>My eyes, following an unconscious glance from his, fell upon a
+new and hitherto unnoticed object&mdash;a little table, now
+startlingly obvious, in a corner of the all but unfurnished room,
+bearing a tray with half full decanter, syphon and glass.</p>
+<p>"You've got all I want here," said I.</p>
+<p>"No. That's mere stimulant. <i>Sapit lucernam</i>. It has a
+horrible flavour of midnight oil. There's not what you understand
+by a drink in it. Let's get out of the accursed hole."</p>
+<p>He dragged me almost by force into the drawing-room, where he
+entertained me courteously. It was curious to observe how his
+manner changed in&mdash;I have to use the Boldero jargon&mdash;in
+the different atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his
+whisky&mdash;a present from old man Jornicroft, a rare blend which
+just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's word, he declared, was
+delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and there a one in the
+City of London were able to procure. In its flavour, said he,
+lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me a
+Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On
+enquiry as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I
+learned that since eminent tenors and divas had sung into
+gramophones, the standard had appreciated.</p>
+<p>"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can
+afford it."</p>
+<p>For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
+drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington
+Station under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and
+afterwards at home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I
+had loosely and playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic,
+without a thought as to the exact significance of the term. Now a
+horrible thought harassed me. Had I been precise without knowing
+it?</p>
+<p>Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy
+of their working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard
+of are such fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which
+Adrian surrounded himself. Why should he put himself under lock and
+key? Why should he not allow human eye to fall, even from the
+distance prescribed by good manners, upon his precious manuscript?
+Why need he use care so scrupulous as not to expose even torn up
+bits of rough draft to the ancillary publicity of a waste-paper
+basket? Soundness of mind did not lie that way. The terms in which
+he alluded to his book were not those of a sane man filled with the
+joy of his creation. None of us, not even Doria, knew how the story
+was progressing. He had signed a contract with an American editor
+for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in the middle of
+May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered. Doria told
+Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much of
+the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
+putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with
+him, calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I
+had been right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to
+the malady and shivered.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, a day or two afterwards, came news that, to some
+extent, relieved my mind.</p>
+<p>While the Bolderos were at breakfast, a cable arrived from the
+Editor. It ran: "Unless half of manuscript is delivered to-day at
+London Office will cancel contract." Adrian read it, frowned and
+handed it to Doria. It seems that in all business matters she had
+his confidence.</p>
+<p>"Well, dear?" she said, looking up at him.</p>
+<p>He broke out angrily. "Did you ever hear such amazing insolence?
+I give this pettifogging tradesman the privilege of publishing my
+novel in his rubbishy periodical and he dares to dictate terms to
+me! Half a novel, indeed! As if it were half a bale of calico. The
+besotted fool! As well ask a clock-maker to deliver half a
+clock."</p>
+<p>"Argument by analogy is rather dangerous," she said gently,
+seeking to turn aside his wrath with a smile. "It's not quite the
+same thing. Can't you give him something to go on with?"</p>
+<p>"I can, but I won't. I'll see him damned first." He turned to
+the maid and demanded a telegraph form.</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to teach him a lesson. He thinks I'm going to be
+taken in by his bluff and run round with a brown paper parcel to
+Fleet Street or wherever his beastly office is. He's mistaken.
+There," he wrote the cable hurriedly and read it aloud, "'Shall not
+deliver anything. Only too glad to cancel contract.' He'll he the
+most surprised and disgusted man in America!"</p>
+<p>"Need you put it quite like that?" said Doria.</p>
+<p>"It's the only way to make him understand. He has been buzzing
+round me like a wasp for the past month. Now he's squashed. And
+now," said he, getting up and lighting a cigarette, "I'm not going
+to do another stroke of work for three months."</p>
+<p>It was the news of this last announcement that relieved my mind:
+not the story of Adrian's intolerable treatment of the editor,
+which was of a piece with his ordinary attitude towards his own
+genius. The capriciousness of the resolution startled me; but I
+approved whole-heartedly. I would have counselled immediate change
+of scene, had not Adrian anticipated my advice by rushing off then
+and there to Cook's and taken tickets to Switzerland. Having some
+business in town, I motored up with Barbara earlier than I need
+have done, and we saw them off at Victoria Station. Adrian, in
+holiday spirits, talked rather loudly. Now that he was free from
+the horror of that bestial vampire sucking his blood&mdash;that was
+his way of referring to the long suffering and hardly used
+editor&mdash;life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his spirit
+could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean.
+He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months
+communing with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain
+heights, three months calm discipline of the soul&mdash;that was
+what he needed. Then to work, and in another three months,
+<i>currente calamo</i>, the book would be written.</p>
+<p>"And what is Doria going to do on top of the Matterhorn?" asked
+my wife.</p>
+<p>Doria cried out, "Oh, don't tease. We're not going near the
+Matterhorn. We're going to read beautiful books, and see beautiful
+things and think beautiful thoughts." She dragged Barbara a step or
+two aside. "Don't you think this is the best thing that could have
+happened?" she asked, with her anxious, earnest gaze.</p>
+<p>"The very, very best, dear," replied Barbara gently.</p>
+<p>And indeed it was. If ever a man realised himself to be on the
+verge of the abyss, I am sure it was Adrian Boldero. Some haunting
+fear was set at the back of his laughing eyes&mdash;the expression
+of an animal instinct for self-preservation which discounted the
+balderdash about the soaring yet disciplined soul.</p>
+<p>I whispered to Doria: "Don't go too far into the wilds out of
+reach of medical advice."</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>"You're taking away a sick man."</p>
+<p>"Do you really think so?"</p>
+<p>"I do," said I.</p>
+<p>She looked to right and left and then at me full in the face,
+and she gripped my hand.</p>
+<p>"You're a good friend, Hilary. God knows I thank you."</p>
+<p>From which I clearly understood that her passionately loyal
+heart was grievously sore for Adrian.</p>
+<p>During their absence abroad, which lasted much longer than three
+months, we heard fairly regularly from Doria; twice or thrice from
+Adrian. After a time he grew tired of mountaintops and solitude and
+declared that his inspiration required steeping in the past,
+communion with the hallowed monuments of mankind. So they wandered
+about the old Italian cities, until he discovered that the one
+thing essential to his work was the gaiety of cosmopolitan society;
+whereupon they went the round of French watering-places, where
+Adrian played recklessly at baccarat and spent inordinate sums on
+food. And all the time Doria wrote glowingly of their doings.
+Adrian had put the book out of his head, was always in the best of
+spirits. He had completely recovered from the strain of work and
+was looking forward joyously to the final spurt in London and the
+achievement of the masterpiece.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile we played the annual comedy of our August migration;
+the only change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West
+Coast of Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One
+gleam of joy irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn&mdash;the news
+that Jaffery, his mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would
+be home for Christmas. Our host and hostess were sporting folk with
+red, weatherbeaten faces and a mania (which they expected us to
+share) for salmon-fishing in the pouring rain. As neither Barbara
+nor I were experts&mdash;I always trembled lest a strong young fish
+getting hold of the end of Barbara's line should whisk her over
+like a feather into the boiling current&mdash;and as for myself, I
+prefer the more contemplative art of bottom fishing from a punt in
+dry weather&mdash;our friends caught all the salmon, while we
+merely caught colds in the head. Many an hour of sodden misery was
+cheered by the whispered word of comfort: Jaffery would be home for
+Christmas. And when, at ten o'clock in the evening, just as we were
+beginning to awake from the nightmare of the day, and to desire
+sprightly conversation, our host and hostess fell into a lethargy,
+and staggered off to slumber, we beguiled the hour before bedtime
+with talk of Jaffery's homecoming.</p>
+<p>At last we escaped and took the good train south. The Bolderos
+had already returned to London. They came to spend our first
+week-end at Northlands. Adrian professed to be in the robustest of
+health and to have not a care in the world. The holiday, said he,
+had done him incalculable good. Already he had begun to work in the
+full glow of inspiration. We thought him looking old and
+hag-ridden, but Doria seemed happy. She had her own reason for
+happiness, which she confided to Barbara. It would be early in the
+New Year. . . . Her eyes, I noticed, were filled with a new and
+wonderful love for Adrian. On the Sunday afternoon as we were
+sauntering about the garden, Adrian touched upon the subject in a
+man's shy way when speaking to his fellow man.</p>
+<p>"Why," said I with a laugh, "that's just about the time you
+expect the book to be out."</p>
+<p>He gave me a queer, slanting look. "Yes," said he, "they'll both
+be born together."</p>
+<p>That night, to my consternation and sorrow, he went to bed quite
+fuddled with whisky.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<p>Never shall I forget that Christmastide. Its shadow has fallen
+on every Christmas since then. And, in the innocent insolence of
+our hearts, we had planned such a merry one. It was the first since
+our marriage that we were spending at Northlands, for like dutiful
+folk we had hitherto spent the two or three festival days in the
+solid London house of Barbara's parents. Her father, Sir Edward
+Kennion, retired Permanent Secretary of a Government Office, was a
+courtly gentleman with a faultless taste in old china and wine, and
+Lady Kennion a charming old lady almost worthy of being the mother
+of Barbara. To speak truly, I had always enjoyed my visits. But
+when the news came that, for the sake of the dear lady's health,
+the Kennions were starting for Bermuda, in the middle of December,
+it did not strike us desolate. On the contrary Barbara clapped her
+hands in undisguised glee.</p>
+<p>"It will do mother no end of good, and we can give Susan a real
+Christmas of her own."</p>
+<p>So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to
+have a roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a
+widowed cousin of mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children;
+and we sent out invitations to the <i>ban</i> and <i>arri&egrave;re
+ban</i> of the county's juvenility, to say nothing of that of
+London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having accounted satisfactorily for
+Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope in a Christian spirit, of
+our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be with us. Why not ask
+his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion affection for each
+other. Then there was Liosha. Both she and Jaffery met in Susan's
+heart, and it was Susan's Christmas. With Liosha would come Mrs.
+Considine, admirable and lonely woman. We trusted to luck and to
+Mrs. Considine's urbane influence for amenable relations between
+Liosha and Euphemia Chayne. With Jaffery in the house, Adrian and
+Doria must come. Last Christmas they had spent in the country with
+old Mrs. Boldero; old Mrs. Boldero was, therefore, summoned to
+Northlands. In the lightness of our hearts we invited Mr.
+Jornicroft. After the letter was posted my spirits sank. What in
+the world would we do with ponderous old man Jornicroft? But in the
+course of a few posts my gloom was lightened by a refusal. Mr.
+Jornicroft had been in the habit for many years of spending
+Christmas at the King's Hotel, Hastings, and had already made his
+arrangements.</p>
+<p>"Who else is there?" asked Barbara.</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I. "This is a modest country house, not an
+International Palace Hotel. Including Eileen's children and their
+governess and nurse and Doria's maid, we shall have to find
+accommodation for fifteen people."</p>
+<p>"Nonsense!" she said. "We can't do it."</p>
+<p>"Count up," said I.</p>
+<p>I lit a cigar and went out into the winter-stricken garden, and
+left her reckoning on her fingers, with knitted brow. When I
+returned she greeted me with a radiantly superior smile.</p>
+<p>"Who said it couldn't be done? I do wish men had some kind of
+practical sense. It's as easy as anything."</p>
+<p>She unfolded her scheme. As far as my dazed wits could grasp it,
+I understood that I should give up my dressing-room, that the maids
+should sleep eight in a bed, that Franklin, our excellent butler,
+should perch in a walnut-tree and that planks should be put up in
+the bath-rooms for as many more guests as we cared to invite.</p>
+<p>"That is excellent," said I, "but do you realise that in this
+house party there are only three grown men&mdash;three ha'porth of
+grown men" (I couldn't forbear allusiveness) "to this intolerable
+quantity of women and children?"</p>
+<p>"But who is preventing you from asking men, dear? Who are
+they?"</p>
+<p>I mentioned my old friend Vansittart; also poor John Costello's
+son, who would most likely be at a loose end at Christmas, and one
+or two others.</p>
+<p>"Well have them, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So four unattached men were added to the party. That made
+nineteen. When I thought of their accommodation my brain reeled. In
+order to retain my wits I gave up thinking of it, and left the
+matter to Barbara.</p>
+<p>We were going to have a mighty Christmas. The house was filled
+with preparations. Susan and I went to the village draper's and
+bought beautifully coloured cotton stockings to hang up at her
+little cousins' bedposts. We stirred the plum pudding. We planned
+out everything that we should like to do, while Barbara, without
+much reference to us, settled what was to be done. In that way we
+divided the labour. Old Jaffery, back from China, came to us on the
+twentieth of December, and threw himself heart and soul into our
+side of the work. He took up our life just as though he had left it
+the day before yesterday&mdash;just the same sun-glazed hairy red
+giant, noisy, laughter-loving and voracious. Susan went about
+clapping her hands the day he arrived and shouting that Christmas
+had already begun.</p>
+<p>The first thing he did was to clamour for Adrian, the man of
+fame. But the three Bolderos were not coming till the
+twenty-fourth. Adrian was making one last glorious spurt, so Doria
+said, in order to finish the great book before Christmas. We had
+not seen much of them during the autumn. Trivial circumstances had
+prevented it. Susan had had measles. I had been laid up with a
+wrenched knee. One side happened to be engaged when the other
+suggested a meeting. A trumpery series of accidents. Besides,
+Adrian, with his new lease of health and inspiration, had plunged
+deeper than ever into his work, so that it was almost impossible to
+get hold of him. On the few occasions when he did emerge from his
+work-room into the light of friendly smiles, he gave glowing
+accounts of progress. He was satisfying his poet's dreams. He was
+writing like an inspired prophet. I saw him at the beginning of
+December. His face was white and ghastly, the furrow had deepened
+between his brows, and the strained squint had become permanent in
+his eyes. He laughed when I repeated my warnings of the spring.
+Small wonder, said he, that he did not look robust; virtue was
+going from him into every drop of ink. He could easily get through
+another month.</p>
+<p>"And then"&mdash;he clapped me on the shoulder&mdash;"my
+boy&mdash;you shall see! It will be worth all the <i>enfantement
+prodigieux</i>. You thought I was going off my chump, you dear old
+fuss-box. But you were wrong. So did Doria&mdash;for a week or two.
+Bless her! she's an artist's wife in ten million."</p>
+<p>"Have you thought of a title?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"'God'," said he. "Yes&mdash;'God'&mdash;short like that. Isn't
+it good?"</p>
+<p>I cried out that it was in the worst possible taste. It would
+offend. He would lose his public. The Non-conformists and
+Evangelicals would be frightened by the very name. He lost his
+temper and scoffed at my Early Victorianism. "Little Lily and her
+Pet Rabbit" was the kind of title I admired. He was going to call
+it "God."</p>
+<p>"My dear fellow, call it what you please," said I, anxious to
+avoid a duel of plates and glasses, for we were lunching on
+opposite sides of a table at his club.</p>
+<p>"I please to call it," said he, "by the only conceivable title
+that is adequate to such a work." Then he laughed, with a gleam of
+his old charm, and filled up my wine glass. "Anyhow, Wittekind, who
+has the commercial end of things in view, thinks it's ripping." He
+lifted his glass. "Here's to 'God.'"</p>
+<p>"Here's to the new book under a different name," said I.</p>
+<p>When I told Barbara about this, she rather agreed with
+Wittekind. It all depended on the matter and quality of the book
+itself.</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow," said I, abhorrent of dissension, "thank Heaven
+the wretched composition's nearly finished."</p>
+<p>On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
+offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine.
+Jaffery met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the
+hour before bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in
+which neither my wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor
+myself were allowed to participate. When nurses sounded the
+retreat, our two Brobdingnagians appeared in the drawing-room,
+radiant, and dishevelled, with children sticking to them like
+flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side of Jaffery,
+unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman against
+physical man, with three children&mdash;two in her generous arms
+and one on her back&mdash;to his mere pair&mdash;that I realised,
+with the shock that always attends one's discovery of the obvious,
+the superb Olympian greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six
+feet to his six feet two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way
+of burly men. She held herself as erect as a redwood pine. The
+depth of her bosom, in its calm munificence, defied the vast, thick
+heave of his shoulders. Her lips were parted in laughter shewing
+magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one could read all the
+mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her hair was
+anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins. Her
+barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted,
+just for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they
+stood, male and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern
+garb. Clap a pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight
+suit of chain mail, moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his
+red sweeping moustache, his red beard, his intense blue eyes
+staring out of a red face; dress Liosha in flaming maize and
+purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a gold torque through her
+hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under autumn bracken;
+strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity&mdash;it was an
+unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the
+G&ouml;tterd&auml;mmerung.</p>
+<p>I can only speak according to the impression produced by their
+entrance on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling
+lady of plump unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy,
+could not understand it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes,
+she saw nothing more in Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and
+considered Liosha far too big for a drawing-room.</p>
+<p>When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery
+surveyed with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the
+fire. Then in his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the
+arm.</p>
+<p>"They're too grown up for us, Liosha. Let's leave 'em. Come and
+I'll teach you how to play billiards."</p>
+<p>So off they went, to the satisfaction of Barbara and myself.
+Nothing could be better for our Christmas merriment than such
+relations of comradeship. We had the cheeriest of dinners that
+evening. If only, said Jaffery, old Adrian and Doria were with us.
+Well, they were coming the next day, together with Euphemia and the
+four unattached men. As I said before, I had given up enquiring
+into the lodging of this host, but Barbara, doubtless, as is her
+magic way, had caused bedrooms and beds to smile where all had been
+blank before. She herself was free from any care, being in her
+brightest mood; and when Barbara gave herself up to gaiety she was
+the most delicious thing in the wide world.</p>
+<p>In the morning the shadow fell. About eleven o'clock Franklin
+brought me a telegram into the library where Jaffery and I were
+sitting. I opened it.</p>
+<p>"<i>Terrible calamity. Come at once. Boldero</i>."</p>
+<p>I passed it to Jaffery. "My God!" said he, and we stared at each
+other. Franklin said:</p>
+<p>"Any answer, sir?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. 'Boldero. Coming at once.' And order the car round
+immediately&mdash;for London. Also ask Mrs. Freeth kindly to come
+here. Say the matter's important." Franklin withdrew. "It's
+Adrian," said I, my mind rushing back to my horrible apprehensions
+of the summer.</p>
+<p>"Or Doria. I understood&mdash;" He waved a hand.</p>
+<p>"Then Barbara must come."</p>
+<p>"She would in any case. It may be Adrian, so I'll come too, if
+you'll let me."</p>
+<p>Let the great, capable fellow come? I should think I would. "For
+Heaven's sake, do," said I.</p>
+<p>Barbara entered swinging housewifely keys.</p>
+<p>"I'm dreadfully busy, dear. What is it?"</p>
+<p>Then she saw our two set faces and stopped short. Her quick eyes
+fell on the telegram which Jaffery had put down in the arm of a
+couch, and before we could do or say anything, she had snatched it
+up and read it. She turned pale and held her little body very
+erect.</p>
+<p>"Have you ordered the car?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Jaffery's coming with us."</p>
+<p>"Good, I'll get on my coat. Send Eileen to me. I must tell her
+about house things."</p>
+<p>She went out. Jaffery laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.</p>
+<p>"What a wonder of a wife you've got!"</p>
+<p>"I don't need you to tell me that," said I.</p>
+<p>We went downstairs to put on our coats and then round to the
+garage to hurry up the car.</p>
+<p>"There's some dreadful trouble at Mr. Boldero's," I said to the
+chauffeur. "You must drive like the devil."</p>
+<p>Barbara, veiled and coated, met us at the front door. She has a
+trick of doing things by lightning. We started; Barbara and Jaffery
+at the back, I sideways to them on one of the little chair seats.
+We had the car open, as it was a muggy day. . . . It is astonishing
+how such trivial matters stick in one's mind. . . . We went, as I
+had ordained, like the devil.</p>
+<p>"Who sent that telegram?" asked Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Doria," said I.</p>
+<p>"I think it's Adrian," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I think," said Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's
+mother. Either of the others would have said something definite.
+Ah!" she smote her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with
+spinal marrow and no backbone to hold it!"</p>
+<p>We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas
+traffic in the town clearing magically before us. Sometimes a car
+on an errand of life or death is recognised, given way to, like a
+fire engine.</p>
+<p>"What makes you so dead sure something's happened to Adrian?"
+Jaffery asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.</p>
+<p>Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears.
+Ever since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches
+to his novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I
+had given of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had
+mentioned his pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office,
+his bombastic rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of
+the Snows, and, all that being part and parcel of our old Adrian,
+we had laughed. Six months before I would have told Jaffery quite a
+different story. But now that Adrian had practically won through,
+what was the good of reviving the memory of ghastly
+apprehensions?</p>
+<p>"Tell me," said Jaffery. "There's something behind all
+this."</p>
+<p>I told him. It took some time. We sped through Slough and
+Hounslow, and past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as
+heavy as our hearts.</p>
+<p>"In plain words," said Jaffery, "it's G.P.&mdash;General
+Paralysis of the Insane."</p>
+<p>"That's what I fear," said I.</p>
+<p>"And you?" He turned to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I too. Hilary has told you the truth."</p>
+<p>"But Doria! Good God! Doria! It will kill her!"</p>
+<p>Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery's great raw
+hand. Only at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear
+gloves.</p>
+<p>"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to
+pieces now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."</p>
+<p>Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main
+entrance in the world into any great city, with bare room for a
+criminal double line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn
+traffic, an officially organised murder-trap for all save the
+shrinking pedestrian on the mean, narrow, greasy side-walk, we
+crawled as fast as we were able. Then through Chiswick, over
+Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London. All London to cross.
+Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was smitten by a
+blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a hundred yards
+ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer yellow, almost
+olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in startling
+meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured. Though
+it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with light,
+but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
+roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of
+black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria
+of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of
+red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands,
+instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm
+reflections of mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an
+agglutinated yet moving mass by the shop fronts, the inner stream a
+garish pink ribbon of faces, the outer a herd of subfuse brown. And
+in the roadway, through the translucent olive, the swirling traffic
+seemed like armies of ghosts mightily and dashingly charioted.</p>
+<p>The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the
+mansions in St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule,
+and the hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened
+the car-door and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's
+face that he had been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as
+constant visitors of the Bolderos.</p>
+<p>"What's the matter?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Don't you know, sir?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his
+news, and bent forward and whispered to me:</p>
+<p>"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."</p>
+<p>I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague
+memory of the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some
+unintelligible account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted
+the ambiguous telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was
+dead. That was all I could think of. The only coherent remark I
+heard the man make was that it was a dreadful thing to happen at
+Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand tight and did not say a word.
+The next phase I remember only too vividly. When the flat door
+opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was like a curtain being
+lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as we entered we
+were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of
+an&aelig;sthetics, disinfectants&mdash;I know not
+what&mdash;greeted us.</p>
+<p>The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew
+down the corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards
+emerged a professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into
+Doria's room. From the spare room came for a moment an elderly
+woman whom we did not know. The study door was flung wide
+open&mdash;I noticed that the jamb was splintered. From the
+drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We entered and found
+Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara sat by her and
+took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell us
+nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went
+out. He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at
+seeing us.</p>
+<p>"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical
+man is apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is
+there a Mrs. Freeth here?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. My wife," said I.</p>
+<p>"Thank goodness&mdash;" He drew a breath. "There's no one here
+capable of doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other
+woman."</p>
+<p>Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Boldero is very ill&mdash;as ill as she can be. Of course
+you were aware of her condition&mdash;well&mdash;the shock has had
+its not very uncommon effect."</p>
+<p>"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.</p>
+<p>"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know
+nothing&mdash;I was summoned and found a man lying dead on the
+floor in that room"&mdash;he pointed to the study&mdash;"and a
+woman in a dreadful state. I've only had time to make sure that the
+poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me something about them?"</p>
+<p>So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who
+Adrian Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world
+and a bit of the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I
+don't know, for beating against the walls of my head was the
+thought that Adrian lay there in the room where I had seen the
+strange woman, lifeless and stiff, with the laughing eyes forever
+closed and the last mockery gone from his lips. Just then the woman
+appeared again. The young doctor beckoned to her and said a few
+words. Jaffery and I followed her into the death-chamber, leaving
+the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood and looked at all that
+was left of Adrian.</p>
+<p>But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I
+really knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the
+mansions then told us. But that little more I will set down
+here.</p>
+<p>For the past few days he had been working early and late,
+scarcely sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at
+five, had risen sleepless at seven, and having dressed and
+breakfasted had locked himself in his study. The very last page, he
+told Doria, was to be written. He was to come down to us for
+Christmas, with his novel a finished thing. At ten o'clock, in
+accordance with custom, when he began to work early, the maid came
+to his door with a cup of chicken-broth. She knocked. There was no
+reply. She knocked louder. She called her mistress. Doria hammered
+. . . she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror grips a woman. She
+sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din to
+awaken&mdash;well&mdash;all but the dead. The man forced the
+door&mdash;hence the splinters on the jamb&mdash;and there they
+found Adrian, in the great bare room, hanging horribly over his
+writing chair, with not a scrap of paper save his blotting-pad in
+front of him. He must have died almost as soon as he had reached
+his study, before he had time to take out his manuscript from the
+jealous safe. That this was so the harassed doctor afterwards
+affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination of the
+dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death&mdash;a
+clot of blood on the brain. . . .</p>
+<p>To go back . . . They found him dead. And then arose an
+unpicturable scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid
+woman, on the point of starting for a Christmas visit, took charge
+of the situation, sent for the doctor, despatched the telegram to
+us, and with the help of the porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The
+elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile mass of sodden hysteria.
+Much that was fascinating and feminine in Adrian came from this
+amiable and incapable lady.</p>
+<p>We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and
+soda&mdash;we needed it&mdash;and talked of the catastrophe. As
+yet, of course, we knew nothing of the clot of blood. Presently
+Barbara came in and put her hands on my shoulders.</p>
+<p>"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your
+club. Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from
+Northlands, and will look after things with Eileen. And put off
+Euphemia and the others, if you can."</p>
+<p>And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with
+such joyous anticipation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria
+hovering on the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on
+a Christmas eve in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was
+Christmas Day. The day after, Boxing Day. The day after that,
+Sunday. The whole world was dead. And all those awful days the thin
+yellow fog that was not fog but mere blight of darkness hung over
+the vast city.</p>
+<p>God spare me such another Christmastide.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<p>The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had
+buried Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us.
+His mother had been put into a train that would carry her to the
+quiet country cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her
+sorrow. Doria still lay in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious,
+perhaps fortunately, of the stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds
+that strike a note of agony through a house of death. And it was
+many days before she awoke to knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed
+with her.</p>
+<p>We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and
+appointing Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his
+wife and the child that was to come, among his private papers in
+the Louis XV cabinet in the drawing-room. We had consulted his
+bankers and put matters in a solicitor's hands with a view to
+probate. Everything was in order. We found his own personal bills
+and receipts filed, his old letters tied up in bundles and
+labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his lease, his
+various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk of a
+careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
+Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
+intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry
+alone, because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search
+from impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.</p>
+<p>All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs
+had been found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we
+had placed the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on
+the sales of "The Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the
+safe in the study, knowing that it held nothing but the manuscript,
+and indeed we had not entered the forbidding room in which our poor
+friend had died. We kept it locked, out of half foolish and half
+affectionate deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara,
+most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the
+death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the
+study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed, professed relief
+from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an inmate of the
+flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household
+things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
+strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the
+living, the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the
+safe and hand it over to the publisher.</p>
+<p>So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and
+entered the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn
+apart, and the blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of
+unilluminating yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been
+laid since the morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered
+with dim grey ash. The stale smell of the week's fog hung about the
+place. I turned on the electric light. With its white distempered,
+pictureless walls, and its scanty office furniture, the room looked
+inexpressibly dreary. We went to the library table. A quill pen lay
+on the blotting pad, its point in the midst of a couple of square
+inches of idle arabesques. On three different parts of the pad
+marked by singularly little blotted matter the quill had scrawled
+"God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass ash-tray I noticed
+three cigarettes, of each of which only about an eighth of an inch
+had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to hang at the
+end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its heavy door
+swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed from
+bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
+of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.</p>
+<p>"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a
+perplexed look. "We'll have our work cut out."</p>
+<p>"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as
+carefully as you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of
+method."</p>
+<p>Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose,
+ragged piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of
+the sheets unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages
+of definite manuscript; these we put aside; others contained
+jottings, notes, fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of
+names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one
+has stuck in my memory. "Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the
+false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah steps in." Other sheets were covered
+with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man
+makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and
+arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.</p>
+<p>"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in
+his beard.</p>
+<p>"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in
+great relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We
+were turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I
+explained Adrian's whimsy.</p>
+<p>"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a
+laugh at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even
+an incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the
+rubbish away, and we'll look at the second shelf."</p>
+<p>The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There
+were more pages of consecutive composition&mdash;of such we sorted
+out perhaps a couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the
+same incoherent scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of
+scenarios of a dozen stories.</p>
+<p>"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said
+Jaffery, standing over me. There was but one chair in the
+room&mdash;Adrian's famous wooden writing chair with the leathern
+pad for which Barbara had pleaded, the chair in which the poor
+fellow had died, and I was sitting in it, as I sorted the
+manuscript which rose in masses on the table.</p>
+<p>"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting
+together those found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can
+make of them."</p>
+<p>We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the
+salvage. We could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless
+brow.</p>
+<p>"It will take weeks to fix it up."</p>
+<p>"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
+old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."</p>
+<p>In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their
+order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page
+with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more
+than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused,
+too, by at least a dozen headed "Chapter I."</p>
+<p>"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.</p>
+<p>I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the
+more I examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the
+nucleus of a coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me
+start in my chair.</p>
+<p>"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"</p>
+<p>He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned
+together in brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in
+front of me.</p>
+<p>"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of
+the pile.</p>
+<p>"Thank God!" said I.</p>
+<p>He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to
+my feet with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the
+face, on a white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the
+hand-written inscription:</p>
+<p>"The Diamond Gate. A Novel&mdash;by Thomas Castleton."</p>
+<p>"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second
+or two we both stood stock-still.</p>
+<p>The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script
+hastily flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's&mdash;Tom
+Castleton, the one genius of our boyish brotherhood, who had died
+on his voyage to Australia. There was no mistake. The great square
+virile hand was only too familiar&mdash;as different from Adrian's
+precise, academical writing as Tom Castleton from Adrian.</p>
+<p>Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been
+committed.</p>
+<p>There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The
+Diamond Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom
+Castleton. Adrian had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man.
+Not only from a dead man, but from the dead friend who had loved
+and trusted in him.</p>
+<p>We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up
+his hands and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the
+safe. Quickly we ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves
+to speak. There are times when words are too idle a medium for
+interchange of thought. We found nothing different from the
+contents of the two upper shelves. The apparently coherent
+manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we examined it. A
+sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful
+certainty.</p>
+<p>The great epoch-making novel did not exist.</p>
+<p>It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have
+had no possibility of existing.</p>
+<p>"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in
+his great, hoarse bass.</p>
+<p>"God knows," said I.</p>
+<p>But even as I spoke, I knew.</p>
+<p>I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the
+Condemned Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I
+began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto
+unnoticed cold. I was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm
+round my shoulders and hugged me kindly.</p>
+<p>"Go and get warm," said he.</p>
+<p>"But this?" I pointed to the litter.</p>
+<p>"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."</p>
+<p>He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room,
+where I crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and
+benumbed feet and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn
+for the better that morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands
+for the day. It was just as well she had gone, I thought. I should
+have a few hours to compose some story in mitigation of the
+tragedy.</p>
+<p>Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He
+sat down on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and
+his shoulders hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer
+tricks with the shadows on his bearded face, making him look old
+and seamed with coarse and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze
+the room was filled with the yellow darkness that was thickening
+outside; yet we did not think of turning on the lights.</p>
+<p>"What have you done?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll
+bring a portmanteau and take it away."</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do with it?"</p>
+<p>"Leave that to me," said he.</p>
+<p>What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was
+very glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself
+with the reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was
+his job, as he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he
+conducted himself like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he
+was a professional demigod. He reassured me further.</p>
+<p>"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire.
+Presently he broke the silence.</p>
+<p>"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in
+God's name?"</p>
+<p>And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the
+cold grip of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was
+none too consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up
+side-tracks, which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to
+speak of Adrian in terms that did not tear our hearts. As a
+despoiler of the dead, his offence was rank. But we had loved him;
+and we still loved him, and he had expiated his crime by a year's
+unimaginable torture.</p>
+<p>Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not.
+Least of all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the
+revelation of his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things
+more or less in perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian.
+With all his faults, his poses, his superficialities, his
+secrecies, his egotisms, I never dreamed of him as aught but a
+loyal and honourable gentleman. When I think of him, I tremble
+before the awful isolation of the human soul. What does one man
+know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was right: "We
+mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable faith in
+Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast with
+conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
+them part of our very selves.</p>
+<p>Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the
+first place made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain
+warped his moral sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom
+Castleton had put the manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his
+hands. Undoubtedly he was to arrange for its publication.
+Castleton's appointment to the professorship in Australia had been
+a sudden matter, as I well remember, necessitating a feverish
+scramble to get his affairs in order before he sailed. Why did not
+Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the manuscript
+straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a question of
+despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were not
+parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
+characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death.
+From that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work.
+For years, in his easy way, he struggled against it, until,
+perhaps, desperate for Doria, he succumbed. What script,
+type-written or hand-written, he sent to Wittekind, the publisher
+of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till later. But why did he
+not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript? That was what
+Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with morbid
+psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
+queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
+relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence&mdash;that
+is the only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a
+psychologist, can explain the sustained act of folly.</p>
+<p>And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he
+accepted it gay and debonair, what could have been the state of
+that man's soul? I remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's
+face, at Mr. Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the
+joy from it, and the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the
+light of knowledge I looked back and recognised the feverishness of
+a demeanour that had been merely gay before. Well . . . he had been
+swept off his feet. If any man ever loved a woman passionately and
+devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For what it may be worth, put that to
+his credit: he sinned for love of a woman. And the rest? The tragic
+rest? His undertaking to write another novel? Indomitable
+self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless, casual lover
+of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set himself to do
+heretofore, he had done.</p>
+<p>As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
+stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
+examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for
+lack of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel
+to eclipse "The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had
+no doubt of his capacity.</p>
+<p>When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of
+guilt. He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's
+work, the beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self,
+the genius that was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this
+light-hearted enthusiasm, must have run a vein of cunning,
+invariable symptom of an unbalanced mind, which prompted secrecy,
+the secrecy which he had always loved to practise, and inspired him
+with the idea of the mysterious, secret room. The latter originated
+in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an intellectual Bluebeard's
+chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken wife would respect.
+It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into the condemned
+cell.</p>
+<p>As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in
+the midst of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly
+seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just
+consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole
+literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems,
+who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am
+aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his
+imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to
+write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which
+would outrival a universally proclaimed work of genius. And he had
+no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially critical; and the
+critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man. All critics are
+clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a little less
+than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was, by a
+barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
+which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative
+work in a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to
+interpret human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if
+you or I, who have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on
+horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It
+did not seem to enter the poor fellow's head that the novelist, in
+no matter how humble a way, no matter how infinitesimal the
+invisible grain of muse may be, must have the especial,
+incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you like, but the
+essential quality of the artist.</p>
+<p>And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all
+those months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination.
+He had never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his
+character scheme, such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at
+one elusive vision of life, after another. His mind had become a
+medley of tags of the comedy and tragedy of human things. The more
+confused, the more universal became the poor limited vision. The
+whole of illimitable life, he had told me in his flogged, crazed
+exaltation, was to be captured in this wondrous book. The pity of
+it!</p>
+<p>How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day
+understand&mdash;that is to say, if he had retained it. The
+hypothesis of madness comforted. I would give much to feel that he
+had really believed in his progress with the work, that his
+assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If he had deceived
+himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had sat down day
+after day, with the appalling consciousness of his impotence, there
+have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted out, in this
+world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he should
+have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No wonder
+he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
+accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills
+for whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after
+night for the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At
+any rate God was merciful at last. He killed him.</p>
+<p>Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire&mdash;the ship-logs
+that Adrian loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and
+what-not, gave green and crimson and lavender flames.</p>
+<p>"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he
+said. "A war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every
+conceivable sort of hell. But this sample I haven't struck before
+and it's the worst of the lot. My God! and only the day before
+yesterday I took him to be married."</p>
+<p>"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked
+hairs out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy
+of China, which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you
+had no idea of time or space."</p>
+<p>He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.</p>
+<p>"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the
+child stillborn&mdash;"</p>
+<p>I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had
+smitten me; that of his words in September, and of the queer
+slanting look in his eyes: "They'll both be born together."</p>
+<p>I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I
+said. "Both stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter,
+the more shudderingly awful it is."</p>
+<p>Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.</p>
+<p>"And she at the point of death&mdash;to complete the tragedy,"
+he said below his breath.</p>
+<p>Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.</p>
+<p>"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried
+with a startling quaver in his deep voice.</p>
+<p>"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the
+best thing you can wish for her?"</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Isn't it obvious? She recovers&mdash;she will, most probably,
+recover; Jephson said so this morning&mdash;she comes back to life
+to find what? The shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My
+dear old Jaff, it's better that she should die now."</p>
+<p>Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow,
+and his eyes blazed.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean&mdash;shattering of idols?"</p>
+<p>"She is bound to learn the truth."</p>
+<p>He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty
+grasp, so that I winced with pain.</p>
+<p>"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any
+dim suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who
+told her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden
+fit of passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with
+clenched fists,&mdash;the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken
+shadow on wall and ceiling of the fog-darkened room&mdash;I shrank
+into my chair, for he seemed not a man but one of the primal forces
+of nature. He shouted in the same deep, shaken voice.</p>
+<p>"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You
+understand." His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You
+have seen it."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."</p>
+<p>"You swear you've seen it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.</p>
+<p>He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through
+his hair, and walked for a little about the room.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself.
+It's a matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you
+understand clearly what I mean?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend
+myself to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it
+can't last forever."</p>
+<p>Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the
+steel of his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's
+enemy.</p>
+<p>"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
+something out of nothing."</p>
+<p>"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've
+seen it, and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the
+hell does it matter to you what becomes of it?"</p>
+<p>"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the
+whole matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor
+and trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
+responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
+choose. But you've seen the outside of it."</p>
+<p>He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled
+a memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a
+copy. Then he turned on me.</p>
+<p>"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a
+human soul of what you have seen this day?"</p>
+<p>I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for?
+But you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must
+know."</p>
+<p>He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted
+smile:</p>
+<p>"You and Barbara are one," said he.</p>
+<p>Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper
+from his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top
+sheet of the blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God:
+A Novel: By Adrian Boldero."</p>
+<p>"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the
+fire.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<p>The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a
+touch of frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that
+Doria emerged from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they
+allowed me to visit her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost
+in search of a human occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she
+looked such a pitiful scrap, all hair and eyes. She smiled and held
+droopingly out to me the most fragile thing in hands I have ever
+seen.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."</p>
+<p>"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for
+things to find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have
+already made the discovery."</p>
+<p>She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I
+love it in the spring. The dancing daffodils&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.</p>
+<p>"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause.
+"At first I longed to die&mdash;that was why my recovery was so
+slow. But now&mdash;odd, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how
+great it is," I replied gently.</p>
+<p>"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."</p>
+<p>I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much
+the same. In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious
+aspiration. If it gives them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's
+name, shouldn't they have it? But in Doria's case, its utterance
+gave me a kind of stab in the heart. By way of reply I patted her
+poor little wrist sympathetically.</p>
+<p>"When will the book be out?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.</p>
+<p>"I suppose they're busy printing it."</p>
+<p>"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.</p>
+<p>"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time.
+It won't do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"</p>
+<p>"I will," said I.</p>
+<p>I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that
+confounded ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought
+in the poor child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it.
+It formed the subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw
+trouble. I could not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the
+present I did not know the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I
+redeemed my promise and gave him Doria's message. He received it
+with a grumpy nod and said nothing. He had become somewhat grumpy
+of late, even when I did not broach the disastrous topic, and made
+excuses for not coming down to Northlands.</p>
+<p>I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather.
+At the best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow
+conditions of town; yet there he was week after week, staying in a
+poky set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing
+nothing in particular, as far as I could make out, save riding on
+the tops of motor-omnibuses without an overcoat.</p>
+<p>After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his
+pipe thoughtfully&mdash;we were in the smoking-room of a club (not
+the Athen&aelig;um) to which we both belonged&mdash;and then he
+roared out:</p>
+<p>"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Well"&mdash;he grinned a little&mdash;"I'm not exactly a kind
+of sick-room flower."</p>
+<p>"I think you ought to see her&mdash;you're as much trustee and
+executor as I am. You might also save Barbara and myself from
+nerve-racking questions."</p>
+<p>"All right, I'll go," he said.</p>
+<p>The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the
+book would be published as soon as possible.</p>
+<p>"When will that be?" she asked.</p>
+<p>Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.</p>
+<p>"Is it in the printer's hands?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet."</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but
+here and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together,
+which Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript.
+He himself was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical
+task of revision.</p>
+<p>"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could
+not be given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very
+much to do, so why are you taking all this time over it?"</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.</p>
+<p>Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not
+greatly please Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related
+this conversation, she complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct.
+He had no right to hang up Adrian's great novel on account of his
+own wretched business. Letting the latter slide would have been a
+tribute to his dead friend. Barbara did her best to soothe her; but
+we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad start.</p>
+<p>A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I
+came across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I
+had known for some years&mdash;originally I think through Jaffery.
+I accepted the offer of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men
+will, we began to discuss our common friend.</p>
+<p>"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a
+while.</p>
+<p>"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Can't make him out."</p>
+<p>"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."</p>
+<p>"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a
+shock, is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a
+wilderness and roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be
+persuaded to leave it."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We
+had to send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as
+well."</p>
+<p>"All this is news to me," said I.</p>
+<p>"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans,
+wild tribes&mdash;a matter of great danger and subtle
+politics&mdash;railways, finance&mdash;the whole hang of the
+international situation and internal conditions&mdash;a big
+scoop&mdash;everything that usually is butter and honey to Jaff
+Chayne&mdash;an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed
+up with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in
+town!"</p>
+<p>At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I
+could not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in
+immaculate vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes!
+Jaffery dancing till three o'clock in the morning! It was all very
+comic, and Arbuthnot seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too.
+But, on the other hand, it was all very incomprehensible. To
+Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence. He
+was a Mercury who took himself seriously. The more remote and rough
+and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it.
+He had never spared himself. He had been a model special
+correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
+ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a
+task after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the
+greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his
+peculiar and honourable position on the paper.</p>
+<p>"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like
+that," said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In
+fact we didn't tell him that we wouldn't."</p>
+<p>It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had
+never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If
+it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play
+Boswell to Jaffery's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to
+him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my
+unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or
+two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the
+bootmaker's to give an order concerning Susan's riding-boots
+(<i>vide</i> diary) and drove home to dinner, to a comfortable chat
+with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day's
+doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and
+inoffensive man.</p>
+<p>A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening
+to be in Westminster in the forenoon&mdash;I had come up to town on
+business&mdash;I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street,
+and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient
+duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket
+and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even
+a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an
+electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did
+not seem to mind. The remains of breakfast were on the table which
+the dingy servitor began to clear. Jaffery rose from the depths of
+his easy chair like an agile mammoth.</p>
+<p>"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"</p>
+<p>His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather.
+When the alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It
+was a hole for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its
+abominable suffocation.</p>
+<p>"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"</p>
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."</p>
+<p>This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.</p>
+<p>"I understood you could have gone to Persia."</p>
+<p>He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know
+that?"</p>
+<p>"Arbuthnot&mdash;" I began.</p>
+<p>"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by
+telling you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head!"</p>
+<p>"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You
+might hurt him."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue
+quiet?"</p>
+<p>He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful
+anathema. Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any
+of you to know anything about it."</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Because I didn't."</p>
+<p>"But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?"</p>
+<p>He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and
+collecting a litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a
+legging from a sofa, pitched it into a corner.</p>
+<p>"Here. Sit down."</p>
+<p>I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying
+the half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the
+comfortable home from Harrod's Stores that Barbara had prescribed;
+and he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the
+heads of game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London
+Repository. It was the impersonal abode of the male bird of
+passage.</p>
+<p>"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink."</p>
+<p>I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded
+country gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at
+half past eleven in the morning, except under the stress of
+peculiar circumstances.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to have one anyway!"</p>
+<p>He disappeared and presently re&euml;ntered with a battered
+two-handled silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription,
+a rowing trophy of Cambridge days, which he always carried about
+with him on no matter what lightly equipped expedition&mdash;it is
+always a matter of regret to me that Jaffery, as I have mentioned
+before, missed his seat in the Cambridge boat; but when one
+despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it is found the central
+feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such as used to
+protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from the
+priggish judgment of university authority?&mdash;he re&euml;ntered,
+with this vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught and
+wiped his moustache with his hand.</p>
+<p>"Better have some. I've got a cask in the bedroom."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" said I, aghast. "What else do you keep there? A side
+of bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?"</p>
+<p>Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in
+his bedroom.</p>
+<p>Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long,
+lean, puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to
+hear the deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.</p>
+<p>"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and
+lighting a cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of
+the chances of your life in not going out to Persia."</p>
+<p>He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard;
+and, turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife,
+and Susan my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly
+disposed towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate
+me.</p>
+<p>"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian
+proposition," said he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking
+out of the window at the infinitely reaching landscape of the
+chimney pots of south London, their grey smoke making London's
+unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of the March sky. "Just
+hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning round my neck I
+could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which was very
+wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of the
+London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away
+and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with
+white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band
+of topaz and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the
+immemorable smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle
+of the harness and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of
+the drivers, and in his heart the certainty of plucking out the
+secret from the soul of this strange land. . . .</p>
+<p>At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair
+enquired politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as
+the Persian journey was concerned the palaver was ended. He did not
+intend to give me his reasons for staying in England and I could
+not demand them more insistently. At any rate I had discovered the
+cause of his grumpiness. What creature of Jaffery's temperament
+could be contented with a soft bed in the centre of civilisation,
+when he had the chance of sleeping in verminous caravanserais with
+a saddle for pillow? In spite of his amazing predilections, Jaffery
+was very human. He would make a great sacrifice without hesitation;
+but the consequences of the sacrifice would cause him to go about
+like a bear with a sore head.</p>
+<p>And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having
+been admitted to her bedside, he went there every day. Flowers and
+fruit he had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a
+grape for Doria failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a
+pumpkin. Now he brought the offerings personally in embarrassing
+bulk. One offering was a gramophone which nearly drove her mad.
+Even in its present stage of development it offends the sensitive
+ear; but in its early days it was an instrument of torturing
+cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen strains music of the
+spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he came to see her,
+and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence of ravished
+senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and
+recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don't think
+the gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's
+unspoken message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes
+the thing played and sending him forth in quest of records of
+recondite and "unrecorded" music, she succeeded in mitigating the
+terror. To the present moment, however, I don't think Jaffery has
+realised that she had a higher &aelig;sthetic equipment than the
+hypnotised fox-terrier in the advertisement. . . . Jaffery also
+bought her puzzles and funny penny pavement toys and gallons of
+eau-de-cologne (which came in useful), and expensive scent (which
+she abominated), and stacks of new novels, and a fearsome machine
+of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of which an
+invalid could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the
+same time. The only thing he did not give her&mdash;the thing she
+craved more than all&mdash;was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's
+book.</p>
+<p>Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of
+Persia. But I could not help thinking that this same Persian
+journey might have afforded a solution of the whole difficulty.
+Despatched suddenly to that vaguely known country, he could have
+taken the mythical manuscript to revise on the journey: the convoy
+could have been attacked by a horde of Kurds or such-like
+desperadoes, all could have been slain save a fortunate handful,
+and the manuscript could have been looted as an important political
+document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would have hated
+Jaffery forever after; but his chivalrous aim would have been
+accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple
+way out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to
+sacrifice his career and remain in London so as to buoy Doria up
+with false hope, all the time praying God to burn down St.
+Quentin's Mansions (where he lived) and Adrian's portmanteau of
+rubbish and himself all together.</p>
+<div><a name="page165" id="page165"></a></div>
+<p>Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft
+stepped in and carried her to the south of France. Barbara and
+Jaffery and myself saw her off by the afternoon train at Charing
+Cross. She was to rest in Paris for the night and the next day, and
+proceed the following night to Nice. She looked the frailest thing
+under the sun. Her face was startling ivory beneath her widow's
+headgear. She had scarcely strength to lift her head. Mr.
+Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her comfort&mdash;an
+ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid
+compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's
+wedding, Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted
+her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from
+the carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her
+tenderly on her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude
+she thanked him with much graciousness. He bent over her&mdash;we
+were standing at the door and could not choose but hear:</p>
+<p>"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second
+and took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You
+get well and strong."</p>
+<p>He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her
+shoulder&mdash;half her little body it seemed to be&mdash;and
+emerging from the compartment joined us on the platform. He put a
+great finger on the arm of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached
+Jornicroft.</p>
+<p>"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get
+into a smoker somewhere or the other."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear sir"&mdash;exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some
+amazement&mdash;"it's awfully kind, but why should you?"</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She
+can't put her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at
+every stage of the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned
+clumsy fellow handle her. I'll see her into the Nice train
+to-morrow night&mdash;perhaps I'll go on to Nice with you and fix
+her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I will. I shan't worry
+you. You won't see me, except at the right time. Don't be
+afraid."</p>
+<p>Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must
+confess, did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he
+had no more intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had
+ourselves.</p>
+<p>"I can't permit it&mdash;it's too kind&mdash;there's no
+necessity&mdash;we'll get on all right!" spluttered Mr.
+Jornicroft.</p>
+<p>"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take
+any risks."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow&mdash;it's absurd&mdash;you haven't any
+luggage."</p>
+<p>"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested
+the impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the
+Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to
+do with it?" His roar could be heard above the din of the hurrying
+station. "I don't want <i>luggage</i>." The humour of the
+proposition appealed to him so mightily that he went off into one
+of his reverberating explosions of mirth.</p>
+<p>"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering&mdash;"Don't you worry about
+that."</p>
+<p>"But have you enough on you&mdash;it's an expensive
+journey&mdash;of course I should be most happy&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and
+beckoned to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the
+station master.</p>
+<p>"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"</p>
+<p>The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a
+ticket now?"</p>
+<p>"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send
+him a wire."</p>
+<p>"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing
+now and going to Nice by the C&ocirc;te d'Azur Express to-morrow
+night. And see after a seat for me, will you?"</p>
+<p>"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his
+hands stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a
+mountainous child. We were all impressed by his lordly command of
+the railway systems of Europe. It was a question of credit, of
+course, but neither Mr. Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor
+myself could have undertaken that journey with a few loose
+shillings in his possession. For the first time since Adrian's
+death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.</p>
+<p>And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an
+overcoat travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than
+to save Doria's sacred little body from being profaned by the touch
+of ruder hands.</p>
+<p>Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer
+from train to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant
+march up the stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took
+the first train back straight through to London.</p>
+<p>He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of
+grumpiness on his jolly face.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<p>About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our
+feet&mdash;the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a
+sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic
+forces, it was but a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it
+startled us all the same. The admirable Mrs. Considine got married.
+A retired warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years
+standing owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had
+occupied separate continents (<i>on avait fait continent &agrave;
+part</i>, as the French might say) during that period, a
+Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant
+correspondent, had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in
+Queen's Gate and, in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the
+admirable and unresisting lady. It was a matter of special license,
+and off went the tardily happy pair to Margate, before we had
+finished rubbing our eyes.</p>
+<p>It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said
+Barbara. She thought her&mdash;no; perhaps she didn't think
+her&mdash;God alone knows the convolutions of feminine mental
+processes&mdash;but she proclaimed her anyhow&mdash;an unscrupulous
+woman.</p>
+<p>"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that
+boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp&mdash;I admit it's deplorable
+taste to change a name of such gentility as Considine for that of
+Jupp, but it isn't unscrupulous&mdash;Mrs. Jupp did not happen to
+be charged with a mission from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the
+rest of her life."</p>
+<p>"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was
+the one person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what
+she's done for her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for
+those two old faggots marrying, they ought to be ashamed of
+themselves."</p>
+<p>Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter.
+Liosha remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's
+indignation could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine
+and bring her back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We
+consulted Jaffery, who as Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted
+us. Jaffery pulled a long face and smiled ruefully. For the first
+time he realised&mdash;in spite of tragic happenings&mdash;the
+comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of two young,
+well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the world
+to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too swore
+lustily at the defaulting duenna.</p>
+<p>"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.</p>
+<p>"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I.
+"Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."</p>
+<p>"That's the devil of it," he growled.</p>
+<p>"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to
+look after before you've done with this existence!"</p>
+<p>His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and
+saddle me with Barbara, I'll punch your head."</p>
+<p>He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense.
+What shall I do?"</p>
+<p>Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.</p>
+<p>I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting
+at the boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the
+elegant "<i>bonbonni&egrave;re</i>" of a chamber known as the
+"boudoir." There was a great deal of ribbon and frill and
+photograph frame and artful feminine touch about it, which Liosha
+and, doubtless, many other inmates thought mightily refined.</p>
+<p>Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade
+us be seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could
+not have been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp)
+herself. That maligned lady had performed her duties during the
+past two years with characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may
+remark that Liosha's table-manners and formal demeanour were now
+irreproachable. Mrs. Considine had also taken up the Western
+education of the child of twelve at the point at which it had been
+arrested, and had brought Liosha's information as to history,
+geography, politics and the world in general to the standard of
+that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she had developed
+in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing, on her
+emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary
+colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver
+harmonies. Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's
+stockyard vocabulary, erasing words and expressions that might
+offend Queen's Gate and substituting others that might charm; and
+she had done it with a touch of humour not lost on Liosha, who had
+retained the sense of values in which no child born and bred in
+Chicago can be deficient.</p>
+<p>"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she
+said pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."</p>
+<p>"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had
+interfered with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a
+stone and everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but
+I've been taught you don't do things like that in South
+Kensington."</p>
+<p>"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"</p>
+<p>"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"</p>
+<p>"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"</p>
+<p>"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."</p>
+<p>"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look
+after myself by this time? What do you take me for?"</p>
+<p>I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery,
+in his tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed
+the point altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about
+with, say to restaurants and theatres."</p>
+<p>"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her
+eyes. "Don't you worry!"</p>
+<p>"All the more reason for a dragon."</p>
+<p>"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I
+talk to a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and
+you're not going to find another like her in a hurry.
+Besides&mdash;I had sense enough to see that she was going to teach
+me things. But I don't want to be taught any more. I've learned
+enough."</p>
+<p>"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you,
+dear," said Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection
+against&mdash;well, any pretty young woman living alone is liable
+to chance impertinence and annoyance."</p>
+<p>Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to
+annoy me. He wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"&mdash;Mrs.
+Jardine was the keeper of the boarding-house&mdash;"she'll tell you
+a thing or two about my being able to keep men from annoying
+me."</p>
+<p>Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few
+sidelights on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in
+subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not
+many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that
+establishment, did not adopt a peculiarly deferential attitude
+towards Liosha.</p>
+<p>"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you
+know."</p>
+<p>"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why
+not take on the job yourself?"</p>
+<p>"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine
+joke.</p>
+<p>"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an
+air of seriousness.</p>
+<p>"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a
+hand to the frills and ribbons.</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the
+advantages and refining influences of a first-class English
+home."</p>
+<p>He pivoted round. "Oh, you be&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look
+after Liosha more than you do&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he
+write? Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting
+on?</p>
+<p>"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara
+asked sternly.</p>
+<p>He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in
+a lapse from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and
+I noticed just the faintest little twitching of her lip.</p>
+<p>"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner
+against his will."</p>
+<p>"But&mdash;God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I
+never thought of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a
+barbarian, my dear girl, just like yourself. If you wanted to be
+taken out, why on earth didn't you say so?"</p>
+<p>Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue
+out."</p>
+<p>Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away
+puzzled. There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's
+tone. He turned again and approached her with a smiling face.</p>
+<p>"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of
+thing, Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the
+Carlton this evening and do a theatre afterwards."</p>
+<p>"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked
+magnificent. Jaffery frowned.</p>
+<p>"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."</p>
+<p>I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had
+frowned and spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise
+her with a cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose
+in her throat and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned
+splendidly, quivering.</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon.
+And"&mdash;alas for the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's
+training&mdash;"I'm going to do as I damn well like."</p>
+<p>Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I
+exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could
+convey a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery
+pulled out pouch and pipe and shook his head.</p>
+<p>"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.</p>
+<p>"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the
+dunderheaded male."</p>
+<p>"I did nothing to cause these heroics."</p>
+<p>"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."</p>
+<p>"I didn't," he protested.</p>
+<p>I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had
+done so. Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed
+savagely.</p>
+<p>"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in
+proper subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."</p>
+<p>"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet.
+He is confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."</p>
+<p>"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."</p>
+<p>"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it
+for pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."</p>
+<p>"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft
+idiot who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by
+the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have
+eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the
+Canton. It's all this infernal civilisation. It has spoiled
+her."</p>
+<p>"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that
+woman was a remarkable phenomenon&mdash;a generalisation which
+includes woman in fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."</p>
+<p>"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I
+didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm
+rather fond of her. She appeals to me as something big and
+primitive. Long ago, if it hadn't been that poor old
+Prescott&mdash;you know what I mean&mdash;I gave up thinking of her
+in that way at once&mdash;and now I just want to be
+friends&mdash;we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and,
+if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . .
+But what I can't stand is these modern neurotics&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"You called them heroics&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by
+every modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're
+taught it's correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where
+to have 'em."</p>
+<p>"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom,
+where she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed,
+had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had
+stuck pigs in the stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family,
+quite as good a family as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes
+and great chieftains, the majority of whom had been most gloriously
+slain in warfare. She would like to know which of Jaff Chayne's
+ancestors had died out of their feather beds.</p>
+<p>"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian
+Mutiny, and his father in the Zulu War."</p>
+<p>Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne
+had no right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a
+female policeman over her. She was a free woman&mdash;she wouldn't
+go out to dinner with Jaff Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she
+hated him; at which renewed declaration she burst into fresh
+weeping and wished she were dead. As a guardian of young and
+beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a success.</p>
+<p>Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the
+paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such
+other lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in
+front of Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she
+waited till the fit had subsided. Then she spoke.</p>
+<p>"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a
+silly schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder
+you didn't announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her
+grievance.</p>
+<p>"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a
+murderous-looking knife that lay on a little table&mdash;it was the
+same weapon that she had lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger."
+She threw it on the girl's lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a
+message for Mr. Chayne to come up. As soon as he enters you can
+stick it into him. Then you can stick it into me. Then if you like
+you can go downstairs and stick it into Hilary. And having
+destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to you, you'll
+feel a silly ass&mdash;such a silly ass that you'll forget to stick
+it into yourself."</p>
+<p>Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a
+neat little chip out of a chair-back.</p>
+<p>"What do you want me to do?"</p>
+<p>"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the
+materials.</p>
+<p>Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha
+obeyed meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.</p>
+<p>"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now
+you look better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself
+beside Liosha and putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the
+way to deal with men. You must learn. They're only overgrown
+babies. Listen."</p>
+<p>And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the
+duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the
+serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither
+I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud
+of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her
+sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the
+little private sitting-room next door whither, according to the
+instructions conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had
+dragged a softly swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said
+serenely:</p>
+<p>"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with
+pleasure. But the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent
+way."</p>
+<p>I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her
+rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all
+very well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the
+wrong: they were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was
+Liosha, who had once asked him to beat her, doing the
+same&mdash;woman was a more curious phenomenon than ever.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he
+with a touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully
+good of you to come."</p>
+<p>She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the
+delicate little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was
+healed, the incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi
+at a quarter to seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we
+must be going. We rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:</p>
+<p>"But we've settled nothing about a rempla&ccedil;ante for Mrs.
+Considine."</p>
+<p>"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No
+one can replace Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently
+Jaffery's theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and,
+to judge by the faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily
+conscious of a mission unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her
+independence.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved
+with extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that
+of Mrs. Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal
+interpretation of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so
+dignified that Jaffery, lest he should offend, was afraid to open
+his mouth except for the purpose of shovelling in food, which he
+did, in astounding quantity. From what both of us gathered
+afterwards&mdash;and gleefully we compared notes&mdash;they were
+vastly polite to each other. He might have been entertaining the
+decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he desired
+facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took him
+in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an
+overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her
+finger and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all
+the time that he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to
+begin. She sat tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite;
+which was a pity, for the ma&icirc;tre d'h&ocirc;tel, given a free
+hand by her barbarously ignorant host, had composed a royal menu.
+As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than a chit of sixteen. Over the
+quails a great silence reigned. Hers she could not touch, but she
+watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one after the other, whole,
+down his throat: and she adored him for it. It was her ideal of
+manly gusto. She nearly wept into her <i>Fraises
+Diane</i>&mdash;vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a
+drift of snow impregnated by all the distillations of all the
+flowers of all the summers of all the hills&mdash;because she would
+have given her soul to sit beside him on the table with the bowl on
+her lap and feed him with a tablespoon and, for her share of it,
+lick the spoon after his every mouthful. But it had been drummed
+into her that she was a woman of the world, the fashionable and all
+but incomprehensible world, the English world. She looked around
+and saw a hundred of her sex practising the well-bred deportment
+that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected that to all of
+those women gently nurtured in this queer English civilisation,
+equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her Albanian
+fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few hours
+before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
+male companions. She also reflected&mdash;and for the reflection
+not Mrs. Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was
+responsible&mdash;that to the man whom she yearned to feed with
+great tablespoonfuls of delight, she counted no more than a pig or
+a cow&mdash;her instinctive similes, you must remember, were
+pastoral&mdash;or that peculiar damfool of a sister of his,
+Euphemia.</p>
+<p>When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite
+to one another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
+super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
+thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
+dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of
+silence and then they talked of the things that did not interest
+them in the least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk
+being essential to the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery
+played host in the orthodox manner, and Liosha acknowledged
+attentions with a courtesy equally orthodox. But how much happier
+they both would have been on a bleak mountain-side eating stew out
+of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy failed to exercise
+mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in their own awful
+correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical comedy or
+a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have
+expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have
+been less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the
+play had caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an
+ironical title, which stupefied them with depression.</p>
+<p>When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate
+to open to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a
+most enjoyable evening.</p>
+<p>"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if
+you will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"</p>
+<p>"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance,
+and the week after that, and so on until it became a grim and
+terrifying fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the
+Eternal Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard
+to smother her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's
+prescription for the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce
+of it was that though in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown,
+she could not for the life of her regard him as a baby. So it came
+to pass that an unnatural pair continued to meet and mystify and
+misunderstand each other to the great content of the high gods and
+of one unimportant human philosopher who looked on.</p>
+<p>"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery
+growled, one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get
+anything out of her."</p>
+<p>"That's a pity," said I.</p>
+<p>"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she
+looks so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with
+all the other women."</p>
+<p>I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your
+friends if you know how to set to work.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<p>It was a gorgeous April day&mdash;one of those days when young
+Spring in madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of
+summer. She could assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of
+the sunshine, but through all the travesty peeped her laughing
+youth, the little tender leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom
+of the lilac, the swelling of the hawthorn buds, the pathetic
+immature barrenness of the walnuts.</p>
+<p>And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in
+their hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in
+their topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale
+butterfly here and there accomplished its early day, and queen
+wasps awakened from their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the
+tiniest winter-palaces in the world, sped like golden arrow tips to
+and from the homes they had to build alone for the swarms that were
+to come. The flower beds shone gay with tulips and hyacinths; in
+the long grass beyond the lawn and under the trees danced a
+thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped up in furs lay
+Doria on a long cane chair.</p>
+<p>She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had
+prophesied, for her full strength had not yet returned, but there
+she was among them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as
+though they were dancing in her honour. She was, however, restored
+to health; the great circles beneath her eyes had disappeared and a
+tinge of colour shewed beneath her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the
+first sunbonnet of the year, sat Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . .
+. Lord! It scarcely seemed two years since Jaffery came from
+Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his arms and was struck
+all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So thought I,
+looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty
+yards, away. And once again&mdash;pleasant self repetition of
+history&mdash;Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had
+spent a night at her father's house and had come down to us the
+evening before to complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go
+straight to the flat in St. John's Wood and begin her life anew
+with Adrian's beloved ghost, and she had issued orders to servants
+to have everything in readiness for her arrival, but Barbara had
+intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man of limited sympathies
+and brutal common sense. All of us, including Jaffery, who seemed
+to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only equalled by that of
+a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah as to the way
+to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of tragic
+memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had
+indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the
+home of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in
+peace with the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of
+Holies in which Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by
+vulgar tread? Our suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything
+that could arise from earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things.
+We could only prevail upon her to postpone her return to the flat
+until such time as she was physically strong enough to grapple with
+changed conditions.</p>
+<p>The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were
+bending over a book on Doria's knee&mdash;<i>Les Malheurs de
+Sophie</i>, which Susan, proud of her French scholarship, had
+proposed to read to Doria, who having just returned from France was
+supposed to be the latest authority on the language. I noticed that
+the severity of this intellectual communion was mitigated by
+Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little
+haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all
+of a sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the
+landscape (framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a
+huge and familiar figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this
+on the ground, rushed up to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung
+Susan in the air and kissed her, and was still laughing and making
+the welkin ring&mdash;that is to say, making a thundering
+noise&mdash;when I, having sped across the lawn, joined the
+group.</p>
+<p>"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"</p>
+<p>"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an
+earlier train. No good staying in town on such a morning.
+Besides&mdash;" He glanced at Doria in significant aposiopesis.</p>
+<p>"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked,
+pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why
+didn't you leave it to be called for?"</p>
+<p>"This? This little <i>sachet</i>?" He lifted it up by one finger
+and grinned.</p>
+<p>Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are
+strong!"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift
+the thing an inch from the ground with both her hands.</p>
+<p>"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I
+felt as if I had been picked up by an iron crane."</p>
+<p>Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his
+physical strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen
+Jaffery in a nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from
+his saddle and wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one
+in each hand, and dash their heads together over his horse's neck.
+But that is the sort of story that Jaffery himself never told.</p>
+<p>Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had
+caught sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great
+hand towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South.
+The sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh?
+Remember when we started for Nice?"</p>
+<p>He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with
+as much pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.</p>
+<p>"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near
+distance, I hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is
+the one disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise
+happy season, Barbara expects me to be something between a
+scene-shifter and a Furniture Removing Van.</p>
+<p>The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we
+settled down. Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very
+wistful look. He held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand
+very gently on hers.</p>
+<p>"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting
+tenderness in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much
+longer."</p>
+<p>"Is it at the printer's?"</p>
+<p>"It's printed."</p>
+<p>Barbara and I gave each a little start&mdash;we looked at
+Jaffery, who was taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at
+each other. What on earth did the man mean?</p>
+<p>"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be
+flooded with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it
+up with Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."</p>
+<p>"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it
+necessary? I mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"</p>
+<p>"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to
+pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't
+presume to do such a thing."</p>
+<p>"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open
+the hasps of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of
+galley-proofs fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which
+he deposited on Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids
+fluttered as she fingered the precious thing. For a moment we
+thought she was going to faint. There was breathless silence. Even
+Susan, who had been left out in the cold, let the black kitten leap
+from her knee, and aware that something out of the ordinary was
+happening, fixed her wondering eyes on Doria. Her mother and I
+wondered even more than Susan, for we had more reason. Of what
+manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed proofs? Was it
+possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in the
+assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of
+despair?</p>
+<p>Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened
+her eyes and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long
+proofs. At once she sat bolt upright.</p>
+<p>"'<i>The Greater Glory</i>.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His
+title was '<i>God</i>.' Who has dared to change it?"</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i190.jpg" id="i190.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/190.jpg"><img src="images/190.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs.</b></div>
+<p>Her eyes flashed; her little body quivered. She flamed an
+incarnate indignation. For some reason or other she turned
+accusingly on me.</p>
+<p>"I knew nothing of the change," said I, "but I'm very glad to
+hear of it now."</p>
+<p>Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of
+what Jaffery had been doing with the book.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind wouldn't have the old title," cried Jaffery eagerly.
+"The public are very narrow minded, and he felt that in certain
+quarters it might be misunderstood."</p>
+<p>"Wittekind told dear Adrian that he thought it a perfect
+title."</p>
+<p>"Our dear Adrian," said I, pacifically, "was a man of enormous
+will-power and perhaps Wittekind hadn't the strength to stand up
+against him."</p>
+<p>"Of course he hadn't," exclaimed Doria. "Of course he hadn't
+when Adrian was alive: now Adrian's dead, he thinks he is going to
+do just as he chooses. He isn't! Not while I live, he isn't!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at me from beneath bent brows and his eyes were
+turned to cold blue steel.</p>
+<p>"Hilary!" said he, "will you kindly tell Doria what we found on
+Adrian's blotting pad&mdash;the last words he ever wrote?"</p>
+<p>What he desired me to say was obvious.</p>
+<p>"Written three or four times," said I, "we found the words: 'The
+Greater Glory: A Novel by Adrian Boldero.'"</p>
+<p>"What has become of the blotting pad?"</p>
+<p>"The sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a
+lot of other unimportant papers."</p>
+<p>"And I came across further evidence," said Jaffery, "of his
+intention to rename the novel."</p>
+<p>Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "I
+should like to have had Adrian's last words," she whispered. Then
+bringing herself back to earth, she begged Jaffery's pardon very
+touchingly. Adrian's implied intention was a command. She too
+approved the change. "But I'm so jealous," she said, with a catch
+in her voice, "of my dear husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm
+sure you've done everything that was right and good, Jaffery." She
+held out the great bundle and smiled. "I pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>Jaffery took the bundle and laid it again on her lap. "It's
+awfully good of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But
+you can keep this set. I've got another, with the corrections in
+duplicate."</p>
+<p>She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips
+in a timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back.</p>
+<p>"I can't read it. I daren't read it. If Adrian had lived I
+shouldn't have seen it before it was published. He would have given
+me the finally bound book&mdash;an advance copy. These
+things&mdash;you know&mdash;it's the same to me as if he were
+living."</p>
+<p>The tears started. She rose; and we all did the same.</p>
+<p>"I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara dear. I'd
+rather be alone." She put her arm round my small daughter. "Perhaps
+Susan will see I don't break my neck across the lawn."</p>
+<p>Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and holding on to Susan,
+who was mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly
+towards the house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the
+bedroom door, she had lingered for a moment outside and had heard
+Auntie Doria crying like anything.</p>
+<p>Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous
+draught of proofs, advanced, a female David, up to Goliath
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a
+graven image and be mystified in my own house. Will you have the
+goodness to explain?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked down on her, his head on one side.</p>
+<p>"Explain what?"</p>
+<p>"That!"</p>
+<p>She pointed to the proofs of which I had possessed myself and
+was eagerly scanning. Unblenching he met her gaze.</p>
+<p>"That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Boldero, which I, as his
+literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough
+manuscript, but he had no time to read it."</p>
+<p>They looked at one another for quite a long time.</p>
+<p>"Is that all you're going to tell me?"</p>
+<p>"That's all."</p>
+<p>"And all you're going to tell Hilary?"</p>
+<p>"Telling Hilary is the same as telling you."</p>
+<p>"Naturally."</p>
+<p>"And telling you is the same as telling Hilary."</p>
+<p>"By no manner of means," said Barbara tartly. She took him by
+the sleeve. "Come and explain."</p>
+<p>"I've explained already," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Barbara eyed him like a syren of the cornfields. "I'm going to
+dress a crab for lunch. A very big crab."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile.
+Barbara could dress crab like no one else in the world. She herself
+disliked the taste of crab. I, a carefully trained gastronomist,
+adored it, but a Puckish digestion forbade my consuming one single
+shred of the ambrosial preparation. Doria would pass it by through
+sheer unhappiness. And it was not fit food for Susan's tender
+years. Old Jaff knew this. One gigantic crab-shell filled with
+Barbara's juicy witchery and flanked by cool pink, meaty claws
+would be there for his own individual delectation. Several times
+before had he taken the dish, with a "One man, one crab. Ho! ho!
+ho!" and had left nothing but clean shells.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to dress this crab," said Barbara, "for the sake of
+the servants. But if you find I've put poison in it, don't blame
+me."</p>
+<p>She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Jaffery
+laughed, sank into a chair and tugged at his pipe.</p>
+<p>"I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing," said
+he.</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked looking up from the proofs.</p>
+<p>"It's not quite up to the standard of 'The Diamond Gate.'"</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't suppose it was," said I drily.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind's delighted anyhow. It's a different <i>genre</i>;
+but he says that's all the better."</p>
+<p>Susan emerged from my study door on to the terrace.</p>
+<p>"My good fellow," said I, "yonder is the daughter of the house,
+evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read
+this wonderful novel and don't want to be disturbed till
+lunch."</p>
+<p>The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan finding herself
+in undisputed possession took him off to remote recesses of the
+kitchen garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile I went on
+reading, very much puzzled. Naturally the style was not that of
+"The Diamond Gate," which was the style of Tom Castleton and not of
+Adrian Boldero. But was what I read the style of Adrian Boldero?
+This vivid, virile opening? This scene of the two derelicts who
+hated one another, fortuitously meeting on the old tramp steamer?
+This cunning, evocation of smells, jute, bilge water, the warm oils
+of the engine room? This expert knowledge so carelessly displayed
+of the various parts of a ship? How had Adrian, man of luxury, who
+had never been on a tramp steamer in his life, gained the
+knowledge? The people too were lustily drawn. They had a flavour of
+the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces; a deep-lunged folk. So
+that I should not be interrupted I wandered off to a secluded nook
+of the garden down the drive away from the house and gave myself up
+to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident
+following incident, every trait of character presented objectively
+in fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen pictures of grim
+scenes faultless in their definition and restraint. There was a
+girl in it, a wild, clean-limbed, woodland thing who especially
+moved my admiration. The more I read the more fascinated did I
+become, and the more did I doubt whether a single line in it had
+been written by Adrian Boldero.</p>
+<p>After a long spell, I took out my watch. It was twenty past one.
+We lunched at half-past. I rose, went towards the house and came
+upon Jaffery and Susan. The latter I despatched peremptorily to her
+ablutions. Alone with Jaffery, I challenged him.</p>
+<p>"You hulking baby," said I, "what's the good of pretending with
+me? Why didn't you tell me at once that you had written it
+yourself?"</p>
+<p>He looked at me anxiously. "What makes you think so?"</p>
+<p>"The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First,"
+I continued, as he made no reply but stood staring at me in
+ingenuous discomfort, "you couldn't have got this out of poor
+Adrian's mush; secondly, Adrian hadn't the experience of life to
+have written it; thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive
+articles in <i>The Daily Gazette</i> and have little difficulty in
+recognising the hand of Jaffery Chayne."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" said he. "It isn't as obvious as all that?"</p>
+<p>I laughed. "Then you did write it?"</p>
+<p>"Of course," he growled. "But I didn't want you to know. I tried
+to get as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here"&mdash;he
+gripped my shoulder&mdash;"if it's such a transparent fraud, what
+the blazes is going to happen?"</p>
+<p>To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position,
+having peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world
+had the faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming
+book would be received without shadow of question as the work of
+the author of "<i>The Diamond Gate</i>." The difference of style
+and treatment would be attributed to the marvellous versatility of
+the dead genius. . . . Jaffery's brow began to clear.</p>
+<p>"What do you think of it&mdash;as far as you've gone?"</p>
+<p>My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my
+appreciation. He positively blushed and looked at me rather
+guiltily, like a schoolboy detected in the act of helping an old
+woman across the road.</p>
+<p>"It's awful cheek," said he, "but I was up against it. The only
+alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and
+take the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I had written
+about half of it all in bits and pieces about three or four years
+ago and put it aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one
+day and read it and it seemed rather good, so, having the story in
+my head, I set to work."</p>
+<p>"And that's why you didn't go to Persia?"</p>
+<p>"How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on
+the back of a beastly camel!"</p>
+<p>He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of
+a laugh.</p>
+<p>"I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up;
+couldn't get along. I must have spent a week, night after night,
+staring at a blank sheet of paper. I thought I had bitten off more
+than I could chew and was going the way of Adrian. By George, it
+taught me something of the Hades the poor fellow must have passed
+through. I've been in pretty tight corners in my day and I know
+what it is to have the cold fear creeping down my spine; but that
+week gave me the fright of my life."</p>
+<p>"I wish you had told me," said I, "I might have helped. Why
+didn't you?"</p>
+<p>"I didn't like to. You see, if this idea hadn't come off, I
+should have looked such a stupendous ass."</p>
+<p>"That's a reason," I admitted.</p>
+<p>"And I didn't tell you at first because you would have thought I
+was going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could
+write a novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the
+impossible, like Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to
+death and you would have put me off."</p>
+<p>Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We
+hurried to the dining-room. Jaffery sat down before a gigantic
+crab.</p>
+<p>"Is it all right?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Doria has interceded for you," said Barbara. "You owe her your
+life."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled. "It's the least I could do for you."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed
+himself in crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said:</p>
+<p>"Hilary has read half the book."</p>
+<p>"What do you think of it?" Barbara asked.</p>
+<p>I repeated my dithyrambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone.</p>
+<p>"I do wish you could see your way to read it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I would give my heart to," said Doria. "But I've told you why I
+can't."</p>
+<p>"Circumstances alter cases," said I, platitudinously. "In
+happier circumstances you would have been presented with the
+novelist's fine, finished product. As it happens, Jaffery has had
+to fill up little gaps, make bridges here and there. I'm sure if
+you had been well enough," I added, with a touch of malice, for I
+had not quite forgiven his leaving me in the dark, "Jaffery would
+have consulted you on many points."</p>
+<p>I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make
+upon her. Although I had reassured Jaffery, I could, scarcely
+conceive the possibility of the book being taken as the work of
+Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it.
+You weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree
+with Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are
+so jolly clumsy."</p>
+<p>Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be
+justified?"</p>
+<p>"Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."</p>
+<p>So it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study
+and demanded the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom,
+where she remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It
+was right that she should know what was going to be published under
+Adrian's name.</p>
+<p>In Jaffery's presence, I disclosed to Barbara the identity of
+the author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me
+before lunch, with, perhaps, a little more shamefacedness. Were it
+not for reiteration upon reiteration of the same things in talk,
+life would be a stark silence broken only by staccato announcement
+of facts. At last Barbara's eyes grew uncomfortably moist.
+Impulsively she flew to Jaffery and put her arms round his vast
+shoulders&mdash;he was sitting, otherwise she could not have done
+it&mdash;and hugged him.</p>
+<p>"You're a blessed, blessed dear," she said; and ashamed of this
+exhibition of sentiment she bolted from the room.</p>
+<p>Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of
+billiards.</p>
+<p>To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room
+before dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen
+since lunch; an arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can
+imagine a Tanagra figure in black and white ivory. Her face,
+however, was a passion of excitement.</p>
+<p>"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't
+know till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things
+he describes&mdash;he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my
+God! If only he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands
+before her eyes and dashed them swiftly away&mdash;"Jaffery has
+done his best, poor fellow. But oh! the bridges he speaks
+of&mdash;they're so crude, so crude! I can see every one. The
+murder&mdash;you remember?"</p>
+<p>It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three
+or four splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing
+was done. Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.</p>
+<p>"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.</p>
+<p>"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's
+horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to
+the imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and
+spoiled it. And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San
+Francisco, where Fenton finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of
+London musical comedy. Adrian never wrote it. It's the sort of
+claptrap he hated. He has often told me so. Jaffery thought it was
+necessary to explain Ellina in the next chapter, and so in his dull
+way, he stuck it in."</p>
+<p>That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a
+low dive on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing
+seen, somewhat journalistic, I admit&mdash;but such as very few
+journalists could give.</p>
+<p>"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.</p>
+<p>"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man
+that had been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I
+don't know the difference between Adrian's work and that of a
+penny-a-liner like Jaffery?"</p>
+<p>The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and
+took him by the lapels of his dress coat.</p>
+<p>"I've read it. It's a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do
+want it to be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear&mdash;I know
+you've done all that mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But
+it isn't your fault if you're not a professional novelist or an
+imaginative writer. And you, yourself, said the bridges were
+clumsy. Couldn't you&mdash;oh!&mdash;I loathe hurting you, dear
+Jaffery&mdash;but it's all the world, all eternity to
+me&mdash;couldn't you get one of Adrian's colleagues&mdash;one of
+the famous people"&mdash;she rattled off a few names&mdash;"to look
+through the proofs and revise them&mdash;just in honour of Adrian's
+memory? Couldn't you, dear Jaffery?" She tugged convulsively at the
+poor old giant's coat. "You're one of the best and noblest men who
+ever lived or I couldn't say this to you. But you understand, don't
+you?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have
+slapped it physically and it would have worn the same dazed,
+paralysed lack of expression.</p>
+<p>"My life," said he, in a queer toned voice, that wasn't
+Jaffery's at all, "my life is only an expression of your wishes.
+I'll do as you say."</p>
+<p>"It's for Adrian's sake, dear Jaffery," said Doria.</p>
+<p>Jaffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face,
+from the roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to
+wipe therefrom all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the
+sunny Reubens-like features that we all loved.</p>
+<p>"But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the
+book's worthy of Adrian?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I do," she cried passionately. "I do. It's a work of
+genius. It's Adrian in all his maturity, in all his greatness!"</p>
+<p>The door opened.</p>
+<p>"Dinner is served, madam," said Franklin.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<p>When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's
+outburst, he fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After
+what he had done for her, said I, given up one of the great chances
+of his career, carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her
+a present of a brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from
+shame, she ought to go on her knees and pray God to shower
+blessings on his head. As it was, she deserved whipping.</p>
+<p>Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass&mdash;he
+has an Eastern habit of, facile vituperation&mdash;and roared about
+the drawing-room. The ladies, be it understood, had retired.</p>
+<p>"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You
+haven't the intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know
+I've written the rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she
+thinks I've spoiled it. She's perfectly justified. For the little
+footling services I rendered her on the journey, she's idiotically
+grateful&mdash;out of all proportion. As for Persia, she knows
+nothing about it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"She ought to," said I.</p>
+<p>"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as
+you're satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."</p>
+<p>It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and
+however understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined
+towards them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through
+all their bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would
+be dead in a week.</p>
+<p>"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor
+girl's mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying
+out of this ghastly farce."</p>
+<p>"I do, my dear chap."</p>
+<p>"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could&mdash;a labour of
+love. But it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work&mdash;which she
+thinks is Adrian's. To keep up the deception I had to crab it and
+say that the faults were mine. Naturally she believes me."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and
+Adrian's memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and
+moral balance&mdash;what then?"</p>
+<p>"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you
+suppose I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"</p>
+<p>I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross
+indelicacy of saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or
+words to that effect. Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition
+that a living second husband&mdash;stretching the imagination to
+the hypothesis of her taking one&mdash;is but an indifferent hero
+to the widow who spends her life in burning incense before the
+shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We can't say these
+things to our friends. We expect them to have common sense as we
+have ourselves. But we don't, and&mdash;for the curious reason,
+based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no
+man can appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a
+particular woman&mdash;we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of
+his heart. The man who pours into our ears a torrential tale of
+passion moves us not to sympathy, but rather to psychological
+speculation, if we are kindly disposed, or to murderous
+inclinations if we are not. On the other hand, he who is silent
+moves us not at all. In any and every case, however, we entirely
+fail to comprehend why, if Ne&aelig;ra is obdurate, our swain does
+not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
+Amaryllis.</p>
+<p>I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt
+somewhat impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was,
+casting the largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a
+woman blinded by the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it
+was his religion to intensify. There he was doing this, and he did
+not see the imbecility of it! In after time we can correlate
+incidents and circumstances, viewing them in a perspective more or
+less correct. We see that we might have said and done a hundred
+helpful things. Well, we know that we did not, and there's an end
+on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery, although&mdash;or
+was it because?&mdash;I recognised the bald fact that he was in
+love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.</p>
+<p>You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick
+you?" and he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned
+to touch my unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the
+world are you to do, save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your
+cigar? This I did. I also found amusement in comparing his meek
+wooing, like that of an early Italian amorist, with his rumbustious
+theories as to marriage by capture and other primitive methods of
+bringing woman to heel.</p>
+<p>Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick
+(when Barbara wasn't looking&mdash;for Barbara had read her a
+lecture on the polite treatment of trustees and executors) and made
+him more her slave than ever. He fetched and carried. He read
+poetry. He was Custodian of the Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was
+damp. He shielded her from over-rough incursions on the part of
+Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany of Saint Adrian. He
+sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her and hold
+figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch
+them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides,
+Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during
+which, touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of
+tender regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one
+could wish to meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one
+else, the smile into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt
+that, in her way and as far as her Adrian-bound emotional
+temperament permitted, she felt grateful to Jaffery. She also felt
+safe in his company. He was like a great St. Bernard dog, she
+declared to Barbara.</p>
+<p>These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until
+a letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's
+approval, Jaffery had sent the proofs.</p>
+<p>"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly
+different from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its
+largeness of conception and the perfection of its kind. The
+alteration of a single word would spoil it. If an alien hand is
+there, it is imperceptible."</p>
+<p>At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He
+tossed the letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.</p>
+<p>"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't
+it? I do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through.
+This ought to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"</p>
+<p>"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."</p>
+<p>But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain&mdash;and how
+could a work of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however
+imperceptible, had touched it?&mdash;was not satisfied. Towards
+noon, when she came downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace,
+with a familiar little knitting of the brow before which his
+welcoming smile faded.</p>
+<p>"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the
+letter. "Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to
+recognise the merits of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed
+of the critical faculty."</p>
+<p>"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me
+to send him the novel?"</p>
+<p>"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria,
+after the way of women.</p>
+<p>"And he hasn't any?"</p>
+<p>"Read the thing again."</p>
+<p>Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well,
+what's to be done now?"</p>
+<p>"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original
+manuscript. Where is it?"</p>
+<p>Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied
+convincingly.</p>
+<p>"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've
+destroyed it."</p>
+<p>"I thought everything was typed nowadays."</p>
+<p>"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an
+advocate of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I
+wanted to rush the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see
+why I should pamper them with type. Have you the original
+manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.</p>
+<p>For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought
+up his daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary
+life. To my great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.</p>
+<p>"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions
+for the manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's
+gone. I'm not unreasonable."</p>
+<p>"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers
+in the drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made
+Jaffery submit his careful editing to an expert, and you're
+honourably bound to accept the expert's verdict."</p>
+<p>"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a
+flash of her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty
+to keep to my own opinion."</p>
+<p>Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face
+as he did in moments of perplexity.</p>
+<p>"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."</p>
+<p>"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad
+tobacco&mdash;not tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's
+encomium had aroused the artist's pride in his first-born. An
+altered word would spoil the book. "My dear girl," said he,
+stretching out his great hand, from beneath which she wriggled an
+impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very gently, "the
+possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man of
+common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us
+do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue
+pencil as much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a
+thundering mess of it."</p>
+<p>Doria made a little gesture&mdash;a bit of a shrug&mdash;a bit
+of a resigned flicker of her hands.</p>
+<p>"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a
+woman with nobody to turn to"&mdash;she smiled with her lips, but
+there was no coordination of her eyes&mdash;"as I said before, I
+pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house,
+leaving Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"</p>
+<p>He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body
+on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to
+her morbid vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it
+birth. You know better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you
+send those proofs straight back to the publisher. If you let her
+persuade you to change one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll
+tell her the whole thing, and damn the consequences!"</p>
+<p>My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest
+sense. They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She
+would no more think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or
+a baby's neck.</p>
+<p>"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said
+Jaffery. "But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying
+brute."</p>
+<p>"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped
+Barbara. "The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree.
+It's only the exceptional woman that can take command."</p>
+<p>I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the
+tenderly sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic
+silence.</p>
+<p>"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery
+with cold politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her
+up in her garden chair and attend to her comforts, and then,
+settled down, she would open a volume of Tolstoi and courteously
+signify his dismissal. Jaffery with a hang-dog expression went with
+me to the golf-course, where he drove with prodigious muscular
+skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a question of good
+taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have reminded him
+that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a little white
+ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal to a dead
+friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor old
+Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
+of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
+masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
+direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian&mdash;for Jaffery is
+too splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of
+his once living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do
+not aspire to these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power
+of generalisation, deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of
+mundane phenomena, and Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates
+the core of spiritual things, could, with little difficulty, divine
+the passionate struggle between love and hatred, between loyalty
+and tenderness, between desire and duty that took place in the soul
+of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly appetited
+gentleman.</p>
+<p>You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of
+romance. I am not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my
+imperfect way, a barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty
+son of Pantagruel forced into the incongruous r&ocirc;le of Sir
+Galahad. . . . During the term of his punishment he behaved in a
+bearish and most unheroic manner. At last, however, Doria forgave
+him, and, smiling on him once more, permitted him to read Tolstoi
+aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his manners.</p>
+<p>The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had
+invited Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She
+usually arrived by an early train in the forenoon and returned by
+the late train at night. But on Saturday evening, she asked
+Barbara, over the telephone, for permission to bring a friend, a
+gentleman staying in the boarding house, the happy possessor of a
+car, who would motor her down. His name was Fendihook. Barbara
+replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's friend, and of
+course came back to us and speculated as to who and what this Mr.
+Fendihook might be.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.</p>
+<p>"It would scarcely have been polite."</p>
+<p>We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I
+don't like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a
+vast deal too much."</p>
+<p>"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus
+started an old argument.</p>
+<p>On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the
+car, a two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and
+perceived between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly
+buttoned Burberry coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the
+middle of which projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha
+out.</p>
+<p>"This is Mr. Fendihook."</p>
+<p>"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.</p>
+<p>I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my
+chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by
+Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings
+and revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily
+attired. I know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against
+a black and white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a
+gold ring.</p>
+<p>"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good
+one, on which he had retained the band.</p>
+<p>"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."</p>
+<p>"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of
+all right here."</p>
+<p>"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha.
+"Ah, Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We
+followed. Mr. Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little
+shock, that he had kept on his gloves.</p>
+<p>"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of
+a blow would do our fair friend good."</p>
+<p>Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath
+the motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he
+preceded me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure
+in the middle of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round
+appreciatively and again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open
+French window.</p>
+<p>"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our
+friends? The long and the short of it, aren't they?"</p>
+<p>He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn.
+I told him their names.</p>
+<p>"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always
+talking about, her guardian or something."</p>
+<p>"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late
+husband."</p>
+<p>"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear,
+signified "Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his
+cigar. "Introduce me." And as I accompanied him across the
+lawn&mdash;"There's nothing like knowing everybody&mdash;getting it
+over at once. Then one feels at home."</p>
+<p>"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said
+I.</p>
+<p>"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I
+did." And the amazing creature patted me on the back.</p>
+<p>I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself
+delighted to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as
+conversation did not start spontaneously, he once more looked
+around, nodded at the landscape approvingly, and once more said
+"Tiptop!"</p>
+<p>"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford
+to retire and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a
+desirable residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's
+country house."</p>
+<p>"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?"
+queried Doria.</p>
+<p>He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."</p>
+<p>I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.</p>
+<p>Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running
+up.</p>
+<p>"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and
+say how d'ye do, Gwendoline."</p>
+<p>Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under
+the chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the
+image of her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the
+bowl of his pipe in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on
+some puzzling insect.</p>
+<p>"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor
+asked.</p>
+<p>"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a
+garden bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to
+affect my nerves. He peeled them off.</p>
+<p>"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried.
+"Catch!"</p>
+<p>He made a feint of throwing them.</p>
+<p>"Haven't you caught 'em?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were
+empty.</p>
+<p>"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He
+flicked a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a
+ball and threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it
+gone to?"</p>
+<p>Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept
+forward fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards
+a flower bed.</p>
+<p>"Why, there it is!"</p>
+<p>He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the
+handkerchief hung limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.</p>
+<p>"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever
+talked to angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."</p>
+<p>He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into
+the central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not
+in the best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught
+the coins announced their intention of sticking to them. But
+threats of reporting to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the
+coins dropped and jingled in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded
+him as she would a god.</p>
+<p>"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.</p>
+<p>"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day
+long."</p>
+<p>He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap
+caught it in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed
+white strong teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"</p>
+<p>"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"Two hours a day solid year in and year out&mdash;not that trick
+alone, of course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you
+know who I am&mdash;I'm the One and Only Ras
+Fendihook&mdash;Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and General Variety
+Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"</p>
+<p>We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.</p>
+<p>"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically.
+"You've never heard of me&mdash;and perhaps you two gentlemen are
+big bugs in your own line&mdash;and I've never heard of you. But
+anyhow, I never asked you, Mr. Chayne, to catch my gloves."</p>
+<p>"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on
+Susan.</p>
+<p>"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."</p>
+<p>And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the
+wash-leather gloves.</p>
+<p>"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the
+matin&eacute;e performance."</p>
+<p>Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."</p>
+<p>"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the
+little one."</p>
+<p>He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour
+came the shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought
+Barbara flying out of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The
+yelping ceased. Mr. Ras Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria,
+Jaffery and I looked at one another in mutual and dismayed
+comprehension.</p>
+<p>"Old pal," quoted Doria.</p>
+<p>I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for
+his sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"</p>
+<p>"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a
+lot he called me."</p>
+<p>"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently.
+"He's&mdash;he's <i>marvelious</i>!"</p>
+<p>"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't
+express him."</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as
+mummy will let you."</p>
+<p>I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of
+that suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon
+until it was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved
+over and over again a tense situation. To the guest in her house
+Barbara was the perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of
+convention raged fury with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer
+social animal for what he is and suck the honey from his flowers of
+unconventionality. She had never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a
+butler when offered a second helping of pudding. She had never
+dreamed of the possibility of a strange table-neighbour laying his
+hand on hers and requesting her to "take it from me, my dear." It
+sent awful shivers down her spine to hear my august self alluded to
+as her "old man." She looked down her nose when, to the apoplectic
+joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest behaviour at meals),
+he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato into the air,
+caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her smile was
+that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic listener
+when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To her
+confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the
+personalities of the World of Variety.</p>
+<p>"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said
+confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off
+with that contortionist&mdash;you know who I mean&mdash;handsome
+chap&mdash;what's his name?&mdash;oh, of course you know him."</p>
+<p>My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a
+K.C.B., assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!</p>
+<p>"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied
+pathetically.</p>
+<p>"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo!
+You must have heard of Romeo."</p>
+<p>I sniggered&mdash;I couldn't help it&mdash;at Barbara's face. He
+went on with his reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I,
+though displeased with Liosha for introducing such an incongruous
+element into my family circle, took the rational course of deriving
+from the fellow considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done
+the same as myself, had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian
+weighed heavily upon him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly.
+Doria, like my wife, I could see was shocked. The only two who,
+beside myself, enjoyed our guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan
+was nine years old and a meal at which a guest broke her whole
+decalogue of table manners at once&mdash;to say nothing of the
+performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange into
+nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently
+extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother&mdash;was a feast
+of memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha,
+pupil of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud
+Albanian chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How
+could she admire this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line,
+peculiarly accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She
+sat by my side, grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she
+had bestowed on us. She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his
+anecdotes, she urged him on to further exhibition of prowess, and
+in a magnificent way appeared unconscious of the presence at the
+table of her trustee and would-be dragon, Jaffery Chayne.</p>
+<p>After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to
+Mr. Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery,
+having invited Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having
+declined, with a polite smile, on the ground that her best
+Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown was not suitable for country roads,
+went off by himself in dudgeon. Barbara took Liosha aside and
+cross-examined her on the subject of Mr. Fendihook and as far as
+hospitality allowed signified her non-appreciation of the guest.
+After a time I took him into the billiard room, Susan following. As
+he was a brilliant player, giving me one hundred and fifty in two
+hundred and running out easily before I had made thirty, he found
+less excitement in the game than in narrating his exploits and
+performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things with the
+billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and
+balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I
+think that day he must have gone through his whole
+r&eacute;pertoire.</p>
+<p>The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's
+first words to Liosha were:</p>
+<p>"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"</p>
+<p>"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.</p>
+<p>He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day.
+But sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."</p>
+<p>He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee
+was rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something
+unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who
+was established on the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked
+cheerfully.</p>
+<p>Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused,
+explaining that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view
+of the excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank
+tea in the afternoon.</p>
+<p>"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"</p>
+<p>The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara&mdash;"And may I drink
+to the success of that promising little affair"&mdash;he jerked a
+backward thumb&mdash;"between our pippy friend and the charming
+widow?"</p>
+<p>Barbara had passed the gasping stage.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now,
+had made strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same
+relation of trustee to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs.
+Prescott."</p>
+<p>But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck!
+Here's to him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."</p>
+<p>He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not
+respond. A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her
+hand showed white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace,
+where she found Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet.
+And this is what happened.</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll
+excuse me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is
+yours. I have business to talk."</p>
+<p>Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my
+dear girl. I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha.
+As soon as they were out of earshot, she said:</p>
+<p>"Are you going to marry her?"</p>
+<p>"Who?"</p>
+<p>"Doria."</p>
+<p>Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic
+mood.</p>
+<p>"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your
+own business."</p>
+<p>"All right," she retorted, "I will."</p>
+<p>"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you.
+What do you mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"</p>
+<p>"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very
+clever and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."</p>
+<p>"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.</p>
+<p>They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast,
+they found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden.
+Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.</p>
+<p>"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery
+continued.</p>
+<p>"How dare you speak so of my friend?"</p>
+<p>"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend.
+And you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"</p>
+<p>"Shan't!" said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with
+him."</p>
+<p>There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said
+the same things over and over again. Both had worked themselves
+into a fury.</p>
+<p>"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."</p>
+<p>"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you
+mind yours."</p>
+<p>"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace
+yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."</p>
+<p>"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up
+magnificently. "Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man
+living? You insult me."</p>
+<p>"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed
+fool of herself&mdash;and you more than most."</p>
+<p>"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she
+taunted, and flung an arm in the direction of the house.</p>
+<p>Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."</p>
+<p>"And you leave me alone."</p>
+<p>They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned,
+marched superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through,
+slammed it in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive
+quarrel, free from all subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in
+Jaffery's veins. If he could have given her a good sound thrashing
+he would have been a happy man. This accursed civilisation
+paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing at whiskers and
+beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in the middle
+of the lawn.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never
+bring him here again."</p>
+<p>"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight
+before her.</p>
+<p>"Well, ask him."</p>
+<p>"I will. Hilary!"</p>
+<p>At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook
+had been discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of
+widowhood to a quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed
+and bright-eyed Juno.</p>
+<p>"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"</p>
+<p>"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been
+conscious of storms. I took her hand.</p>
+<p>"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated
+that it is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate
+ramifications&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"&mdash;I hesitated&mdash;"not quite
+the kind of person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a
+pattern, like little tin soldiers."</p>
+<p>"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it
+goes."</p>
+<p>"Oh, go on&mdash;" Jaffery interrupted.</p>
+<p>"But&mdash;" I continued.</p>
+<p>"You'd rather not see him again?"</p>
+<p>"No," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me.
+"You and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"</p>
+<p>I still held her hand, which was growing moist&mdash;and I
+suppose mine was too&mdash;and I didn't like to drop it, for fear
+of hurting her feelings. I gave it a great squeeze. It was very
+difficult for me. Personally, I enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and
+prodigiously accomplished scion of a vulgar race. As a mere
+bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should have taken him
+joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my microscope and
+studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that there was
+of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan who
+did not count, he was&mdash;I admit, deservedly&mdash;an object of
+loathing. So I squeezed Liosha's hand.</p>
+<p>"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that
+he's not quite a gentleman."</p>
+<p>"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."</p>
+<p>She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor
+advisedly. She had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before
+a breeze.</p>
+<p>"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."</p>
+<p>Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.</p>
+<p>"We must hook it!"</p>
+<p>Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"</p>
+<p>"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very
+kind. But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for
+the evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."</p>
+<p>"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.</p>
+<p>Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained
+with a learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the
+pink, fleshy face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered
+away down the drive.</p>
+<p>"Yes, indeed," said Doria.</p>
+<p>Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.</p>
+<p>"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"</p>
+<p>"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.</p>
+<p>"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to
+dine among all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"</p>
+<p>"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria.
+"I should think it was rather a rise in the social scale."</p>
+<p>And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save
+the puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his
+interest in Liosha.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<p>"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the
+reviewers and made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a
+legitimate successor to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit
+of Tom Castleton. The contrast was so extraordinary, so
+inexplicable. It was generally concluded that no writer but Adrian
+Boldero, in the world's history, had ever revealed two such
+distinct literary personalities as those that informed the two
+novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused universal wonder.
+His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained by English
+letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the new
+book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals,
+knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the
+press. In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius;
+for, after all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can
+put your finger on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom
+Castleton's work possessed; Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater
+Glory" vibrated with life, it was wide and generous, it was a
+capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond Gate," it could not rank
+with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David Copperfield." I say this
+in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but merely to present
+his work in true proportion. Published under his own name it would
+doubtless have received recognition; probably it would have made
+money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic reception it
+enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name of Adrian
+Boldero.</p>
+<p>Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had
+succeeded beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs
+of the woman he loved. He had also astonished himself
+enormously.</p>
+<p>"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that
+I'm not a mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap
+with brains, and"&mdash;he turned over a bundle of
+press-cuttings&mdash;"and 'poetic fancy' and 'master of the human
+heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of things' and
+'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.' Ho! ho!
+ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
+years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
+complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling
+like blazes."</p>
+<p>It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
+ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
+spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His
+poorer human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now
+Adrian's restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria
+there would open a new life in which, with the past behind her, she
+could find a glory in the sun and an influence in the stars, and a
+spark in her own bosom responsive to his devotion. For the
+tumultuous moment, however, when Adrian's name was on all men's
+tongues, and before all men's eyes, the ghost walked in triumphant
+verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings of Jaffery and Doria,
+he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever he was evoked;
+and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or perhaps
+for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
+Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
+reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
+blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
+reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to
+write on Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it
+and that of Jaffery Chayne?</p>
+<p>One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.</p>
+<p>"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery
+sacrificed his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling
+together Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success
+of it, and you treat him as if he were a dog."</p>
+<p>Doria protested. "I don't. I <i>am</i> grateful. I don't know
+what I should do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness
+for Jaffery can't alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work;
+and when I hear those very faults in the book praised, I am fit to
+be tied."</p>
+<p>"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by
+yourself," said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be
+sane and civil."</p>
+<p>"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't
+the wife of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you
+again."</p>
+<p>"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and
+you know it."</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little
+eyrie in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever
+leaving it. Arbuthnot of <i>The Daily Gazette</i> satirically
+enquiring whether he wanted a job or still yearned for a season in
+Mayfair he consigned, in his grinning way, to perdition. Change was
+the essence of holiday-making, and this was his holiday. It was
+many years since he had one. When he wanted a job he would go round
+to the office.</p>
+<p>"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want
+to keep your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring
+us up."</p>
+<p>Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he
+liked.</p>
+<p>The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria
+Street may have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I
+dismissed the excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch,
+at the club, assuming my most sceptical manner.</p>
+<p>"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after
+her."</p>
+<p>"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound
+health, perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does
+want a man's advice, she can always turn to me."</p>
+<p>"And there's Liosha."</p>
+<p>"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable
+of looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very
+definitely to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any
+more interesting evenings out lately?"</p>
+<p>"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her
+off that low-down bounder."</p>
+<p>"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with
+him."</p>
+<p>He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of
+the argument.</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction,
+"she can't marry him."</p>
+<p>"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"</p>
+<p>"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar
+is married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four
+wives in fact&mdash;oh, a dreadful hound&mdash;but only one real
+one with a wedding ring, and she lives up in the north with a pack
+of children."</p>
+<p>"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a
+villain."</p>
+<p>He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was
+not Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I
+agreed with him.</p>
+<p>"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as
+to look after her."</p>
+<p>"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company.
+She'll get a bad name."</p>
+<p>"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you
+devoting his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of
+mischief is too preposterous. Try me with something else."</p>
+<p>Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was
+writing another book.</p>
+<p>He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to
+know. He was getting along famously. He had had the story in his
+head for a long time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline
+very picturesquely. Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the
+development of the man Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had
+happened. The born novelist had just discovered himself and
+clamoured for artistic self-expression. He was writing this book
+just because he could not help it, finding gladness in the mere
+work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and letting himself
+go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become of it when
+written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a matter.
+Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new
+novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as
+closely as "Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be
+the deuce to pay. If he published it under his own name, he would
+render himself liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from
+the dead author of "The Greater Glory," and so complicate this
+already complicated web of literary theft; and if he threw
+sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria to enable him to publish
+under Adrian's name, he would be performing the task of the
+altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.</p>
+<p>Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his
+novel, looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and
+enjoying the society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds
+of passage like himself, who happened to be passing through London.
+Being a man of modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food,
+he found his small patrimony and the savings from his professional
+earnings quite adequate for amenable existence. When he wanted
+healthy, fresh air he came down to us to see Susan; when he wanted
+anything else he went to see Doria, which was almost daily.</p>
+<p>Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and
+Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing
+and dusting, she entered the awful room&mdash;neither servants nor
+friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was
+always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the
+focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be
+a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy.
+In her blind perversity she counted on his co&ouml;peration. It was
+he who carried through negotiations with an eminent sculptor for a
+bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time, she
+bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion
+of Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National
+Biography. . . . And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign
+behests without a murmur and without a hint that he desired reward
+for his servitude. But, to those gifted with normal vision, signs
+were not wanting that he chafed, to put it mildly, under this
+forced worship of Adrian; and to those who knew Jaffery it was
+obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not last forever.
+Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one should
+kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find august
+recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was not
+devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted
+everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery
+for his meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct
+must have revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath
+the exterior of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For
+one thing, she considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity
+perhaps blinded her judgment. At all events she did not realise
+that a change was bound to come in their relations. It came,
+inevitably.</p>
+<p>One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St.
+John's Wood flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of
+queer isolation from the world below, and from the strange world
+masked behind the vast superficies of brick against which they were
+perched. Jaffery said something about a nest midway on a cliff side
+overlooking the sea. He also, in bass incoherence, formulated the
+opinion that in such a nest might he found true happiness. The
+pretty languor of early summer laughed in the air. Their situation,
+'twixt earth and heaven, had a little sensuous charm. Doria replied
+sentimentally:</p>
+<p>"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of
+cliff, with the sea-gulls wheeling about it&mdash;bringing messages
+from the sunset lands across the blue, blue sea&mdash;" Poor dear!
+She forgot that sea lit by a westering sun is of no colour at all
+and that the blue water lies to the east; but no matter; Jaffery,
+drinking in her words, forgot it likewise. "Away from everything,"
+she continued, "and two people who loved&mdash;with a great, great
+love&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down
+Maida Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted&mdash;the
+ripeness of youth and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained
+her ivory cheek&mdash;you will find the exact simile in Virgil. She
+was too desirable for Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in
+his chair&mdash;they were sitting face to face, so that he had his
+back to the motor omnibuses&mdash;and put his great hand on her
+knee.</p>
+<p>"Why not we two?"</p>
+<p>It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish&mdash;what you please;
+but every man's first declaration of love is bathos&mdash;the
+zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his
+intelligence. Anyhow the declaration was made, without shadow of
+mistake.</p>
+<p>Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset
+and gulls and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from
+before her eyes, and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff
+Chayne.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean."</p>
+<p>He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The
+three-foot balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles.
+She put out a hand.</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so
+nervous."</p>
+<p>He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as
+if she had dealt him a slap in the face.</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I
+want you and I'll never be happy till I get you."</p>
+<p>She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"</p>
+<p>"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward
+glance.</p>
+<p>"Not with an obstinate devil like me."</p>
+<p>He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.</p>
+<p>"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the
+drawing-room.</p>
+<p>He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a
+footling balcony. What do you take me for?"</p>
+<p>"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave
+elf facing horrible ogre&mdash;and, either by chance or design, her
+hand touched and held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph
+of her late husband.</p>
+<p>"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's
+memory when you say such things to me?"</p>
+<p>"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to
+the free woman he loves."</p>
+<p>"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."</p>
+<p>"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."</p>
+<p>"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of
+you,"&mdash;his blue eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his
+hands, but heedless she went on&mdash;"yes, mean and base and
+despicable of you to wish to betray him. Adrian&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and
+listen to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual
+disgusts and sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real
+live man who would walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail
+body in his great grasp, and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught
+up by a dynamo. "My love for you has nothing whatever to do with
+Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as one man can be to another,
+living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary and Barbara. But I want
+you. I've wanted you since the first moment I set eyes on you.
+You've got into my blood. You're going to love me. You're going to
+marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."</p>
+<p>He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely.
+She did not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were
+white and her face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And
+unconscious that his grip was giving her physical pain he
+continued:</p>
+<p>"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I
+heard you were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting.
+But, by God!"&mdash;and, not knowing what he did, he shook her
+backwards and forwards&mdash;"I'll not go on waiting for ever.
+You&mdash;you little bit of mystery&mdash;you little bit of
+eternity&mdash;you&mdash;you&mdash;ah!"</p>
+<p>With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not
+counted on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning,
+and she fell, knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp
+of horror and in an instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa,
+and on his knees beside her, with remorse oversurging his passion,
+behaved like a penitent fool, accusing himself of all the
+unforgivable savageries ever practised by barbaric male. Doria, who
+was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed to the door.</p>
+<p>"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of
+reaction.</p>
+<p>"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."</p>
+<p>She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you
+out, but if Adrian was alive&mdash;Ha! ha! ha!&mdash;" she laughed
+with a touch of hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren
+rascal&mdash;how do you dare to think you can take the place of a
+man like Adrian?"</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i234.jpg" id="i234.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/234.jpg"><img src="images/234.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>"Go! You are nothing but a brute."</b></div>
+<p>The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her
+up bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I
+would hold a cat or a rabbit.</p>
+<p>"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference
+between a man and a&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might
+have struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.</p>
+<p>"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going
+to hurt you."</p>
+<p>He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the
+room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<p>If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the
+lover who woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have
+thrown away his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed.
+Doria proved to Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration
+and nervous collapse, that she would never set eyes again upon the
+unqualifiable savage by whom her holiest sentiments had been
+outraged and her person disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a
+blood-curdling story into semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short
+work of her contention that Jaffery ought to have respected her as
+he would have respected the wife of a living friend, characterising
+it as morbid and indecent nonsense; and with regard to the physical
+violence she declared that it would have served her right had he
+smacked her.</p>
+<p>"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband,
+be faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man
+comes along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an
+honourable way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months
+all a man has to give, and then, when he tells you what you've
+known perfectly well all along, treat him as if he were making
+shameful proposals to you&mdash;especially a man like Jaffery; I
+have no patience with you."</p>
+<p>Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No
+one understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was
+aware. But when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery
+Chayne, she really thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore
+Barbara, rather angry at being brought up to London on a needless
+errand, involving loss of dinner and upset of household
+arrangements, administered a sleeping-draught and bade her wake in
+the morning in a less idiotic frame of mind.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me
+later&mdash;to "behave like a cat" is her way of signifying a
+display of the vilest phases of feminine nature&mdash;"but I
+couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal of sense. It isn't
+as if I had never warned her about the way she has been treating
+Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian&mdash;I'm sick
+of his name&mdash;and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"</p>
+<p>This she said during a private discussion that night on the
+whole situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she
+returned to Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the
+first time in his life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent
+dinner, imploring me to tell him whether he should enlist for a
+soldier, or commit suicide, or lie prone on Doria's doormat until
+it should please her to come out and trample on him. He seemed
+rather surprised&mdash;indeed a trifle hurt&mdash;that neither of
+us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not
+Doria's&mdash;especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside
+of the scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about
+the drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.</p>
+<p>"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both
+of you, she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You&mdash;'a
+barren rascal'&mdash;you? Good God!"</p>
+<p>He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must
+take this from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on
+her. He oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He
+was a savage unfit for the society of any woman outside a
+wigwam.</p>
+<p>"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to
+bed. Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."</p>
+<p>The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I
+could not exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless,
+and with a large disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent
+him a suit of my meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same
+purpose.</p>
+<p>He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria
+and was denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned
+unopened. He passed a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose
+end in London during the height of the season. In despair he went
+to <i>The Daily Gazette</i> office and proclaimed himself ready for
+a job. But for the moment the earth was fairly calm and the
+management could find no field for Jaffery's special activities.
+Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable
+weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of
+the proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the
+newspaper office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a
+disturber of traffic. Then he came down to Northlands for a while,
+where, for want of something to do, he hired himself out to my
+gardener and dug up most of the kitchen garden. His usual
+occupation of romping with Susan was gone, for she lay abed with
+some childish ailment which Barbara feared might turn into German
+measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or eating or
+sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless mood. At
+nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases wherein
+he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer the
+most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying
+with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when
+a merciful Providence gave him something definite to think
+about.</p>
+<p>It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my
+dressing-room when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding
+admittance, rushed in, clad in bath gown and slippers, flourishing
+a letter.</p>
+<p>"Read that."</p>
+<p>I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Dear Jaff Chayne,</p>
+<br />
+<p>"As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm
+going to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook&mdash;"</p>
+</div>
+<p>I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."</p>
+<p>"He is. Read on."</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married
+at Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an
+Albanian it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in
+England, and I would have to give up half my money to Government.
+But in France, owing to different laws, I can get married without
+any fuss at all. I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a
+lawyer, so it's all right. I suppose when I am married you won't be
+my trustee any more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and
+thank you for all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and
+Barbara and Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is
+Erasmus, but you will when you know him better.</p>
+<p>"Yours affectionately,</p>
+<p>"LIOSHA PRESCOTT."</p>
+</div>
+<p>The amazing epistle took my breath away.</p>
+<p>"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.</p>
+<p>"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look
+signified that it was he who intended to cause it.</p>
+<p>"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.</p>
+<p>"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He
+must have once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."</p>
+<p>I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of
+pity for our poor deluded Liosha.</p>
+<p>"We must get her out of this."</p>
+<p>"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."</p>
+<p>I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the
+room where she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in
+cap and peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with
+lather crinkling over one-half of my face, held first an
+indignation meeting, and then a council of war.</p>
+<p>"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He
+couldn't offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing
+bigamy, and I know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement;
+so he has invented this poisonous plot to get her out of
+England."</p>
+<p>"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?"
+asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but
+Barbara's eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws
+and formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the
+fact that, not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be
+sold to a young Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming
+to haggle over her price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in
+telling her wild fables of English life. Her ignorance in many ways
+was abysmal. Once having seen a photograph in the papers of the
+King in a bowler-hat she expressed her disappointment that he wore
+no insignia of royalty; and when I consoled her by saying that, by
+Act of Parliament, the King was obliged to wear his crown so many
+hours a day and therefore wore it always at breakfast, lunch and
+dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted my assurance with the
+credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara rebuked me for
+taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry indeed. How
+was she to know when and where not to believe me?</p>
+<p>"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any
+kind of plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a
+full account of it is a proof."</p>
+<p>"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled.
+"If Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."</p>
+<p>"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara.
+"She thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you
+know."</p>
+<p>"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said
+I.</p>
+<p>"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick
+knitting of the brow.</p>
+<p>"Precisely," said I.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with
+the fellow already?"</p>
+<p>"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."</p>
+<p>He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while
+Barbara discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard
+to Liosha.</p>
+<p>Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.</p>
+<p>"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday.
+Fendihook left last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."</p>
+<p>We regarded each other in dismay.</p>
+<p>"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from
+moustache downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When
+he was puzzled he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why
+should he leave the boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you.
+Because his London engagement was over and he had to put in a
+week's engagement at some provincial music-hall. Theatrical folks
+always travel on Sunday. If he was still working in London and
+wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have chosen Sunday. We can
+easily see by the advertisements in the morning paper. His London
+engagement was at the Atrium."</p>
+<p>"I've got the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> here," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken
+condition to which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest
+search among the ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement
+page. The attractions at the Atrium were set out fully; but the
+name of Ras Fendihook did not appear.</p>
+<p>"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where
+did she write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown
+pocket. "Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday
+afternoon. So she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was
+written on her own note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address,
+and then held it up before us. "See anything queer about this?"</p>
+<p>We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."</p>
+<p>"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come
+along. I can tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I
+seem to be a bit of an ass. Besides&mdash;you'll come, won't
+you?"</p>
+<p>"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."</p>
+<p>"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be
+prepared to come to Havre&mdash;all over France, if necessary."</p>
+<p>"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast
+coolness of the proposal.</p>
+<p>"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."</p>
+<p>"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave
+Susan."</p>
+<p>"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you
+can't." He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."</p>
+<p>"Where?" I asked, stupidly.</p>
+<p>"Wherever I take you."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow&mdash;" I remonstrated.</p>
+<p>He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack
+his bag, and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."</p>
+<p>He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.</p>
+<p>"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by
+yourself?"</p>
+<p>"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me
+and I met the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help
+me to save a woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find
+somebody else."</p>
+<p>"Of course I'll come," said I.</p>
+<p>"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a
+breakfast."</p>
+<p>He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman
+heroes rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy,
+bellowing fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the
+normal tones of the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.</p>
+<p>I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that
+we should be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other
+people's lives?"</p>
+<p>She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's
+just because we've done nothing&mdash;nothing otherwise to justify
+our existence. We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and
+Susan. If we didn't take a share of other people's troubles we
+should die of congestion of the soul."</p>
+<p>I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the
+steady vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at
+a moment's notice for anywhere&mdash;perhaps Havre, perhaps
+Marseilles, perhaps Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which
+wouldn't suit me&mdash;anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving
+Jaffery might choose to ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with
+my translation of Firdusi. . . .</p>
+<p>"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin
+to put in an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs.
+Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately
+done black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we
+were calling in question the moral character of her establishment.
+She did not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone.
+She was not in the habit of putting such enquiries to her
+guests.</p>
+<p>"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on
+Thursday. It was not my business to associate the two departures in
+any way."</p>
+<p>By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an
+old client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had
+been touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come
+without much ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms,
+paid her bill and departed with her trunks.</p>
+<p>"When did she give notice to leave you?"</p>
+<p>"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then
+she came with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things
+were packed and ready to be brought downstairs."</p>
+<p>"What address did she give to the cabman?"</p>
+<p>Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter.
+Jaffery repeated his question.</p>
+<p>"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.</p>
+<p>I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded
+it as the most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on
+me.</p>
+<p>"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying
+instructions&mdash;covering up her tracks. When she got to
+Westminster she told the driver to cross the bridge&mdash;and what
+railway station is the other end of the bridge?"</p>
+<p>"Waterloo," said I.</p>
+<p>"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from
+Southampton the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny,
+believe me."</p>
+<p>I said no more.</p>
+<p>The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his
+pocket.</p>
+<p>"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this
+district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.</p>
+<p>"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was
+something fishy about it."</p>
+<p>"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne,
+and I'm surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my
+character. I had a short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday
+enclosing four other letters which she asked me to stamp and post,
+as I owed her fourpence change on her bill."</p>
+<p>"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.</p>
+<p>"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.</p>
+<p>"But the postmark on the envelope."</p>
+<p>She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been
+destroyed.</p>
+<p>"Then where is she?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at
+once."</p>
+<p>So after a visit to my bankers&mdash;for I am not the kind of
+person to set out for Santa F&eacute; de Bogot&agrave; with
+twopence halfpenny in my pocket&mdash;and after a hasty lunch at a
+restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient disgust&mdash;"Why the
+dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if we're to fool
+about wasting time over lunch?"&mdash;but as I explained, if I
+don't have regular meals, I get a headache&mdash;and after having
+made other sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase
+of a toothbrush, an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin,
+admirable fellow that he is, invariably forgets to put into my
+case, we started for Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth
+Road we went, through Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the
+Surrey Downs rolling warm in the sunshine, through Farnham, through
+grey, dreamy Winchester, past St. Cross, with its old-world
+almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill and down to
+Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a quarter.
+Jaffery drove.</p>
+<p>We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the
+various places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in
+Southampton. We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the
+Royal, the Star, the Dolphin, the Polygon&mdash;and found no trace
+of the runaways. Jaffery interviewed officials at the stations and
+docks, dapper gentlemen with the air of diplomatists, tremendous
+fellows in uniform, policemen, porters, with all of whom he seemed
+to be on terms of familiar acquaintance; but none of them could
+trace or remember such a couple having crossed by the midnight
+boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were their names down on the list
+of those who had secured berths in advance for this Saturday
+night.</p>
+<p>"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not
+displeased at my masterful friend's failure.</p>
+<p>"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly
+means that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on
+Monday. If it was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've
+only to wait and catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement,
+which is possible, he and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that
+case we'll cross ourselves and track them down."</p>
+<p>"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I
+murmured.</p>
+<p>"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement
+he must be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must
+be working in the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place
+besides this is Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only
+seventeen miles."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
+comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to
+dine at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the
+car drove off.</p>
+<p>"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."</p>
+<p>"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow
+night's boat."</p>
+<p>"There isn't one on Sundays."</p>
+<p>"Then Monday night's boat."</p>
+<p>"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet
+him on the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down
+on my leg above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I
+should like to take you on an expedition. It would do you a
+thundering lot of good."</p>
+<p>We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of
+enquiries as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining
+Southsea could we find a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook,
+and still less of the obscure Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel.
+We dined very well. On that I insisted&mdash;without much
+expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me for a Sybarite
+and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on account of
+succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
+excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we
+felt that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it
+so gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back
+to Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on
+the off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to
+catch the Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I
+cheerfully contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre.
+And as Jaffery (also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining
+me with juicy stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt
+equal to any dare-devil adventure.</p>
+<p>We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
+South-Western Hotel&mdash;the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our
+uncertainty as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed
+his dull brain. Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to
+stick to his side and obey him slavishly took the place of
+intellectual workings. It was nearly midnight. We walked through
+the docks, a background of darkness, a foreground of confusing
+lights amid which shone vivid illuminated placards before the
+brightly lit steamers&mdash;"St.
+Malo"&mdash;"Cherbourg"&mdash;"Jersey"&mdash;"Havre." At the quiet
+gangway of the Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags
+on the quay and stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a
+stick at its master's feet.</p>
+<p>One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad
+ants swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the
+fore, he the aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women,
+vague human forms encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of
+impedimenta. They all seemed alike&mdash;just a herd of Britons,
+impelled by irrational instinct, like the fate-driven lemmings of
+Norway, to cross the sea. And all around, weird in the conflicting
+lights, hurried gnome-like figures mountainously laden, and in the
+confusion of sounds could be heard the slither and thud of trunks
+being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail of the packed wedge
+disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I went to the aft
+gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had seen Fendihook
+or Liosha.</p>
+<p>A second train produced results equally barren.</p>
+<p>There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We
+went aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.</p>
+<p>My method of travel has always been to arrange everything
+beforehand with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains
+and boats I have thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear
+therefore that there were no berths free and that we should have to
+pass the night either on the windy deck or in the red-plush
+discomfort of the open saloon caused me not unreasonable dismay. I
+had to choose and I chose the saloon. Jaffery, of course, chose the
+raw winds of heaven. All night I did not get a wink of sleep. There
+was a gross fellow in the next section of red-plush whose snoring
+drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long after they had
+cleared away the remains of supper from the long central table
+chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
+world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the
+popping of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three
+a minute. I understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the
+human brain. I devised exquisite means of removing him from a
+nauseated world. Then there was a lamp which swung backwards and
+forwards and searched my eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I
+covered them.</p>
+<p>What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife
+and child and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got
+out to sea. There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and
+swift scurrying of stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly
+hate a ship to do. And I was fully dressed and it seemed as if all
+the tender parts of my body were tied up with twine. What was I
+doing in this galley?</p>
+<p>When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning
+over me and all was deathly still.</p>
+<p>"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is
+there a fog?"</p>
+<p>"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of
+Havre."</p>
+<p>"What time is it?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Half-past six."</p>
+<p>"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said
+I, lying down again.</p>
+<p>He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.</p>
+<p>The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck
+of Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.</p>
+<p>"What a ghastly night!"</p>
+<p>"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped
+over twenty miles."</p>
+<p>There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate
+numbers on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the
+companion onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the
+releasing gangway. I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans.
+The sky was overcast. It was very cold. The universe had an
+uncared-for, unswept appearance, like a house surprised at dawn,
+before the housemaids are up. The forced appearance of a well-to-do
+philosopher at such an hour was nothing less than an outrage. I
+glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and turned down
+its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool thoughtlessness I
+had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in charge of the
+blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I glanced
+over my shoulder.</p>
+<p>"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.</p>
+<p>At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep
+from us turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into
+each other's eyes.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER
+XVIII</h2>
+<p>Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm.
+Her eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then
+she turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just
+beyond the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even
+further away. The gangway was fixed and the movement of the
+conglomerate mass began. Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.</p>
+<p>"There's the brute waiting for her."</p>
+<p>And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a
+smile on his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the
+foot of the gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence,
+sought us anxiously with his gaze; then with an air of bravado
+waved his hat&mdash;a hard white felt&mdash;and cried out: "Cheer
+O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and linking his arm
+through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers hurrying across
+the stones to the custom-sheds.</p>
+<p>"Stop," Jaffery roared.</p>
+<p>They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook
+would have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the
+stream into a clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us.
+When we had struggled our slow way down and reached the quay she
+advanced a few steps looking very terrible in her wrath.</p>
+<p>"How dare you follow me?"</p>
+<p>"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an
+imperious gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the
+stern of the boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging,
+and a sergeant de ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.</p>
+<p>"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I
+didn't play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play
+dragon with a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."</p>
+<p>"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said
+jauntily.</p>
+<p>"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone.
+"You know very well why I'm here."</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne&mdash;" Liosha began.</p>
+<p>He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."</p>
+<p>"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."</p>
+<p>"He has got to tell me, not you."</p>
+<p>"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said
+Fendihook, with sudden nastiness.</p>
+<p>"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."</p>
+<p>"How are you going to do it?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?"
+snarled Fendihook.</p>
+<p>"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."</p>
+<p>"Sure," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"And are you going to marry this lady?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly."</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you marry her in England?"</p>
+<p>"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here&mdash;we don't
+want any of your interference." And she planted herself by the side
+of her abductor, glaring defiance at Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and
+an Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and
+would forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little
+skunk!"</p>
+<p>The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked
+swiftly at Fendihook.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't it true what you told me?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in
+England as Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>She paid no attention to me.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.</p>
+<p>Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that
+rot seriously, you silly cuckoo?"</p>
+<p>Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly.
+For the first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her
+candid mind.</p>
+<p>"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise
+to marry her in France."</p>
+<p>"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."</p>
+<p>"Who says I can't?"</p>
+<p>"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."</p>
+<p>"I've divorced her."</p>
+<p>"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing.
+I've found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous
+character."</p>
+<p>Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her
+eyes burning.</p>
+<p>"He's married already&mdash;" she gasped.</p>
+<p>"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."</p>
+<p>Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been
+for Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been
+round Fendihook's throat.</p>
+<p>"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron
+strength. Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as
+white as a sheet. I tapped him on the arm.</p>
+<p>"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if
+you don't want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a
+scared look, "you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You
+had better stick to the sort you're accustomed to."</p>
+<p>"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."</p>
+<p>"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne.
+With my own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like
+and"&mdash;I made an expressive gesture&mdash;"throw him clean
+away."</p>
+<p>"Right O!" said he.</p>
+<p>He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck
+me. I overtook him.</p>
+<p>"Where are you staying in Havre?"</p>
+<p>He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know
+for?"</p>
+<p>"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be
+if we chanced upon the same hotel."</p>
+<p>"I'm staying at the Phares&mdash;the swagger one on the beach
+near the Casino."</p>
+<p>"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."</p>
+<p>"Good-bye, old pal," said he.</p>
+<p>He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.</p>
+<p>I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she
+stood unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking
+sidewise down. Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had
+mastered her fury, but now we had to deal with her shame and
+humiliation.</p>
+<p>"Let her go!" I whispered.</p>
+<p>Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without
+moving her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have
+known exactly what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat
+helplessly.</p>
+<p>"<i>Monsieur</i>," said a voice close by, and we saw our little
+blue-bloused porter. He explained that he had been seeking us
+everywhere. If we did not make haste we would lose the Paris
+train.</p>
+<p>I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not
+pressed for time; but this little outside happening broke the
+situation.</p>
+<p>"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground
+a leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
+extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.</p>
+<p>"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides,
+we'll have to stay the night."</p>
+<p>"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."</p>
+<p>"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."</p>
+<p>An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she
+wore cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly
+unconcerned with such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken
+face to all the world. I felt intensely sorry for her. She realised
+now from what a blatant scoundrel she had been saved; but she still
+bitterly resented our intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped
+naked walking between them"&mdash;that was her primitive account
+later of her state of mind.</p>
+<p>"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."</p>
+<p>She nodded, without looking at me.</p>
+<p>"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."</p>
+<p>She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but
+she remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
+mechanically to her declarations.</p>
+<p>On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the
+cheery sun had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a
+glorious day. The luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took
+an open cab and rattled through the narrow flag-paved streets of
+the harbour quarter of the town. As we emerged into a more spacious
+thoroughfare, suddenly from a gaudy column at the corner flared the
+name of Ras Fendihook. I caught the heading of the <i>affiche</i>:
+"Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery was solved. Jaffery had
+been right in his deduction that he had left London on a
+professional engagement; but we had not thought of an engagement
+out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question: "Why
+Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
+of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had
+eyes for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We
+passed another column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where
+already at that early hour, above its wide terrace, the striped
+awning of Tortoni's was flung. We alighted at the hotel and ordered
+our three rooms; coffee and roll to be taken up to madame; we men
+would eat our petit d&eacute;jeuner downstairs. Liosha left us
+without saying a word.</p>
+<p>Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good <i>caf&eacute; au
+lait</i>, gladdened by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our
+morning's work, quite a different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on
+the terrace from the sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours
+before. My urbane dismissal of Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my
+memory. The glow of conscious heroism warmed me, even like last
+night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind. After despatching, by the
+chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and sending up to Liosha's
+room a bunch of red roses we bought at a florist's hard by, I
+surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the matutinal
+Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his pipe and
+uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.</p>
+<p>I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is
+regarding of its <i>sous</i>, it is what you will. But it lives a
+spacious, out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury
+itself, like provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks
+abroad. It indulges in its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is
+intensely conscious of family, but it can take deep breaths of
+freedom. It is not Sundayfied into our vacuous boredom. It clings
+to the picturesque, in which it finds its dignified delight. The
+little soldier clad in blue tunic and red trousers struts along
+with his <i>fianc&eacute;e</i> or <i>ma&icirc;tresse</i> on his
+arm; the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair
+plume; the cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty
+wife, drinks syrup at a neighbouring table in your caf&eacute;. The
+work-girls, even on Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they
+were at home in the friendly street. The cur&eacute; in shovel hat
+and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday happens not to be the
+<i>jour de repos hebdomadaire</i> ordained by law, in their blue
+<i>sarreau</i>; the peasants from outlying villages&mdash;the men
+in queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
+dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent
+black, with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with
+fat and greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an
+exiguous cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a
+quarter of an inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair
+of gendarmes with their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords;
+the white-aproned waiters standing by caf&eacute; tables&mdash;all
+these types are distinct, picked out pleasurably by the eye; they
+give a cheery sense of variety; the stage is dressed.</p>
+<p>So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do
+all day, I replied:</p>
+<p>"Sit here."</p>
+<p>"Don't you want to see the place?"</p>
+<p>"The place," said I, "is parading before us."</p>
+<p>"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."</p>
+<p>"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and
+she's not in a mood for jaunts."</p>
+<p>"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful
+for her. Oh, that swine of a blighter!"</p>
+<p>His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the
+dozenth time we went over the story.</p>
+<p>"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She
+can't go back to the boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to
+Barbara."</p>
+<p>"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know,
+Hilary, there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if
+one only knew the right way to take her."</p>
+<p>The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal
+it. I assented to Jaffery's proposition.</p>
+<p>"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a
+Spanish gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of
+truth and honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been
+a nasty knock for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as
+she has pulled herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a
+big way."</p>
+<p>And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing
+towards us past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself.
+Another woman would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us
+would have had to soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her
+to eat and cajole her into revisiting the light of day. Not so
+Liosha. She arrayed herself in fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt,
+fitting close to her splendid figure, which she held erect, a smart
+hat with a feather, and new white gloves, and came to us the
+incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the morning, our roses pinned
+in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her lips were not quite
+under control, but she made a valiant show.</p>
+<p>We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our
+chairs.</p>
+<p>"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."</p>
+<p>We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she
+looked steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.</p>
+<p>"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."</p>
+<p>"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been
+rather indiscreet."</p>
+<p>"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat
+your breakfast?"</p>
+<p>She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What
+would she have now? I sent a waiter for caf&eacute;-au-lait and a
+brioche and lectured her on the folly of going without proper
+sustenance. The ghost of a smile crept into her eyes, in
+recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism with which I am wrongly
+credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for the roses. They
+were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the little tray
+and the <i>verseur</i> poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
+her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.</p>
+<p>"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.</p>
+<p>"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the
+boat? We watched the London trains carefully."</p>
+<p>"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and
+went to bed at once."</p>
+<p>"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What
+were you doing at Southsea?"</p>
+<p>"Staying with Emma&mdash;Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I
+couldn't stick that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote
+to Emma to ask her to put me up."</p>
+<p>"So that's why you went on Thursday?"</p>
+<p>"That's why."</p>
+<p>"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
+Considine&mdash;I mean Mrs. Jupp&mdash;into your confidence?"</p>
+<p>"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going
+to Havre&mdash;to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that.
+But Jaff Chayne was the only person that had to know the
+truth."</p>
+<p>We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the
+intrigue that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left
+London on Sunday for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of
+Havre. As there was no Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to
+travel to Havre via Paris. Being a crafty villain, he would not run
+away with Liosha straight from London. She was to join him a week
+later, after he had had time to spy out the land and make his
+nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His fortnight up, he was
+sailing away again to America. Liosha was to accompany him. In all
+probability, for I delight in thinking the worst of Mr. Ras
+Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of his
+tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
+worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed
+voyage back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in
+the railway network of the United States. I have made it my
+business to enquire into the ways of this entertaining but unholy
+villain. This is what I am sure he would have done. One girl some
+half dozen years before he had left penniless in San Francisco and
+the door over which burns the Red Lamp swallowed her up
+forever.</p>
+<p>For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a
+soul must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As
+Jaffery had guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of
+Westminster Abbey. Although her open nature abhorred the deception,
+she obeyed his instructions in minor details and thought she was
+acting in the spirit of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters
+to Mrs. Jardine to be posted in London. By risking discovery of her
+secret during her visit to the admirable lady at Southsea and by
+ingenuously disclosing the plot to Jaffery she showed herself to be
+a very sorry conspirator.</p>
+<p>She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to
+touch upon the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not
+stay in Havre all day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who
+might swagger into the town from his swagger hotel on the
+<i>plage</i>, we carried out Jaffery's proposal, hired an
+automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight from inland into
+the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of fisher-folk and
+fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged needle gates
+jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
+grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
+sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew
+a deep breath.</p>
+<p>"Oh, let us all come and live here."</p>
+<p>We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats
+wherein the fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach
+where a few belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the
+curious steps to the terrace and listened to the last number of the
+orchestra. Then lunch at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet
+among the fishing boats; and afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the
+little shady courtyard. Jaffery was very gentle with Liosha,
+treating her tenderly like a bruised thing, and talked of his
+adventures and cracked little jokes and attended solicitously to
+her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy gratitude,
+and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled her to
+make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
+sipped <i>cr&ecirc;me de menthe</i> with frank gusto. To me she
+appeared like a naughty child who instead of meeting with expected
+punishment finds itself coddled in affectionate arms. All
+resentment had died away. Unreservedly she had laid herself as a
+"damn fool" at our feet&mdash;or rather at Jaffery's feet, for I
+did not count for much. Instead of blundering over her and tugging
+her up and otherwise exacerbating her wounds, he lifted her with
+tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the first time, save when
+Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a spiritual relation
+with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy&mdash;she was dealing with
+a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
+immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At
+the same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously
+throbbing and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those
+few hours.</p>
+<p>To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in
+Jaffery's category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have
+threatened on many restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a
+gigantic wheel for his benefit similar to that in which Susan's
+white mice take futile exercise. If there was such a wheel he must,
+I am sure, get in and whirl it round; just as if there is a boat he
+must row it, or tree to be felled he must fell it, or a hill to be
+climbed he must climb it. At Etretat, as it happens, there are two
+hills. He stretched forth his hand to one, of course the highest,
+crowned by the fishermen's chapel and ordained an ascent. Liosha
+was in the chastened mood in which she would have dived with him to
+the depths of the English Channel. I, with grudging meekness and a
+prayer for another five minutes devoted to the deglutition of
+another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.</p>
+<p>It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze
+tempered the fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and
+agreeable to the feet. The smell of wild thyme mingling with the
+salt of the low-tide seaweed conveyed stimulating fragrance. When
+we reached the top and Jaffery suggested that we should lie down, I
+protested. Why not walk along the edge of the inspiring cliffs?</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night,"
+said he throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I
+need rest."</p>
+<p>Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after
+the quick ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played
+charmingly in the wind which blew her skirts close around her in
+fine modelling. I thought of the Winged Victory.</p>
+<p>"I'm not a bit tired," she said.</p>
+<p>But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his
+fists, she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to
+go contrary to his desires?" and settled down beside him.</p>
+<p>So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the
+dancing sea and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long
+plume from a steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us
+and the tiny golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and
+were in fact giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when
+suddenly Liosha broke the spell.</p>
+<p>"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have
+killed him."</p>
+<p>Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.</p>
+<p>"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I did strike him once."</p>
+<p>"Oh?" said I.</p>
+<p>"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to
+hear the details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous
+elements. But she left them to my imagination. "After that," she
+continued, "he saw I was an honest woman and talked about
+marriage."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my
+dear," said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."</p>
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders&mdash;it was the full shrug of the
+un-English child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze
+still far away. "He was so funny."</p>
+<p>"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
+remonstrance.</p>
+<p>"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he
+was different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very
+much. You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't
+behave like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me
+out to dinner."</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go
+on."</p>
+<p>"What can I say?"&mdash;she shrugged her shoulders again. "With
+him I hadn't to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I
+liked. You all think it dreadful because I know, like everybody
+else, how children come into the world, and can make jokes about
+things like that. Emma used to say it was not ladylike&mdash;but
+he&mdash;he did not say so. He laughed. His friends used to laugh.
+With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off my
+stays"&mdash;she threw out her hands largely&mdash;"ouf!"</p>
+<p>"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.</p>
+<p>"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a
+crowd of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a
+big difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in
+a low voice.</p>
+<p>I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to
+Barbara for her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My
+attitude, as you can understand, was solely one of kindly
+curiosity. Liosha, for some moments, also said nothing. Rather
+feverishly she pulled off her new white gloves and cast them away;
+and I noticed an all but imperceptible something&mdash;something,
+for want of a better word, like a ripple&mdash;sweep through her,
+faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her neck and
+dying away in a flush on her cheek.</p>
+<p>"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the
+grass-blades.</p>
+<p>She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or
+two and clutched his shoulder.</p>
+<p>"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I
+thought you understood. I would have married anybody who would have
+taken me out of prison. He was going to take me out of prison to
+places where I could breathe." She fell back onto her heels and
+beat her breast with both hands. "I was dying for want of air. I
+was suffocating."</p>
+<p>Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.</p>
+<p>"What are you talking about?"</p>
+<p>She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
+spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my
+knees.</p>
+<p>"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my
+throat"&mdash;and forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's
+discipline she mimed her words startlingly&mdash;"I was
+sick&mdash;sick&mdash;sick to death. You forget, Jaff Chayne, the
+mountains of Albania."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her.
+"But I remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"</p>
+<p>She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though
+to hide swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them
+away. "No. Not now. Not after&mdash;No. But mountains,
+freedom&mdash;anything unlike prison. Oh, I've gone mad sometimes.
+I've wanted to take up a fender and smash things."</p>
+<p>"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"And what have you done?"</p>
+<p>"I've broken out of prison and run away."</p>
+<p>"That's what I did," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and
+looked at her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And
+Liosha laughed, too.</p>
+<p>"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what
+it comes to."</p>
+<p>No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy
+good-humour had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her
+imagination of wider horizons; he promised her release from the
+conventions and restrictions of her artificial existence; she was
+ready to embark with him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was
+evident that she had not given him the tiniest little scrap of her
+heart.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I tried to be good to please you&mdash;you and Barbara and
+Hilary, who've been so kind to me."</p>
+<p>"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear
+girl, I'm as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere
+and wear beads."</p>
+<p>"So do I," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
+chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my
+knees, consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a
+moment afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect
+agreement of babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff
+road. I jumped to my feet and pursued them.</p>
+<p>"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe
+the decencies of civilised life."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<p>"<i>Arr&ecirc;tez! 'Arr&ecirc;tez!</i>" roared Jaffery all of a
+sudden.</p>
+<p>We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from
+Etretat. The chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door,
+leaped out and disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice
+reverberating from side to side of the Boulevard Maritime.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"</p>
+<p>I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw
+Jaffery in characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the
+shoulders and laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad,
+powerful-looking fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a
+point, and wearing a curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a
+bowler-hat. I noticed that he carried neither stick nor gloves. The
+ecstasies of encounter having subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the
+car.</p>
+<p>"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted,
+opening the door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a
+drink at Tortoni's."</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling,
+took off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave,
+self-possessed manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes,
+the colour of a stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering
+him my seat next Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he
+quickly established himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto
+occupied by Jaffery. Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur
+and leaned over the partition. The car started.</p>
+<p>"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard
+him. "From Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and
+Mediterranean ports thrown in. In the depth of winter.
+Remember?"</p>
+<p>"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head
+round. "We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of
+December."</p>
+<p>"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and
+back."</p>
+<p>"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain
+Maturin.</p>
+<p>"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave
+smile. "He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."</p>
+<p>"Remember that night off Vigo?"</p>
+<p>"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch
+and go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think
+of the time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self
+was responsible for the saving of his ship.</p>
+<p>"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.</p>
+<p>"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since,
+myself included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with
+me."</p>
+<p>Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few
+planks, holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and
+from side to side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water
+and fronting a hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the
+time not knowing from one minute to the next whether you are going
+to Kingdom come&mdash;No. It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of
+fun. And even as duty&mdash;I thanked merciful Heaven that never
+since the age of nine, when I was violently sick crossing to the
+Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest desire to be a mariner,
+either professional or amateur. I looked at the two adventurers
+wonderingly; and so did Liosha.</p>
+<p>"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"</p>
+<p>"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner,
+and I grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend
+to on board ship."</p>
+<p>He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly
+for the entertainment of a pretty woman.</p>
+<p>"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If
+a man doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's
+not saying that I love the sea."</p>
+<p>With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the
+Hotel, Restaurant and Caf&eacute; Tortoni in the Place Gambetta.
+The terrace was thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and
+wives and families enjoying the Sunday afternoon
+<i>ap&eacute;ritif</i>.</p>
+<p>"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through
+the crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine
+devices. But Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a
+pretty woman at our table as well as other people? She flushed at
+the compliment, the first, I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter
+conjured a vacant table and chairs from nowhere, in the midst of
+the sedentary throng. For Liosha was brought grenadine syrup and
+soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain Maturin, with the steady
+English sailor's suspicion of any other drink than Scotch whisky,
+glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an appetite for
+dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.</p>
+<p>"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing
+with yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"</p>
+<p>"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue
+Cross Line&mdash;Ellershaw &amp; Co.&mdash;trading between Havre
+and Mozambique."</p>
+<p>"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.</p>
+<p>I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information.
+"Portuguese East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to
+Madagascar."</p>
+<p>"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of
+soda into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to
+me, exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped
+his drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us&mdash;for he
+was not a spontaneously communicative man&mdash;that he now had a
+very good command: steamship <i>Vesta</i>, one thousand five
+hundred tons, somewhat old, but sea-worthy, warranted to take more
+cargo than any vessel of her size he had ever set eyes on.</p>
+<p>"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up
+now."</p>
+<p>Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered
+another.</p>
+<p>"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, worse luck."</p>
+<p>"Why worse luck?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of
+Madagascar before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and
+plot of garden at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.</p>
+<p>"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
+Chayne?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white
+teeth showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And
+bringing down his hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder&mdash;"Why
+not? You and I. Out of this rotten civilisation?"</p>
+<p>Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement.
+So did I. I thought he was going mad.</p>
+<p>"Would you like it?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang
+into her face.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin leaned forward.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and
+certainly there's no accommodation for ladies."</p>
+<p>Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady&mdash;in your
+silly old sailor sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me.
+When you had me aboard, did you think of having accommodation for a
+gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At any rate," said he, at the end of the
+peal, "you've a sort of spare cabin? There's always one."</p>
+<p>"A kind of dog-hole&mdash;for you, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He
+jumped to his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two
+adjoining and crowded tables, for which, dismayed and
+bareheaded&mdash;Jaffery could be a very courtly gentleman when he
+chose&mdash;he apologized in fluent French, and, turning, caught
+Captain Maturin beneath the arm.</p>
+<p>"Let us have a private palaver about this."</p>
+<p>They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness
+of the Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till
+they disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:</p>
+<p>"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"</p>
+<p>"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.</p>
+<p>"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I
+notice that her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had
+cast them on the hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my
+immortal soul to go."</p>
+<p>I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark,
+staring craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring
+craziness is.</p>
+<p>"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I,
+pretending to believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a
+tramp&mdash;without another woman on board, with all the inherited
+smells of all the animals in Noah's Ark, including the descendants
+of all the cockroaches that Noah forgot to land, with a crew of
+Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful food, without a bath, with a beast
+of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to sleep in&mdash;a wallowing,
+rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of a steamer, a
+little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping seas,
+always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
+always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the
+bridge to see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down&mdash;a
+floating&mdash;when she does float&mdash;a floating inferno of
+misery&mdash;here it is&mdash;I can tell you all about it&mdash;any
+child in a board school could tell you&mdash;an inferno of misery
+in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
+suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently
+ill and always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused
+by the wind&mdash;to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo
+of cotton goods catching fire, and the wheezing medi&aelig;val
+boilers bursting and sending you all to glory&mdash;"</p>
+<p>I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and
+chin on hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with
+absorbed interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a
+shaky voice:</p>
+<p>"I should love it! I should love it!"</p>
+<p>"But it's lunatic," said I.</p>
+<p>"So much the better."</p>
+<p>"But the proprieties."</p>
+<p>She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and
+flung out her hands towards me.</p>
+<p>"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What
+have Jaff Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I
+travel from Scutari to London?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different
+now?"</p>
+<p>It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from
+glow to defensive sombreness admitted its significance.</p>
+<p>"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the
+same." She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath
+lowering brows. "If you think just because he and I are good
+friends now there's any difference, you're making a great mistake.
+And just you tell Barbara that."</p>
+<p>"I will do so&mdash;" said I.</p>
+<p>"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha
+Prescott is not going to let herself be made a fool of by a man
+who's crazy mad over another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not
+me. And as for the proprieties"&mdash;she snapped her
+fingers&mdash;"they be&mdash;they be anything'd!"</p>
+<p>To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I
+drank the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back
+on the manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
+anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its
+discomfort.</p>
+<p>"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear,
+will always be in the way."</p>
+<p>"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery
+sun now about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables,
+followed by the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.</p>
+<p>"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en
+understands the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem
+and Madagascar and North and South Amerikee,' come."</p>
+<p>"But this is midsummer madness," said I.</p>
+<p>"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and
+fortuitously caught a waiter by the arm. "<i>M&ecirc;me chose pour
+tout le monde</i>." He flicked him away. "Now, this is business.
+Will you come and rough it? The <i>Vesta</i> isn't a Cunard Liner.
+Not even a passenger boat. No luxuries. I hope you understand."</p>
+<p>"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but
+you mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign
+on as one of the crew?"</p>
+<p>"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up
+to the binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in
+irons."</p>
+<p>"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
+incredulity.</p>
+<p>"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and
+portmanteaux aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"The <i>what</i>?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha
+and me have dunnage."</p>
+<p>"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together
+with a parrot in a cage."</p>
+<p>Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to
+light mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I
+asked, "is to become of the forty-odd <i>colis</i> that we passed
+through the customs this morning?"</p>
+<p>"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over
+his third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I
+brought him along? I told him he'd come in useful."</p>
+<p>"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a
+lone man, give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all
+this baggage? They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and
+I shall be arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are
+agencies of expedition. We can forward the luggage by <i>grande
+vitesse</i> or <i>petite vitesse</i>&mdash;how long are you likely
+to be away on this Theophile Gautier voyage&mdash;'<i>Cueillir la
+fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka</i>'?"</p>
+<p>"Four months," said Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just
+in time."</p>
+<p>I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
+difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
+nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing
+crates belonging to a woman who is not my wife.</p>
+<p>There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic,
+but to the others practical details, in which I had no share. A
+suit of oilskins and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of
+much complicated argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin
+undertook to procure them from marine stores this peaceful Sunday
+night. Liosha, aglow with excitement and looking exceedingly
+beautiful, also mentioned her need of thick jersey and woollen cap
+and stout boots not quite so tempest-defying as the others; and
+these, too, the foolish and apparently infatuated mariner promised
+to provide. We drifted mechanically, still talking, into the
+interior of the Caf&eacute;-Restaurant, where we sat down to a
+dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not one of the others
+took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a schoolboy son of
+Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth&mdash;it might have been
+tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or cared.
+His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
+clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
+plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the
+table, after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight&mdash;I
+whispered the information as (through force of training) I should
+have whispered it to Barbara, with no other result than an
+impatient push which rendered it more piquantly crooked than ever.
+Captain Maturin went through the performance with the grave face of
+another classical devotee to duty; but his heart&mdash;poor
+fellow!&mdash;was not in his food. It was partly in Pinner, partly
+in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of having as
+cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman of the
+stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
+finery, who was sitting next to him.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do
+before turning in&mdash;including, I suppose, the purchase of his
+cook's mate's outfit&mdash;and he was to sail at five-thirty in the
+morning. If his new deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside
+at five or thereabouts, he would see to their adequate
+reception.</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said
+he, with a grip like&mdash;like any horrible thing that is hard and
+iron and clamping in a steamer's machinery&mdash;and athwart his
+green-grey eyes filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of
+humour&mdash;"There's still time."</p>
+<p>"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact
+that all my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a
+Persian poet."</p>
+<p>If I am not urbane, I am nothing.</p>
+<p>He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
+rearrangement of her luggage&mdash;"dunnage," I
+corrected&mdash;would be a lengthy process. She thanked me, in her
+best Considine manner, for all the trouble I had taken on her
+account, sent her love to Barbara and to Susan, whose sickness, she
+trusted, would be transitory, expressed the hope that the care of
+her belongings would not be too great a strain upon my
+household&mdash;and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
+middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities
+and respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around
+my neck in a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary,
+I do love you!" and marched away magnificently through the staring
+tables to the inner recesses of the hotel.</p>
+<p>Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are
+credited in France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it
+conforms with traditions of <i>le fl&egrave;gme britannique</i>;
+but there was not much <i>fl&egrave;gme</i> about Liosha's embrace,
+and so the good Havrais were mystified.</p>
+<p>There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have
+run after her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more
+instinctively artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might
+suppose. Besides, there was the bill to pay. We sat down again.</p>
+<p>"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery.
+"He's one of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a
+damnable way of getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command
+of a great liner instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred
+tons."</p>
+<p>I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described
+it in those terms to Liosha."</p>
+<p>"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
+cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."</p>
+<p>It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."</p>
+<p>"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when
+I contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of
+bewilderment. But in one respect my mind retains its serene
+equipoise. Nothing short of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed
+at half-past four in the morning."</p>
+<p>"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."</p>
+<p>"Give them to me now," said I.</p>
+<p>He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind
+tidying up, some day&mdash;I left my papers in a deuce of a
+mess."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything
+should crop up."</p>
+<p>He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the
+document, which I put into my letter case.</p>
+<p>"And what about letters?"</p>
+<p>"Don't want any. Unless"&mdash;said he, after a little pause,
+frowning in the plenitude of his content&mdash;"if you and Barbara
+can make things right again with Doria&mdash;then one of you might
+drop me a line. I'll send you a schedule of dates."</p>
+<p>"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.</p>
+<p>"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me
+there's only one woman in the world."</p>
+<p>"Let us have a final drink," said I.</p>
+<p>We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.</p>
+<p>When I awoke the next morning the <i>Vesta</i> was already four
+hours on her way to Madagascar.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<p>I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the
+County of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely
+confess it. I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men
+are&mdash;which, thank Heaven, I am not&mdash;I might wear a pound
+or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my person. This I decline
+to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot keep a key. Of all
+the household stowaway places under my control (and Barbara limits
+their number) only one is locked; and that drawer containing I know
+not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so forever and
+ever&mdash;for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
+desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who
+are trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and
+strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to
+waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and
+have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it
+as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of
+Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at
+Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my arrival at
+Northlands.</p>
+<p>"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge
+of this thing."</p>
+<p>But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must
+accept the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a
+luggage label to the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend,
+"Key of Jaffery's flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into
+the wall of my library.</p>
+<p>"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I
+am not going to have anything to do with this crack-brained
+adventure."</p>
+<p>"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at
+considerable length on the subject, "one would think that I could
+have prevented it. If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to
+throw her cap over the topmasts, why in the world shouldn't
+they?"</p>
+<p>"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the
+description you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child
+will be utterly miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure
+and her skin."</p>
+<p>I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the
+steamship <i>Vesta</i>.</p>
+<p>As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St.
+Quentin's Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who,
+knowing me to be a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need
+not have burdened myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's
+chambers. I found the small sitting-room in very much the same
+state of litter as when Jaffery left it. He enjoyed litter and
+hated the devastating tidiness of housemaids. Give a young horse
+with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an hour's run in an ordinary
+bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal appearance of
+Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his books and
+pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos, of
+old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
+and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender
+care upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder,
+which reposed&mdash;most useful piece of furniture&mdash;in the
+middle of the hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric
+radiator that took the place of a grate, I let these things be, and
+concentrated my attention on his papers which lay loose on desk and
+table. This was obviously the tidying up to which he had referred.
+I swept his correspondence into one drawer. I gathered together the
+manuscript of his new novel and swept it into another. On the top
+of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the original manuscript of "The
+Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper and threaded through
+with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer of the desk,
+which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his bedroom,
+where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and looked
+around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed two
+photographs on his dressing-table&mdash;one of his mother, whom I
+remembered, and, one of Doria&mdash;these I laid face downwards so
+that the light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered
+portmanteau from beneath the lid of which protruded three or four
+corners of scribbling paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the
+offending beer-barrel in a dark alcove. The basin set below the
+tap, in order to catch the drip, was nearly full. In four months'
+time the room would be flooded with sour and horrible beer. Full of
+the thought, I deposited the letters in the drawer with the rest of
+the correspondence, and, leaving the flat, summoned the lift, and
+in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter with the contents of
+a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow that mantles from
+man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a friend for
+life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
+labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery
+and myself had, at least, one thing in common&mdash;videlicet, the
+keyless habit. I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked
+some hidden <i>trait-d'union</i>. Now I had found it.</p>
+<p>And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how
+congenial Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the
+<i>Vesta</i>. The weather had changed from summer calm to storm.
+The gentleman from the meteorological office who writes for the
+newspapers talked about cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales
+in the channel and on the west coasts of France. The same was
+likely to continue. The wind blew hard enough in Berkshire, what
+must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a matter of fact, as we
+learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a short letter
+from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips considerably
+later&mdash;for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to the
+bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe&mdash;they had
+made their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during
+which they apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas
+washed the deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food
+had not been procurable. It seemed that every horror I had
+prophesied had come to pass. I should have pitied them, but for the
+blatant joyousness of their communications. "I was not seasick a
+minute, and I have never been so happy in my life," wrote Liosha.
+"Hilary should have been with us," wrote Jaffery. "It would have
+made a man of him. Liosha in splendid fettle. She goes about in
+men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her hand to anything when
+she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just imagine them having
+cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing in wet and dirt.
+. . .</p>
+<p>About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in
+my all too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her
+first visit since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to
+make friends with us once more, and to prove it showed the
+pleasanter side of her character. She professed not to have
+forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the terrible episode in less
+vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that she missed him more
+than she would confess, even to herself. In her reconstituted
+existence he had stood for an essential element. Unconsciously she
+had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his constant
+service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now that
+she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
+neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble
+uncomfortably. After all, she had provoked the man (this with some
+reluctance she admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up
+and shaken her. He had had no intention of dashing out her brains
+or even of giving her a beating. In her heart she repented.
+Otherwise why should she take so ill Jaffery's flight with Liosha,
+which she characterised as abominable, and Liosha's flight with
+Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?</p>
+<p>"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
+morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
+disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat
+back in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the
+woman. One would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of
+stain."</p>
+<p>"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."</p>
+<p>"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot.
+"You, a man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off
+with that dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with
+Jaffery. What respectable woman&mdash;well, what honest woman,
+according to the term of the lower classes&mdash;would run away
+with two men within twenty-five hours?"</p>
+<p>"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going
+to marry her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because
+there's no question of marriage or anything else between them."</p>
+<p>"<i>Sancta simplicitas!</i>" She shook her head from side to
+side and looked at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a
+fool. But she isn't. The best one can say for her is that she has
+no moral sense. I know the type."</p>
+<p>"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.</p>
+<p>She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied
+with her ready sureness:</p>
+<p>"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own
+among literary people."</p>
+<p>"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional
+chair."</p>
+<p>"You're as bemused as Barbara."</p>
+<p>"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've
+studied an individual, which you haven't."</p>
+<p>She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own
+way&mdash;Paul and Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to
+me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it&mdash;what the dickens
+does it matter to you?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.</p>
+<p>"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with
+malicious intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again.
+You've banished him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no
+concern of yours. If he chose to elope with the fat woman in a
+freak museum, why shouldn't he? What would it have to do with
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not
+sitting on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the
+more insulting."</p>
+<p>"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.</p>
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+<p>She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she
+had swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to
+myself. She was eaten up with jealousy.</p>
+<p>"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the
+absent being always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back
+and hear what they've got to say for themselves."</p>
+<p>She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little
+black and ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What
+they may say is a matter of perfect indifference to me."</p>
+<p>I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
+Jaffery's&mdash;practically&mdash;last words to me were: 'There's
+only one woman in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away
+with a laugh. "And to prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh,
+Hilary"&mdash;with the tips of her fingers she brushed my
+hair&mdash;"you really are a simple old dear!"</p>
+<p>"All the same&mdash;" I began.</p>
+<p>"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy
+conversation. I didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy
+of Baudelaire, if you have one."</p>
+<p>She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down <i>Les
+Fleurs du Mal</i>. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm,
+and went out.</p>
+<p>Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good
+discipline. It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever
+get Jaffery back again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I
+was certain that not only would she forgive past mishandling, but
+for the sake of keeping him would put up with a little more.
+Whether she would marry him was another story. I had every reason
+to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned her bosom's lord. In
+her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She regarded a second
+marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough, with her
+husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
+back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she
+would treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of
+course, were my conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara)
+from the patent fact that she found herself lost without Jaffery
+and that she was furiously jealous of Liosha.</p>
+<p>It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived.
+Barbara and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all
+my gods I would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I
+arrived with a mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid
+at a great hotel on the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed
+in the Adriatic. We revisited familiar churches and picture
+galleries in Venice. We mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd and
+developed the complexions (not only in our faces) of an Othello
+family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every August, Mr.
+Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and other
+feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
+marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
+nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.</p>
+<p>Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the
+sea having subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled
+down to the normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn
+with the hands, coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his
+watch. Liosha, we were given to understand, besides helping in the
+galley and the cabin and swabbing decks, found much delight in
+painting the ship's boats with paint which Jaffery had bought for
+the purpose at Bordeaux. She had struck up a friendship with the
+first mate, who, possessing a camera, had taken their photographs.
+They sent us one of the two standing side by side, and a more
+villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could not wish to
+see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
+Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's
+sake, had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without
+taking the trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung
+about her calves in disgraceful fringes.</p>
+<p>"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
+anything but utterly miserable."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she
+maintained.</p>
+<p>"Well, it's her own skin."</p>
+<p>"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.</p>
+<p>What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had
+the last word.</p>
+<p>The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly
+afterwards Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the
+Adrian-haunted flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining
+that no one but her father, of whose society she had wearied, was
+in town, and went off on a series of country-house visits. The
+flat, I suspected, for all its sacred memories, was dull without
+Jaffery. She still maintained her unrelenting attitude, and spoke
+scornfully of him; but once or twice she asked when this mad voyage
+would be over, thereby betraying curiosity rather than
+indifference.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing.
+Wittekind's list of new novels in its deep black framing border
+stared at you from the advertisement pages of every periodical you
+picked up, and so did the list of every other publisher. Day after
+day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day
+after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The
+Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers,
+were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the
+great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what
+purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this
+dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her. Adrian's book had
+been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold enormously.
+It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any longer.
+Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do his
+duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
+"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he
+wasn't a tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of
+selling books, how could Adrian's novels have attained their wide
+circulation? It was to his interest to increase that circulation as
+much as possible. Why not let him run his very successful business
+his own way? Doria loftily assured me that she had no interest in
+his business, in the mere vulgar number of copies sold. Adrian's
+glory was above such sordid things. Of far higher importance was it
+that his name should be kept, like a beacon, before the public. Not
+to do so was callous ingratitude and tradesman's niggardliness on
+the part of Wittekind. Something ought to be done. I confessed my
+inability to do anything.</p>
+<p>"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
+executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking
+after his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."</p>
+<p>Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I
+might have asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been
+kind, he would have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued
+her from Fendihook, and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet.
+But what would have been the use? I was tired of these windy
+arguments with Doria, and worn out with the awful irony of
+upholding our poor Adrian's genius.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he
+might have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."</p>
+<p>A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced
+an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> of the works of a brilliant
+novelist cut off like Adrian in the flower of his age. It was
+printed on special paper and illustrated by a famous artist, and
+limited to a certain number of copies. This set Doria aflare. From
+Scotland, where she was paying one of her restless visits, she sent
+me the newspaper cutting. If the commercial organism, she said,
+that passed with Wittekind for a soul would not permit him to
+advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn list, why couldn't he
+do like Mackenzie &amp; Co., and advertise an <i>&eacute;dition de
+luxe</i> of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie &amp; Co. thought
+it worth while to bring out such an edition of an entirely
+second-rate author, surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to
+treat Adrian equally sumptuously. I advised her to write to
+Wittekind. She did. Accompanied by a fury of ink, she sent me his
+most courteous and sensible answer. Both books were doing
+splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden aftermath of cheap
+editions. The time was not ripe for an <i>&eacute;dition de
+luxe</i>. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to,
+when other sales showed signs of exhaustion.</p>
+<p>"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when
+he sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or
+waste'&mdash;there's a foolish woman here who evidently has written
+a foolish book, and has shown me her silly contract with a
+publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what he's thinking of. It's
+intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to but you. Do
+advise me."</p>
+<p>I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of
+concocting a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to
+impress the recipient. It ran:</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite
+him."</p>
+<p>I was rather pleased at the humour&mdash;may I venture to
+qualify it as mordant?&mdash;of the suggestion. Even Barbara
+smiled. Of course, I was right. Let her fight it out herself with
+Wittekind.</p>
+<p>But I have regretted that telegram ever since.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<p>Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me
+from all quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the
+voyage of the <i>S.S. Vesta</i>, they were rare phenomena.
+Ordinarily, if I heard from him thrice a year I had to consider
+that he was indulging in an orgy of correspondence. But what with
+Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with Barbara and myself being
+so intimately mixed up in the matters which preoccupied his mind,
+the voyage of the <i>Vesta</i> covered a period of abnormal
+epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor found a
+post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the journalist's
+trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque hero, who
+could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a University
+Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand hang on
+to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
+scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
+writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances&mdash;that is to say in
+what, to Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances&mdash;he performed
+these literary gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the
+voyage of the <i>Vesta</i> was an exceptional affair. Save
+incidentally&mdash;for he did send descriptive articles to <i>The
+Daily Gazette</i>&mdash;he was not out on professional business.
+The gymnastics were performed for my benefit&mdash;yet with an
+ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to satisfy a
+certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
+Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the
+deeper he plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer
+did the poor ogre come to heartache and to desire. He wrote
+spaciously, in the foolish hope that I would reply narrowly,
+following a Doria scent laid down with the na&iuml;vet&eacute; of
+childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of dates and
+addresses&mdash;I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
+certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North
+Pole or horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather
+pathetic, for I could give him but little comfort.</p>
+<p>Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs
+taken chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible
+to reconstruct the <i>S.S. Vesta</i> in all her dismalness. You
+have seen scores of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the
+world. You have only to picture an old, two-masted, well-decked
+tramp with smokestack and foul clutter of bridge-house amidships,
+and fore and aft a miserable bit of a deck broken by hatches and
+capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions and chains and other
+unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual promenader. From
+the photographs and letters I learned that the dog-hole, intended
+by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha, was away aft,
+beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch of the
+propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy, bunked
+in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
+relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
+life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful
+Providence for having been spared so dreadful an experience.</p>
+<p>Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in
+everything; I have their letters to prove it. And Jaffery
+especially found perpetual enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For
+instance, here is an extract from one of his letters:</p>
+<p>"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the
+time. Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work
+till you sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just
+see Liosha. Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor
+like her, and that was the daughter of a trader sailing among the
+Islands, who had lived all her life since birth on his ship and had
+scarcely slept ashore. She's as much born to it as any shell-back
+on board. She has the amazing gift of looking part of the tub, like
+the stokers and the man at the wheel. Unlike another woman, she's
+never in the way, and the more work you can give her to do, the
+happier she is. She's in magnificent health and as strong as a
+horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of her; now
+she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep her
+from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on
+as cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and
+between the cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and
+tell her about their wives and their girls and what rotten food
+they've got&mdash;'Everybody has got rotten food on board ship, you
+silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What do you expect&mdash;sweetbreads and
+ices?'&mdash;and what soul-shattering blighters they've shipped
+with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly imaginary) they have
+performed in pursuit of their perilous calling. They're all
+children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them, these
+hell-tearing fellows&mdash;children afflicted with a perpetual
+thirst and a craving to punch heads&mdash;and Liosha's a child,
+too; so there's a kind of freemasonry between them.</p>
+<p>"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other
+evening. The first mate went to look into it and found Liosha
+standing enraptured at the hatch looking down upon a free fight.
+There were knives about. The mate, being a blasphemous and
+pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then he came up to
+Liosha&mdash;you and Barbara should have seen her&mdash;it was
+sultry, not a breath of air&mdash;and she just had on a thin bodice
+open at her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged
+skirt and was bareheaded.</p>
+<p>"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'</p>
+<p>"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except
+the skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an
+ox-eyed Juno; you know her way.</p>
+<p>"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'</p>
+<p>"'Enjoyment&mdash;!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his
+arms and came over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail.
+'There they was trying to cut one another's throats, and she calls
+it enjoyment.'</p>
+<p>"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A
+Dutchman&mdash;what you would call a Swede&mdash;a hulking beggar,
+came up from the fo'c'sle very much the worse for wear. Liosha
+says:</p>
+<p>"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'</p>
+<p>"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'</p>
+<p>"'What was it all about?'</p>
+<p>"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of
+that mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had
+called him a &mdash;&mdash;, he had retaliated, and the others had
+taken a hand, too."</p>
+<p>It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But,
+believe me, they were enough to annoy anybody.</p>
+<p>"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on
+deck for a minute.'</p>
+<p>"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London,
+emerged.</p>
+<p>"'what's the matter?'</p>
+<p>"Why did you call Petersen a &mdash;&mdash;?' she asked
+pleasantly and word-perfect.</p>
+<p>"'Cos he is one.'</p>
+<p>"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you.
+And you both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to
+see the end of it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see
+here, if you two don't shake hands, right now, and make friends and
+promise not to fight again, I'll not speak a word to either of you
+for the rest of the voyage.'</p>
+<p>"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they
+would have consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any
+other woman had attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would
+have told her in perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind
+her own business. In either case they would have resented to the
+depths of their simple souls the alien interference. But with
+Liosha it was different. Of course sex told. Naturally. But she was
+a child like themselves. She had looked on, placidly, and had
+caught the flash of knives without turning a hair. They felt that
+if she were drawn into a m&ecirc;l&eacute;e she would use a knife
+with the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems
+so deuced interesting and I should like to know what you and
+Barbara think. Do you remember Gulliver? For all the world it was
+like Glumdalclitch making the peace between two little
+nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men looked at each other
+sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at the fo'c'sle
+hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At last the
+lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
+without looking at him.</p>
+<p>"'All right, mate.'</p>
+<p>"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried
+'Bravo, missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just
+a bit abaft the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time,
+swung up the deck towards me, as pleased as Punch."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.</p>
+<p>Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed
+them in full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of
+the African continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round
+by the Cape of Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish
+way, duplicated these travel-pictures in articles to <i>The Daily
+Gazette</i>, which, supplemented by memory, he has already
+published in book form for all the world to read. Therefore, if I
+recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape Lopez, Boma, Matadi,
+Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other apocalyptic places, I
+should be merely plagiarising or infringing copyright, or what-not;
+and in any case I should be introducing matter entirely irrelevant
+to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty <i>Vesta</i>
+wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
+disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken
+port, and making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a
+European market. If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all
+about it; but you see, I remained in England. And if I subjected
+Jaffery's correspondence to microscopic examination, and read up
+blue books on the exports and imports of all the places on the
+South African coast line, and told you exactly what was taken out
+of the <i>S.S. Vesta</i> and what was put into her, I cannot
+conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To do so,
+would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
+transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a
+matter of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled,
+in so-called comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know
+all about it. Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a
+mile of the shore. On one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed
+lighters manned by glistening and excited negroes. On board is a
+donkey-engine working a derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast
+bales and packing cases are lifted from the holds. A dingily
+white-suited officer stands by with greasy invoice sheets, while
+another at the yawning abyss whence the cargo emerges makes the
+tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations. And the
+merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter, by
+black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
+unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me;
+and I cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or
+daughters of men who are not intimately concerned in a particular
+trade. . . . You must imagine, I say, the <i>S.S. Vesta</i>
+repeating this monotonous performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the
+little, black-bearded skipper, all clad in decent raiment, going
+ashore, and being entertained scraggily or copiously by German,
+French, Portuguese, English, fever-eyed commissioners, who took
+them on the <i>tour du propri&eacute;taire</i>, among the white
+wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of the natives,
+and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom Houses and
+the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger children,
+and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
+yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts
+to which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant
+to the story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I
+have to relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you.
+I should have chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as
+far as I can make out, the moment they put foot on shore, they
+behaved like the best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually
+in a semi-detached residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be
+furious when he reads this. But great is the Truth, and it shall
+prevail. It was on the sea, away from ports and mission stations
+and exiles hungering for the last word of civilisation, and
+shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by Jaffery swelled with
+juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of his letters are
+those humoristically concerned with the doings of Liosha.</p>
+<p>As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When
+Jaffery put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what
+he saw and letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy
+references to Doria were all the more poignant by reason of their
+rarity. But Liosha was the central figure in many a picture.</p>
+<p>Here, I say, is another extract:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing
+that worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with
+her after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going
+round and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go
+with her. I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't
+see her settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I
+think I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a
+snarling tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy
+has managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine.
+It shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting
+in another long stretch. . . .</p>
+<p>"She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
+the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
+wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
+his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
+I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
+strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
+and again, when it's my watch&mdash;I'm on the starboard watch, you
+know&mdash;I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She
+stands for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her
+lungs. And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her
+skirts, and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at
+her face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
+deck&mdash;and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of
+a woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell
+of bacon and eggs&mdash;my son, if you don't know the conglomerate
+smell of fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the
+pure early morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary.
+She and the Portugee between them, he contributing the science and
+she the good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn
+your nose up at it&mdash;but you've never been hungry in your life!
+and there hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered
+her the permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to
+our comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to.
+She's a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
+spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
+cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
+result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
+considered the matter gravely.</p>
+<p>"'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
+luck so far, have I?'</p>
+<p>"I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'</p>
+<p>"'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she
+said. 'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used
+to meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras
+Fendihooks!'</p>
+<p>"She rose&mdash;we had been sitting on the cabin
+sky-light&mdash;and leaned over the taffrail and looked wistfully
+out to sea. I joined her. She was silent for a bit. Then she
+said:</p>
+<p>"'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to
+marry a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't
+beat me&mdash;and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm
+built.'</p>
+<p>"She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
+talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
+who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
+would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
+Honest&mdash;I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean
+great Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he
+as decent a sort as you please."</p>
+</div>
+<p>It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's
+horizon gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as
+an invalid's interests become circumscribed by the walls of his
+sick-room. He tells us of childish things, a catch of fish, a
+quarrel between the first and second mate over Liosha, second
+having accused first of a disrespectful attitude towards the lady,
+the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind which Liosha had her
+morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's toe and her
+temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and Liosha's
+supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of the
+impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay
+more&mdash;with a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he
+himself had created Liosha.</p>
+<p>Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us
+both:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of
+Doria. If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've
+bought some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when
+I reach home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is
+rough only on the outside.</p>
+<p>"Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given
+her by the donkey-man. . . .</p>
+</div>
+<p>There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a
+long account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's
+company including the captain took part, to the subversion of
+discipline and navigation. But you see&mdash;he switches off at
+once to Liosha and the trivial records of the humdrum day.</p>
+<p>At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were
+in the Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I
+can scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
+dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
+rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
+ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
+a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
+shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
+colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
+straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
+packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
+mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
+had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
+straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
+port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
+turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
+other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
+inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
+didn't like it; no one liked it.</p>
+<p>"When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway
+and began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying,
+staggering crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of
+forty-five degrees one way and thirty degrees another and
+constantly shifting both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed
+athwart the ship to catch hold of, your mind is pretty well
+concentrated on yourself. I know mine was. I slipped and wallowed
+on my belly hanging on to the rope like grim death till my turn
+came for the ladder. I got my feet on the rungs. I was all right,
+when looking up into the livid daylight whom do you think I saw
+calmly preparing to follow me? Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She
+had sea-boots and a jersey and looked just like a man. I
+roared:</p>
+<p>"'Clear out. This is no place for you.'</p>
+<p>"'I'm coming. Go along down.'</p>
+<p>"She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as
+much of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.</p>
+<p>"'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'</p>
+<p>"Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What
+the this, that and the other were we waiting for?</p>
+<p>"'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'</p>
+<p>"'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn
+soon make you,' cried Andrews.</p>
+<p>"He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of
+the cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of
+devils. He was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of
+courtesy, but at the moment he didn't care who went down into the
+hold, or who was killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted
+and the crazy old tub didn't go down.</p>
+<p>"So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down
+we were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
+peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
+some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
+quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
+able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
+huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
+quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
+they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
+know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
+muscles about to snap&mdash;queer feeling that&mdash;and I think
+I'm about as tough as they make 'em.</p>
+<p>"Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught
+sight of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
+you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
+running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got jammed
+on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked
+out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what
+was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the
+ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He looked
+ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the iron
+ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along, barging
+into everything&mdash;it was blowing half a gale&mdash;and once I
+fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
+and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
+cook, sick of fever&mdash;I think he's a blighted
+malingerer&mdash;was the only creature there. I routed him out, in
+the dim mephitic place reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in
+his charge. Then I went back through the drenching seas to the
+hatch. There was just enough room for a man's body to squeeze
+through down the ladder. I went down into the same hell-broth of
+sweat and confusion. The ground you stood upon might have been the
+back of a super-Titanic butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent
+term. It was a helpless scuttering surge of men and vast wooden
+cubes. Most of the men had torn off their upper garments and fought
+half naked, the sweat glistening on their skins in the feeble
+light. Soon the heat became unbearable and I too tore off jersey
+and shirt. Liosha joined me and we worked together without
+speaking. Her long thick hair had come down and she had hastily
+tied it in a knot, just as you might tie a knot in a towel, and she
+had thrown off things like everybody else and only a flimsy cotton,
+sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's called, drenched through and
+sticking to her, made a pretence of covering her from her
+waist.</p>
+<p>"You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
+your time&mdash;if you could&mdash;for the roll, and push and then
+scramble with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out
+of the way of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with
+fantastic murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring
+of the storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the
+propeller lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of
+every plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.</p>
+<p>"We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast,
+and were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
+anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
+twilight&mdash;just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down
+the ladder where the hatch was open,&mdash;hanging on to edges and
+corners of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave,
+vibrated in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus
+of cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand
+clear!' Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I
+stumbled and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding
+crate, two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung
+aside, to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was
+stopped by the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the
+men securing the crate and the other half grovelling around
+something on the deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless
+with blood streaming from her head.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i308.jpg" id="i308.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/308.jpg"><img src="images/308.jpg" width="60%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside.</b></div>
+<p>"In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of
+another fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before
+realised the appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her
+bunk aft; I sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances
+from the ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far
+she was injured. . . .</p>
+<p>"Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
+But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
+lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
+skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
+A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
+her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
+clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
+hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
+seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
+I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
+about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
+refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."</p>
+</div>
+<p>And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit
+of a scrawl from Liosha&mdash;her complete account of the
+incident:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo
+go loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the
+head and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it
+gave me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to
+them. Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event
+in the amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved
+by a woman at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how
+heroic in action and how magnanimous in after modesty, does not
+forget it either. Although he had been credited (to his ingenuous
+delight) by reviewers of "The Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge
+of the complexities of a woman's nature, I have never met a more
+dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings with women. He perceived
+the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on Liosha's part, but seems to
+have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last <i>Vesta</i>
+letters, "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's
+splendid. I take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said
+about her. And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of
+intimacy, she has adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards
+me. In her great, spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression
+that she owns Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his
+good. Women's ways are wonderful but weird."</p>
+</div>
+<p>He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
+epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
+motherliness.</p>
+<p>"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly
+ass!</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<p>It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her
+round of country-house visits and returned to the flat in St.
+John's Wood. The morning after her arrival in town she took my
+satirical counsel and called at Wittekind's office, and, I am
+afraid, tried to bite that very pleasant, well-intentioned
+gentleman. She went out to do battle, arraying herself in subtle
+panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's account of the matter.
+She informs me that when a woman goes to see her solicitor, her
+banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man who really
+understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different kind
+of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
+at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered
+when tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true.
+Costumes also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with
+the hats. I recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it
+explained many puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations
+in my wee wife's personal appearance. And yet, the other morning
+when I was going up to town to see after some investments, and I
+asked her which was the more psychological tie, a green or a
+violet, in which to visit my stockbroker, she lost as much of her
+temper as she allows herself to lose and bade me not he silly. . .
+. But this has nothing to do with Doria.</p>
+<p>Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on
+striking terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in
+the outer office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian
+Boldero, doors flew open, and Doria marched straight away into
+Wittekind's comfortably furnished private room. Wittekind himself,
+tall, loose-limbed, courteous, the least tradesman-like person you
+can imagine, rose to receive her. For some reason or the other, or
+more likely against reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug
+little man hiding crafty eyes behind spectacles; but here he was,
+obviously a man of good breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly
+and gave her to understand that she was the one person in the world
+whom he had been longing to meet. And the office was not a sort of
+human <i>charcuterie</i> hung round with brains of authors for
+sale, but a quiet, restful place to which valuable prints on the
+walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an air of
+distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
+bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old
+armchair with a beautiful back&mdash;she was sensitive to such
+things&mdash;and spoke of Adrian as of his own blood brother. She
+had not anticipated such warmth of genuine feeling, or so fine an
+appreciation of her Adrian's work.</p>
+<p>"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only
+to you in my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't
+do to keep your husband's memory green. But it is green, thank
+goodness. How do I know? By two signs. One that people wherever the
+English language is spoken are eagerly reading his books&mdash;I
+say reading, because you deprecate the purely commercial side of
+things; but you must forgive me if I say that the only proof of all
+their reading is the record of all their buying. And when people
+buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they also discuss
+him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
+advertisement and an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i>. But it is only
+the little man that needs the big drum."</p>
+<p>"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an <i>&eacute;dition
+de luxe</i> would be such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care
+a bit about the money," she went on with a splendid disregard of
+her rights that would have sent a shiver down the incorporated back
+of the Incorporated Society of Authors, "I'm only too willing to
+contribute towards the expense. Please understand me. It's a
+tribute and a monument."</p>
+<p>"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said
+Wittekind.</p>
+<p>"But my husband&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"&mdash;isn't dead," said he.</p>
+<p>"Oh!" said Doria. "Then&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"The time for your <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> is not
+yet."</p>
+<p>"Yet? But&mdash;you don't think Adrian's work is going to
+die?"</p>
+<p>She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.</p>
+<p>"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that
+he is among the immortals. But an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> now
+would be a wanton <i>Hic jacet</i>."</p>
+<p>All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound
+business from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through
+the medium of Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I
+listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my
+soul&mdash;or across whatever part of oneself one smiles with when
+one's face is constrained to immobility.</p>
+<p>"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr.
+Wittekind," she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to
+leave Adrian's reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come
+to see you before." "I wish you had," said he.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's
+a splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."</p>
+<p>"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;so prompt."</p>
+<p>"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
+unconscionable time," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do.
+Your husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled
+together. He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time,
+although it was a labour of love."</p>
+<p>"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind,"
+she cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see
+exactly what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried!
+Why do your printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"</p>
+<p>"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays.
+They print from a typed copy."</p>
+<p>"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original
+manuscript."</p>
+<p>Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero.
+From two typed copies&mdash;one in England and one in America."</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you
+Adrian's original manuscript with his revisions."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I
+read the typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your
+husband's manuscript."</p>
+<p>"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's
+manuscript."</p>
+<p>"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."</p>
+<p>Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great
+dark eyes grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand
+on the writing desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was
+sitting. He rose, too.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
+manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the
+printers."</p>
+<p>"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're
+making some extraordinary mistake."</p>
+<p>"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."</p>
+<p>Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow
+me."</p>
+<p>He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me
+at once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this.
+Mr. Forest is my literary adviser&mdash;everything goes through his
+hands."</p>
+<p>They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember
+the Boldero manuscripts?"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"</p>
+<p>"Typescript."</p>
+<p>"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original
+manuscript?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure it hasn't."</p>
+<p>"Thank you, Mr. Forest."</p>
+<p>The reader retired.</p>
+<p>"You see," said Wittekind.</p>
+<p>"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate'
+and 'The Greater Glory'?"</p>
+<p>"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of
+knowing."</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers
+and destroyed by the printers."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling
+misunderstanding. Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a
+distinguished man&mdash;and a man of unblemished honour. A word or
+two will clear up everything."</p>
+<p>"He's in Madagascar."</p>
+<p>"Then wait till he comes back."</p>
+<p>Doria insisted&mdash;and who in the world can blame her for
+insisting?</p>
+<p>"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm
+not&mdash;not to the extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne
+has told me definitely that those two manuscripts came to your
+office, that the books were printed from them and that they were
+destroyed by the printers."</p>
+<p>"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour&mdash;and I
+have also given you independent testimony&mdash;that no manuscript
+of your husband's has ever entered this office."</p>
+<p>"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
+destroyed?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the
+proofs. Typed copy may or may not be returned."</p>
+<p>"But autograph copy is valuable?"</p>
+<p>"Naturally."</p>
+<p>"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of
+money?"</p>
+<p>"Quite a lot of money."</p>
+<p>"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"</p>
+<p>"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne
+would be incapable."</p>
+<p>"And you've never seen any of it?"</p>
+<p>"I've given you my word of honour."</p>
+<p>"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.</p>
+<p>She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.</p>
+<p>"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You
+have nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She
+looked up at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give
+explanations. In the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's
+memory in your hands&mdash;to keep green, as you say"&mdash;tears
+came into her eyes&mdash;"and you will, won't you?"</p>
+<p>The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent
+over her, still holding her hand.</p>
+<p>"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers
+have our ideals&mdash;and our purest is to distribute through the
+world the works of a man of genius."</p>
+<p>So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on
+urgent business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full
+of the virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a
+full account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations
+of Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for
+having counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have
+thrown every possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I
+ought to have foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one
+weak spot in our web of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven
+by necessity from the paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished
+liar. It is not my fault. Mere providence has guided my life
+through such gentle pastures that I have had no practice worth
+speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in mendacity. Both of us
+were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and suspicious
+cross-examination.</p>
+<p>"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," I lied.</p>
+<p>"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"</p>
+<p>"No," I lied again.</p>
+<p>"Was it among Adrian's papers?"</p>
+<p>"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the
+printers, he destroyed it."</p>
+<p>"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has
+also got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want
+them for?"</p>
+<p>"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer,
+because I don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know
+nothing whatever about them."</p>
+<p>"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done
+for me," said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know
+something."</p>
+<p>From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of
+view, she was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful.
+If she had brought an action against us for recovery of these
+wretched manuscripts and we managed to keep the essential secret,
+both counsel and judge would have flayed me alive. . . . Put
+yourself in her place for a minute&mdash;God knows I tried to do so
+hard enough&mdash;and you will see the logic of her position, all
+through. She was not a woman of broad human sympathies and generous
+outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole being had been
+concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life; it was
+concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
+flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to
+bear with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had
+happened to cloud her faith. She had come up against many
+incomprehensible things: the delay in publication of Adrian's book;
+the change of title; the burning of Adrian's last written words on
+the blotting pad; the vivid pictures that were obviously not
+Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo of the original
+manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of
+the executorship. She had accepted them&mdash;not without protest;
+but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of things
+more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her outrageously.
+I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.</p>
+<p>But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor
+Barbara do? We sat, both of us, racking our brains for some
+fantastic invention, while Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen,
+walked about my library, inveighing against Jaffery and crying for
+her manuscripts. And I dared not know anything at all about them.
+She had every reason to reproach me.</p>
+<p>Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame
+Hilary. When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a
+special department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's
+management of financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with
+the literary side of things. It has worked very well. This silly
+muddle about the manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."</p>
+<p>"But it does matter," cried Doria.</p>
+<p>And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts
+written by the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers,
+every fibre of her passionate self craved their possession. We
+argued futilely, as people must, who haven't the ghost of a
+case.</p>
+<p>"But why has Jaffery lied?"</p>
+<p>"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again
+perjuring myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me.
+As I've told you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went
+through together. We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.'
+Possibly," said I, with a despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it
+about so much and deface it with his own great scrawl, that he
+thought it might pain you to see it, and so he told you that it had
+disappeared at the printer's. Now that I remember, he did say
+something of the kind."</p>
+<p>"Yes, he did," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're
+merely saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see
+through you"&mdash;I have already apologised to you for our being
+the unconvincing liars that we were&mdash;"you know nothing more
+about it than I do. You ought to, as I've already said. But you
+don't. In fact, you know considerably less. Shall I tell you where
+the manuscripts are at the present moment?"</p>
+<p>"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who
+has come to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine
+how utterly wearied we were with the whole of the miserable
+business. "Let us wait till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very
+long."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't
+condemn a man without a hearing?"</p>
+<p>Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend.
+And when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful
+than when she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then
+she gets really angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."</p>
+<p>I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem
+to detect anything particularly wrong about it.</p>
+<p>"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't
+do anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at
+that."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I
+don't want to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can
+help. But that's where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of
+them"&mdash;and she pointed to the key of Jaffery's flat hanging
+with its staring label against my library wall.</p>
+<p>Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to
+Jaffery. But again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our
+heads and demanded Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every
+reason to believe in their existence. Wittekind had never seen
+them. Vandal and Goth and every kind of Barbarian that she
+considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable that he had
+deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable that he
+had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
+therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
+satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did
+we confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious
+dealings. If it were only to gain time in order to think and
+consult, we had to refer her to the absent Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a
+deuce of a mess."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid we are."</p>
+<p>"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs,
+with no thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig
+and about anything outside our nice comfortable sty."</p>
+<p>"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm
+roused."</p>
+<p>We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the
+disastrous topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and
+discussed the modern tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on
+being in the forefront of progress, and found no dramatic salvation
+outside the most advanced productions of the Incorporated Stage
+Society. I pleaded for beauty, which she called wedding-cake. She
+pleaded for courage and truth in the presentation of actual life,
+which I called dull and stupid photography which any dismal fool
+could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely profitless
+argument.</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to
+your silly old early Victorian platitudes!"</p>
+<p>"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own
+home by one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."</p>
+<p>So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If
+only, I thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a
+fascinating little person she might be. And I understood how it had
+come to pass that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her
+so desperately.</p>
+<p>The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the
+planting of some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs,
+came through my library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried
+to her.</p>
+<p>"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying
+to lunch."</p>
+<p>No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara,
+was waiting to take her to the station.</p>
+<p>"I'll see you into the train," said I.</p>
+<p>"Oh, please don't trouble."</p>
+<p>"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the
+slope to the front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin
+with the luggage. Doria and I drove to the station. For the few
+minutes before the train came in we walked up and down the
+platform. She was in high spirits, full of jest and laughter. An
+unwonted flush in her cheeks and a brightness in her deep eyes
+rendered her perfectly captivating.</p>
+<p>"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such
+a long time," I said.</p>
+<p>The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good
+in the world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de
+Jouvence for weary people."</p>
+<p>That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with
+me a short while afterwards through the carriage window, she
+thanked me for our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality
+than she had ever before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling
+that, after all, we had done something to help the poor little lady
+on her way. If I had been a cat, I should have purred. After an
+hour or so, Barbara summoned me from my contemplative
+occupation.</p>
+<p>"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.</p>
+<p>"Have you written to Rogers?"</p>
+<p>Rogers was a plumber.</p>
+<p>"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a
+letter from a clean-minded man."</p>
+<p>"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to
+be unusable."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this
+household in his awful hands?"</p>
+<p>"He does."</p>
+<p>"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."</p>
+<p>"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to
+have done it three days ago."</p>
+<p>So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
+conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I
+turned in my chair, holding it up in my hand.</p>
+<p>"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"</p>
+<p>I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice
+that the pipes&mdash;". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes
+on the wall, "what has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"</p>
+<p>There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it,
+impertinently and nakedly bright. The labelled key had
+vanished.</p>
+<p>"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the
+household from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in
+frantic search, and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses
+and wives and children to help, only to discover that I have had
+the wretched object in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is
+Barbara to this wolf-cry that if I came up to her without my head
+and informed her that I had lost it, she would be profoundly
+sceptical.</p>
+<p>But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I
+declared, "and I saw it this morning."</p>
+<p>"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant
+you it was there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our
+attention to it."</p>
+<p>"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met
+in a sudden stare.</p>
+<p>"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"</p>
+<p>"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to
+me in the garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally
+animated and demonstrative at the station&mdash;your sex's little
+guileful way ever since the world began. She had the stolen key
+about her. She's going straight to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those
+manuscripts."</p>
+<p>"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them,
+because they don't exist."</p>
+<p>"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
+everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up
+in the place!"</p>
+<p>"Do you mean&mdash;?" she cried aghast.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."</p>
+<p>"I'll come with you," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to
+London. We alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter
+came out to receive us.</p>
+<p>"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"</p>
+<p>"No, sir, not to my knowledge."</p>
+<p>We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a
+strain.</p>
+<p>"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said
+I.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i325.jpg" id="i325.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/325.jpg"><img src="images/325.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and strewn<br />
+papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.</b></div>
+<p>"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the
+porter.</p>
+<p>"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her
+ready common-sense, took me aside and whispered:</p>
+<p>"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with
+us?"</p>
+<p>In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney
+that Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.</p>
+<p>"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."</p>
+<p>"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."</p>
+<p>We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We
+entered the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked
+drawers and strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on
+the hearthrug, lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER
+XXIII</h2>
+<p>If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many
+sorrows, it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the
+soul-stricken little creature owe her life and her reason. For a
+fortnight she scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours
+anywhere, and snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a
+swallow. For a whole fortnight she wrestled with the powers of
+darkness, which like Apollyon straddled quite over all the breadth
+of the way, and by sheer valiancy and beauty of heart, she made
+them spread forth their dragon's wings and speed them away so that
+Doria for a season saw them no more. How she fought and with what
+weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are written down; but
+in a Book which no human eye can see.</p>
+<p>We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
+revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to
+Northlands. It was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct
+foresaw madness if we took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her
+father's house, her natural refuge, was equally impossible. For
+what explanation could we have given to the worthy but
+uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors to minister to
+a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of diagnosis.
+Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy; which
+was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
+gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:</p>
+<p>"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to
+go. I can't ask father&mdash;and I can't go back home. It would
+drive me mad."</p>
+<p>Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
+flat&mdash;haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable
+Presence, the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented
+country bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To
+save her reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had
+bridged over the chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She
+knew all that we knew. Further attempts at deception would have
+been vain cruelty. Barbara could palliate the offence; she could
+show how irresistible had been the temptation; she could prove how
+our love for Adrian had been unshaken by disastrous knowledge and
+urge that Doria's love should be unshaken likewise; she could apply
+all the healing remedies of which she only has the secret&mdash;but
+she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
+uncertainty.</p>
+<p>Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I,
+when I went through the place in order to make arrangements for
+closing it altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the
+condemned cell where Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been
+sacrosanct; not a thing had been disturbed; there was the iron safe
+empty, but yet a grim receptacle of abominable secrets; the quill
+pen, its point stained with idle ink, lay on the office
+writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there under a clump
+of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in the corner
+stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a syphon
+of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
+even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had
+hated it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing
+transcendental had affected me; but now I shuddered, physically
+shuddered, as though the cubic space were informed with a spirit in
+the torture of an everlasting despair. Doria not knowing, he could
+have borne his punishment. But now Doria knew. He had lost her
+love, the rock on which he had built his hope of salvation. He was
+damned to eternity. It is the supreme and unspeakable horror of
+eternal life that you cannot dash your head against a wall and
+plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful Presence of Adrian
+was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly walls. . .
+.</p>
+<p>I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again.
+Of course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not
+have slept in that flat for anything in the world.</p>
+<p>I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's
+chambers, in order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had
+made. She had ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the
+contents of the old portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent
+manuscript, about the floor. I did what I ought to have done on my
+first visit; I brought the tragic lumber to Northlands, and having
+made a bonfire in a corner of the kitchen garden, burned the whole
+lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the evidence of Adrian's guilt,
+I could not at the time imagine. It was only later that I heard the
+trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn the papers in his
+flat, because he had no fire&mdash;only the electric radiator. You
+try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six thousand sheets
+of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his idea, when
+he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his next
+voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
+cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise,
+and throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his
+two voyages that year&mdash;if a channel crossing can be termed a
+voyage&mdash;at a moment's notice. In each case he had not had
+occasion to call at his chambers, and the destroying journey had
+yet to be made. As for discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked
+receptacles, who was there to discover them? Such friends as he had
+would never pry into his private concerns; and as for housemaids
+and waiters and porters, the whole matter to them was
+unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's Mansions, he
+considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that he
+would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That
+I bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken
+steps to destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long
+time I felt the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three
+kingdoms. If I had been a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it
+would not have mattered; but I have always prided myself on
+being&mdash;not the last word, for that would not be consonant with
+my natural modesty&mdash;but, say, the penultimate word of our
+modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
+ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
+brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each
+other's bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms
+for careless fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not
+a bit of good to anybody.</p>
+<p>The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his
+great fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men
+could ever set Humpty-Dumpty up again.</p>
+<p>Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
+interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. <i>Moi
+qui vous parle</i>, I have read all of them; and I like them. I
+have even seen some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the
+Agamemnon given by the boys of Bradfield College, in their model
+open-air Greek theatre, built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat
+gripped from beginning to end by the tremendous drama. I am not
+talking foolishly. I know as much as the ordinary man need know
+about Greek tragedy. But in spite of Aristotle (who ought to have
+been strangled at birth, like all other bland
+doctrinaires&mdash;and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has
+none been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago
+when the pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a
+bison was clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not
+draw for nuts)&mdash;in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the
+theorists, I assert that, as far as my experience goes, in the
+ordinary wary modern life to which we are accustomed, doom and
+inevitableness do not matter a hang. If we have any common-sense we
+can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course, if a woman marries a
+congenital idiot there are bound to be ructions&mdash;here we are
+entering the domain of pathology, which is as doomful as you
+please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent. of the
+tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The
+history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of
+coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian
+purist that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He
+only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That
+there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging
+human destinies is another question. I am neither a theologian nor
+a metaphysician, and I do not desire to discuss the subject. I only
+maintain that, had it not been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret
+would never have been discovered a second time. I cannot see any
+doom about it. A series of sheer, silly accidents on the part of
+Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to face with these
+incriminating papers. As for her having gained access to the flat
+without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation on her
+part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken
+some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable
+stairs.</p>
+<p>I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles;
+but in view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What
+useful purpose would have been served? He would have left the
+steamship <i>Vesta</i> and travelled post-haste overland, dragging
+with him a resentful Liosha, and rushed like a mad bull into an
+upheaval in which he could have no place. We had arranged by
+correspondence that, after he had parted from the good Captain
+Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to leave
+Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with
+her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be
+far better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their
+lunatic adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at
+Northlands to break the disastrous tidings. It would give us time
+to watch Doria and see what direction the resultant of the forces
+now tearing her soul would take.</p>
+<p>"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I
+can't be bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended
+for a year."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a
+great pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax,
+and she had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered
+the apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and
+hugged her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a
+few silly words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room
+fire, and rushed out into the garden and cut the last poor
+lingering autumn roses, and, returning, cast them into her lap. And
+we talked hard about the roses; and I told her which were Madame
+Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de Salisbury, and which Frau Karl
+Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady Hillingdon. We did not
+refer at all to unhappy things.</p>
+<p>It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the
+veil of her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any
+fool could have divined it. Together with far less shattering of
+idols has many a woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor
+Doria's case it was not only the shattering of idols.</p>
+<p>"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I
+can't go on living here for ever."</p>
+<p>"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and
+you're only just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets.
+Why do you want to go?"</p>
+<p>We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp
+morning and the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their
+leaves around us in a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen
+lay sodden on the grass borders. Here and there a surviving blossom
+of antirrhinum swaggered among its withered brethren as if to
+maintain the illusion of summer. A partridge or two whirred across
+the path from copse to meadow. The gentle sadness of the autumn day
+had moved her to discourse on the mutability of mundane things.
+Hence, by chain of association, I suppose, her sudden remark.</p>
+<p>"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the
+dreamy peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such
+a long time&mdash;for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad
+pet&mdash;biting the hand that fed me."</p>
+<p>I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.</p>
+<p>"It's true. While the three of you&mdash;you and Barbara and
+Jaffery&mdash;were doing for me what has never been done for
+another human being, I was all the time snarling and snapping. I
+can't make out how you can bear the sight of me." She clenched her
+hands and straightened her arms down tense. "The thought of it
+scorches me," she cried suddenly.</p>
+<p>"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we
+understood it all. How could we blame you?"</p>
+<p>We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods
+to whom human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion
+on which to tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the
+father of lies. I am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was
+a warm-hearted philanthropist, who has never received due credit,
+and that the devil having seized hold of his discovery perverted it
+to his own diabolical uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing
+that devils, whether they promote ancient Gehennas or modern
+companies, have been doing since the world began.</p>
+<p>"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The
+horrible things I said and did&mdash;the ghastliness of
+it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let
+this mere fringe of tragedy worry you."</p>
+<p>She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most
+unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.</p>
+<p>"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening
+irritation? The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it
+doesn't kill. And for some reason"&mdash;she threw out her little
+gloved hands&mdash;"the big thing hasn't killed me&mdash;it has
+paralysed me. The springs of feeling"&mdash;she clutched her
+bosom&mdash;"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I can't
+explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone
+through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up
+altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you
+call it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for
+the torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an
+appealing touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean
+to go on in this wild way. I thought I had a better hold on
+myself."</p>
+<p>"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to
+one who has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of
+Adrian."</p>
+<p>She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the
+gravel path. I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a
+few paces, before either of us spoke.</p>
+<p>"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to
+unburden. There never was an Adrian."</p>
+<p>"There was indeed," said I, warmly.</p>
+<p>"Yours. Not mine."</p>
+<p>"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.</p>
+<p>She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great
+eyes gleamed black ice.</p>
+<p>"No," she said.</p>
+<p>I went straight to bed-rock.</p>
+<p>"He was the father of your dead child," said I.</p>
+<p>Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the
+drive. "I can only thank God that the child didn't live."</p>
+<p>Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to
+hold Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till
+now when I heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know
+that she had never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate
+directness.</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.</p>
+<p>"I am as God made me."</p>
+<p>"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake&mdash;in order to get
+you."</p>
+<p>She dismissed the argument with a gesture.</p>
+<p>"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable
+torment of those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at
+creation."</p>
+<p>She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we
+turned and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:</p>
+<p>"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain
+out,&mdash;his when he was alive&mdash;and mine now. The thought of
+it will freeze my soul for all eternity. I can't tell you what I
+feel." She cast out her hands imploringly to the autumn fields. "I
+pity him as I would pity some one remote from me&mdash;a criminal
+whom I might have seen done to death by awful tortures. It's a
+matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all the
+understanding. But I can't find the pardon."</p>
+<p>"That will come," said I.</p>
+<p>"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."</p>
+<p>Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to
+argue about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her
+point of view, she was mercilessly right.</p>
+<p>"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all
+this time I've been living, first on stolen property and now on
+charity&mdash;Jaffery's charity&mdash;and he hasn't even had a word
+of thanks. Quite the contrary." Again she laughed the shrill, dead
+laugh. "You see, I must go home&mdash;to my father's&mdash;I'm
+strong enough now&mdash;and start my life, such as it is, all over
+again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money.
+Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."</p>
+<p>"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's
+not the man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you
+don't like to keep the money&mdash;I appreciate your
+feelings&mdash;you can devote it to philanthropic purposes."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this
+fraud&mdash;this false reputation&mdash;to go on forever?"</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by
+throwing such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody
+living were suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's
+no reason to blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."</p>
+<p>"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the
+secret?" she asked anxiously.</p>
+<p>"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else,"
+said I.</p>
+<p>"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things
+public, I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the
+disgrace."</p>
+<p>"To poor Adrian," said I.</p>
+<p>She flashed a quick, defiant glance.</p>
+<p>"To me."</p>
+<p>"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He
+sinned&mdash;the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it.
+He's expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not
+yours, that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so
+irrevocably wrapped up in him"&mdash;I pursued my
+advantage&mdash;"that you feel yourself a partner in his guilt.
+Which means that you love him still."</p>
+<p>She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her
+shoulder. Then, all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an
+agony of sobs and tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and
+put my arm round her and let her sob herself out.</p>
+<p>After that we did not speak of Adrian.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<p>At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous
+voyage.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us
+Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to
+all.</p>
+<p>"JAFFERY."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in
+his proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading
+than to make a d&eacute;tour through London. Rooms were got ready.
+In the one destined for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of
+trunks which the Great Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time.
+The next day I took the car to Reading and waited for the
+train.</p>
+<p>From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a
+moment afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier,
+redder than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook
+me in his lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and
+Liosha all rocked and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and,
+before I could recover, Liosha threw her arms round my neck and
+kissed me. A porter who picked up my hat restored me to mental
+equipoise. Then I looked at them, and anything more splendid in
+humanity than that simple, happy pair of gigantic children I have
+never seen in my life. I, too, felt the laughter of happiness swell
+in my heart, for their gladness at the sight of me was so true, so
+unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed aloud foolishly. It
+is good to be loved, especially when you've done nothing particular
+to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two loved me.</p>
+<p>"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Magnificent," said I.</p>
+<p>She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a
+gipsy swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health.
+When I had parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of
+soft increase in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh
+had hardened down into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her
+splendour. And there seemed to be more authority in her radiant
+face and a new masterfulness and a quicker intelligence in her
+brown eyes. I noticed that it was she who first broke away from the
+clamour of greeting and gave directions as to the transport of
+their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail of his eye;
+then turned to me with a bass chuckle.</p>
+<p>"We're a sort of Jaff Chayne and Co., according to her, and she
+thinks she's managing director. Ho! ho! ho!" He put his arm round
+my shoulder and suddenly grew serious. "How's everybody?"</p>
+<p>"Flourishing," said I.</p>
+<p>"And Doria?"</p>
+<p>"At Northlands."</p>
+<p>"She knows I'm coming?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I.</p>
+<p>Liosha joined us, accompanied by a porter, carrying their
+exiguous baggage. We walked to the exit, without saying much, and
+settled ourselves in the limousine, my guests in the back seat, I
+on one of the little chairs facing them. We started.</p>
+<p>"My dear old chap," said I, leaning forward. "I've got something
+to tell you. I didn't like to write about it. But it has got to be
+told, and I may as well get it over now."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>It was a subdued and half-scared Jaffery who greeted Barbara and
+Susan at our front door. The jollity had gone out of him. He was
+nothing but a vast hulk filled with self-reproach. It was his
+fault, his very grievous and careless fault for having postponed
+the destruction of the papers, and for having left them loose and
+unsecured in his rooms. He all but beat his breast. If Doria had
+died of the shock his would be the blame. He saluted Barbara with
+the air of one entering a house of mourning.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't look so woe-begone," she said. "Something like this
+was bound to happen. I have dreaded it all along&mdash;and now it
+has happened and the earth hasn't come to an end."</p>
+<p>We stood in the hall, while Franklin divested the visitors of
+their outer wraps and trappings.</p>
+<p>"And, Liosha," Barbara continued, throwing her arms round as
+much of Liosha as they could grasp&mdash;she had already kissed her
+a warm welcome&mdash;"it's a shame, dear, to depress you the moment
+you come into the place. You'll wish you were at sea again."</p>
+<p>"I guess not," said Liosha. "I know now I'm among folks who love
+me. Isn't that true, Susan?"</p>
+<p>"Daddy loves you and mummy loves you and I adore you," cried
+Susan.</p>
+<p>Whereupon there was much hugging of a spoiled monkey.</p>
+<p>We went upstairs. At the drawing-room door Barbara gave me one
+of her queer glances, which meant, on interpretation, that I should
+leave her alone with Jaffery for a few minutes so that she could
+pour the balm of sense over his remorseful soul, and that in the
+meantime it would be advisable for me to explain the situation to
+Liosha. Aloud, she said, before disappearing:</p>
+<p>"Your old room, Liosha, dear&mdash;you'll find everything
+ready."</p>
+<p>In order to carry out my wife's orders, I had to disentangle
+Susan from Liosha's embrace and pack her off rueful to the nursery.
+But the promise to seat her at lunch between the two seafarers
+brought a measure of consolation.</p>
+<p>"Come into the library, Liosha," said I, throwing the door open.
+I followed her and settled her in an armchair before a big fire;
+and then stood on the hearthrug, looking at her and feeling rather
+a fool. I offered her refreshment. She declined. I commented again
+on her fine physical appearance and asked her how she was. I drew
+her attention to some beautiful narcissi and hyacinths that had
+come from the greenhouse. The more I talked and the longer she
+regarded me in her grave, direct fashion, the less I knew how to
+tell her, or how much to tell her, of Doria's story. The drive had
+been a short one, giving time only for a narration of the facts of
+the discovery. Liosha, although accepting my apology, had sat
+mystified; also profoundly disturbed by Jaffery's unconcealed
+agitation. Her life with him during the past four months had drawn
+her into the meshes of the little drama. For her own sake, for
+everybody's sake, we could not allow her to remain in complete
+ignorance. . . . I gave her a cigarette and took one myself. After
+the first puff, she smiled.</p>
+<p>"You want to tell me something."</p>
+<p>"I do. Something that is known only to four people in the
+world&mdash;and they're in this house."</p>
+<p>"If you tell me, I guess it'll be known only to five," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to
+insult truth itself.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I. "You'll be the fifth and last." And then,
+as simply as I could, I told her all there was to know. She grasped
+the literary details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found
+afterwards that the long months of the voyage had not been entirely
+taken up with the cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there
+had been long stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things
+under heaven, and aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her
+mental horizon had broadened prodigiously through constant
+association with a cultivated man. . . . When I reached the point
+in my story where Jaffery gave up the Persian expedition, she
+gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips worked in their
+familiar quiver.</p>
+<p>"He must have loved her to do that," she said in a low
+voice.</p>
+<p>I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous
+affair, the more was I convinced that it would he better for her to
+understand clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria. You see, I
+knew all along, as all along I hope I have given you to
+understand&mdash;ever since the day when she asked him to beat her
+with a golf-stick&mdash;that the poor girl loved Jaffery, heart and
+soul. I knew also that she made for herself no illusions as to
+Jaffery's devotion to Doria. On that point her words to me at Havre
+had left me in no doubt whatever. But since Havre all sorts of
+extraordinary things had happened. There had been their intimate
+comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few
+months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards
+Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the
+emotional subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel
+to tell her of the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so
+grotesque, between the man she loved and the other woman. But her
+unflinching bravery and her great heart demanded it. And as I told
+her, walking nervously about the room, she followed me with her
+steadfast eyes.</p>
+<p>"So that's why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me."</p>
+<p>"I suppose so," said I.</p>
+<p>"If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her
+out of the window."</p>
+<p>"I dare say. But you wouldn't have been Jaff Chayne."</p>
+<p>"That's true," she assented. "No man like him ever walked the
+earth. And how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I
+can't imagine."</p>
+<p>"Her head was full of another man, you see."</p>
+<p>"Oh yes, I see," she said with a touch of contempt. "And such a
+man! You were fond of him I know. But he was a sham. He used to
+look on me, I remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the
+Zoological Gardens. It never occurred to him that I had sense. He
+was a fool."</p>
+<p>Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she
+had ever expressed an opinion regarding Adrian. We had assumed
+that, having touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy
+figure in her mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned
+us, she had viewed him with entire indifference. But her keen
+feminine brain had picked out the fatal flaw in poor Adrian's
+character, the shallow glitter that made us laugh and the want of
+vision from which he died.</p>
+<p>"Go on," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>I continued. In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for
+setting Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She
+understood. False gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped,
+had for a time the mystifying power of concealing their falsehood.
+And during that time they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus,
+flaming Joves to poor mortal Semeles. Liosha quite understood.</p>
+<p>I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard,
+uncomprehending, in the car.</p>
+<p>"And that's how it stands," said I.</p>
+<p>I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I
+turned aside and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for
+a while, resting her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her
+deep tones:</p>
+<p>"Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!"</p>
+<p>Tears flooded her eyes.</p>
+<p>"By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature."</p>
+<p>"I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose. "I guess I
+must have a clean up before lunch," and she made for the door.</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch. "You just have time," said I.</p>
+<p>I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in
+front of the fire. Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the
+serene young barbarian who had come to us two and a half years
+before blandly characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she
+would not let her buy a stocked chicken incubator and take it to
+the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie wolf from the noble Great Dane. Her
+nature had undergone remarkable developments. As Jaffery had
+prophesied at Havre, she treated things in a big way, and she had
+learned restraint, not the restraint of convention, for not a
+convention would have stopped her from doing what she chose, but
+the restraint of self-discipline. And she had learned pity. A year
+ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every woman's
+reason for hating. A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in her
+heart. If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family
+had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks
+before her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt
+whether she would have cut off one single head.</p>
+<p>A tap at the window aroused me. It was Jaffery in the rain,
+which had just begun to fail, seeking admittance. I let him in.</p>
+<p>"This is an awful business, old man," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>From which I gather that for once Barbara's soothing had been of
+little avail.</p>
+<p>"Have you seen Doria yet?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He shook his head. "Barbara is with her. She's coming in to
+lunch."</p>
+<p>At the anti-climax, I smiled. "That shews she's not quite dead
+yet."</p>
+<p>But to Jaffery it was no smiling matter. "Look here, Hilary," he
+said hoarsely, "don't you think it would be better for me to cut
+the whole thing and go away right now?"</p>
+<p>"Go away&mdash;?" I stared at him. "What for?"</p>
+<p>"Why should I force myself on that poor, tortured child? Think
+of her feelings towards me. She must loathe the sound of my
+name."</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne," said I, "I believe you're afraid of mice."</p>
+<p>He frowned. "What the blazes do you mean?"</p>
+<p>"You're in a blue funk at the idea of meeting Doria."</p>
+<p>"Rot," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But he was.</p>
+<p>Franklin summoned us to luncheon. We went into the drawing-room
+where the rest of our little party were assembled, Susan and her
+governess, Liosha, Barbara and Doria. Doria stepped forward
+valiantly with outstretched hand, looking him squarely in the
+face.</p>
+<p>"Welcome back, Jaffery. It's good to see you again."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grew very red and bending over her hand muttered
+something into his beard.</p>
+<p>"You'll have to tell me about your wonderful voyage."</p>
+<p>"There was nothing so wonderful about it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>That was all for the moment, for Barbara hustled us into the
+dining-room. But the terrible meeting that both had dreaded was
+over. Nobody had fainted or shed tears; it was over in a perfectly
+well-bred way. At lunch Susan, between Liosha and Jaffery, became
+the centre of attention and saved conversation from constraint.</p>
+<p>To Doria, who had lingered at Northlands, in order to lose no
+time in setting herself right with Jaffery,&mdash;her own
+phrase&mdash;the ordinary table small-talk would have been an
+ordeal. As it was, she sat on my left, opposite Liosha, lending a
+polite ear to the answers to Susan's eager questions. The child had
+not received such universal invitation to chatter at mealtime since
+she had learned to speak. But, in spite of her inspiring
+assistance, a depressing sense of destinies in the balance pervaded
+the room, and we were all glad when the meal came to an end. Susan,
+refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to
+the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship <i>Vesta</i>.
+Barbara and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I,
+after a perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for
+a while on different things, the child's robustious health, the
+garden, the weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal
+fashion as assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought
+downstairs. At last Barbara said:</p>
+<p>"I must go and write some letters."</p>
+<p>And I said: "I'm going to have my afternoon nap."</p>
+<p>Both the others cried out with simultaneous anxiety and scarlet
+faces:</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't go, Barbara, dear."</p>
+<p>"Can't you cut the sleep out for once?"</p>
+<p>"I must!" said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"No," said I.</p>
+<p>And we left our nervous ogre and our poor little elf to fight
+out between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps
+it was cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come
+to mutual understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had
+the afternoon before them. It was pouring with rain. They had
+nothing else to do. In order that they should be undisturbed,
+Barbara had given orders that we were not at home to visitors.
+Besides, we were actuated by motives not entirely altruistic. If I
+seem to have posed before you as a noble-minded philanthropist, I
+have been guilty of careless misrepresentation. At the best I am
+but a not unkindly, easy-going man who loathes being worried. And I
+(and Barbara even more than myself) had been greatly worried over
+our friends' affairs for a considerable period. We therefore
+thought that the sooner we were freed from these worries the better
+for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts against their
+joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.</p>
+<p>"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going
+to happen?"</p>
+<p>"She'll marry him, of course."</p>
+<p>"She won't," said I.</p>
+<p>"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."</p>
+<p>"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that
+young woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against
+Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"If," she said. "But you haven't."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>"All right," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to
+become of Liosha?"</p>
+<p>Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."</p>
+<p>"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall
+be."</p>
+<p>"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<p>So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
+drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity
+and realised failure; the woman&mdash;as it seemed to me, smoking
+reflectively in my library armchair, for sleep was
+impossible&mdash;the woman in the calm of desperation. The man who
+had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to shield her from harm,
+who lavished on her all the devotion and tenderness of his simple
+heart; the woman who owed him her life, and, but for fool accident
+and her own lack of faith in him, would still be owing him the
+twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not met, or
+exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
+John's Wood flat, when he had told her that he loved her, and by
+the sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the
+ground; since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and
+contempt, when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed
+him into fury; when, white with realisation that the secret was
+about to escape from his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had
+gone blindly into the street. Now facing each other for the first
+time after many months, they remembered all too poignantly that
+parting. The barren rascal who stood before her was the man who had
+written every word of Adrian's triumphant second novel, and had
+given it to her out of the largesse of his love. And he had borne
+with patience all her imperious strictures and had obeyed all her
+crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her&mdash;quixotically
+fooled her, it is true&mdash;but fooled her as never woman had been
+fooled in the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren
+rascal, all the time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never
+had he uttered one disparaging word. And he had secured the
+insertion of a life of Adrian in the next supplement to the
+Dictionary of National Biography; and he had helped her to set up
+that staring white marble monument in Highgate Cemetery, with its
+lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested in such a
+Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through Hell-fire.
+No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No wonder
+the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
+And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she
+was alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she
+stood face to face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose
+loving hand had unwittingly kindled that burning torment?</p>
+<p>The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had
+plucked out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she
+regard the man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt,
+the contempt of pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I
+could not take my mind off those two closeted together. What was
+happening? Again and again I went over the whole disastrous story.
+What would be the end? I wearied myself for a long, long time with
+futile speculation.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering
+lip and tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by
+my side and buried her head on the arm of the chair and began to
+cry wretchedly.</p>
+<p>"My dear, my dear," said I, bewildered by this tornado of
+misery. "My dear," said I, putting an arm round her shoulders,
+"what is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I'm a fool," she wailed. "I know I'm a fool, but I can't help
+it. I went in there just now. I didn't know they were there.
+Susan's music mistress came and I had to go out of the
+nursery&mdash;and I went into the drawing-room. Oh, it's hard,
+Hilary, dear&mdash;it's damned hard."</p>
+<p>"My poor Liosha," said I.</p>
+<p>"There doesn't seem to be a place in the world for me."</p>
+<p>"There's lots of places in our hearts," I said as soothingly as
+I could. But the assurance gave her little comfort. Her body
+shook.</p>
+<p>"I wish the cargo had killed me," she said.</p>
+<p>I waited for a little, then rose and made her sit in my chair. I
+drew another near her.</p>
+<p>"Now," said I. "Tell me all about it."</p>
+<p>And she told me in her broken way.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>She walked into the drawing-room thinking to find Barbara.
+Instead, she sailed into a surging sea of passion. Doria crouched
+on a sofa hiding her face&mdash;the flame, poor little elf in the
+Nessus shirt, had been lapping her round, and with both hands
+outstretched she motioned away Jaffery who stood over her.</p>
+<p>"Don't touch me, don't touch me! I couldn't bear it!" she cried;
+and then, aware of Liosha's sudden presence, she started to her
+feet. Liosha did not move. The two women glared at each other.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean by coming in here?" cried Doria.</p>
+<p>"You had better leave us, Liosha," said Jaffery sombrely.</p>
+<p>But Liosha stood firm. The spurning of Jaffery by Doria struck a
+chord of the heroic that ran through her strange, wild nature. If
+this man she loved was not for her, at least no other woman should
+scorn him. She drew herself up in her full-bosomed
+magnificence.</p>
+<p>"Instead of telling him not to touch you, you little fool, you
+ought to fall at his feet. For what he has done for you, you ought
+to steal the wide world and give it to him. And you refuse your
+footling little insignificant self. If you had a thousand selves,
+they wouldn't be enough for him."</p>
+<p>"Stop!" shouted Jaffery.</p>
+<p>She wheeled round on him. "Hold your tongue, Jaff Chayne. I
+guess I've the right, if anybody has, to fix up your concerns."</p>
+<p>"What right?" Doria demanded.</p>
+<p>"Never mind." She took a step forward. "Oh, no; not that right!
+Don't you dare to think it. Jaff Chayne doesn't care a tinker's
+curse for me that way. But I have a right to speak, Jaff Chayne.
+Haven't I?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's mind went back to the Bedlam of the slithering cargo.
+He turned to Doria.</p>
+<p>"Let her say what she wants."</p>
+<p>"I want nothing!" cried Liosha. "Nothing for myself. Not a
+thing! But I want Jaff Chayne to be happy. You think you know all
+he has done for you, but you don't. You don't know a bit. They
+offered him thousands of pounds to go to Persia, and he would have
+come back a great man, and he didn't go because of you."</p>
+<p>"Persia? I never heard of that," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"The job didn't suit me," Jaffery growled.</p>
+<p>"And you told her all about it?"</p>
+<p>"No, he didn't," said Liosha. "Hilary told me to-day."</p>
+<p>"I take your word for it," said Doria coldly. "It only shows
+that I'm under one more obligation than I thought to Mr.
+Chayne."</p>
+<p>From what I could gather, the word "obligation" infuriated
+Liosha. She uttered an avalanche of foolish things. And Jaffery
+(for what is man in a woman's battle but an impotent spectator?)
+looked in silence from one: to the other; from the little ivory,
+black and white Tanagra figure to the great full creature whom he
+had seen, but a few days ago, with the salt spray in her hair and
+the wind in her vestments. And at last she said:</p>
+<p>"If I were a woman like you and wouldn't marry a man who loved
+me like Jaff Chayne, and who had done for me all that Jaff Chayne
+had done for you, I'd pray to God to blast me and fill my body with
+worms."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>And then she burst out of the room, and, like a child seeking
+protection, came and threw herself down by my side.</p>
+<p>What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me
+up till three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he
+poured into his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in
+embarrassing silence, until Doria spoke:</p>
+<p>"She misunderstood&mdash;when she came in. Quite natural. It was
+your touch of pity that I couldn't bear. I wasn't repelling you, as
+she seemed to think."</p>
+<p>"It cut me to the heart to see you in such grief," said Jaffery.
+"I only thought of comforting you."</p>
+<p>"I know." She sat on a chair by the window and looked out at the
+pouring rain.</p>
+<p>"Tell me," she said, without turning round, "what did she mean
+by saying she had the right to interfere in your affairs?"</p>
+<p>"She saved my life at the risk of her own," replied Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I see. And you saved my life once; so perhaps you have rights
+over me."</p>
+<p>"That would be damnable!" he cried. "Such a thought has never
+entered my head."</p>
+<p>"It is firmly fixed in mine," said Doria.</p>
+<p>She sat for a while, with knitted brows deep in thought. Jaffery
+stood dejectedly by the fire, his hands in his pockets. Presently
+she rose.</p>
+<p>"Besides saving my life and doing for me the things I know,
+there must be many things you've done for me that I never heard
+of&mdash;like this sacrifice of the Persian expedition. Liosha was
+right. I ought to go on my knees to you. But I can't very well do
+that, can I?"</p>
+<p>"No," replied Jaffery, scrabbling at whiskers and beard. "That
+would be stupid. You mustn't worry about me at all. Whatever I did
+for you, my dear, I'd do a thousand times over again!"</p>
+<p>"You must have your reward, such as it is. God knows you have
+earned it."</p>
+<p>"Don't talk about rights or rewards," said he. "As I've said
+repeatedly this afternoon, I've forfeited even your thanks."</p>
+<p>"And I've said I forgive you&mdash;if there's anything to
+forgive," she smiled, just a little wearily. "So that is wiped out.
+All the rest remains. Let us bury all past unhappiness between us
+two."</p>
+<p>"I wish we could. But how?"</p>
+<p>"There is a way."</p>
+<p>"What is that?"</p>
+<p>"You make things somewhat hard for me. You might guess. But I'll
+tell you. Liosha again was right. . . . If you want me still, I
+will marry you. Not quite yet; but, say, in six months' time. You
+are a great-hearted, loyal man"&mdash;she continued bravely,
+faltering under his gaze&mdash;"and I will learn to love you and
+will devote my life to making you happy."</p>
+<p>She glanced downwards with averted head, awaiting some outcry of
+gladness, surrendering herself to the quick clasp of strong arms.
+But no outcry came, and no arms clasped. She glanced up, and met a
+stricken look in the man's eyes.</p>
+<p>For Jaffery could not find a word to utter. A chill crept about
+his heart and his blood became as water. He could not move; a
+nightmare horror of dismay held him in its grip. The inconceivable
+had happened. He no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted
+his thoughts for over two years, for whom he had made quixotic
+sacrifices, for whom he had made a mat of his great body so that
+she should tread stony paths without hurt to her delicate feet, was
+his now for the taking&mdash;nobly self-offered&mdash;and with all
+the world as an apanage he could not have taken her. The phenomenon
+of sex he could not explain. Once he had desired her passionately.
+The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired his blood. He had
+fought with beasts. He had wrestled with his soul in the night
+watches. He had loved her purely and sweetly, too. But now, as she
+stood before him, recoiling a little from his fixed stare of pain,
+though she had suffered but little loss in beauty and in that of
+her which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that
+he desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the
+idealised love he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams.
+Not that he would not still do her infinite service. The pathos of
+her broken life moved him to an anguish of pity. For her soothing
+he would give all that life held for him, save one
+thing&mdash;which was no longer his to give. Another man glib of
+tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an
+abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He
+could not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life. His
+nature was too primitive. He could only stare in spellbound
+affright at the icy barrier that separated him from Doria.</p>
+<p>"I see," she said tonelessly, moving slowly away from him. "Your
+feelings have changed. I am sorry."</p>
+<p>Then he found power of motion and speech. He threw out his arms.
+"My God, dear, forgive me he groaned, and sat down and clutched his
+head in his hands. She returned to the window and looked out at the
+rain. And there she fought with her woman's indignant humiliation.
+And there was a long, dead silence, broken only by the faintly
+heard notes of Susan's piano in the nursery and the splash of water
+on the terrace.</p>
+<p>Presently all that was good in Doria conquered. She crossed the
+room and laid a light hand on Jaffery's head. It was the finest
+moment in her life.</p>
+<p>"One can't help these things. I know it too well. And no hearts
+are broken. So it's all for the best."</p>
+<p>He groaned again. "I didn't know. I'd like to shoot myself."</p>
+<p>She smiled, conscious of feminine superiority. "If you did, I
+should die, too. I tell you, it's all for the best. I love you as I
+never loved you before. I usen't to love you a little bit. But I
+should have had to learn to love you as a wife&mdash;and it might
+have been difficult."</p>
+<p>A moment afterwards she appeared in the library, serenely
+matter-of-fact. Liosha started round in her chair and looked
+defiantly at her rival.</p>
+<p>"Would both of you mind coming into the drawing-room for a
+minute?"</p>
+<p>We followed her. She held the door, which I was about to shut,
+and left it open. Before Jaffery had time to rise at our entrance,
+I caught sight of him sitting as she had left him, great clumps of
+his red hair sticking through his fingers. His face was a picture
+of woe. I can imagine nothing more like it than that of a
+conscience smitten lion. Doria ran her arm through mine and kept me
+near the doorway.</p>
+<p>"I've asked Jaffery to marry me," she said, in a steady voice,
+"and he doesn't want to. It's because he loves a much better woman
+and wants to marry her."</p>
+<p>Then while Jaffery and Liosha gasped in blank astonishment, she
+swung me abruptly out of the room and slammed the door behind
+her.</p>
+<p>"There," she said, and flung up her little bead, "what do you
+think of that?"</p>
+<p>"Magnificent," said I, "but bewildering. Did Jaffery
+really&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>In a few words, she put me into possession of the bare
+facts.</p>
+<p>"I'm not sorry," she added. "Sometimes I love
+Jaffery&mdash;because he's so lovable. Sometimes I hate
+him&mdash;because&mdash;oh, well&mdash;because of Adrian. You can't
+understand."</p>
+<p>"I'm not altogether a fool," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, that's how it is. I would have worn myself to death to
+try to make him happy. You believe me?"</p>
+<p>"I do indeed, my dear," I replied. And I replied with unshakable
+conviction. She was a woman who once having come under the
+domination of an idea would obey it blindly, ruthlessly, marching
+straight onwards, looking neither to right nor left. The very
+virtue that had made her overcruel to him in the past would have
+made her overkind to him in the future. Unwittingly she had used a
+phrase startlingly true. She would have worn herself to death in
+her determination to please. Incidentally she would have driven him
+mad with conscientious dutifulness.</p>
+<p>"He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she
+said. "But we needn't speak of it any more. I'm not the woman for
+him. Liosha is. It's all over. I'm glad. At any rate, I've made
+atonement&mdash;at least, I've tried&mdash;as far as things lay in
+my power."</p>
+<p>I took both her hands, greatly moved by her courage.</p>
+<p>"And what's going to happen to you, my dear?"</p>
+<p>"Now that all this is straight," she replied, with a faint
+smile, "I can turn round and remake my life. You and Barbara will
+help."</p>
+<p>"With all our hearts," said I.</p>
+<p>"It won't be so hard for you, ever again, I promise. I shall be
+more reasonable. And the first favour I'll ask you, dear Hilary, is
+to let me go this afternoon. It would be a bit of a strain on me to
+stay."</p>
+<p>"I know, my dear," I said. "The car is at your service."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no! I'll go by train."</p>
+<p>"You'll do as you're told, young woman, and go by car."</p>
+<p>At this rubbishy speech, the tears, for the first time, came
+into her eyes. She pulled down my shoulders&mdash;I am rather lank
+and tall&mdash;and kissed me.</p>
+<p>"You're a dear," she said, and went off in search of
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>I returned to my library, rang the bell, and gave orders for the
+chauffeur to stand at Mrs. Boldero's disposal. Then I sat down at a
+loose end, very much like a young professional man, doctor or
+estate-agent, waiting for the next client. And like the young
+professional man at a loose end, I made a pretence of looking
+through papers. Presently I became aware that I only had to open a
+window in order to summon a couple of clients at once. For there in
+the gathering November dusk and in the rain&mdash;it had ceased
+pouring, but it was drizzling, and therefore it was rain&mdash;I
+saw our pair of delectable savages strolling across the wet, sodden
+lawn, in loverlike proximity, for all the world as though it were a
+flowery mead in May. I might have summoned them, but it would have
+been an unprofessional thing to do. Instead, I drew my curtains and
+turned on the light, and continued to wait. I waited a long time.
+At last Barbara rushed in.</p>
+<p>"Doria's ready."</p>
+<p>"You've heard all about it?" She nodded. "I said there would be
+no marriage," I remarked blandly.</p>
+<p>"You said she wouldn't marry him. I said she would. And so she
+would, if he had let her. I know you're prepared to argue," she
+said, rather excitedly, "but it's no use. I was right all the
+time."</p>
+<p>I yielded.</p>
+<p>"You're always right, my dear," said I.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell
+you about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the
+drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still
+sore, and childishly anxious that I should not account him a
+traitor and a scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human
+touch, told me, as I have already stated, over and over again,
+until I yawned for weariness in the small hours of the morning,
+what had taken place in his staggering interview with Doria; but as
+regards Liosha, he was shyly evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a
+very simple affair. She had told me bluntly that when the two men,
+Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the scene of Balkan desolation in
+which she was the central figure, Jaffery was the one who caused
+her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way she had loved him
+ever since that extraordinary moment. And though Jaffery has never
+confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as Monsieur
+Jourdain spoke prose, <i>sans le savoir</i>, so, without knowing
+it, was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from
+Northlands in Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. <i>Quien
+sabe?</i> But he imagined himself to be in love with a moonbeam.
+And the moonbeam shot like a glamorous, enchanted sword between him
+and Liosha, and kept them apart until the moment of dazed
+revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam was merely a pale,
+earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien to his every
+instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from the
+goddess of his idolatry.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i361.jpg" id="i361.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/361.jpg"><img src="images/361.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as<br />
+war correspondent. Liosha is there, too.</b></div>
+<p>That is how I explain&mdash;and I have puzzled my head into
+aching over any other possible explanation&mdash;the attitude of
+Jaffery towards Liosha on the <i>Vesta</i> voyage. Well, my
+conjectures are of not much value. I have done my best to put the
+facts, as I know them, before you; and if you are interested in the
+matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's content. "Look
+here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my mind to new
+conditions, "what about your new novel?"</p>
+<p>He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you
+going to finish it?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born
+novelist?"</p>
+<p>"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"</p>
+<p>"I don't," said I.</p>
+<p>He walked about the library in his space&mdash;occupying
+way.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to tear the damned thing up! I'm never going to write
+a novel again. I cut it out altogether. It's the least I can do for
+her."</p>
+<p>"Isn't that rather quixotic?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Suppose it is. What have you to say against it?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, keep on saying it," replied Jaffery, with the steel flash
+in his eyes.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>They were married. Our vicar performed the ceremony. I gave the
+bride away. Liosha revealed the feminine kink in her otherwise
+splendid character by insisting on the bridal panoply of white
+satin, veil and orange blossoms. I confess she looked superb. She
+looked like a Valkyr. A leather-visaged war correspondent, named
+Burchester, whom I had never seen before, and have not seen since,
+acted as best man. Susan, tense with the responsibilities of
+office, was the only bridesmaid. Mrs. Jupp (late Considine) and her
+General were our only guests. Doria excused herself from
+attendance, but sent the bride a travelling-case fitted with a
+myriad dazzling gold-stoppered bottles and a phantasmagoria of
+gold-mounted toilette implements.</p>
+<p>And then they went on their honeymoon. And where do you think
+they went? They signed again on the steamship <i>Vesta</i>. And
+Captain Maturin gave them his cabin, which is more than I would
+have done, and slept, I presume, in the dog-hole. And they were as
+happy as the ship was abominable.</p>
+<p>Now, as I write, there is a war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery
+is there as the correspondent of <i>The Daily Gazette</i>. Liosha
+is there, too, as the inseparable and peculiarly invaluable
+companion of Jaffery Chayne. They live impossible lives. But what
+has that got to do with you or me? They like it. They adore it. A
+more radiantly mated pair the earth cannot produce. Their
+two-year-old son is learning the practice of the heroic virtues at
+Cettinje, while his parents loaf about battlefields in full
+eruption.</p>
+<p>"Poor little mite!" says Barbara.</p>
+<p>But I say:</p>
+<p>"Lucky little Pantagruel!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14669 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
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+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14669 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14669)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jaffery
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2005 [EBook #14669]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAFFERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (_See page 165_)]
+
+
+
+
+JAFFERY
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+F. MATANIA
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+1915
+
+Press of
+J.J. Little & Ives Company
+New York, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO MY WIFE
+
+
+This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial affection
+I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and
+many dreams that we have shared.
+
+You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with
+the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote.
+You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913;
+so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on
+our Egyptian journey.
+
+_C'est bien loin, tout cela_! War overtook it in its serial course; and
+now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the
+moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.
+
+These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our
+home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted
+as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to
+live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to
+modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date;
+but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we
+from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last
+words.
+
+Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there,
+across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's
+work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel
+that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice
+thundering across the lawn. . . ?
+
+W.J.L.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                         FACING
+                                                          PAGE
+
+It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness             _Frontispiece_
+
+Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding      64
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek        78
+
+He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs            186
+
+"Go! You're nothing but a brute"                            228
+
+Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside        300
+
+And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning
+heap of a woman                                             316
+
+There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there
+as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too                  350
+
+
+
+
+THE
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+YEAR-BOOK
+
+A _bon-mot_ for each day in
+every year, selected from
+this popular author's works.
+
+_Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend, Jaffery
+Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following account of that
+dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say that I have been
+egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A man of my somewhat
+urbane and dilettante temperament does not do these things without being
+worried into them. I had the inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my
+wife), and she agreed, at the time, dutifully, that I ought to record
+our friend Jaffery's doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the
+first suggestion, the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the
+"egging on" is merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene
+insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge, all
+the facts of the story--although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian Boldero and
+poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the imbroglio, counted
+themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor wretch (a man must get
+home somewhere), was in the nursery; and that, finally, if she had been
+taught English grammar and spelling at school, she would have dispensed
+entirely with my pedantic assistance and written the story herself.
+Anyhow, man-like, I am broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't
+very much matter. Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I
+know they are one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so
+futile a thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
+self-appointed and fantastic task.
+
+But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that if it
+had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
+half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
+confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only to a
+man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to a man. On
+the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister women and her
+brother men which, but for her, would never reach a man's ears. So by
+combining the information obtained from our family encyclopædia under
+the feminine heading of China with that obtained under the masculine
+heading of Philosophy, I can, figuratively speaking, like the famous
+student, issue my treatise on Chinese Philosophy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago, when the
+parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves wantonly to the
+sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as I sat at my table,
+with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which I caught with the tail
+of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance, my quiet outlook on
+greenery and colour was obscured by a human form. I may mention that my
+study-table is placed in the bay of a window, on the ground floor. It is
+a French window, opening on a terrace. Beyond the parapet of the
+terrace, the garden, with its apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its
+lawn, its beds of tulips, its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts
+of other pleasant things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron
+railings separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow,
+when she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
+in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious cow.
+Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I digress. . . .
+
+I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife. She
+looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair _blond
+comme les blés_, and her mocking cornflower blue eyes, and her mutinous
+mouth, which has never yet (after all these years) assumed a responsible
+parent's austerity. She wore a fresh white dress with coquettish bits of
+blue about the bodice. In her hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper,
+the _Daily Telegraph_, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.
+
+"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"
+
+She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal of
+spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and laburnum,
+that I put down my pen and I smiled.
+
+"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."
+
+"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.
+
+"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand Meeting,
+next month, of the Hafiz Society."
+
+"I wonder," said Barbara, "why Hafiz always makes me think of sherbet."
+
+I remonstrated, waving a dismissing hand.
+
+"If that's all you've got to say--"
+
+"But it isn't."
+
+She crossed the threshold, stepped in, swished round the end of my long
+oak table and took possession of my library. I wheeled round politely in
+my chair.
+
+"Then, what is it?" I asked.
+
+"Have you read the paper this morning?"
+
+"I've glanced through the _Times_," said I.
+
+She patted her handful of bedclothing and let fall a blanket and a
+bed-spread or two--("Look at my beautifully, orderly folded _Times_,"
+said I, with an indicatory gesture) She looked and sniffed--and shed
+Vallombrosa leaves of the _Daily Telegraph_ about the library until she
+had discovered the page for which she was searching. Then she held a
+mangled sheet before my eyes.
+
+"There!" she cried, "what do you think of that?"
+
+"What do I think of what?" I asked, regarding the acre of print.
+
+"Adrian Boldero has written a novel!"
+
+"Adrian?" said I. "Well, my dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is capable
+of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He might write a
+sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth or steal the tin
+cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be still the same beautiful,
+charming, futile Adrian."
+
+Barbara pished and insisted. "But this is apparently a wonderful novel.
+There's a whole column about it. They say it's the most astounding book
+published in our generation. Look! A work of genius."
+
+"Rubbish, darling," said I, knowing my Adrian.
+
+"Take the trouble to read the notice," said Barbara, thrusting the paper
+at me in a superior manner.
+
+I took it from her and read. She was right. Somebody calling himself
+Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond Gate," which a
+usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to be a work of genius.
+He sketched the outline of the story, indicated its peculiar wonder. The
+review impressed me.
+
+"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else--not our Adrian."
+
+"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"
+
+"Thousands," said I.
+
+She pished again and tossed her pretty head.
+
+"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all about
+it."
+
+She departed through the library door into the recesses of the house
+where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of my
+presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied my
+thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the more I
+read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of "The Diamond
+Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same person.
+
+You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton
+and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of
+youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's
+shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were
+gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual
+capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of
+reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged one another pretty
+accurately and remained devoted friends. There were other men, of
+course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and each of us had our little
+separate circle; we did not form a mutual admiration society and
+advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and
+d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a quiet way, we recognised our
+quadruple union of hearts, and talked amazing rubbish and committed
+unspeakable acts of lunacy and dreamed impossible dreams in a very
+delightful, and perhaps unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our middle
+and late thirties--all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien
+grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He was the
+son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to talk to us
+of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they were
+haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he was forever
+writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always
+on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in him firmly. He
+alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.
+
+Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would
+certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and,
+because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at
+the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.
+Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review,
+and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy
+waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of
+Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I am a happy nonentity. I
+have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
+accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few founder's
+shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to
+gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the other three
+mattered. They were definite--Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian
+Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton,
+romantically definite. And poor old Tom was dead. Dear, impossible,
+feckless fellow. He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we
+thought his brilliant career was assured--but somehow circumstances
+baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking
+pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the
+meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He
+secured a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
+us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton. He never
+reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!
+
+So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my
+Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and
+then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a
+comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something
+idiotically desperate somewhere or the other--he was a war-correspondent
+by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of hot-cross
+buns), and a desperado by predilection--I had not heard from him for a
+year; and now Adrian--if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
+he--had written an epoch-making novel.
+
+But Adrian--the precious, finnikin Adrian--how on earth could he have
+written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond doubt he was a clever
+fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the Law Tripos and had done
+well in his Bar examination. But after fourteen years or so he was
+making twopence halfpenny per annum at his profession. He made another
+three-farthings, say, by selling elegant verses to magazines. He dined
+out a great deal and spent much of his time at country houses, being a
+very popular and agreeable person. His other means of livelihood
+consisted of an allowance of four hundred a year made him by his mother.
+Beyond the social graces he had not distinguished himself. And now--
+
+"It _is_ Adrian," cried my wife, bursting into the library. "I knew it
+was. He has had several other glorious reviews which we haven't seen.
+Isn't it splendid?"
+
+Her eyes danced with loyalty and gladness. Now that I too knew it was
+our Adrian I caught her enthusiasm.
+
+"Splendid," I echoed. "To think of old Adrian making good at last! I'm
+more than glad. Telephone at once, dear, for a copy of the book."
+
+"Adrian is bringing one with him. He's coming down to dine and stay the
+night. He said he had an engagement, but I told him it was rubbish, and
+he's coming."
+
+Barbara had a despotic way with her men friends, especially with Adrian
+and Jaffery, who, each after his kind, paid her very pretty homage.
+
+"And now, I've got a hundred things to do, so you must excuse me," said
+Barbara--for all the world as if I had invited her into my library and
+was detaining her against her will.
+
+My reply was smilingly ironical. She disappeared. I returned to Hafiz.
+Soon a bumble-bee, a great fellow splendid in gold and black and
+crimson, blundered into the room and immediately made furious racket
+against a window pane. Now I can't concentrate my mind on serious
+things, if there's a bumble-bee buzzing about. So I had to get up and
+devote ten minutes to persuading the dunderhead to leave the glass and
+establish himself firmly on the piece of paper that would waft him into
+the open air and sunlight. When I lost sight of him in the glad greenery
+I again came back to my work. But two minutes afterwards my little seven
+year old daughter, rather the worse for amateur gardening, and holding a
+cage of white mice in her hand, appeared on the threshold, smiled at me
+with refreshing absence of apology, darted in, dumped the white mice on
+an open volume of my precious Turner Macan's edition of Firdusi, and
+clambering into my lap and seizing pencil and paper, instantly ordained
+my participation in her favourite game of "head, body and legs."
+
+An hour afterwards a radiant angel of a nurse claimed her for purposes
+of ablution. I once more returned to Hafiz. Then Barbara put her head in
+at the door.
+
+"Haven't you thought how delighted Doria will be?"
+
+"I haven't," said I. "I've more important things to think about."
+
+"But," said Barbara, entering and closing the door with soft
+deliberation behind her and coming to my side--"if Adrian makes a big
+success, they'll be able to marry."
+
+"Well?" said I.
+
+"Well," said she, with a different intonation. "Don't you see?"
+
+"See what?"
+
+It is wise to irritate your wife on occasion, so as to manifest your
+superiority. She shook me by the collar and stamped her foot.
+
+"Don't you care a bit whether your friends get married or not?"
+
+"Not a bit," said I.
+
+Barbara lifted the Macan's Firdusi, still suffering the desecration of
+the forgotten cage of white mice, onto my manuscript and hoisted herself
+on the cleared corner of the table.
+
+"Doria is my dearest friend. She did my sums for me at school, although
+I was three years older. If it hadn't been for us, she and Adrian would
+never have met."
+
+"That I admit," I interrupted. "But having started on the path of crime
+we're not bound to pursue it to the end."
+
+"You're simply horrid!" she cried. "We've talked for years of the sad
+story of these two poor young things, and now, when there's a chance of
+their marrying, you say you don't care a bit!"
+
+"My dear," said I, rising, "what with you and Adrian and a bumble-bee
+and the child and two white mice, and now Doria, my morning's work is
+ruined. Let us go out into the garden and watch the starlings resting in
+the walnut trees. Incidentally we might discuss Doria and Adrian."
+
+"Now you're talking sense," said Barbara.
+
+So we went into the garden--and discussed the formation next autumn of a
+new rose-bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the afternoon train came Adrian, impeccably vestured and feverish
+with excitement. Two evening papers which he brandished nervously,
+proclaimed "The Diamond Gate" a masterpiece. The book had been only out
+a week--(we country mice knew nothing of it)--and already, so his
+publisher informed him, repeat orders were coming in from the libraries
+and distributing agents.
+
+"Wittekind, my publisher, declares it's going to be the biggest thing in
+first novels ever known. And though I say it as shouldn't, dear old
+Hilary,"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"it's a damned fine book."
+
+I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his
+manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a
+smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had
+conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured me
+in the shade. At one leap he had mounted to planes beyond our dreams.
+All this his attitude betokened. He removed the hand from my shoulder
+and flourished it in a happy gesture.
+
+"My fortune's made," he cried.
+
+"But, my dear fellow," I asked, "why have you sprung this surprise on
+us? I had no idea you were writing a novel."
+
+He laughed. "No one had. Not even Doria. It was on her account I kept it
+secret. I didn't want to arouse possible false hopes. It's very simple.
+Besides, I like being a dark horse. It's exciting. Don't you remember
+how paralysed you all were when I got my First at Cambridge? Everybody
+thought I hadn't done a stroke of work--but I had sweated like mad all
+the time."
+
+This was quite true, the sudden brilliance of the end of Adrian's
+University career had dazzled the whole of his acquaintance. Barbara,
+impatient of retrospect, came to the all-important point.
+
+"How does Doria take it?"
+
+He turned on her and beamed. He was one of those dapper, slim-built men
+who can turn with quick grace.
+
+"She's as pleased as Punch. Gave it to old man Jornicroft to read and
+insisted on his reading it. He's impressed. Never thought I had it in
+me. Can't see, however, where the commercial value of it comes in."
+
+"Wait till you show him your first thumping cheque," sympathised my
+wife.
+
+"I'm going to," he exclaimed boyishly. "I might have done it this
+afternoon. Wittekind was off his head with delight and if I had asked
+him to give me a bogus cheque for ten thousand to show to old man
+Jornicroft, he would have written it without a murmur."
+
+"How much did he really write a cheque for this afternoon?" I asked,
+knowing (as I have said before) my Adrian.
+
+Barbara looked shocked. "Hilary!" she remonstrated.
+
+But Adrian laughed in high good humour. "He gave me a hundred pounds on
+account."
+
+"That won't impress Mr. Jornicroft at all," said I.
+
+"It impressed my tailor, who cashed it, deducting a quarter of his
+bill."
+
+"Do you mean to say, my dear Adrian," I questioned, "that you went to
+your tailor with a cheque for a hundred pounds and said, 'I want to pay
+you a quarter of what I owe you, will you give me change?'"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But why didn't you pass the cheque through your banking account and
+post him your own cheque?"
+
+"Did you ever hear such an innocent?" he cried gaily. "I wanted to
+impress him, I did. One must do these things with an air. He stuffed my
+pockets with notes and gold--there has never been any one so all over
+money as I am at this particular minute--and then I gave him an order
+for half-a-dozen suits straight away."
+
+"Good God!" I cried aghast. "I've never had six suits of clothes at a
+time since I was born."
+
+"And more shame for you. Look!" said he, drawing my wife's attention to
+my comfortable but old and deliberately unfashionable raiment. "I love
+you, my dear Barbara, but you are to blame."
+
+"Hilary," said my wife, "the next time you go to town you'll order
+half-a-dozen suits and I'll come with you to see you do it. Who is your
+tailor, Adrian?"
+
+He gave the address. "The best in London. And if you go to him on my
+introduction--Good Lord!"--it seemed to amuse him vastly--"I can order
+half-a-dozen more!"
+
+All this seemed to me, who am not devoid of a sense of humour and an
+appreciation of the pleasant flippancies of life, somewhat futile and
+frothy talk, unworthy of the author of "The Diamond Gate" and the lover
+of Doria Jornicroft. I expressed this opinion and Barbara, for once,
+agreed with me.
+
+"Yes. Let us be serious. In the first place you oughtn't to allude to
+Doria's father as 'old man Jornicroft.' It isn't respectful."
+
+"But I don't respect him. Who could? He is bursting with money, but
+won't give Doria a farthing, won't hear of our marriage, and practically
+forbids me the house. What possible feeling can one have for an old
+insect like that?"
+
+"I've never seen any reason," said Barbara, who is a brave little woman,
+"why Doria shouldn't run away and marry you."
+
+"She would like a shot," cried Adrian; "but I won't let her. How can I
+allow her to rush to the martyrdom of married misery on four hundred a
+year, which I don't even earn?"
+
+I looked at my watch. "It's time, my friends," said I, "to dress for
+dinner. Afterwards we can continue the discussion. In the meanwhile I'll
+order up some of the '89 Pol Roger so that we can drink to the success
+of the book."
+
+"The '89 Pol Roger?" cried Adrian. "A man with '89 Pol Roger in his
+cellar is the noblest work of God!"
+
+"I was thinking," Barbara remarked drily, "of asking Doria to spend a
+few days here next week."
+
+"All I can say is," he retorted, with his quick turn and smile, "that
+you are the Divinity Itself."
+
+So, a short time afterwards, a very happy Adrian sat down to dinner and
+brought a cultivated taste to the appreciation of a now, alas!
+historical wine, under whose influence he expanded and told us of the
+genesis and the making of "The Diamond Gate."
+
+Now it is a very odd coincidence, one however which had little, if
+anything, to do with the curious entanglement of my friend's affairs
+into which I was afterwards drawn, but an odd coincidence all the same,
+that on passing from the dining room with Adrian to join Barbara in the
+drawing room, I found among the last post letters lying on the hall
+table one which, with a thrill of pleasure, I held up before Adrian's
+eyes.
+
+"Do you recognise the handwriting?"
+
+"Good Lord!" cried he. "It's from Jaffery Chayne. And"--he scanned the
+stamp and postmark--"from Cettinje. What the deuce is he doing there?"
+
+"Let us see!" said I.
+
+I opened the letter and scanned it through; then I read it aloud.
+
+     "Dear Hilary,
+
+     "A line to let you know that I'm coming back soon. I haven't quite
+     finished my job--"
+
+     "What was his job?"
+
+     "Heaven knows," I replied. "The last time I heard from him he was
+     cruising about the Sargasso Sea."
+
+     I resumed my reading.
+
+     "--for the usual reason, a woman. If it wasn't for women what a
+     thundering amount of work a man could get through. Anyhow--I'm
+     coming back, with an encumbrance. A wife. Not my wife, thank
+     Olympus, but another man's wife--"
+
+     "Poor old devil!" cried Adrian. "I knew he would come a mucker one
+     of these days!"
+
+     "Wait," said I, and I read--
+
+     "--poor Prescott's wife. I don't think you ever knew Prescott, but
+     he was a good sort. He died of typhoid. Only quaggas and yaks and
+     other iron-gutted creatures like myself can stand Albania. I'm
+     escorting her to England, so look out for us. How's everybody? Do
+     you ever hear of Adrian? If so, collar him. I want to work the
+     widow off on him. She has a goodish deal of money and is a kind of
+     human dynamo. The best thing in the world for Adrian."
+
+     Adrian confounded the fellow. I continued--
+
+     "Prepare then for the Dynamic Widow. Love to Barbara, the fairy
+     grasshopper--"
+
+     "Who's that?"
+
+     "My daughter, Susan Freeth. The last time he saw her, she was
+     hopping about in a green jumper--Barbara would give you the
+     elementary costume's commercial name."
+
+     "--and yourself," I read. "By the way, do you know of a
+     granite-built, iron-gated, portcullised, barbicaned, really
+     comfortable home for widows?
+
+     Yours, Jaffery."
+
+Without waiting for comment from Adrian, I went with the letter into the
+drawing room, he following. I handed it to Barbara, who ran it through.
+
+"That's just like Jaffery. He tells us nothing."
+
+"I think he has told us everything," said I.
+
+"But who and what and whence is this lady?"
+
+"Goodness knows!" said I.
+
+"Therefore, he has told us nothing," retorted Barbara. "My own belief is
+that she's a Brazilian."
+
+"But what," asked Adrian, "would a lone Brazilian female be doing in the
+Balkans?"
+
+"Looking for a husband, of course," said Barbara.
+
+And like all wise men when staggered by serene feminine asseveration we
+bowed our heads and agreed that nothing could be more obvious.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Some weeks passed; but we heard no more of Jaffery Chayne. If he had
+planted his widow there, in Cettinje, and gone off to Central Africa we
+should not have been surprised. On the other hand, he might have walked
+in at any minute, just as though he lived round the corner and had
+dropped in casually to see us.
+
+In the meantime events had moved rapidly for Adrian. Everybody was
+talking about his book; everybody was buying it. The rare phenomenon of
+the instantaneous success of a first book by an unknown author was
+occurring also in America. Golden opinions were being backed by golden
+cash. Adrian continued to draw on his publishers, who, fortunately for
+them, had an American house. Anticipating possible alluring proposals
+from other publishers, they offered what to him were dazzling and
+fantastic terms for his next two novels. He accepted. He went about the
+world wearing Fortune like a halo. He achieved sudden fame; fame so
+widespread that Mr. Jornicroft heard of it in the city, where he
+promoted (and still promotes) companies with monotonous success. The
+result was an interview to which Adrian came wisely armed with a note
+from his publisher as to sales up to date, and the amazing contract
+which he had just signed. He left the house with a father's blessing in
+his ears and an affianced bride's kisses on his lips. The wedding was
+fixed for September. Adrian declared himself to be the happiest of God's
+creatures and spent his days in joy-sodden idleness. His mother, with
+tears in her eyes, increased his allowance.
+
+The book that created all this commotion, I frankly admit, held me
+spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most enthusiastic
+reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I had ever read. It
+was a modern high romance of love and pity, of tears iridescent with
+laughter, of strong and beautiful though erring souls; it was at once
+poignant and tender; it vibrated with drama; it was instinct with calm
+and kindly wisdom. In my humility, I found I had not known my Adrian one
+little bit. As the shepherd of old who had a sort of patronizing
+affection for the irresponsible, dancing, flute-playing, goat-footed
+creature of the woodland was stricken with panic when he recognised the
+god, so was I convulsed when I recognised the genius of my friend
+Adrian. And the fellow still went on dancing and flute-playing and I
+stared at him open-mouthed.
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, who was a widower, gave a great dinner party at his
+house in Park Crescent, in honour of the engagement. My wife and I
+attended, fishes somewhat out of water amid this brilliant but solid
+assembly of what it pleased Barbara to call "merchantates." She
+expressed a desire to shrink out of the glare of the diamonds; but she
+wore her grandmother's pearls, and, being by far the youngest and
+prettiest matron present, held her own with the best of them. There were
+stout women, thin women, white-haired women, women who ought to have
+been white-haired, but were not; sprightly and fashionable women; but
+besides Barbara, the only other young woman was Doria herself.
+
+She took us aside, as soon as we were released from the formal welcome
+of Mr. Jornicroft, a thickset man with a very bald head and heavy black
+moustache.
+
+"The sight of you two is like a breath of fresh air. Did you ever meet
+with anything so stuffy?"
+
+Now, considering that all these prosperous folks had come to do her
+homage I thought the remark rather ungracious.
+
+"It's apt to be stuffy in July in London," I said.
+
+She laid her hand on Barbara's wrist and pointed at me with her fan.
+
+"He thinks he's rebuking me. But I don't care. I'm glad to see him all
+the same. These people mean nothing but money and music-halls and bridge
+and restaurants--I'm so sick of it. You two mean something else."
+
+"Don't speak sacrilegiously of restaurants, even though you are going to
+marry a genius," said I. "There is one in Paris to which Adrian will
+take you straight--like a homing bird."
+
+"Wherever Adrian takes me, it will be beautiful," she said defiantly.
+
+My little critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly adorable
+in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly made, with
+dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a sensitive nose
+and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried her head high and,
+for so diminutive a person, appeared vastly important.
+
+Adrian, released from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles, to greet
+us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion to Barbara and
+my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from strict monogamy dealt me
+a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is only one man in the universe
+worthy of being so regarded by a woman; and he is oneself. Every
+true-minded man will agree with me. She was inordinately proud of him;
+proud too of herself in that she had believed in him and given him her
+love long before he became famous. Adrian's eyes softened as they met
+the glance. He turned to Barbara.
+
+"It's in a crowd like this that she looks so mysterious--an Elemental;
+but whether of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, I shall spend my life trying
+to discover."
+
+The faintest flush possible mounted to that pure ivory-white cheek of
+hers. She laughed and caught me by the arm.
+
+"I must carry you to Lady Bagshawe--you're taking her in to dinner. Her
+husband is Master of the Organ-Grinders' Company--"
+
+"No, no, Doria," said I.
+
+"--Well, it's some city company--I don't know--and she is a museum of
+diseases and a gazetteer of cure places. Now you know where you are."
+
+She led me to Lady Bagshawe. Soon afterwards we trooped down to dinner,
+during which I learned more of my inside than I knew before, and more of
+that of Lady Bagshawe than any of her most fervent adorers in their
+wildest dreams could have ever hoped to ascertain; during which, also, I
+endeavoured to convince an unknown, but agreeable lady on my left that I
+did not play polo, whereat, it seemed, her eight brothers were experts;
+and that Omar Khayyam was a contemporary not of the Prophet Isaiah, but
+of William the Conqueror. As for the setting--I am not an observant
+man--but I had an impression of much gold and silver and rare flora on
+the table, great gold frames enclosing (I doubt not) costly pictures on
+the walls, many desirable jewels on undesirable bosoms, strong though
+unsympathetic masculine faces, and such food and drink as Lucullus, poor
+fellow, did not live long enough to discover.
+
+When the ladies retired, and we moved up towards our host, I found
+myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile depravity of a
+gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard, the other arguing
+on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian loan. A vacant chair
+happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in hand, came round the table
+and sat down.
+
+"How are you getting on?"
+
+"Well," said I. "Very well." I sipped my port. I recognised Cockburn
+1870.
+
+"You seemed rather at a loose end."
+
+"When one has 1870 port to drink," said I, "why fritter away its flavour
+in vain words?"
+
+"It is damned good port," Adrian admitted.
+
+"Earth holds nothing better," said I.
+
+We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us. I confess that
+I rather surrendered myself to the wine. A little taper for cigarettes
+happened to be in front of me; I held my glass in its light and lost
+myself in the wine's pure depths of mystery and colour; and my mind
+wandered to the lusty sunshine of "Lusitanian summers" that was there
+imprisoned. I inhaled its fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and
+spacious generosity. Wine, like bread and oil--"God's three chief
+words"--is a thing of itself--a thing of earth and air and sun--one of
+the great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the eyes
+of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern Italy has
+its fascination for me, in that it is essentially something apart from
+the dust and empty racket of the world; how much more then this radiant
+vintage suddenly awakened from its slumber in the darkness of forty
+years. So I mused, as I think an honest man is justified in musing,
+soberly, over a great wine, when suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's
+face. He too was musing; but musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed
+to have swept his face and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his
+half-emptied glass, with the short stem of which his fingers were
+nervously toying. There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine
+flowed over the cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came
+back, manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to
+Mr. Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
+wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as one
+might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee came and
+liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart
+to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid,
+simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's Sheriff of the City of
+London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenæum
+Club. When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of
+Dry Bones--my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous
+Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions,
+I think, before I was born--my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and
+worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were overrun with
+Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail,
+he refused to be disillusioned. I told him that on the occasion of my
+last visit to the Megatherium--Thackeray, I explained--a Royal
+Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate
+"The Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the
+austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room story
+which was current at my preparatory school--and that in the library I
+ran into an equally desolate, though even less familiar Archdeacon, who
+seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and never let me go until he had
+impressed upon my mind the name and address of the only man in London
+who could cut clerical gaiters. But the simple child of sugar would have
+his way. There was but one Valhalla in London, and it was built by
+Decimus Burton.
+
+After that we joined the ladies for an unimportant half hour or so, and
+then Barbara and I took our leave. As we were motoring home--we live
+some thirty miles out of London--we discussed the dinner party,
+according to the way of married folks, home-bound after a feast, and I
+mentioned the trivial incident of Adrian and the broken glass. Why
+should his face have been so haggard when he had everything to make him
+happy?
+
+"He was thinking of Mr. Jornicroft's previous insulting behaviour."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"He told me," said Barbara.
+
+"I never knew Adrian to be seriously vindictive," said I.
+
+"It strikes me, my dear," replied Barbara, taking my hand, "that you are
+an old ignoramus."
+
+And this from a woman who actively glories in not knowing how many "r's"
+there are in "harassed."
+
+She nestled up to me. "We're not going abroad in August, are we?"
+
+"What?" I cried, "leave the English country during the only part of the
+year that is not 'deformed with dripping rains or withered by a frost'?
+Certainly not."
+
+"But we did last year, and the year before."
+
+"Pure accident. The year before, Susan was recovering from the measles
+and you had some pretty frocks which you thought would look lovely at
+Dinard. And last year you also had some frocks and insisted that
+Houlgate was the only place where Susan could avoid being stricken down
+by scarlet-fever."
+
+"Anyhow," said my wife, "we're not going away this year, for I've fixed
+up with Doria and Adrian to spend August at Northlands."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me so at once? Why did you ask me whether we were
+going away?"
+
+"Because I knew we weren't," she answered.
+
+In putting two questions at the same time, I blundered. The first was a
+poser and might have elicited some interesting revelation of feminine
+mental process. In forlorn hope I repeated it.
+
+"Why, I've told you, stupid," said Barbara. "You've no objection to
+their coming, have you?"
+
+"Good Lord, no. I'm delighted."
+
+"From the way you've argued, any one would have thought you didn't want
+them."
+
+Outraged by the illogic, I gasped; but she broke into a laugh.
+
+"You silly old Hilary," she said. "Don't you see that Doria must get her
+trousseau together and Adrian must find a house or a flat, that has to
+be decorated and furnished, and the poor child hasn't a mother or any
+sensible woman in the world to look after her but me?"
+
+"I see," said I, "that you intend having the time of your life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My prevision proved correct. In August came the engaged couple and every
+day Barbara took them up to town and whirled them about from house-agent
+to house-agent until she found a flat to suit them, and then from
+emporium to emporium until she found furniture to suit the flat, and
+from raiment-vendor to raiment-vendor until she equipped Doria to suit
+the furniture. She used to return almost speechless with exhaustion; but
+pantingly and with the glaze of victory in her eyes, she fought all her
+battles o'er again and told of bargains won. In the meantime had it not
+been for Susan, I should have lived in the solitude of an anchorite. We
+spent much time in the garden which we (she less conscious of irony than
+I) called our desert island. I was Robinson Crusoe and she was Man
+Friday, and on the whole we were quite happy; perhaps I should have been
+happier in a temperature of 80° in the shade if I had not been forced to
+wear the Polar bear rug from the drawing-room in representation of
+Crusoe's goatskins. I did suggest that I should be Robinson Crusoe's
+brother, who wore ordinary flannels, and that she should be Woman
+Wednesday. But Susan saw through the subterfuge and that game didn't
+work. One afternoon, however, Barbara, returning earlier than usual,
+caught us at it and expressing horror and indignation at the uses to
+which the bearskin was put, metaphorically whipped me and sent me to bed
+as being the elder of the naughty ones. After that we played at fairies
+in a glade, which was much cooler.
+
+It was in the evenings that I was loneliest; for then Barbara went early
+to bed, and the lovers strolled about together in the moonlight. With
+the intention, half-malicious, half-pitiful, of filling up my time,
+Doria taught me a new and complicated Patience. Then finally, when
+Doria, having spent a couple of polite minutes in the drawing-room, had
+retired, and when I was tired out from the strain of the day and
+half-asleep through weariness, Adrian would mix himself the longest
+possible brandy and soda, light the longest possible cigar and try to
+keep me up all night listening to his conversation.
+
+At last, one Friday evening, while I was engaged in my forlorn and
+unprofitable game, the butler entered the drawing-room with unperturbed
+announcement:
+
+"Mr. Chayne on the telephone, sir."
+
+I sent the card table flying amid the wreckage of my lay-out and rushed
+to the telephone.
+
+"Hullo! That you, Jaff?"
+
+"Yes, old man. Very much me. A devil of a lot of me. How are you?"
+
+His strong bass boomed through the receiver. I have always found a
+queer comfort in Jaffery's voice. It wraps you round about in thundering
+waves. We exchanged the commonplaces of delighted greeting. I asked:
+
+"When did you arrive?"
+
+"A couple of days ago."
+
+"Why on earth didn't you let me know at once?"
+
+I heard him laugh. "I'll tell you when I see you. By the way, can
+Barbara have me for the week-end?"
+
+This was like Jaffery. Most men would have asked me, taking Barbara for
+granted.
+
+"Barbara would have you for the rest of time," said I. "And so would
+Susan. I'll expect you by the 11 o'clock train."
+
+"Right," said he.
+
+"And, I say!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Talking of fair ladies--what about--?"
+
+"Oh, Hell!" came Jaffery's great voice. "She's here right enough."
+
+"Where?" I asked.
+
+"The Savoy. So is Euphemia--"
+
+Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a
+little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape.
+
+"Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her."
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?"
+
+"She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears.
+
+"Why not bring her down with Euphemia?"
+
+"I want a couple of days off. I want a good quiet time, with no female
+women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as you know, I
+love to distraction."
+
+"But will Euphemia be all right with her?"
+
+I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the "problem" was.
+
+"Right as rain. Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow night to a
+lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City Temple on Sunday.
+Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of
+Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless.
+Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to
+converse further I might have told him that another female woman, Doria
+Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he might not have come.
+Jaffery was always a queer fish where women were concerned. Not a
+chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean fish, now hot, now cold. I
+have seen him shrink like a sensitive plant in the presence of an
+ingenue of nineteen and royster in Pantagruelian fashion with a mature
+member of the chorus of the Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly,
+a scared Joseph, from the allurements of the charming wife of a Right
+Honourable Sir Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in
+front of an obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street.
+I do not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating
+that my dear old Jaffery had no morals. He had--lots of them. He was
+stuffed with them. But what they were, neither he nor I nor any one else
+was ever able to define. As a general rule, however, he was shy of
+strange women, and to that category did Doria belong.
+
+When the lovers came in I told them my news. Adrian expressed
+extravagant delight. A little tiny cloud flitted over Doria's brow.
+
+"Shall I like him?" she asked.
+
+"You'll adore him," cried Adrian.
+
+"I'll try to, dear, because he seems to mean so much to you. Are you
+going up to town with us to-morrow?"
+
+"There's only a morning's fitting at a dressmaker--no place for me," he
+laughed. "I'll stay and welcome old Jaffery."
+
+Again the most transient of tiny little clouds. But I could not help
+thinking that if Jaffery had been a woman instead of a mere man, there
+would have been a thunderstorm.
+
+When we were alone Adrian threw himself into a chair.
+
+"Women are funny beings," he said. "I do believe Doria is jealous of old
+Jaffery."
+
+"You have every reason to be proud," said I, "of your psychological
+acumen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of the
+train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of great
+sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his turn,
+shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck wondering
+heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself between us,
+linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down the quiet
+country platform. A porter followed with his suit-case.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"
+
+"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.
+
+"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople--you remember Robson of
+Pembroke--fussy little cock-sparrow--he'd just come from England and was
+full of it. You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"
+
+Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release himself
+and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub himself
+ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.
+
+"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the subway.
+"Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em. That's the
+pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives and families. I'm
+coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter. How are they?"
+
+I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station yard,
+where his eye fell upon a familiar object.
+
+"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"
+
+The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient, ancient car,
+the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment (together with the
+impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not allow me to sell. It had
+been a splendid thing in those far-off days. It kept me in health. It
+made me walk miles and miles along unknown and unfrequented roads. In
+the aggregate I must have spent months of my life doing physical culture
+exercises underneath it. You got into it at the back; it was about ten
+feet high, and you started it at the side by a handle in its midriff.
+But I loved it. It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and
+insulted it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go.
+But Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
+rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
+adventure.
+
+"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I don't keep a
+fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the donkey-cart. Get in
+and don't be so fastidious--unless you're afraid--"
+
+He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no attempt to
+enter the car.
+
+"Barbara gone away?"
+
+I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed by
+Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly unconcealed.
+
+"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
+business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."
+
+His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
+Northlands without Barbara--" He shook his head.
+
+We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though she
+choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were half way up
+the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who later on harnessed
+the donkey to her and pulled her into the motor-house. We dismounted,
+however, in the drive. A tiny figure in a blue smock came scuttling over
+the sloping lawn. The next thing I saw was the small blue patch
+somewhere in the upland region of Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth
+from him idiotic exclamations which are not worth chronicling,
+accompanied by a duet of bass and treble laughter. Then he set her
+astride of his bull neck and pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to
+hold.
+
+"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.
+
+She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish shock in
+her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an elephant with a robin
+on his head, unconscious of her weight. We mounted to the terrace in
+front of the house and having established my guests in easy chairs, I
+went indoors to order such drink as would be refreshing on a sultry
+August noon. When I returned I found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee,
+questioning Adrian, after the manner of a primitive savage, on the
+subject of "The Diamond Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity,
+dazzling our simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.
+
+"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked Jaffery. "Do
+you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a pen and jab it into
+a piece of paper, and--tchick!--up comes a golden sovereign every time
+he does it."
+
+Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she commanded.
+
+"I haven't got a pen," said he.
+
+"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
+Jaffery's knee.
+
+Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father of a
+feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I think,
+rather tactfully.
+
+"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old daddy
+hasn't got one."
+
+"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have you got
+one?"
+
+"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a golden
+pen in your mouth."
+
+The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his face and a
+doll in his mouth--the Archangel Gabriel, commonly known as Gabs, and so
+termed on account of his archi-angelic disposition, a hideous mongrel
+with a white patch over one eye and a brown patch over the other, with
+the nose of a collie and the legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a
+fox-terrier, whose mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold
+assertion that he was a Zanzibar bloodhound--the lucky advent of this
+pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from the
+somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the rescue
+or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to it to explain
+the mystery of the golden pen.
+
+"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said I, waving
+a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic widow?"
+
+"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene and
+sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll tell you
+about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar way, showing
+two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between the hair on lip
+and chin.
+
+"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What were
+you doing in Albania, for instance?"
+
+"Prospecting," said he.
+
+"In what--gold, coal, iron?"
+
+"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of these
+days--and one of these days very soon--in the Balkans. From Scutari to
+Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming triangle--it's going to be a
+battlefield. The war correspondent who goes out there not knowing his
+ground will be a silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So
+poor old Prescott--you must know Prescott of Reuter's?--anyhow that was
+the chap--poor old Prescott and I went out exploring. When he pegged out
+with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his widow down at Cettinje
+where I have some pals, and started out again on my own. That's all."
+
+He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always had to
+provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his throat.
+
+"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your adventures," said
+Adrian.
+
+Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if you'll
+give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and white
+handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.
+
+But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and for the
+next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his wanderings.
+He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his experiences, even
+those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the laughter got into his
+speech, so that many amusing episodes were told in the roars of a
+hilarious lion.
+
+Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
+Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
+front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door, appeared
+to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and almost hugged
+her. And there they stood holding on to each other's hands and smiling
+into each other's faces and saying how well they looked, regardless of
+the fact that they were blocking the way for Doria, who remained in the
+car, I had to move them on with the reminder that they had the whole
+week-end for their effusions. Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to
+Doria then, for the first time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery
+blinked at her oddly as he held her little gloved fingers in his
+enormous hand. And, indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very
+striking object to come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's
+vision, with her chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath
+which her great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white
+face.
+
+She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then after a
+fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so much of you."
+
+He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze of
+admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's waist. The
+ladies went indoors to take off their things, accompanied by Adrian, who
+wanted a lover's word with Doria on the way. Jaffery followed her with
+his eyes until she had disappeared at the corner of the hall-stairs.
+Then he took me by the arm and led me up towards the terrace.
+
+"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.
+
+"Doria Jornicroft," said I.
+
+"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my life."
+
+"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I with a
+laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged to Adrian."
+
+He dropped my arm. "Do you mean--she's going to marry him?"
+
+"Next month," said I.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not enlighten
+me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The most
+pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce didn't you
+tell me before?"
+
+"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought we would
+give you as long a respite as possible."
+
+"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that Adrian's
+fiancée was knocking around I'd have lumped her in my heart with Barbara
+and Susie."
+
+"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.
+
+His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy old
+Adrian getting married!"
+
+"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get married. I'm
+married."
+
+"Oh, you--you were born to be married," he said crushingly.
+
+"And so are you," I retorted.
+
+"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in petticoats,
+whom I should have to swear to love, honour and obey--?"
+
+"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears obedience."
+
+"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"
+
+His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
+adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her tail
+in the air and scampered away, in terror.
+
+"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can
+always cut them when you like."
+
+"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends and
+makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I know 'em?
+They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."
+
+He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
+institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
+provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
+multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
+But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
+untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
+conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
+scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
+them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
+spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
+colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.
+
+"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
+you were a devil of a fellow."
+
+"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory, or
+rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of those men
+who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs with air, who
+must get out into the wilds if they're to live--God! I'd sooner be
+snowed up on a battlefield than smirk at a damned afternoon tea-party
+any day in the week! If I want a woman, I like to take her by her hair
+and swing her up behind me on the saddle and ride away with her--"
+
+"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"
+
+"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But that's my
+attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would be for me to
+tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of a thing in
+petticoats."
+
+"You're a blessed innocent," said I.
+
+Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined us on
+the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his philosophy, caught
+him by the shoulders and shook him in pain-dealing exuberance. Old
+Adrian was going to be married. He wished him joy. Yet it was no use his
+wishing him joy because he already had it--it was assured. That
+exquisite wonder of a girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially
+lucky devil. He, Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .
+
+"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to you," said
+I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and swung her up
+behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her. It's a little way
+Jaffery has."
+
+In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face, Jaffery
+grew red.
+
+"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy that he
+was.
+
+And I shut up--not because he commanded, but because Barbara, like
+spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at noontide, appeared on
+the terrace.
+
+Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy Jaffery and
+Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they should sit next
+each other. He helped the child to impossible viands, much to my wife's
+dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories of Bulgaria, somewhat to her
+puzzledom, but wholly to her delight. But when he proposed to fill her
+silver mug (which he, as godfather, had given her on her baptism) with
+the liquefied dream of Paradise that Barbara, _sola mortalium_, can
+prepare, consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and
+borage and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
+Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the crystal
+jug of joy poised in his hand.
+
+"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"
+
+"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your mother's
+hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child and fill up your
+own glass."
+
+"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
+Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer holiday!"
+
+At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a
+handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold
+beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian
+butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he
+returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded
+it wide-eyed.
+
+"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible
+whisper.
+
+"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if
+I don't get enough to eat!"
+
+"And Aunt Doria?"
+
+Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.
+
+"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.
+
+It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
+inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
+with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
+out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
+appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
+lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
+We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
+devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
+interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
+new kind of hippopotamus.
+
+The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
+east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
+swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
+three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
+earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
+responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
+discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
+the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
+that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
+matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied
+attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its
+merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
+pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery's
+voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out
+of my head. I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.
+
+"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all
+that," Jaffery was saying--his light word about an ogre at lunch was not
+a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a
+vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf--she had taken off
+her hat--engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on
+the defensive--"and you're always tracking down motives to their roots,
+and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things--"
+
+"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual woman's
+nature, the blatant universalist has his points."
+
+"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like a
+dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against glass
+panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches off. Do
+you see what I'm driving at?"
+
+Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away his
+corona corona--a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and ninety-nine men
+out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had religiously preserved two
+inches of ash on his)--and hauled out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could
+not hear what she said. When she had finished, he edged a span nearer.
+
+"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple sort of
+savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian complications
+of feeling. I've had in my life"--he stuck pouch and pipe on the stone
+beside him--"I've had in my life just a few men I've loved--I don't
+count women--men--men I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one
+cares for people?"
+
+She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
+
+"The latest was poor Prescott--he has just pegged out--you'll hear soon
+enough about Prescott. There was Tom Castleton--has Adrian told you
+about Castleton--?"
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"He will--of course--a wonder of a fellow--up with us at Cambridge. He's
+dead. There only remains Hilary, our host, and Adrian."
+
+As far as I could gather--for she spoke in the ordinary tones of
+civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression that he was
+whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest bull--as far as I
+could gather, she said:
+
+"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than Mr.
+Freeth and Adrian."
+
+"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't. If I
+was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no prospect of
+earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and say, 'Keep me for
+the rest of my life'--and they would do it"
+
+"And would you do the same for either of them?"
+
+Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and towered
+over her.
+
+"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
+children's children."
+
+He sat down again in confusion at having been led into hyperbole. But he
+took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands, somewhat to her
+alarm--for, in her world, she was not accustomed to gigantic males
+laying unceremonious hold of her--
+
+"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this--that if Adrian's
+wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go away and cut my
+throat"
+
+Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
+willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends; whereupon he
+caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the terrace towards us,
+shouting out his news.
+
+"I've fixed it up with Doria"--he turned his head--"I can call you
+Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission--what else could she do? "We're
+going to be friends. And I say, Barbara, they'll want a wedding-present.
+What shall I give 'em? What would you like?"
+
+The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had followed
+demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for from the
+drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who marched up straight
+to Jaffery.
+
+"A lady to see you, sir"
+
+"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"
+
+He stared at Franklin, in dismay.
+
+"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put her down
+at the back entrance. She would not give her name."
+
+"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of a
+desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the slip."
+
+Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"
+
+Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:
+
+"The dynamic widow," said he.
+
+"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.
+
+But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She has no
+business to come running after you like this. She must be taught
+manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"
+
+She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, thereby
+demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her own house.
+
+Presently Franklin reappeared.
+
+"Mrs. Prescott," said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+That there should have been in the uncommon-tall young woman of buxom
+stateliness and prepossessing features, attired (to the mere masculine
+eye) in quite elegant black raiment--a thing called, I think, a picture
+hat, broad-brimmed with a sweeping ostrich feather, tickled my especial
+fancy, but was afterwards reviled by my wife as being entirely unsuited
+to fresh widowhood--what there should have been in this remarkable
+Junoesque young person who followed on the heels of Franklin to strike
+terror into Jaffery's soul, I could not, for the life of me, imagine. In
+the light of her personality I thought Barbara's _coup de théâtre_
+rather cruel. . . . Of course Barbara received her courteously. She,
+too, was surprised at her outward aspect, having expected to behold a
+fantastic personage of comic opera.
+
+"I am very pleased to see you, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+Liosha--I must call her that from the start, for she exists to me as
+Liosha and as nothing else--shook hands with Barbara, making a queer
+deep formal bow, and turned her calm, brown eyes on Jaffery. There was
+just a little quarter-second of silence, during which we all wondered in
+what kind of outlandish tongue she would address him. To our gasping
+astonishment she said with an unmistakable American intonation: "Mr.
+Chayne, will you have the kindness to introduce me to your friends?"
+
+I broke into a nervous laugh and grasped her hand "Pray allow me. I am
+Mr. Freeth, your much honoured host, and this is my wife, and . . .
+Miss Jornicroft . . . and Mr. Boldero. Mr. Chayne has been deceiving us.
+We thought you were an Albanian."
+
+"I guess I am," said the lady, after having made four ceremonious bows,
+"I am the daughter of Albanian patriots. They were murdered. One day I'm
+going back to do a little murdering on my own account."
+
+Barbara drew an audible short breath and Doria instinctively moved
+within the protective area of Adrian's arm. Jaffery, with knitted brow,
+leaned against one of the posts supporting the old wistaria arbour and
+said nothing, leaving me to exploit the lady.
+
+"But you speak perfect English," said I.
+
+"I was raised in Chicago. My parents were employed in the stockyards of
+Armour. My father was the man who slit the throats of the pigs. He was a
+dandy," she said in unemotional tones--and I noticed a little shiver of
+repulsion ripple through Barbara and Doria. "When I was twelve, my
+father kind of inherited lands in Albania, and we went back. Is there
+anything more you'd like to know?"
+
+She looked us all up and down, rather down than up, for she towered
+above us, perfectly unconcerned mistress of the situation. Naturally we
+made mute appeal to Jaffery. He stirred his huge bulk from the post and
+plunged his hands into his pockets.
+
+"I should like to know, Liosha," said he, in a rumble like thunder, "why
+you have left my sister Euphemia and what you are doing here?"
+
+"Euphemia is a damn fool," she said serenely. "She's a freak. She ought
+to go round in a show."
+
+"What have you been quarrelling about?" he asked.
+
+"I never quarrel," she replied, regarding him with her calm brown eyes.
+"It is not dignified."
+
+"Then I repeat, most politely, Liosha--what are you doing here?"
+
+She looked at Barbara. "I guess it isn't right to talk of money before
+strangers."
+
+Barbara smiled--glanced at me rebukingly. I pulled forward a chair and
+invited the lady to sit--for she had been standing and her astonishing
+entrance had flabbergasted ceremonious observance out of me. Whilst she
+was accepting my belated courtesy, Barbara continued to smile and said:
+
+"You mustn't look on us as strangers, Mrs. Prescott. We are all Mr.
+Chayne's oldest and most intimate friends."
+
+"Do tell us what the row was?" said Jaffery.
+
+Liosha took calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a pleasant-faced
+and by no means an antagonistic assembly--even Doria's curiosity lent
+her a semblance of a sense of humour--she relaxed her Olympian serenity
+and laughed a little, shewing teeth young and strong and exquisitely
+white.
+
+"I am here, Jaff Chayne," she said, "because Euphemia is a damn fool.
+She took me this morning to your big street--the one where all the shops
+are--"
+
+"My dear lady," said Adrian, "there are about a hundred miles of such
+streets in London."
+
+"There's only one--" she snapped her fingers, recalling the name--"only
+one Regent Street, I ever heard of," she replied crushingly. "It was
+Regent Street. Euphemia took me there to shew me the shops. She made me
+mad. For when I wanted to go in and buy things she dragged me away. If
+she didn't want me to buy things why did she shew me the shops?" She
+bent forward and laid her hand on Barbara's knee. "She must he a damn
+fool, don't you think so?"
+
+Said Barbara, somewhat embarrassed:
+
+"It's an amusement here to look at shops without any idea of buying."
+
+"But if one wants to buy? If one has the money to buy?--I did not want
+anything foolish. I saw jewels that would buy up the whole of Albania.
+But I didn't want to buy up Albania. Not yet. But I saw a glass cage in
+a shop window full of little chickens, and I said to Euphemia: 'I want
+that. I must have those chickens.' I said, 'Give me money to go in and
+buy them.' Do you know, Jaff Chayne, she refused. I said, 'Give me my
+money, my husband's money, this minute, to buy those chickens in the
+glass cage.' She said she couldn't give me my husband's money to spend
+on chickens."
+
+"That was very foolish of her," said Adrian solemnly, "for if there's
+one thing the management of the Savoy Hotel love, it's chicken
+incubators. They keep a specially heated suite of apartments for them."
+
+"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not. She knows
+less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She refused. I saw an
+automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he
+will give me the money.' He asked where Mr. Jaff Chayne was. I said he
+was staying with Mr. Freeth, at Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not
+a fool like Euphemia. I remember. I left Euphemia standing on the
+sidewalk with her mouth open like that"--she made the funniest grimace
+in the world--"and the automobile brought me here to get some money to
+buy the chickens." She held out her hand to Jaffery.
+
+"Confound the chickens," he cried. "It's the taxi I'm thinking
+of--ticking out tuppences, to say nothing of the mileage. Liosha," said
+he, in a milder roar, "it's no use thinking of buying chickens this
+afternoon. It's Saturday and the shops are shut. You go home before that
+automobile has ticked out bankruptcy and ruin. Go back to the Savoy and
+make your peace with Euphemia, like a good girl, and on Monday I'll talk
+to you about the chickens."
+
+She sat up straight in her chair.
+
+"You must take me somewhere else. I've got no use for Euphemia."
+
+"But where else can I take you?" cried Jaffery aghast.
+
+"I don't know. You know best where people go to in England. Doesn't he?"
+She included us all in a smile.
+
+"But you must go back to Euphemia till Monday, at any rate."
+
+"And she has arranged such a nice little programme for you," said
+Adrian. "A lecture on Tolstoi to-night and the City Temple to-morrow.
+Pity to miss 'em."
+
+"If I saw any more of Euphemia, I might hurt her," said Liosha.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Jaffery. "But you must go somewhere." He turned to me
+with a groan. "Look here, old chap. It's awfully rough luck, but I must
+take her back to the Savoy and mount guard over her so that she doesn't
+break my poor sister's neck."
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Liosha.
+
+"How far would you go?" Adrian asked politely, with the air of one
+seeking information.
+
+"Oh, shut up, you idiot," Jaffery turned on him savagely. "Can't you see
+the position I'm in?"
+
+"I'm very sorry you're angry, Jaff Chayne," said Liosha with a certain
+kind dignity. "But these are your friends. Their house is yours. Why
+should I not stay here with you?"
+
+"Here? Good God!" cried Jaffery.
+
+"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady
+manners.
+
+"The very thing," said I.
+
+Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested,
+growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing
+would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott.
+Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm.
+
+"But why shouldn't they have me? When a stranger asks for hospitality in
+Albania he is invited to walk right in and own the place. Is it refused
+in England?"
+
+"Strangers don't ask," growled Jaffery.
+
+"It would make life much more pleasant if they did," said Barbara,
+smiling. "Mrs. Prescott, this bear of a guardian or trustee or whatever
+he is of yours, makes a terrible noise--but he's quite harmless."
+
+"I know that," said Liosha.
+
+"He does what I tell him," the little lady continued, drawing herself up
+majestically beside Jaffery's great bulk. "He's going to stay here, and
+so will you, if you will so far honour us."
+
+Liosha rose and bowed. "The honour is mine."
+
+"Then will you come this way--I will shew you your room."
+
+She motioned to Liosha to precede her through the French window of the
+drawing-room. Before disappearing Liosha bowed again. I caught up
+Barbara.
+
+"My dear, what about clothes and things?"
+
+"My dear," she said, "there's a telephone, there's a taxi, there's a
+maid, there's the Savoy hotel, and there's a train to bring back maid
+and clothes."
+
+When Barbara takes command like this, the wise man effaces himself. She
+would run an Empire with far less fuss than most people devote to the
+running of a small sweet-stuff shop. I smiled and returned to the
+others. Jaffery was again filling his huge pipe.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+Adrian burst out laughing "But she's immense, your widow! The most
+refreshing thing I've seen for many a day. The way she clears the place
+of the cobwebs of convention! She's great. Isn't she, Doria?"
+
+"I can quite understand Mr. Chayne finding her an uncomfortable charge."
+
+"Thank you," said Jaffery, with rather unnecessary vehemence. "I knew
+you would be sympathetic." He dropped into a chair by her side. "You
+can't tell what an awful thing it is to be responsible for another human
+being."
+
+"Heaps of people manage to get through with it--every husband and
+wife--every mother and father."
+
+"Yes; but not many poor chaps who are neither father nor husband are
+responsible for another fellow's grown-up widow."
+
+Doria smiled. "You must find her another husband."
+
+"That's a great idea. Will you help me? Before I knew of Adrian's great
+good fortune, I wrote to Hilary--ho! ho! ho! But we must find somebody
+else."
+
+"Has she any money?" asked Doria, who smiled but faintly at the jocular
+notion of a Liosha-bound Adrian.
+
+"Prescott left her about a thousand a year. He was pretty well off, for
+a war-correspondent."
+
+"I don't think she'll have much difficulty. Do you know," she added,
+after a moment or two of reflection, "if I were you, I would establish
+her in a really first-class boarding-house."
+
+"Would that be a good way?" Jaffery asked simply.
+
+She nodded. "The best. She seems to have fallen foul of your sister."
+
+"The dearest old soul that ever lived," said Jaffery.
+
+"That's why. I'm sure I know your sister perfectly. The daughter of an
+Albanian patriot who used to kill pigs in Chicago--why, what can your
+poor sister do with her? Your sister is much older than you, isn't she?"
+
+"Ten years. How did you guess?"
+
+Doria smiled with feminine wisdom. "She's the gentlest maiden lady that
+ever was. It's only a man that could have thought of saddling her with
+our friend. Well--that's impossible. She would be the death of your
+sister in a week. You can't look after her yourself--that wouldn't be
+proper."
+
+"And it would be the death of me too!" said Jaffery.
+
+"You can't leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the poor
+woman would die of boredom. The only thing that remains is the
+boarding-house."
+
+Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen Goth
+receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.
+
+"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."
+
+"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not displayed
+enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.
+
+So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on the
+mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
+exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts.
+Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry
+convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own;
+she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to the type for whom
+vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had made no vows, save of
+loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided they are kept, are
+perfectly consistent with a man's falling hopelessly, despairingly in
+love with his friend's affianced bride. And, as far as Barbara and
+myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that
+Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call _le
+coup de foudre_, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had
+first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise
+the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at
+her little feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.
+
+The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a hitherto
+undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of
+a wife. Why he married her has never been told. Why the mortal male whom
+we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing
+mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an
+insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we
+expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of
+matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The
+ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
+love--and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum,
+there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the
+world worth the hearing--we have quite a different condition of affairs.
+Did you ever hear of an ogre sighing himself to a shadow for love of a
+gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending
+his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin
+princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a
+wraith of a creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and
+stars. He stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy,
+feathery tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand.
+Its touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his
+arm. He has a mighty respect for her. He could take her up in his
+fingers and eat her like a quail--the one satisfactory method of eating
+a quail is unfortunately practised only by ogres--but he does not want
+to eat her. He goes on his knees, and invites her to chew any portion of
+him that may please her dainty taste. In short he makes the very
+silliest ass of himself, and the elfin princess, who of course has come
+into contact with the Real Beautiful Young Man of the Story Books, won't
+have anything to do with the Ogre; and if he is more rumbustious than he
+ought to be, generally finds a way to send him packing. And so the poor
+Ogre remains, planted there. The Fairy Tales, I remark again, are very
+true in demonstrating that the Ogre loves the elf and not the Ogress.
+But all the same they are deucedly unsympathetic towards the poor Ogre.
+The only sympathetic one I know is Beauty and the Beast; and even that
+is a mere begging of the question, for the Beast was a handsome young
+nincompoop of a Prince all the time!
+
+Barbara says that this figurative, allusive adumbration of Jaffery's
+love affair is pure nonsense. Anything less like an ogre than our
+overgrown baby of a friend it would he impossible to imagine. But I hold
+to my theory; all the more because when Adrian and I returned from our
+stroll round the garden, we found Jaffery standing over her, legs apart,
+like a Colossus of Rhodes, and roaring at her like a sucking dove. I
+noticed a scared, please-don't-eat-me look in her eyes. It was the ogre
+(trying to make himself agreeable) and the princess to the life.
+
+Presently tea was brought out, and with it came Barbara, a quiet laugh
+about her lips, and Liosha, stately and smiling. My wife to put her at
+her ease (though she had displayed singularly little shyness), after
+dealing with maid and taxi, had taken her over the house, exhibited
+Susan at tea in the nursery, and as much of Doria's trousseau as was
+visible in the sewing-room. The approaching marriage aroused her keen
+interest. She said very little during the meal, but smiled
+embarrassingly on the engaged pair. Jaffery stood glumly devouring
+cucumber sandwiches, till Barbara took him aside.
+
+"She's rather a dear, in spite of everything, and I think you're
+treating her abominably."
+
+Jaffery grew scarlet beneath the brick-coloured glaze.
+
+"I wouldn't treat any woman abominably, if I could help it."
+
+"Well, you can help it--" and taking pity on him, she laughed in his
+face. "Can't you take her as a joke?"
+
+He glanced quietly at the lady. "Rather a heavy one," he said.
+
+"Anyhow come and talk to us and be civil to her. Imagine she's the
+Vicar's wife come to call."
+
+Jaffery's elementary sense of humour was tickled and he broke out into a
+loud guffaw that sent the house cat, a delicate mendicant for food,
+scuttling across the lawn. The sight of the terror-stricken animal
+aroused the rest of the party to harmless mirth.
+
+"Tell me, Mrs. Prescott," said Adrian, "was he allowed to do that in
+Albania?"
+
+"I guess there aren't many things Jaff Chayne can't do in Albania,"
+replied Liosha. "He has the _bessas_ that carry him through and he's as
+brave as a lion."
+
+"I suppose you like brave men?" said Doria.
+
+"A woman who married a coward would be a damn fool--especially in
+Albania. I guess there aren't many in my mountains."
+
+"I wish you would tell us about your mountains," said Barbara
+pleasantly.
+
+"And at the same time," said I, "Jaff might let us hear his story. That
+is to say if you have no objection, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+"With us," said Liosha, "the guest is expected to talk about himself;
+for if he's a guest he's one of the family."
+
+"Shall I go ahead then?" asked Jaffery, "and you chip in whenever you
+feel like it?"
+
+"That would be best," replied Liosha.
+
+And having lit a cigarette and settled herself in her deck-chair, she
+motioned to Jaffery to proceed. And there in the shade of the old
+wistaria arbour, surrounded by such dainty products of civilisation as
+Adrian (in speckless white flannels and violet socks) and the tea-table
+(in silver and egg-shell china) this pair of barbarians told their tale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It is some years now since that golden August afternoon, and my memory
+of the details of the story of Liosha as told by Jaffery and illustrated
+picturesquely by the lady herself is none of the most precise.
+Incidentally I gathered, then and later in the smoking-room from Jaffery
+alone, a prodigious amount of information about Albania which, if I had
+imprisoned it in writing that same evening as the perfect diarist is
+supposed to do, would have been vastly useful to me at the present
+moment. But I am as a diarist hopelessly imperfect. I stare, now, as I
+write, at the bald, uninspiring page. This is my entry for Aug. 4th,
+19--.
+
+"Weighed Susan. 4 st. 3.
+
+"Met Jaffery at station.
+
+"Albanian widow turned up unexpectedly after lunch. Fine woman. Going to
+be a handful. Staying week-end. Story of meeting and Prescott marriage.
+
+"Promised Susan a donkey ride. Where the deuce does one get donkeys
+warranted quiet and guaranteed to carry a lady? _Mem:_ Ask Torn
+Fletcher.
+
+"_Mem:_ Write to Launebeck about cigars."
+
+Why I didn't write straight off to Launebeck about the cigars, instead
+of "mem-ing" it, may seem a mystery. It isn't. It is a comfortable habit
+of mine. Once having "mem-ed" an unpleasant thing in my diary, the
+matter is over. I dismiss it from my mind. But to return to Liosha--I
+find in my entry of sixty-two words thirty-five devoted to Susan, her
+donkey and the cigars, and only twenty-seven to the really astonishing
+events of the day. Of course I am angry. Of course I consult Barbara. Of
+course she pats the little bald patch on the top of my head and laughs
+in a superior way and invents, with a paralysing air of verity, an
+impossible amplification of the "story of meeting and Prescott
+marriage." And of course, the frivolous Jaffery, now that one really
+wants him, is sitting astride of a cannon, and smoking a pipe and,
+notebook and pencil in hand, is writing a picturesque description of the
+bungling decapitation by shrapnel of the general who has just been
+unfolding to him the whole plan of the campaign, and consequently is
+provokingly un-getatable by serious persons like myself[A].
+
+[Footnote A: Hilary is writing at the end of the late Balkan
+war.--W.J.L.]
+
+So for what I learned that day I must trust to the elusive witch,
+Memory. I have never been to Albania. I have never wanted to go to
+Albania. Even now, I haven't the remotest desire to go to Albania. I
+should loathe it. Wherever I go nowadays, I claim as my right bedroom
+and bath and viands succulent to the palate and tender to the teeth. My
+demands are modest. But could I get them in Albania? No. Could one
+travel from Scutari to Monastir in the same comfort as one travels from
+London to Paris or from New York to Chicago? No. Does any sensible man
+of domestic instincts and scholarly tastes like to find himself halfway
+up an inaccessible mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed
+desperadoes in fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of
+pistols, daggers and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical
+demonstration with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with
+a mania of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your
+repose, to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call
+the flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They were
+made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other irresponsible
+phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit, as windscreens and
+water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can assume very pretty
+colours, owing to varying atmospheric conditions; and the more jagged
+and unenticing they are, the greater is their specious air of
+stupendousness. . . . At any rate they are hindrances to convenient
+travel and so I go among them as little as possible.
+
+To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and Liosha,
+Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to live in. It is
+divided into three religious sects, then re-divided into heaven knows
+how many tribes. What it will be when it gets autonomy and a government
+and a parliament and picture-palaces no one yet knows. But at the time
+when my two friends met it was in about as chaotic a condition as a
+jungle. Some tribes acknowledged the rule of the Turk. Others did not.
+Every mountainside had a pretty little anarchical system of its own.
+Every family had a pretty little blood feud with some other family.
+Accordingly every man was handy with knife and gun and it was every
+maiden's dream to be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel
+in the neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
+Liosha.
+
+When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
+prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he lived,
+I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been betrothed years
+before. The price her father demanded was high. Not only did he hold a
+notable position on his mountain, but he had travelled to the fabulous
+land of America and could read and write and could speak English and
+could handle a knife with peculiar dexterity. Again, Liosha was no
+ordinary Albanian maiden. She too had seen the world and could read and
+write and speak English. She had a will of her own and had imbibed
+during her Chicago childhood curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine
+independence. Being beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize
+bride worth (in her father's eyes) her weight in gold.
+
+It was to try to reduce this excessive valuation that the young
+cutthroat visited his father's house. During the night two families, one
+of whom had a feud with the host and another with the guest, each
+attended by an army of merry brigands, fell upon the sleeping homestead,
+murdered everybody except Liosha, who managed to escape, plundered
+everything plunderable, money, valuables, household goods and live
+stock, and then set fire to the house and everything within sight that
+could burn. After which they marched away singing patriotic hymns. When
+they had gone Liosha crept out of the cave wherein she had hidden, and
+surveyed the scene of desolation.
+
+"I tell you, I felt just mad," said Liosha at this stage of the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember Barbara and Doria staring at her open-mouthed. Instead of
+fainting or going into hysterics or losing her wits at the sight of the
+annihilation of her entire kith and kin--including her bridegroom to
+be--and of her whole worldly possessions, Liosha "felt just mad," which
+as all the world knows is the American vernacular for feeling very
+angry.
+
+"It was enough to turn any woman into a raving lunatic," gasped Barbara.
+
+"Guess it didn't turn me," replied Liosha contemptuously.
+
+"But what did you do?" asked Dora.
+
+"I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with that
+crowd." She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.
+
+[Illustration: Where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.]
+
+"And that's where we came in, don't you see?" interposed Jaffery
+hastily.
+
+You can imagine the scene. The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red and
+hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain path on
+ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of despair where
+the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding.
+
+Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form
+acquaintance. She told her story to the two horror-stricken men. British
+instinct cried out for justice. They would take her straight to the Vali
+or whatever authority ruled in the wild land, so that punishment should
+be inflicted on the murderers. But she laughed at them. It would take an
+army to dislodge her enemies from their mountain fastnesses. And who
+could send an army but the Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his
+head over the massacre of a few Christians? As for a local government,
+the _mallisori_, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any. The
+Englishmen swore softly. Liosha nodded her head and agreed with them.
+What was to be done? The Englishmen, alter giving her food and drink
+which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place where she
+could find relations or friends. Again she laughed scornfully.
+
+"All my relations lie there"--she pointed to the smoking ruins. "And I
+have no friends. And as for your escorting me--why I guess it would be
+much more use my escorting you."
+
+"And where would you escort us?"
+
+"God knows," she said.
+
+Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world, homeless
+and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were responsible to
+God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who spoke the English
+of the stockyards of Chicago. Again what was to be done? They could take
+her back to Scutari, whence they had come, in the hope of finding a
+Roman Catholic sisterhood. The proposal evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm.
+Liosha being convinced that they would turn her into a nun--the last
+avocation in the world she desired to adopt. Her simple idea was to go
+out to America, like her father, return with many bags of gold and
+devote her life to the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of
+her enemies. When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she
+replied that she would work in the packing-houses like her mother. But
+how, they asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago? "It
+must come from you!" she said. And the men looked at each other, feeling
+mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves. Then,
+being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she asked them what
+they were doing in Albania. They explained. They were travellers from
+England, wandering for pleasure through the Balkans. They had come from
+Scutari, as far as they could, in a motor-car. Liosha had never heard of
+a motor-car. They described it as a kind of little railway-engine that
+didn't need rails to run upon. At the foot of the mountains they had
+left it at a village inn and bought the ragged ponies. They were just
+going ahead exploring.
+
+"Do you know the way?" she asked with a touch of contempt.
+
+They didn't.
+
+"Then I guess I'll guide you. You pay me wages every day until you're
+tired and I'll use the money to go out to Chicago." And seeing them
+hesitate, she added: "No one's going to hurt me. A woman is safe in
+Albania. And if I'm with you, no one will hurt you. But if you go on by
+yourselves you'll very likely get murdered."
+
+Fantastic as was her intention, they knew that, as far as they
+themselves were concerned, she spoke common-sense. So it came to pass
+that Liosha, having left them for a few moments to take grim farewell of
+the charred remains of her family lying hidden beneath the smouldering
+wreckage, returned to them with a calm face, mounted one of the ponies
+and pointing before her, led the way into the mountains.
+
+Now, if old Jaff would only sit down and write this absurd Odyssey in
+the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to me, he would
+produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But he never will. As
+a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few Westerners have done
+and learned useful bits of language and made invaluable friends, and
+although he appreciated the journey's adventurous and humorous side, it
+did not afford him complete satisfaction. A day or two after their
+start, Prescott began to shew signs of peculiar interest in their guide.
+In spite of her unquestioning readiness to shoulder burdens, Prescott
+would run to relieve her. Liosha has assured me that Jaffery did the
+same--and indeed I cannot conceive Jaffery allowing a female companion
+to stagger along under a load which he could swing onto his huge back
+and carry like a walnut. To go further--she maintains that the two
+quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation of her labours, so much so,
+that often before they had ended their quarrel, she had performed the
+task in dispute. This of course Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was
+there, paid to do certain things, and she had to do them. The way
+Prescott spoiled her and indulged her, as though she were a little
+dressed-up cat in a London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman
+accustomed to throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head,
+was simply sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's
+infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. Jaffery
+talked (not before Liosha, but to Adrian and myself, that night, after
+the ladies had gone to bed) as if the girl had woven a Vivien spell
+around his poor friend. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's way. . . .
+
+At all events, whether Jaffery was jealous or not, it is certain that
+Prescott fell wildly, blindly, overwhelmingly in love with Liosha.
+Considering the close intimacy of their lives; considering that they
+were in ceaseless contact with this splendid creature, untrammelled by
+any convention, daughter of the earth, yet chaste as her own mountain
+winds; and considering that both of them were hot-blooded men, the only
+wonder is that they did not fly at each other's throats, or dash in each
+other's heads with stones, after the fashion of prehistoric males. It is
+my well-supported conviction, however, that Jaffery, honest old bear,
+seeing his comrade's very soul set upon the honey, trotted off and left
+him to it, and made pretence (to satisfy his ursine conscience) of
+growling his sarcastic disapproval.
+
+"The devil of it was," he declared that night, with a sweep of his arm
+that sent a full glass of whiskey and soda hurtling across space to my
+bookshelves and ruining some choice bindings--"the devil of it was,"
+said he, after expressing rueful contrition, "that she treated him like
+a dog, whereas I could do anything I liked with her. But she married
+him."
+
+Of course she married him. Most Albanian young women in her position
+would have married a brave and handsome Englishman of incalculable
+wealth--even if they had not Liosha's ulterior motives. And beyond
+question Liosha had ulterior motives. Prescott espoused her cause hotly.
+He convinced her that he was a power in Europe. As a Reuter
+correspondent he did indeed possess power. He would make the civilised
+world ring with this tale of bloodshed and horror. He would beard
+Sultans in their lairs and Emperors in their dens. He would bring down
+awful vengeance on the heads of her enemies. How Sultans and Emperors
+were to do it was as obscure as at the horror-filled hour of their first
+meeting. But a man vehemently in love is notoriously blind to practical
+considerations. Prescott put his life into her hands. She accepted it
+calmly; and I think it was this calmness of acceptance that infuriated
+Jaffery. If she had been likewise caught in the whirlpool of a mad
+passion, Jaffery would have had nothing to say. But she did not (so he
+maintained) care a button for Prescott, and Prescott would not believe
+it. She had promised to marry him. That ideal of magnificent womanhood
+had promised to marry him. They were to be married--think of that, my
+boy!--as soon as they got back to Scutari and found a British Consul and
+a priest or two to marry them. "Then for God's sake," roared Jaffery,
+"let us trek to Scutari. I'm fed up with playing gooseberry. The Giant
+Gooseberry. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+So they shortened their projected journey and, making a circuit, picked
+up the motor-car--a joy and wonder to Liosha. She wanted to drive
+it--over the rutted wagon-tracks that pass for roads in Albania--and
+such was Prescott's infatuation that he would have allowed her to do so.
+But Jaffery sat an immovable mountain of flesh at the wheel and brought
+them safely to Scutari. There arrangements were made for the marriage
+before the British Vice-Consul. On the morning of the ceremony Prescott
+fell ill. The ceremony was, however, performed. Towards evening he was
+in high fever. The next morning typhoid declared itself. In two or three
+days he was dead. He had made a will leaving everything to his wife,
+with Jaffery as sole executor and trustee.
+
+This sorry ending of poor Prescott's romance--I never knew him, but
+shall always think of him as a swift and vehement spirit--was told very
+huskily by Jaffery beneath the wistaria arbour. Tears rolled down
+Barbara's and Doria's cheeks. My wife's sympathetic little hand slid
+into Liosha's. With her other hand Liosha fondled it. I am sure it was
+rather gratitude for this little feminine act than poignant emotion that
+moistened Liosha's beautiful eyes.
+
+"I haven't had much luck, have I?"
+
+"No, my poor dear, you haven't," cried Barbara in a gush of kindness.
+
+In the course of a few weeks to have one's affianced husband murdered
+and one's legal though nominal husband spirited away by disease, seemed
+in the eyes of my gentle wife to transcend all records of human tragedy.
+Very soon afterwards she made a pretext for taking Liosha away from us,
+and I had the extraordinary experience of seeing my proud little
+Barbara, who loathes the caressive insincerities prevalent among women,
+cross the lawn with her arm around Liosha's waist.
+
+The rest of the bare bones of the story I have already told you.
+Jaffery, after burying his poor comrade, took ship with Liosha and went
+to Cettinje, where he entrusted her to the care of old friends of his,
+the Austrian Consul and his wife, and made her known as the widow of
+Prescott of Reuter's to the British diplomatic authorities. Then having
+his work to do, he started forth again, a heavy-hearted adventurer, and,
+when it was over, he picked up Liosha, for whom Frau von Hagen had
+managed to procure a stock of more or less civilised raiment, and
+brought her to London to make good her claim, under Prescott's will, to
+her dead husband's fortune.
+
+Now this is Jaffery all over. Put him on a battlefield with guns going
+off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of a herd of
+crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation, and will
+telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of the born
+journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life, which a child
+of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and he is scared to
+death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for instance, when he arrived in
+London, or any other sensible woman, say, like Frau von Hagen of
+Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a timid maiden lady of forty-five,
+from her tea-parties and Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge
+Wells, and plants her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this
+disconcerting product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady
+was at her wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born
+baby or a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to
+this type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
+the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing the
+fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.
+
+"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
+day--they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk before
+dinner--"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi! My dear Jaffery!
+And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the girl to church, why not
+her own church, the Brompton Oratory or Farm Street?"
+
+"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship--she still calls it
+Popish, poor dear--to save her soul alive, or anybody else's soul,"
+replied Jaffery.
+
+"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara. "She's
+even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal. I'll see to
+Liosha."
+
+Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous of her,
+but he couldn't dream of it.
+
+"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And there's
+Franklin. Come to dinner."
+
+"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.
+
+We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha, who sat on
+my right, refreshingly free in her table manners (embarrassingly so to
+my most correct butler), was equally free in her speech. She provided me
+with excellent entertainment. I learned many frank truths about Albanian
+women, for whom, on account of their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed
+the most scathing contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, were
+full size. Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
+disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
+grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
+great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth Century
+product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue Laundry,
+merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha, for all her
+yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise annoy her enemies,
+did not greatly regret the loss of the distinguished young Albanian
+cutthroat who was her affianced. Had he lived she would have spent the
+rest of her days in saying, like Melisande, "I am not happy." She would
+have been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving
+drudge, while he went triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among
+the scattered Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a
+whole-hearted detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that
+the death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that it
+might have done.
+
+You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian, wanted to
+run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds of civilisation.
+His daughter (woman the world over) was all for hunting. He had spent
+twenty years in America. By a law of gravitation, natural only in that
+Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago, he had come across an Albanian
+wife. . . .
+
+Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me tell you
+a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery Chayne or
+Liosha--except perhaps to shew that there is no reason why a Tierra del
+Fuegan foundling should not run across his long-lost brother on Michigan
+Avenue, and still less reason why Albanian male should not meet Albanian
+female in Armour's stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged
+on, as I said on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't
+see why I should not put into them anything I choose.
+
+An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received a
+representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to interview him.
+The interviewer was a typical American reporter, blue-eyed, high
+cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung, courteous, intensely alive,
+desirous to get to the heart of my friend's mystery, and charmingly
+responsive to his frank welcome. They talked. My friend, to give the
+young man his story, discoursed on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of
+the conglomeration of all the races under Heaven. To point his remarks
+and mark his contrasts he used the words "we English" and "you
+Americans." After a time the young man smiled and said: "But am not an
+American--at least I'm an American citizen, but I'm not a born
+American."
+
+"But," cried my friend, "you're the essence of America."
+
+"No," said the young man, "I'm an Icelander."
+
+Thus it was natural for Liosha's father to find an Albanian wife in
+Chicago. She too was superficially Americanised. When they returned to
+Albania with their purely American daughter, they at first found it
+difficult to appear superficial Albanians. Liosha had to learn Albanian
+as a foreign language, her parents and herself always speaking English
+among themselves. But the call of the blood rang strong in the veins of
+the elders. Robbery and assassination on the heroic scale held for the
+man an irresistible attraction, and he acquired great skill at the
+business; and the woman, who seems to have been of a lymphatic
+temperament, sank without murmuring into the domestic subjection into
+which she had been born. It was only Liosha who rebelled. Hence her
+complicated attitude towards life, and hence her entertaining talk at
+the dinner table.
+
+I enjoyed myself. So, I think, did everybody. When the ladies rose,
+Jaffery, who was nearest the door, opened it for them to pass out,
+Barbara, the last, lingered for a second or two and laid her hand on
+Jaffery's arm and looked up at him out of her teasing blue eyes.
+
+"My dear Jaff," she said, "what kind of a dinner do you eat when you
+_are_ hungry?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Barbara having freed Jaffery from immediate anxieties with regard to
+Liosha, easily persuaded him to pay a longer visit than he had proposed.
+A telephonic conversation with a first distracted, then
+conscience-smitten and then much relieved Euphemia had for effect the
+payment of bills at the Savoy and the retreat of the gentle lady to
+Tunbridge Wells. Liosha remained with us, pending certain negotiations
+darkly carried on by my wife and Doria in concert. During this time I
+had some opportunity of observing her from a more philosophic standpoint
+and my judgment was--I will not say formed--but aided by Barbara's
+confidential revelations. When not directly thwarted, she seemed to be
+good-natured. She took to Susan--a good sign; and Susan took to her--a
+better. Finding that her idea of happiness was to sprawl about the
+garden and let the child run over her and inveigle her into childish
+games and call her "Loshie" (a disrespectful mode of address which I had
+all the pains in the world in persuading Barbara to permit) and
+generally treat her as an animate instrument of entertainment, we
+smoothed down every obstacle that might lie in this particular path to
+beatitude. So many difficulties were solved. Not only were we spared the
+problem of what the deuce to do with Liosha during the daytime, but also
+Barbara was able to send the nurse away for a short and much needed
+holiday. Of course Barbara herself undertook all practical duties; but
+when she discovered that Liosha experienced primitive delight in
+bathing Susan--Susan's bath being a heathen rite in which ducks and fish
+and swimming women and horrible spiders played orgiac parts, and in
+getting up at seven in the morning--("Good God! Is there such an hour?"
+asked Adrian, when he heard about it)--in order to breakfast with Susan,
+and in dressing and undressing her and brushing her hair, and in
+tramping for miles by her side while with Basset, her vassal, in
+attendance, Susan rode out on her pony; when Barbara, in short, became
+aware of this useful infatuation, she pandered to it, somewhat
+shamelessly, all the time, however, keeping an acute eye on the zealous
+amateur. If, for instance, Liosha had picked a bushel of nectarines and
+had established herself with Susan, in the corner of the fruit garden,
+for a debauch, which would have had, for consequence, a child's funeral,
+Barbara, by some magic of motherhood, sprang from the earth in front of
+them with her funny little smile and her "Only one--and a very ripe
+one--for Susan, dear Liosha." And in these matters Liosha was as much
+overawed by Barbara as was Susan.
+
+This, I repeat, was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she would
+have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my child was
+naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She was _rarissinia
+avis_ in the lands of small girls--one of the few points on which
+Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement. No one could have helped
+falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in the case of Liosha, who was
+an out-of-the-way, incalculable sort of creature--it was a good sign.
+Perhaps, considering the short period during which I had her under close
+observation, it was the best sign. She had grievous faults.
+
+One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, Barbara burst into my
+dressing-room.
+
+"Reynolds has given me notice."
+
+"Oh," said I, not desisting (as is the callous way of husbands the world
+over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of my tie. "What
+for?"
+
+"Liosha has just gone for her with a pair of scissors."
+
+"Horrible!" said I, getting the ends even. "I can imagine nothing more
+finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat with nail scissors,
+especially when the subject is unwilling."
+
+Barbara pished and pshawed. It was no occasion for levity.
+
+"I agree," said I. The dressing hour is the calmest and most philosophic
+period of the day.
+
+Barbara came up to me blue eyed and innocent, and with a traitorous
+jerk, undid my beautiful white bow.
+
+"There, now listen."
+
+And I, dilapidated wretch, had to listen to the tale of crime. It
+appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a
+ready-made gown--a model gown I believe is the correct term--insisted on
+her being properly corseted. Liosha, agonisingly constricted, rebelled.
+The maid was obdurate. Liosha flew at her with a pair of scissors. I
+think I should have done the same. Reynolds bolted from the room. So
+should I have done. I sympathised with both of them. Reynolds fled to
+her mistress, and, declaring it to be no part of her duty to wait on
+tigers, gave notice.
+
+"We can't lose Reynolds," said I.
+
+"Of course we can't."
+
+"And we can't pack Liosha off at a moment's notice, so as to please
+Reynolds."
+
+"Oh, you're too wise altogether," said my wife, and left me to the
+tranquil completion of my dressing.
+
+Liosha came down to dinner very subdued, after a short, sharp interview
+with Barbara, who, for so small a person, can put on a prodigious air of
+authority. As a punishment for bloodthirsty behaviour she had made her
+wear the gown in the manner prescribed by Reynolds; and she had
+apologised to Reynolds, who thereupon withdrew her notice. So serenity
+again prevailed.
+
+In some respects Liosha was very childish. The receipt of letters, no
+matter from whom--even bills, receipts and circulars--gave her
+overwhelming joy and sense of importance. This harmless craze, however,
+led to another outburst of ferocity. Meeting the postman outside the
+gate she demanded a letter. The man looked through his bundle.
+
+"Nothing for you this morning, ma'am."
+
+"I wrote to the dressmaker yesterday," said Liosha, "and you've got the
+reply right there."
+
+"I assure you I haven't," said the postman.
+
+"You're a liar," cried Liosha, "and I guess I'm going to see."
+
+Whereupon Liosha, who was as strong as a young horse, sprang to
+death-grapple with the postman, a puny little man, pitched him onto the
+side of the road and calmly entered into felonious possession of His
+Majesty's mails. Then finding no letter she cast the whole delivery over
+the supine and gasping postman and marched contemptuously into the
+house.
+
+The most astonishing part of the business was that in these outbreaks of
+barbarity she did not seem to be impelled by blind rage. Most people who
+heave a postman about a peaceful county would do so in a fit of passion,
+through loss of nerve-control. Not so Liosha. She did these things with
+the bland and deadly air of an inexorable Fate.
+
+The perspiration still beads on my brow when I think of the cajoling and
+bribing and blustering and lying I had to practise in order to hush up
+the matter. As for Liosha, both Jaffery and I rated her soundly. I
+explained loftily that not so many years ago, transportation, lifelong
+imprisonment, death were the penalties for the felony which she had
+committed.
+
+[Illustration: Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.]
+
+"You ought to have a jolly good thrashing," roared Jaffery.
+
+At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes of
+angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall table and
+handed it to the red-bearded giant.
+
+"I guess I do," she said. "Beat me."
+
+And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her at her
+word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing without a
+murmur. What was one to do with such a woman?
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek. Gradually she
+raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was startled to see the
+most extraordinary doglike submission. He frowned portentously and shook
+his head. Her lips worked, and after a convulsive sob or two, she threw
+herself on the ground, clasped his knees, and to our dismay burst into a
+passion of weeping. Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture,
+like a fairy tornado, released us from our embarrassing position. She
+annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.
+
+"Oh, go away, both of you, go away!"
+
+So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.
+
+Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very
+pleasantly. Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight (it
+was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course. Adrian and
+Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to justify my
+position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard at a Persian
+Grammar. Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime arranging for
+Liosha's future. Her organising genius had brought Doria's suggestion as
+to the First Class London Boarding House into the sphere of practical
+things. The Boarding House idea alone would not work; but, combine it
+with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran on wheels.
+
+"Even you," said Barbara, as though I were a sort of Schopenhauer, a
+professional disparager of her sex--"even you have a high opinion of
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+I had. Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine. She was not very
+beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very angelic or very
+anything--but she was one of those women of whom everybody has a high
+opinion. The impoverished widow of an Indian soldierman, with a son
+soldiering somewhere in India, she managed to do a great deal on very
+small means. She was a woman of the world, a woman of character. She
+knew how to deal with people of queer races. Heaven indicated her for
+appointment by Barbara as Liosha's duenna in the Boarding House. Mrs.
+Considine, herself compelled to live in these homes for the homeless,
+gladly accepted the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who
+happened then to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away,
+so to speak, with her contract in her pocket. It was part of the
+programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha's
+education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil into her
+a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and gradually root
+out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to death. It was a
+capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of a smile, in which,
+seeing Barbara's shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I suppressed the irony.
+
+When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most care-free
+fellow alive. His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude towards Liosha
+changed. He established himself as fellow slave with her under the whip
+of Susan's tyranny. It did one good to see these two magnificent
+creatures sporting together for the child's, and incidentally their own,
+amusement. For the first time during their intercourse they met on the
+same plane.
+
+"She's really quite a good sort," said Jaffery.
+
+But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more
+touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed so
+anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
+puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
+herself to read him little lectures.
+
+"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him one
+day.
+
+"Do you think I am?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said apologetically--"when
+there's one for me to do. And when there isn't I kind of prepare myself
+for the next. For instance I've got to keep myself always fit."
+
+"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
+superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self that
+matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of self-development. If
+a human being is the same at the end of a year as he was at the
+beginning he has made no spiritual progress."
+
+Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived," said
+he.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from one year's
+end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent, and so, that I
+don't live."
+
+"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every one
+must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the conscious
+striving after spiritual progress is so necessary--and you seem to put
+it aside. It is such waste of life."
+
+"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.
+
+She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see--well, what do you
+do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make notes about them
+in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the future. When you come
+across anything to kill, you kill it. It also pleases you to come across
+anything that calls for an exercise of strength. When there is a war or
+a revolution or anything that takes you to your real work, as you call
+it, you've only got to go through it and report what you see."
+
+"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every chap
+that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign. And it
+isn't every chap that can _see_ the things he ought to write about.
+That's when the training comes in."
+
+Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession, my dear
+Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the Alpha and Omega
+of things? Don't you see? The real life is intellectual, spiritual,
+emotional. What are your ideals?"
+
+Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools of eyes lay the
+spirituality that made her a mystery so sacred. He, great hulking
+fellow, was a gross lump of clay. Ideals?
+
+"I don't suppose I have any," said he.
+
+"But you must. Everybody has, to a certain extent."
+
+"Well, to ride straight and tell the truth--like the ancient Persians, I
+suppose it was the Persians--anyway it's a sort of rough code I've got."
+
+"Have you read Nietzsche?" she asked suddenly.
+
+He frowned perplexedly. "Nietzsche--that's the mad superman chap, isn't
+it? No. I've not read a word."
+
+"I do wish you would. You'll find him so exhilarating. You might
+possibly agree with a lot of what he says. I don't. But he sets you
+thinking."
+
+She sketched her somewhat prim conception of the Nietzschean philosophy,
+and after listening to it in dumb wonder, he promised to carry out her
+wishes. So, when I came down to my library that evening dressed for
+dinner, I found him, still in morning clothes, with "Thus Spake
+Zarathustra" on his knees, and a bewildered expression on his face.
+
+"Have you read this, Hilary?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"Understand it?"
+
+"More or less."
+
+"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria understands it
+too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he rose ponderously and
+looked down on me with serious eyes--"what the Hell is it all about?"
+
+I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before rushing
+up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time to expound a
+philosophic system."
+
+Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression and the
+Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the essentials of life,
+we should have been met with bellows of rude and profane derision. I
+don't believe he had even roughly considered what kind of an
+individuality he had, still less enquired into the state of his
+spiritual being. But the flip of a girl he professed so much to despise
+came along and reduced him to a condition of helpless introspection. I
+cannot say that it lasted very long. Psychology and metaphysics and
+æsthetics lay outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his
+own simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it
+an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual superiority.
+On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the subtler mental
+qualities, videlicet his similitude of the bumble-bee; now, however, he
+went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a
+chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with
+childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the
+shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by
+Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader
+of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.
+
+Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had laughed over
+him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had guessed (with
+Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt, found in his humility
+something pathetic which was lost to Adrian. The latter only saw the
+blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews and sinews, at the mercy of
+anything in petticoats, from Susan upward. I disagreed. He was not at
+the mercy of Liosha.
+
+"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library, Jaffery
+having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about in mortal
+terror of her?"
+
+"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an abominable
+nuisance--a millstone round his neck--a responsibility--"
+
+"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too probable
+huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and Doria he knows
+he's safe--spared the worst--so he yields and they pick him up--look at
+him and stand him on his head and do whatever they darn well like to
+him; but with Liosha he knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued,
+after having lit a cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his
+way. With Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of
+marriage or nothing."
+
+"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon think of
+marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."
+
+"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal funk lest
+his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her pedestal and with
+resistless hands take him away and marry him."
+
+"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the day,"
+said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of observation."
+
+For some unaccountable reason Adrian's pale face flushed scarlet. He
+broke out vexedly:
+
+"I don't see what my imaginative work has got to do with the
+trivialities of ordinary life. As a matter of fact," he added, after a
+pause, "the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and it's the same
+imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with Jaffery and this
+unqualifiable lady."
+
+"All right, my dear man," said I, pacifically. "Probably you're right
+and I'm wrong. I was only talking lightly. And speaking of
+imagination--what about your next book?"
+
+"Oh, damn the next book," said he, flicking the ash off his cigarette.
+"I've got an idea, of course. A jolly good idea. But I'm not worrying
+about it yet."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+He threw his cigarette into the grate. How, in the name of common sense,
+could he settle down to work? Wasn't his head full of his approaching
+marriage? Could he see at present anything beyond the thing of dream and
+wonder that was to be his wife? I was a cold-blooded fish to talk of
+novel-writing.
+
+"But you'll have to get into it sometime or other," said I.
+
+"Of course. As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down to a
+normal life in the flat."
+
+"What does Doria think of the new idea?"
+
+Thousands who knew him not were looking forward to Adrian Boldero's new
+book. We, who loved him, were peculiarly interested. Somehow or other we
+had not touched before so intimately on the subject. To my surprise he
+frowned and snapped impatient fingers.
+
+"I haven't told Doria anything about it. It isn't my way. My work's too
+personal a thing, even for Doria. She understands. I know some fellows
+tell their plots to any and everybody--and others, if they don't do
+that, lay bare their artistic souls to those near and dear to them.
+Well, I can't. A word, no matter how loving, of adverse criticism, a
+glance even that was not sympathetic would paralyse me, it would shatter
+my faith in the whole structure I had built up. I can't help it. It's my
+nature. As I told you two or three months ago, it has always been my
+instinct to work in the dark. I instanced my First at Cambridge. How
+much more powerful is the instinct when it's a question of a vital
+created thing like a novel? My dear Hilary, you're the man I'm fondest
+of in the world. You know that. But don't worry me about my work. I
+can't stand it. It upsets me. Doria, heart of my heart and soul of my
+soul, has promised not to worry me. She sees I must be free from outside
+influences--no matter how closely near--but still outside. And you must
+promise too."
+
+"My dear old boy," said I, somewhat confused by this impassioned
+exposition of the artistic temperament, "you've only got to express the
+wish--"
+
+"I know," said he. "Forgive me." He laughed and lit another cigarette.
+"But Wittekind and the editor of _Fowler's_ in America--I've sold him
+the serial rights--are shrieking out for a synopsis. I'm damned if I'm
+going to give 'em a synopsis. They get on my nerves. And--we're intimate
+enough friends, you and I, for me to confess it--so do our dearest
+Barbara and old Jaff, and you yourself, when you want to know how I'm
+getting on. Look, dear old Hilary"--he laughed again and threw himself
+into an armchair--"giving birth to a book isn't very much unlike giving
+birth to a baby. It's analogical in all sorts of ways. Well, some women,
+as soon as the thing is started, can talk quite freely--sweetly and
+delicately--I haven't a word to say against them--to all their women
+friends about it. Others shrink. There's something about it too near
+their innermost souls for them to give their confidence to anyone. Well,
+dear old Hilary--that's how I feel about the novel."
+
+He spoke from his heart. I understood--like Doria.
+
+"Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls it 'the sorrowful, great gift,'" said
+I. "We who haven't got it can only bow to those who have."
+
+Adrian rose and took a few strides about the library.
+
+"I'm afraid I've been talking a lot of inflated nonsense. It must sound
+awfully like swelled head. But you know it isn't, don't you?"
+
+"Don't he an idiot," said I. "Let us talk of something else."
+
+We did not return to the subject.
+
+In the course of time came Mrs. Considine to carry off Liosha to the
+First Class Boarding House which she had found in Queen's Gate. Liosha
+left us full of love for Barbara and Susan and I think of kindly feeling
+for myself. A few days afterwards Jaffery went off to sail a small boat
+with another lunatic in the Hebrides. A little later Doria and Adrian
+went to pay a round of short family visits beginning with Mrs. Boldero.
+So before August was out, Barbara and Susan and I found ourselves alone.
+
+"Now," said I, "I can get through some work."
+
+"Now," said Barbara, "we can run over to Dinard."
+
+"What?" I shouted.
+
+"Dinard," she said, softly. "We always go. We only put it off this year
+on account of visitors."
+
+"We definitely made up our minds," I retorted, "that we weren't going to
+leave this beautiful garden. You know I never change my mind. I'm not
+going away."
+
+Barbara left the room, whistling a musical comedy air.
+
+We went to Dinard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by writing
+descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so many pebbly
+facts into such a small compass. They know the names of everybody who
+attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of poor relations.
+With the cold accuracy of an encyclopædia, and with expert technical
+discrimination, they mention the various fabrics of which the costumes
+of bride and bridesmaids were composed. They catalogue the wedding
+presents with the correct names of the donors. They remember what hymns
+were sung and who signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the
+honeymoon. They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
+departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their accounts
+naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be faithful records
+of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word that brings a scene
+before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are never collected and
+published in book form.
+
+Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria and
+Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.
+
+"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away and
+presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This is a
+full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in useful
+some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in bodily."
+
+I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end it in
+despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure up to my
+mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it back to
+Barbara.
+
+"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.
+
+And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as legally and
+irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of a distinguished
+congregation assembled in a fashionable London church could marry them.
+Of what actually took place I have the confused memory of the mere man.
+I know that it was magnificent. All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft
+were splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria,
+dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek,
+looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was
+best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by
+the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
+set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
+mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . . .
+Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook
+hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude of one
+accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving from church to
+reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox manner of the superior
+husband, at the modern wedding.
+
+"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic of
+marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and never knew
+his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring but the symbol of
+the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the expression of a hope for a
+prolific union? The satin slipper tied on to the carriage or thrown
+after it? Good luck? No such thing. It was once part of the marriage
+ceremony for the bridegroom to tap the wife with a shoe to symbolise
+his assertion of and her acquiescence in her entire subjection."
+
+"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara sweetly. "Did
+you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."
+
+I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do with the
+subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"
+
+She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course not."
+
+Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.
+
+It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in Park
+Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage. He had been
+very hearty and booming all the time, the human presentment of a
+devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great laugh thundering
+cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected the heterogeneous
+gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and pursy lips vibrated into
+smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have never attended, and I am sure
+it was nothing but Jaffery's pervasive influence that infused vitality
+into the deadly and decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich
+Silenic personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of
+Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and
+apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail of
+Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had managed to
+make a journalistic reputation as a great war and foreign correspondent.
+Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an inch or two aside. I saw him
+mingle with an alien crowd, and, by what On the surface appeared to be
+sheer brute full-bloodedness, compel them to his will. The wedding was
+not to be a hollow clang of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all
+hearts. In order that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be
+memorable he had instinctively put out the forces that had carried him
+unscathed through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men.
+He could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had started
+the working of the sap of life.
+
+As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an
+Elizabethan spaciousness. . . . There was no hugger-mugger escape of
+travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal progress
+through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of the Ceremonies,
+exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted them to their
+glittering carriage and pair--and, unconscious of anthropological truth,
+threw the slipper of woman's humiliation. The carriage drove off amid
+the cheers of the multitude. Jaffery stood and watched it until it
+disappeared round the curve. In my eagerness to throw the unnecessarily
+symbolic rice I had followed and stayed a foot or two away from him; and
+then I saw his face change--just for a few seconds. All the joyousness
+was stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists
+of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and unclenched
+themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly he gulped
+something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me by the
+shoulders.
+
+"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you wish
+you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or Honolulu--wherever you chose
+without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He linked his arm in mine, and said in what
+he thought was a whisper: "For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to
+find a real drink."
+
+We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons were
+set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda and poured
+it down his throat.
+
+"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.
+
+"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his frock
+coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me a suit of
+armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."
+
+I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see that
+transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the discomfort of
+the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with the swallowing of
+the huge jorum of alcohol.
+
+Of course I told Barbara all about it--it is best to establish your wife
+in the habit of thinking you tell her everything--and she was more than
+usually gentle to Jaffery. We carried him down with us to Northlands
+that afternoon, calling at his club for a suit-case. In the car he
+tucked a very tired and comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his
+great arm. There was something pathetically tender in the gathering of
+the child to him. Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the
+harmonics of chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were
+alone together, she said with tears very near her eyes:
+
+"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"
+
+"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the tongue of
+an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still earth-bound."
+
+The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her hand.
+
+"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love you."
+
+For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is praise
+indeed.
+
+"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are going to be
+happy?"
+
+"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two people can
+possibly be."
+
+She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were both of
+them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods. I avowed
+absolute agreement.
+
+"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if Jaffery had
+come along first and there had been no question of Adrian. Would they
+have been happy?"
+
+Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you satisfied? You
+have made one match--you, and you'll pardon me for saying so, not
+Heaven--and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical
+one."
+
+"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."
+
+I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her
+and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph
+over me.
+
+During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of
+Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness--she had an eerie
+way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn.
+That was his home. He had no possessions.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got about three
+hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say
+nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever
+saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow."
+
+"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner
+plate or a fork?"
+
+"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be called for in
+all the shops of London."
+
+He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture. I
+laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a thousand
+pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of household clutter, he
+certainly is that household clutter's potential owner. Between us we
+developed this incontrovertible proposition.
+
+"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's Stores and
+purchase a comfortable home?"
+
+"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for the
+interior of China the day after to-morrow."
+
+"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.
+
+"The interior of China?" I reëchoed, with masculine definiteness.
+
+"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into hysterics
+if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me, Barbara. It
+would do him a thundering lot of good."
+
+At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately. I need
+not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the interior of
+China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long he would be away.
+
+"A year or two," he replied casually.
+
+"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no conception of
+time and space."
+
+"A couple of years pass pretty quick," said Jaffery.
+
+"So does a lifetime," said I.
+
+Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the amenities of
+civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again. In vain he pleaded
+his job, the valuable copy he would send to his paper. I proved to him
+it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he could not understand why we
+should be startled by the announcement that within forty-eight hours he
+would be on his way to lose himself for a couple of years in Crim
+Tartary.
+
+"Suppose I sprang a thing like that on you," said I. "Suppose I told you
+I was starting to-morrow morning for the South Pole. What would you
+say?"
+
+"I should say you were a liar. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+In his mirth he rubbed his hands and feet together like a colossal fly.
+The joke lasted him for the rest of the evening.
+
+So, the next morning Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as ever I
+get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We felt sad; not
+only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something in the quiet
+backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less
+happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer _Wanderlust_ that
+had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of
+escaping from the unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he
+betook himself would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . .
+It was just as well he had gone, said Barbara.
+
+A man of intense appetites and primitive passions, like Jaffery, for all
+his loyalty and lovable childishness, was better away from the
+neighbour's wife who had happened to engage his affections. If he lost
+his head. . . .
+
+I had once seen Jaffery lose his head and the spectacle did not make for
+edification. It was before I was married, when Jaffery, during his
+London sojourn, had the spare bedroom in a set of rooms I rented in
+Tavistock Square. At a florist's hard by, a young flower seller--a hussy
+if ever there was one--but bewitchingly pretty--carried on her poetical
+avocation; and of her did my hulking and then susceptible friend become
+ragingly enamoured. I repeat, she was a hussy. She had no intention of
+giving him more than the tip of her pretty little shoe to kiss; but
+Jaffery, reading the promise of secular paradise in her eyes, had no
+notion of her little hard intention. He squandered himself upon her and
+she led him a dog's life. Of course I remonstrated, argued, implored. It
+was like asking a hurricane politely not to blow. Her name I remember
+was Gwenny. One summer evening she had promised to meet him outside the
+house in Tavistock Square--he had arranged to take her to some Earl's
+Court Exhibition, where she could satiate a depraved passion for
+switch-backs, water-chutes and scenic railways. At the appointed hour
+Jaffery stood in waiting on the pavement. I sat on the first floor
+balcony, alternately reading a novel and watching him with a sardonic
+eye. Presently Gwenny turned the corner of the square--our house was a
+few doors up--and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the
+square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in the
+height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously accompanied
+by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young man; his arm was
+round her waist, and her arm was around his, in the approved enlinkment
+of couples in her class who are keeping company, or, in other words,
+are, or are about to be, engaged to be married. A curious shock vibrated
+through Jaffery's frame. He flamed red. He saw red. Gwenny shot a
+supercilious glance and tossed her chin. Jaffery crossed the road and
+barred their path. He fished in his pocket for some coins and addressed
+the scrubby man, who, poor wretch, had never heard of Jaffery's
+existence.
+
+"Here's twopence to go away. Take the twopence and go away. Damn
+you--take the twopence."
+
+The man retreated in a scare.
+
+"Won't you take the twopence? I should advise you to."
+
+Anybody but a born fool or a hero would have taken the twopence. I think
+the scrubby man had the makings of a hero. He looked up at the blazing
+giant.
+
+"You be damned!" said he, retreating a pace.
+
+Then, suddenly, with the swiftness of a panther, Jaffery sprang on him,
+grasped him in the back by a clump of clothes--it seemed, with one hand,
+so quickly was it done--and hurled him yards away over the railings. I
+can still see the flight of the poor devil's body in mid air until it
+fell into a holly-bush. With another spring he turned on the paralysed
+Gwenny, caught her up like a doll and charged with her now screaming
+violently against the shut solid oak front door. A flash of instinct
+suggested a latchkey. Holding the girl anyhow, he fumbled in his pocket.
+It was an August London evening. The Square was deserted; but at
+Gwenny's shrieks, neighbouring windows were thrown up and eager heads
+appeared. It was very funny. There was Jaffery holding a squalling girl
+in one arm and with the other exploring available pockets for his
+latchkey. I had one of the inspirations of my life. I rushed into my
+bedroom, caught up the ewer from my washstand, went out onto the extreme
+edge of the balcony and cast the gallon or so of water over the heads of
+the struggling pair. The effect was amazing. Jaffery dropped the girl.
+The girl, once on her feet, fled like a cat. Jaffery looked up
+idiotically. I flourished the empty jug. I think I threatened to brain
+him with it if he stirred. Then people began to pour out of the houses
+and a policeman sprang up from nowhere. I went down and joined the
+excited throng. There was a dreadful to-do. It cost Jaffery five hundred
+pounds to mitigate the righteous wrath of the young man in the
+holly-bush, and save himself from a dungeon-cell. The scrubby young man,
+who, it appeared, had been brought up in the fishmongering trade, used
+the five hundred pounds to set up for himself in Ealing, where very
+shortly afterwards Gwenny joined him, and that, save an enduring
+ashamedness on the part of Jaffery, was the end of the matter.
+
+So, if Jaffery did lose his head over Doria, there might be the devil to
+pay. We sighed and reconciled ourselves to his exile in Crim Tartary.
+After all, it was his business in life to visit the dark places of the
+earth and keep the world informed of history in the making. And it was a
+business which could not possibly be carried on in the most cunningly
+devised home that could be purchased at Harrod's Stores.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+In the course of time Adrian and Doria returned from Venice, their heads
+full of pictures and lagoons and palaces, and took proud possession of
+their spacious flat in St. John's Wood. They were radiantly happy, very
+much in love with each other. Having brought a common vision to bear
+upon the glories of nature and art which they had beheld, they were
+spared the little squabbles over matters of æsthetic taste which often
+are so disastrous to the serenity of a honeymoon. Touchingly they
+expounded their views in the first person plural. Even Adrian, whom I
+must confess to have regarded as an unblushing egotist, seldom delivered
+himself of an egotistical opinion. "We don't despise the Eclectics,"
+said he. And--"We prefer the Lombardic architecture to the purely
+Venetian," said Doria. And "we" found good in Italian wines and "we"
+found nothing but hideousness in Murano glass. They were, therefore, in
+perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The only difference I
+could see between them was that Adrian loved to wallow in the comfort of
+a club or another person's house, but insisted on elegant austerity in
+his own home, whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere. So they
+had a pure Jacobean entrance hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire
+bedroom, and as far as I could judge by the barrenness of the apartment,
+a Spartan study for Adrian.
+
+On our first visit, they triumphantly showed us round the establishment.
+We came last to the study.
+
+"No really fine imaginative work," said Adrian, with a wave of the hand
+indicating the ascetic table and chair, the iron safe, the bookcase and
+the bare walls--"no really fine imaginative work can be done among
+luxurious surroundings. Pictures distract one's attention, arm-chairs
+and sofas invite to sloth. This is my ideal of a novelist's workshop."
+
+"It's more like a workhouse," said Barbara, with a shiver. "Or a
+condemned cell. But even a condemned cell would have a plank bed in it."
+
+"You don't understand a bit," said Doria, with a touch of resentment at
+adverse criticism of her paragon's idiosyncrasies, "although Adrian has
+tried to explain it to you. It's specially arranged for concentration of
+mind. If it weren't for the necessity of having something to sit upon
+and something to write at and a few necessary reference books and a
+lock-up place, we should have had nothing in the room at all. When
+Adrian wants to relax and live his ordinary human life, he only has to
+walk out of the door and there he is in the midst of beautiful things."
+
+"Oh, I quite see, dear," said Barbara, with a familiar little flash in
+her blue eyes. "But do you think a leather seat for that hard wooden
+chair--what the French call a _rond-de-cuir_--would very greatly impair
+the poor fellow's imagination?"
+
+"It might be economical, too," said I, "in the way of saving
+shininess!--"
+
+Adrian laughed. "It does look a bit hard, darling," said he.
+
+"We'll get a leather seat to-day," replied Doria.
+
+But she did not smile. Evidently to her the spot on which Adrian sat was
+sacrosanct. The room was the Holy of Holies where mortal man put on
+immortality. Flippant comment sounded like blasphemy in her ears. She
+even grew somewhat impatient at our lingering in the august precincts,
+although they had not yet been consecrated by inspired labour. Their
+unblessed condition was obvious. On the large library table were a
+couple of brass candlesticks with fresh candles (Adrian could not work
+by electric light), a couple of reams of scribbling paper, an inkpot, an
+immaculate blotting pad, three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's
+whimsies to write always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an
+office stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this
+last monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination
+and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road, but
+not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of challenge
+from Doria, I forebore to make ignorant criticism.
+
+In the bedroom while Barbara was putting on her veil and powdering her
+nose (this may be what grammarians call a _hysteron proteron_--but with
+women one never can tell)--Doria broke into confidences not meet for
+masculine ears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, darling," she cried, looking at Barbara with great awe-stricken
+eyes, "you can't tell what it means to be married to a genius like
+Adrian. I feel like one of the Daughters of Men that has been looked
+upon by one of the Sons of God. It's so strange. In ordinary life he's
+so dear and human--responsive, you know, to everything I feel and
+think--and sometimes I quite forget he's different from me. But at
+others, I'm overwhelmed by the thought of the life going on inside his
+soul that I can never, never share--I can only see the spirit that
+conceived 'The Diamond Gate'--don't you understand, darling?--and that
+is even now creating some new thing of wonder and beauty. I feel so
+little beside him. What more can I give him beyond what I have given?"
+
+Barbara took the girl's tense face between her two hands and smiled and
+kissed her.
+
+"Give him," said she, "ammoniated quinine whenever he sneezes."
+
+Then she laughed and embraced the Heavenly One's wife, who, for the
+moment, had not quite decided whether to feel outraged or not, and
+discoursed sweet reasonableness.
+
+"I should treat your genius, dear, just as I treat my stupid old
+Hilary."
+
+She proceeded to describe the treatment. What it was, I do not know,
+because Barbara refused to tell me. But I can make a shrewd guess. It's
+a subtle scheme which she thinks is hidden from me; but really it is so
+transparent that a babe could see through it. I, like any wise husband,
+make, however, a fine assumption of blindness, and consequently lead a
+life of unruffled comfort.
+
+Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my doubts.
+Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old Hilary's chair and
+worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent wife and I've no fault to
+find with her; but she has never done that, and she is the last woman in
+the world to counsel any wife to do it. Personally, I should hate to be
+worshipped. In worship hours I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a
+sense of congruity can imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship
+would bore me to paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as
+the new hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more
+he was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration
+he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette--a way which
+Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown with the
+grape on Mount Cithaeron--and a way of exhaling a cloud of smoke, holier
+than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of the adorer, which moved me
+at once to envy and exasperation.
+
+Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either in
+their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands than in
+St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of upholstered
+furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox on his tongue
+and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while Doria, chin on palm,
+and her great eyes set on him, drank in all the wonder of this
+miraculous being.
+
+I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the man."
+
+Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of
+view. . . .
+
+"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking. When she
+has turned him into the idiot--"
+
+"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.
+
+"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"
+
+"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I. "The
+unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole
+consistency."
+
+Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none,
+the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a while and then,
+quickly, a smile replaced the frown.
+
+"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she said
+sweetly.
+
+I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates of a
+torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she vanished
+from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned high-falutin' phrase is
+the best description I can give of the elusive uncapturable nature of
+this wife of mine. It is a pity that she has so little to do with the
+story of Jaffery which I am trying to relate, for I should like to make
+her the heroine. You see, I know her so well, or imagine I do, which
+comes to the same thing, and I should love to present you with a
+solution, of this perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled
+conundrum that is Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a
+_raisonneur_ in the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the
+background. _Paullo majora canamus_. Let us come to the horses.
+
+All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha. As deputies for the
+absent trustee we received periodical reports from the admirable Mrs.
+Considine, and entertained both ladies for an occasional week-end. On
+the whole, her demeanour in the Queen's Gate boarding-house was
+satisfactory. At first trouble arose over a young curly haired Swiss
+waiter who had won her sympathy in the matter of a broken heart. She had
+entered the dining-room when he was laying the table and discovered him
+watering the knives and forks with tears. Unaccustomed to see men weep,
+she enquired the cause. He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a
+woeful tale of a faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and
+well-to-do. He had looked forward to marry her at the end of the year,
+and to pass an unruffled life in the snugness of the _delicatessen_ shop
+which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had announced her
+engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among the chitterlings and
+liver-sausages was shattered. Herr Gott! what was he to do? Liosha
+counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and assassination of his rival.
+To kill another man for her was the surest way to a woman's heart. The
+waiter approved the scheme, but lacked the courage--also the money to go
+to Neuchatel. Liosha, espousing his cause warmly, gave him the latter at
+once. The former she set to work to instil into him. She waylaid him at
+odd corners in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and
+sought to inspire him with the true Balkan spirit. She even supplied him
+with an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp. At last, the poor craven,
+finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the mistress
+of the boarding-house protection against his champion. Mrs. Considine,
+called into consultation, was informed that Mrs. Prescott must either
+cease from instigating the waiters to commit murder or find other
+quarters. Liosha curled a contemptuous lip.
+
+"If you think I'm going to have anything more to do with the little
+skunk, you're mistaken."
+
+And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room,
+approached her with the tray, she waved him off.
+
+"See here," she said calmly, "just you keep out of my way or I might
+tread on you."
+
+Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the genteel
+assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole difficulty by
+bolting from the house, never to return.
+
+When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter, Liosha
+shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
+
+"I guess," she said, "if a man loves a woman strongly enough to cry for
+her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted in, without
+being told."
+
+"But you don't seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to take
+the life of a human being," said Barbara.
+
+"I can understand how you feel," Liosha admitted. "But I don't feel
+about it the same as you. I've been brought up different."
+
+"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father made
+his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished with the
+pigs he took on humans who displeased him."
+
+"And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.
+
+Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she extracted a
+promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a knife into
+anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so doing.
+
+But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace, Liosha
+led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house. If she now and
+then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits and free
+expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them a chronic
+topic of conversation. A large though somewhat scornful generosity also
+established her in their esteem. She would lend or give anything she
+possessed. When one of the forlorn and woollen-shawled old maids fell
+ill, she sat up of nights with her, and in spite of her ignorance of
+nursing, which was as vast as that of a rhinoceros, magnetised the
+fragile lady into well-being. I think she was fairly happy. If London
+had been situated amid gorges and crags and ravines and granite cliffs
+she would have been completely so. She yearned for mountains. Mrs.
+Considine to satisfy this nostalgia took her for a week's trip to the
+English Lakes. She returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for
+unimportant undulations, and declaring her preference for London. So in
+London she remained.
+
+In these early stages of our acquaintance with Liosha, she counted in
+our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even in the crises
+of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not rob us of our
+night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy personality whose
+quaint vagaries afforded us constant amusement than as an intense human
+soul. The working out of her destiny did not come within the sphere of
+our emotional sympathies like that of Adrian and Doria. The latter were
+of our own kind and class, bound to us not only by the common traditions
+of centuries, but by ties of many years' affection. It is only natural
+that we should have watched them more closely and involved ourselves
+more intimately in their scheme of things.
+
+The first fine rapture of house-pride having grown calm, the Bolderos
+settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life tempered by the
+amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian worked, Doria read Dante
+and attended performances of the Intellectual Drama; when Adrian
+relaxed, she cooked dainties in a chafing dish and accompanied him to
+Musical Comedy. They entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out
+into cultivated society. The Art of Life, they declared, was to catch
+atmosphere, whatever that might mean. Adrian explained, with the gentle
+pity of one addressing himself to the childish intelligence.
+
+"It's merely the perfect freedom of mental adaptation. To discuss
+pragmatism while eating oysters would be destructive to the enjoyment
+afforded by the delicate sense of taste, whereas, to let one's mind
+wander from the plane of philosophic thought when preparing for a
+Hauptmann or a Strindberg play would lead to nothing less than the
+disaster of disequilibrium."
+
+Saying this he caught my cold, unsympathetic gaze, but I think I noticed
+the flicker of an eyelid. Doria, however, nodded, in wide-eyed approval.
+So I suppose they really did practise between themselves these modal
+gymnastics. They were all of a piece with the "atmospheres" evoked in
+the various rooms of the flat. To Barbara and myself, comfortable
+Philistines, all this appeared exceeding lunatic. But every married
+couple has a right to lay out its plan of happiness in its own way. If
+we had made taboo of irrelevant gossip between the acts of a serious
+play our evening would have been a failure. Theirs would have been, and,
+in fact, was a success. Connubial felicity they certainly achieved: and
+what else but an impertinence is a criticism of the means?
+
+Easter came. They had been married six months. "The Diamond Gate" had
+been published for nearly a year and was still selling in England and
+America. Adrian flourishing his first half-yearly cheque in January had
+vowed he had no idea there was so much money in the world. He basked in
+Fortune's sunshine. But for all the basking and all the syllabus of the
+perfect existence, and all his unquestionable love for Doria, and all
+her worship for him together with its manifestation in her admirable
+care for his material well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began
+to strike me as a man lacking some essential of happiness. They spent a
+week or so with us at Northlands. Adrian confessed dog-weariness. His
+looks confirmed his words. A vertical furrow between the brows and a
+little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair
+moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face. In moments
+of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a squint, appeared
+in his blue eyes. He was no longer debonair, no longer the lightly
+laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox seeing flippancy in the
+Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in Little Tich. He was morose and
+irritable. He had acquired a nervous habit of secretly rubbing his
+thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips when Doria, in her pride, spoke of
+his work, which amounted almost to ill-breeding. It was only late at
+night during our last smoke that he assumed a semblance of the old
+Adrian; and by that time he had consumed as much champagne and brandy as
+would have rendered jocose the prophet Jeremiah.
+
+He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From Doria we
+learned the cause. For the last three months he had been working at
+insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he
+breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and
+remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he began a three-hour
+spell of work. At night a four hours' spell--from nine to one, if they
+had no evening engagement, from midnight to four o'clock in the morning
+if they had been out.
+
+"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of this
+maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't let him
+do it. He is killing himself."
+
+"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting out
+creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous novelists
+whom I meet at the Athenæum have told me so themselves. Even prodigious
+people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola--"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist must be
+a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why--those two that you've
+mentioned--they slung out stuff by the bucketful. It didn't matter to
+them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the rhythm and the balance
+and the beauty of every sentence he writes--to say nothing of the
+subtlety of his analysis and the perfect drawing of his pictures. My
+dear, good people"--she threw out her hands in an impatient
+gesture--"you don't know what you're talking about. How can you? It's
+impossible for you to conceive--it's almost impossible even for me to
+conceive--the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four
+hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is
+stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine
+that work like Adrian's is to be done in this dead mechanical way."
+
+"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My admiration for
+Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I repeat that no human
+brain since the beginning of time has been capable of spinning cobwebs
+of fancy for twelve hours a day, day in and day out for months at a
+time. Look at your husband. He has tried it. Does he sleep well?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has he a hearty appetite?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Is he a light-hearted, cheery sort of chap to have about the place?"
+
+"He's naturally tired, after his winter's work," said Doria.
+
+"He's played out," said I, "and if you are a wise woman, you'll take him
+away for a couple of months' rest, and when he gets back, see that he
+works at lower pressure."
+
+Doria promised to do her best; but she sighed.
+
+"You don't realise Adrian's iron will."
+
+Once more I recognised with a shock that I did not know my Adrian. I
+used to think one could blow the thistledown fellow about whithersoever
+one pleased. Of the two, Doria seemed to have unquestionably the
+stronger will-power.
+
+"Surely," said I, "you can twist him round your little finger."
+
+Doria sighed again--and a wanly indulgent smile played about her lips.
+
+"You two dear people are so sensible, that it makes me almost angry to
+see how you can't begin to understand Adrian. As a man, of course I have
+a certain influence over him. But as an artist--how can I? He's a thing
+apart from me altogether. I know perfectly well that thousands of
+artists' wives wreck their happiness through sheer, stupid jealousy of
+their husbands' art. I'm not such a narrow-minded, contemptible woman."
+She threw her little head up proudly. "I should loathe myself if I
+grudged one hour that Adrian gave to his work instead of to me."
+
+This time Barbara and I sighed, for we realised how vain had been our
+arguments. Our considerably greater knowledge of life, our stark
+common-sense, our deep affection for Adrian counted as naught beside the
+fact that we had no experience whatever in the rearing of a genius.
+
+That word "genius" came too often from Doria's lips. At first it
+irritated me; then I heard it with morbid detestation. In the course of
+a more or less intimate conversation with Adrian, I let slip a mild
+expression of my feelings. He groaned sympathetically.
+
+"I wish to heaven she wouldn't do it," said he. "It puts a man into such
+a horrible false position towards himself. It's beautiful of her, of
+course--it's her love for me. But it gets on my nerves. Instead of
+sitting down at my desk with nothing in my mind but my day's work to
+slog through, I hear her voice and I have to say to myself, 'Go to. I am
+a genius. I mustn't write like any common fellow. I must produce the
+work of a genius.' It really plays the devil with me."
+
+He walked excitedly about the library, flourishing a cigar and
+scattering the ash about the carpet. I am pernicketty in a few ways and
+hate tobacco ash on my carpet; every room in the house is an arsenal of
+ash trays. In normal mood Adrian punctiliously observed the little laws
+of the establishment. This scattering of cigar ash was a sign of
+spiritual convulsion.
+
+"Have you explained the matter to Doria?" I asked.
+
+He halted before me performing his new uncomfortable trick of slithering
+thumb over finger tips.
+
+"No," he snapped. "How can I?"
+
+I replied, mildly, that it seemed to be the simplest thing in the world.
+He broke away impatiently, saying that I couldn't understand.
+
+"All right," said I, though what there was to understand in so
+elementary a proposition goodness only knows. I was beginning to resent
+this perpetual charge of non-intelligence.
+
+"I think we had better clear out," he said. "I'm only a damned nuisance.
+I've got this book of mine on the brain"--he held up his head with both
+hands--"and I'm not a fit companion for anybody."
+
+I adjured him in familiar terms not to talk rubbish. He was here for the
+repose of country things and freedom from day-infesting cares. Already
+he was looking better for the change. But I could not refrain from
+adding:
+
+"You wrote 'The Diamond Gate' without turning a hair. Why should you
+worry yourself to death about this new book?"
+
+When he answered I had the shivering impression of a wizened old man
+speaking to me. The slight cast I had noticed in his blue eyes became
+oddly accentuated.
+
+"'The Diamond Gate,'" he said, peering at me uncannily, "was just a
+pretty amateur story. The new book is going to stagger the soul of
+humanity."
+
+"I wish you weren't such a secretive devil," said I. "What's the book
+about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It will do you good."
+
+I put my arm round his shoulders and my hand gave him an affectionate
+grip. My heart ached for the dear fellow, and I longed, in the plain
+man's way, to break down the walls of reserve, which like those of the
+Inquisition Chamber, I felt were closing tragically upon him.
+
+"Come, come," I continued. "Get it out. It's obvious that the thing is
+suffocating you. I'll tell nobody--not even that you've told me--neither
+Doria nor Barbara--it will be the confidence of the confessional. You'll
+be all the better for it. Believe me."
+
+He shrugged himself free from my grasp and turned away; his nervous
+fingers plucked unconsciously at his evening tie until it was loosened
+and the ends hung dissolutely over his shirt front.
+
+"You're very good, Hilary," said he, looking at every spot in the room
+except my eyes. "If I could tell you, I would. But it's an enormous
+canvas. I could give you no idea--" The furrow deepened between his
+brows--"If I told you the scheme you would get about the same dramatic
+impression as if you read, say, the letter R, in a dictionary. I'm
+putting into this novel," he flickered his fingers in front of
+me--"everything that ever happened in human life."
+
+I regarded him in some wonder.
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, "you can't compress a Liebig's Extract of
+Existence between the covers of a six-shilling novel."
+
+"I can," said he, "I can!" He thumped my writing table, so that all the
+loose brass and glass on it rattled. "And by God! I'm going to do it."
+
+"But, my dearest friend," I expostulated, "this is absurd. It's
+megalomania--_la folie des grandeurs_."
+
+"It's the divinest folly in the world," said he.
+
+He threw a cigar stump into the fireplace and poured himself out and
+drank a stiff whisky and soda. Then he laughed in imitation of his
+familiar self.
+
+"You dear prim old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come
+straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
+centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. And now,
+good-night."
+
+He laughed, waved his arm in a cavalier gesture and went from the room,
+slamming the door masterfully behind him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+We kept the unreasonable pair at Northlands as long as we could, doing
+all that lay in our power to restore Adrian's idiotically impaired
+health. I motored him about the county; I took him to golf, a pastime at
+which I do not excel; and I initiated him into the invigorating
+mysteries of playing at robbers with Susan. We gave a carefully selected
+dinner-party or two, and accepted on his behalf a few discreet
+invitations. At these entertainments--whether at Northlands or
+elsewhere--we caused it to be understood that the lion, being sick,
+should not be asked to roar.
+
+"It's so trying for him," said Doria, "when people he doesn't know come
+up and gush over 'The Diamond Gate'--especially now when his nerves are
+on edge."
+
+On the occasion of our second dinner-party, the guests having been
+forewarned of the famous man's idiosyncrasies, no reference whatever was
+made to his achievements. We sat him between two pretty and charming
+women who chattered amusingly to him with what I, who kept an eye open
+and an ear cocked, considered to be a very subtly flattering deference.
+Adrian responded with adequate animation. As an ordinary clever,
+well-bred man of the world he might have done this almost mechanically;
+but I fancied that he found real enjoyment in the light and picturesque
+talk of his two neighbours. When the ladies left us, he discussed easy
+politics with the Member for our own division of the County. In the
+drawing-room, afterwards, he played a rubber at bridge, happened to
+hold good cards and smiled an hour away. When the last guest departed,
+he yawned, excused himself on the ground of healthy fatigue and went
+straight off to bed. Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on the
+success of our dinner-party. The next day Adrian went about as glum as a
+dinosaur in a museum, and conveyed, even to Susan's childish mind, his
+desire for solitude. His hang-dog dismalness so affected my wife, that
+she challenged Doria.
+
+"What in the world is the matter with him, to-day?"
+
+Doria drew herself up and flashed a glance at Barbara--they were both
+little bantams of women, one dark as wine, the other fair as corn. If
+ever these two should come to a fight, thought I who looked on, it would
+be to the death.
+
+"Your friends are very charming, my dear, and of course I've nothing to
+say against them; but I was under the impression that every educated
+person in the English-speaking world knew my husband's name, and I
+consider the way he was ignored last night by those people was
+disgraceful."
+
+"But, my dear Doria," cried Barbara, aghast, "we thought that Adrian was
+having quite a good time."
+
+"You may think so, but he wasn't. Adrian's a gentleman and plays the
+game; but you must see it was very galling to him--and to me--to be
+treated like any stockbroker--or architect--or idle man about town."
+
+"You are unfortunate in your examples," said I, intervening judicially.
+"Pray reflect that there are architects alive whose artistic genius is
+not far inferior to Adrian's."
+
+"You know very well what I mean," she snapped.
+
+"No, we don't, dear," said Barbara dangerously. "We think you're a
+little idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. We took the trouble to
+tell every one of those people that Adrian hated any reference to his
+work, and like decent folk they didn't refer to it. There--now round
+upon us."
+
+The pallor deepened a shade in Doria's ivory cheek.
+
+"You have put me in the wrong, I admit it. But I think it would have
+been better to let us know."
+
+What could one do with such people? I was inclined to let them work out
+their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but Barbara decided
+otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree of lunacy as
+warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain duty to look
+after them. So we continued to look after our genius and his worshipper,
+and we did it so successfully that before he left us he recovered his
+sleep in some measure, and lost the squinting look of strain in his
+eyes.
+
+On the morning of their departure I mildly counselled him to temper his
+fine frenzy with common-sense.
+
+"Knock off the night work," said I.
+
+He frowned, fidgeted with his feet.
+
+"I wish to God I hadn't to work at all," said he. "I hate it! I'd sooner
+be a coal-heaver."
+
+"Bosh!" said I. "I know that you're an essentially idle beggar; but
+you're as proud as Punch of your fame and success and all that it means
+to you."
+
+"What does it mean after all?"
+
+"If you talk in that pessimistic way," I said, "you'll make me cry.
+Don't. It means every blessed thing in the world to you. At any rate it
+has meant Doria."
+
+"I suppose that's true," he grunted. "And I suppose I am essentially
+idle. But I wish the damned thing would get written of its own accord.
+It's having to sit down at that infernal desk that gets on my nerves. I
+have the same horrible apprehension of it--always have--as one has
+before a visit to the dentist, when you know he's going to drill hell
+into you."
+
+"Why do you work in such a depressing room?" I asked. "If I were shut up
+alone in it, I would stick my nose in the air and howl like a dog."
+
+"Oh, the room's all right," said he. Then he looked away absently and
+murmured as if to himself, "It isn't the room."
+
+"Then what is it?" I persisted.
+
+He turned with a dreary sort of smile. "It's the born butterfly being
+condemned to do the work of the busy bee."
+
+A short while afterwards we saw them drive off and watched the car
+disappear round the bend of the drive.
+
+"Well, my dear," said I, "thank goodness I'm not a man of genius."
+
+"Amen!" said Barbara, fervently.
+
+As soon as they had settled down in their flat, Adrian began to work
+again, in the same unremitting fashion. The only concession he made to
+consideration of health was to go to bed immediately on his return from
+dinner-parties and theatres instead of spending three or four hours in
+his study. Otherwise the routine of toil went on as before. One
+afternoon, happening to be in town and in the neighbourhood of St.
+John's Wood, I called at the flat with the idea of asking Doria for a
+cup of tea. I also had in my pocket a letter from Jaffery which I
+thought might interest Adrian. The maid who opened the door informed me
+that her mistress was out. Was Mr. Boldero in? Yes; but he was working.
+
+"That doesn't matter," said I. "Tell him I'm here."
+
+The maid did not dare disturb him. Her orders were absolute. She could
+not refuse to admit me, seeing that I was already in the hall; but she
+stoutly refused to announce me. I argued with the damsel.
+
+"I may have business of the utmost importance with your master."
+
+She couldn't help it. She had her orders.
+
+"But, my good Ellen," said I--the minx had actually been in our service
+a couple of years before!--"suppose the place were on fire, what would
+you do?"
+
+She looked at me demurely. "I think I should call a policeman, sir."
+
+"You can call one now," said I, "for I'm going to announce myself. Don't
+tell me I'll have to walk over your dead body first, for it won't do."
+
+I know it is not looked upon as a friendly act to interrupt a man in his
+work and to disregard the orders given to his servants, but I was
+irritated by all this Grand Llama atmosphere of mysterious seclusion.
+Besides, I had been walking and felt just a little hot and dusty and
+thirsty, and I felt all the hotter, dustier and thirstier for my
+argument with Ellen.
+
+"I'll announce myself," I said, and marched to the door of Adrian's
+study. It was locked. I rapped at the door.
+
+"Who's there?" came Adrian's voice.
+
+"Me. Hilary."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"I happen to be a guest under your roof," said I, with a touch of
+temper.
+
+"Wait a minute," said he.
+
+I waited about two. Then the door was unlocked and opened and I strode
+in upon Adrian who looked rather pale and dishevelled.
+
+"Why the deuce," said I, "did you keep me hanging about like that?"
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied. "But I make it a fixed rule to put away my
+work"--he waved a hand towards the safe--"whenever anybody, even Doria,
+wants to come into the room."
+
+I glanced around the cheerless place. There were no traces of work
+visible. Save that the quill pens and blotting pad were inky, his
+library table seemed as immaculate, as unstained by toil, as it did on
+the occasion of my first visit.
+
+"You needn't have made all that fuss," said I. "I only dropped in for a
+second or two. I wanted to ask for a drink and to show you a letter from
+Jaffery."
+
+"Oh, Jaffery!" He smiled. "How's the old barbarian getting on?"
+
+"Tremendously. He's the guest of a Viceroy and living in sumptuousness.
+Read for yourself."
+
+I took from my pocket letter and envelope. Now I am a man who keeps few
+letters and no envelopes. The second post bringing Jaffery's epistle had
+just arrived when I was leaving Northlands that morning, and it was but
+an accident of haste that the envelope had not been destroyed. I took
+the opportunity of tearing it up while Adrian was reading. With the
+pieces in my hand, I peered about the room.
+
+"What are you looking for?" he asked.
+
+"Your waste-paper basket."
+
+"Haven't got such a thing."
+
+I threw my litter into the grate.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I'm not going to pander to the curiosity of housemaids," he replied
+rather irritably.
+
+"What do you do with your waste paper, then?"
+
+"Never have any," he said, with his eyes on Jaffery's letter.
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Do you pigeon-hole bills and money-lenders'
+circulars and second-hand booksellers' catalogues and all their
+wrappers?"
+
+He folded up the letter, took me by the arm and regarded me with a smile
+of forced patience.
+
+"My dear Hilary, can't you ever understand that this room is just a
+workshop and nothing else? Here I think of nothing but my novel. I would
+as soon think of conducting my social correspondence in the bathroom. If
+you want to see the waste-paper basket where I throw my bills and
+unanswered letters from duchesses, and the desk--I share it with
+Doria--where I dash off my brilliant replies to money-lenders, come into
+the drawing-room. There, also, I shall be able to give you a drink."
+
+My eyes, following an unconscious glance from his, fell upon a new and
+hitherto unnoticed object--a little table, now startlingly obvious, in a
+corner of the all but unfurnished room, bearing a tray with half full
+decanter, syphon and glass.
+
+"You've got all I want here," said I.
+
+"No. That's mere stimulant. _Sapit lucernam_. It has a horrible flavour
+of midnight oil. There's not what you understand by a drink in it. Let's
+get out of the accursed hole."
+
+He dragged me almost by force into the drawing-room, where he
+entertained me courteously. It was curious to observe how his manner
+changed in--I have to use the Boldero jargon--in the different
+atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his whisky--a present from old
+man Jornicroft, a rare blend which just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's
+word, he declared, was delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and
+there a one in the City of London were able to procure. In its flavour,
+said he, lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me
+a Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On enquiry
+as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I learned that
+since eminent tenors and divas had sung into gramophones, the standard
+had appreciated.
+
+"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can afford it."
+
+For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
+drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington Station
+under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and afterwards at
+home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I had loosely and
+playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic, without a thought as
+to the exact significance of the term. Now a horrible thought harassed
+me. Had I been precise without knowing it?
+
+Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy of their
+working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard of are such
+fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which Adrian surrounded
+himself. Why should he put himself under lock and key? Why should he not
+allow human eye to fall, even from the distance prescribed by good
+manners, upon his precious manuscript? Why need he use care so
+scrupulous as not to expose even torn up bits of rough draft to the
+ancillary publicity of a waste-paper basket? Soundness of mind did not
+lie that way. The terms in which he alluded to his book were not those
+of a sane man filled with the joy of his creation. None of us, not even
+Doria, knew how the story was progressing. He had signed a contract with
+an American editor for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in
+the middle of May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered.
+Doria told Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much
+of the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
+putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with him,
+calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I had been
+right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to the malady and
+shivered.
+
+Suddenly, a day or two afterwards, came news that, to some extent,
+relieved my mind.
+
+While the Bolderos were at breakfast, a cable arrived from the Editor.
+It ran: "Unless half of manuscript is delivered to-day at London Office
+will cancel contract." Adrian read it, frowned and handed it to Doria.
+It seems that in all business matters she had his confidence.
+
+"Well, dear?" she said, looking up at him.
+
+He broke out angrily. "Did you ever hear such amazing insolence? I give
+this pettifogging tradesman the privilege of publishing my novel in his
+rubbishy periodical and he dares to dictate terms to me! Half a novel,
+indeed! As if it were half a bale of calico. The besotted fool! As well
+ask a clock-maker to deliver half a clock."
+
+"Argument by analogy is rather dangerous," she said gently, seeking to
+turn aside his wrath with a smile. "It's not quite the same thing. Can't
+you give him something to go on with?"
+
+"I can, but I won't. I'll see him damned first." He turned to the maid
+and demanded a telegraph form.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to teach him a lesson. He thinks I'm going to be taken in by
+his bluff and run round with a brown paper parcel to Fleet Street or
+wherever his beastly office is. He's mistaken. There," he wrote the
+cable hurriedly and read it aloud, "'Shall not deliver anything. Only
+too glad to cancel contract.' He'll he the most surprised and disgusted
+man in America!"
+
+"Need you put it quite like that?" said Doria.
+
+"It's the only way to make him understand. He has been buzzing round me
+like a wasp for the past month. Now he's squashed. And now," said he,
+getting up and lighting a cigarette, "I'm not going to do another stroke
+of work for three months."
+
+It was the news of this last announcement that relieved my mind: not the
+story of Adrian's intolerable treatment of the editor, which was of a
+piece with his ordinary attitude towards his own genius. The
+capriciousness of the resolution startled me; but I approved
+whole-heartedly. I would have counselled immediate change of scene, had
+not Adrian anticipated my advice by rushing off then and there to Cook's
+and taken tickets to Switzerland. Having some business in town, I
+motored up with Barbara earlier than I need have done, and we saw them
+off at Victoria Station. Adrian, in holiday spirits, talked rather
+loudly. Now that he was free from the horror of that bestial vampire
+sucking his blood--that was his way of referring to the long suffering
+and hardly used editor--life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his
+spirit could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean.
+He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months communing
+with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain heights, three
+months calm discipline of the soul--that was what he needed. Then to
+work, and in another three months, _currente calamo_, the book would be
+written.
+
+"And what is Doria going to do on top of the Matterhorn?" asked my wife.
+
+Doria cried out, "Oh, don't tease. We're not going near the Matterhorn.
+We're going to read beautiful books, and see beautiful things and think
+beautiful thoughts." She dragged Barbara a step or two aside. "Don't you
+think this is the best thing that could have happened?" she asked, with
+her anxious, earnest gaze.
+
+"The very, very best, dear," replied Barbara gently.
+
+And indeed it was. If ever a man realised himself to be on the verge of
+the abyss, I am sure it was Adrian Boldero. Some haunting fear was set
+at the back of his laughing eyes--the expression of an animal instinct
+for self-preservation which discounted the balderdash about the soaring
+yet disciplined soul.
+
+I whispered to Doria: "Don't go too far into the wilds out of reach of
+medical advice."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're taking away a sick man."
+
+"Do you really think so?"
+
+"I do," said I.
+
+She looked to right and left and then at me full in the face, and she
+gripped my hand.
+
+"You're a good friend, Hilary. God knows I thank you."
+
+From which I clearly understood that her passionately loyal heart was
+grievously sore for Adrian.
+
+During their absence abroad, which lasted much longer than three months,
+we heard fairly regularly from Doria; twice or thrice from Adrian. After
+a time he grew tired of mountaintops and solitude and declared that his
+inspiration required steeping in the past, communion with the hallowed
+monuments of mankind. So they wandered about the old Italian cities,
+until he discovered that the one thing essential to his work was the
+gaiety of cosmopolitan society; whereupon they went the round of French
+watering-places, where Adrian played recklessly at baccarat and spent
+inordinate sums on food. And all the time Doria wrote glowingly of their
+doings. Adrian had put the book out of his head, was always in the best
+of spirits. He had completely recovered from the strain of work and was
+looking forward joyously to the final spurt in London and the
+achievement of the masterpiece.
+
+Meanwhile we played the annual comedy of our August migration; the only
+change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West Coast of
+Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One gleam of joy
+irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn--the news that Jaffery, his
+mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would be home for Christmas.
+Our host and hostess were sporting folk with red, weatherbeaten faces
+and a mania (which they expected us to share) for salmon-fishing in the
+pouring rain. As neither Barbara nor I were experts--I always trembled
+lest a strong young fish getting hold of the end of Barbara's line
+should whisk her over like a feather into the boiling current--and as
+for myself, I prefer the more contemplative art of bottom fishing from a
+punt in dry weather--our friends caught all the salmon, while we merely
+caught colds in the head. Many an hour of sodden misery was cheered by
+the whispered word of comfort: Jaffery would be home for Christmas. And
+when, at ten o'clock in the evening, just as we were beginning to awake
+from the nightmare of the day, and to desire sprightly conversation, our
+host and hostess fell into a lethargy, and staggered off to slumber, we
+beguiled the hour before bedtime with talk of Jaffery's homecoming.
+
+At last we escaped and took the good train south. The Bolderos had
+already returned to London. They came to spend our first week-end at
+Northlands. Adrian professed to be in the robustest of health and to
+have not a care in the world. The holiday, said he, had done him
+incalculable good. Already he had begun to work in the full glow of
+inspiration. We thought him looking old and hag-ridden, but Doria seemed
+happy. She had her own reason for happiness, which she confided to
+Barbara. It would be early in the New Year. . . . Her eyes, I noticed,
+were filled with a new and wonderful love for Adrian. On the Sunday
+afternoon as we were sauntering about the garden, Adrian touched upon
+the subject in a man's shy way when speaking to his fellow man.
+
+"Why," said I with a laugh, "that's just about the time you expect the
+book to be out."
+
+He gave me a queer, slanting look. "Yes," said he, "they'll both be born
+together."
+
+That night, to my consternation and sorrow, he went to bed quite fuddled
+with whisky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Never shall I forget that Christmastide. Its shadow has fallen on every
+Christmas since then. And, in the innocent insolence of our hearts, we
+had planned such a merry one. It was the first since our marriage that
+we were spending at Northlands, for like dutiful folk we had hitherto
+spent the two or three festival days in the solid London house of
+Barbara's parents. Her father, Sir Edward Kennion, retired Permanent
+Secretary of a Government Office, was a courtly gentleman with a
+faultless taste in old china and wine, and Lady Kennion a charming old
+lady almost worthy of being the mother of Barbara. To speak truly, I had
+always enjoyed my visits. But when the news came that, for the sake of
+the dear lady's health, the Kennions were starting for Bermuda, in the
+middle of December, it did not strike us desolate. On the contrary
+Barbara clapped her hands in undisguised glee.
+
+"It will do mother no end of good, and we can give Susan a real
+Christmas of her own."
+
+So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to have a
+roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a widowed cousin of
+mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children; and we sent out
+invitations to the _ban_ and _arrière ban_ of the county's juvenility,
+to say nothing of that of London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having
+accounted satisfactorily for Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope
+in a Christian spirit, of our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be
+with us. Why not ask his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion
+affection for each other. Then there was Liosha. Both she and Jaffery
+met in Susan's heart, and it was Susan's Christmas. With Liosha would
+come Mrs. Considine, admirable and lonely woman. We trusted to luck and
+to Mrs. Considine's urbane influence for amenable relations between
+Liosha and Euphemia Chayne. With Jaffery in the house, Adrian and Doria
+must come. Last Christmas they had spent in the country with old Mrs.
+Boldero; old Mrs. Boldero was, therefore, summoned to Northlands. In the
+lightness of our hearts we invited Mr. Jornicroft. After the letter was
+posted my spirits sank. What in the world would we do with ponderous old
+man Jornicroft? But in the course of a few posts my gloom was lightened
+by a refusal. Mr. Jornicroft had been in the habit for many years of
+spending Christmas at the King's Hotel, Hastings, and had already made
+his arrangements.
+
+"Who else is there?" asked Barbara.
+
+"My dear," said I. "This is a modest country house, not an International
+Palace Hotel. Including Eileen's children and their governess and nurse
+and Doria's maid, we shall have to find accommodation for fifteen
+people."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said. "We can't do it."
+
+"Count up," said I.
+
+I lit a cigar and went out into the winter-stricken garden, and left her
+reckoning on her fingers, with knitted brow. When I returned she greeted
+me with a radiantly superior smile.
+
+"Who said it couldn't be done? I do wish men had some kind of practical
+sense. It's as easy as anything."
+
+She unfolded her scheme. As far as my dazed wits could grasp it, I
+understood that I should give up my dressing-room, that the maids should
+sleep eight in a bed, that Franklin, our excellent butler, should perch
+in a walnut-tree and that planks should be put up in the bath-rooms for
+as many more guests as we cared to invite.
+
+"That is excellent," said I, "but do you realise that in this house
+party there are only three grown men--three ha'porth of grown men" (I
+couldn't forbear allusiveness) "to this intolerable quantity of women
+and children?"
+
+"But who is preventing you from asking men, dear? Who are they?"
+
+I mentioned my old friend Vansittart; also poor John Costello's son, who
+would most likely be at a loose end at Christmas, and one or two others.
+
+"Well have them, dear," said Barbara.
+
+So four unattached men were added to the party. That made nineteen. When
+I thought of their accommodation my brain reeled. In order to retain my
+wits I gave up thinking of it, and left the matter to Barbara.
+
+We were going to have a mighty Christmas. The house was filled with
+preparations. Susan and I went to the village draper's and bought
+beautifully coloured cotton stockings to hang up at her little cousins'
+bedposts. We stirred the plum pudding. We planned out everything that we
+should like to do, while Barbara, without much reference to us, settled
+what was to be done. In that way we divided the labour. Old Jaffery,
+back from China, came to us on the twentieth of December, and threw
+himself heart and soul into our side of the work. He took up our life
+just as though he had left it the day before yesterday--just the same
+sun-glazed hairy red giant, noisy, laughter-loving and voracious. Susan
+went about clapping her hands the day he arrived and shouting that
+Christmas had already begun.
+
+The first thing he did was to clamour for Adrian, the man of fame. But
+the three Bolderos were not coming till the twenty-fourth. Adrian was
+making one last glorious spurt, so Doria said, in order to finish the
+great book before Christmas. We had not seen much of them during the
+autumn. Trivial circumstances had prevented it. Susan had had measles. I
+had been laid up with a wrenched knee. One side happened to be engaged
+when the other suggested a meeting. A trumpery series of accidents.
+Besides, Adrian, with his new lease of health and inspiration, had
+plunged deeper than ever into his work, so that it was almost impossible
+to get hold of him. On the few occasions when he did emerge from his
+work-room into the light of friendly smiles, he gave glowing accounts of
+progress. He was satisfying his poet's dreams. He was writing like an
+inspired prophet. I saw him at the beginning of December. His face was
+white and ghastly, the furrow had deepened between his brows, and the
+strained squint had become permanent in his eyes. He laughed when I
+repeated my warnings of the spring. Small wonder, said he, that he did
+not look robust; virtue was going from him into every drop of ink. He
+could easily get through another month.
+
+"And then"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"my boy--you shall see! It
+will be worth all the _enfantement prodigieux_. You thought I was going
+off my chump, you dear old fuss-box. But you were wrong. So did
+Doria--for a week or two. Bless her! she's an artist's wife in ten
+million."
+
+"Have you thought of a title?" I asked.
+
+"'God'," said he. "Yes--'God'--short like that. Isn't it good?"
+
+I cried out that it was in the worst possible taste. It would offend. He
+would lose his public. The Non-conformists and Evangelicals would be
+frightened by the very name. He lost his temper and scoffed at my Early
+Victorianism. "Little Lily and her Pet Rabbit" was the kind of title I
+admired. He was going to call it "God."
+
+"My dear fellow, call it what you please," said I, anxious to avoid a
+duel of plates and glasses, for we were lunching on opposite sides of a
+table at his club.
+
+"I please to call it," said he, "by the only conceivable title that is
+adequate to such a work." Then he laughed, with a gleam of his old
+charm, and filled up my wine glass. "Anyhow, Wittekind, who has the
+commercial end of things in view, thinks it's ripping." He lifted his
+glass. "Here's to 'God.'"
+
+"Here's to the new book under a different name," said I.
+
+When I told Barbara about this, she rather agreed with Wittekind. It all
+depended on the matter and quality of the book itself.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said I, abhorrent of dissension, "thank Heaven the
+wretched composition's nearly finished."
+
+On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
+offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine. Jaffery
+met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the hour before
+bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in which neither my
+wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor myself were allowed to
+participate. When nurses sounded the retreat, our two Brobdingnagians
+appeared in the drawing-room, radiant, and dishevelled, with children
+sticking to them like flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side
+of Jaffery, unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman
+against physical man, with three children--two in her generous arms and
+one on her back--to his mere pair--that I realised, with the shock that
+always attends one's discovery of the obvious, the superb Olympian
+greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six feet to his six feet
+two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way of burly men. She held
+herself as erect as a redwood pine. The depth of her bosom, in its calm
+munificence, defied the vast, thick heave of his shoulders. Her lips
+were parted in laughter shewing magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one
+could read all the mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her
+hair was anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins.
+Her barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted, just
+for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they stood, male
+and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern garb. Clap a
+pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight suit of chain mail,
+moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache,
+his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress
+Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a
+gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under
+autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity--it
+was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the Götterdämmerung.
+
+I can only speak according to the impression produced by their entrance
+on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling lady of plump
+unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy, could not understand
+it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes, she saw nothing more in
+Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and considered Liosha far too big for
+a drawing-room.
+
+When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery surveyed
+with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the fire. Then in
+his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the arm.
+
+"They're too grown up for us, Liosha. Let's leave 'em. Come and I'll
+teach you how to play billiards."
+
+So off they went, to the satisfaction of Barbara and myself. Nothing
+could be better for our Christmas merriment than such relations of
+comradeship. We had the cheeriest of dinners that evening. If only, said
+Jaffery, old Adrian and Doria were with us. Well, they were coming the
+next day, together with Euphemia and the four unattached men. As I said
+before, I had given up enquiring into the lodging of this host, but
+Barbara, doubtless, as is her magic way, had caused bedrooms and beds to
+smile where all had been blank before. She herself was free from any
+care, being in her brightest mood; and when Barbara gave herself up to
+gaiety she was the most delicious thing in the wide world.
+
+In the morning the shadow fell. About eleven o'clock Franklin brought me
+a telegram into the library where Jaffery and I were sitting. I opened
+it.
+
+"_Terrible calamity. Come at once. Boldero_."
+
+I passed it to Jaffery. "My God!" said he, and we stared at each other.
+Franklin said:
+
+"Any answer, sir?"
+
+"Yes. 'Boldero. Coming at once.' And order the car round
+immediately--for London. Also ask Mrs. Freeth kindly to come here. Say
+the matter's important." Franklin withdrew. "It's Adrian," said I, my
+mind rushing back to my horrible apprehensions of the summer.
+
+"Or Doria. I understood--" He waved a hand.
+
+"Then Barbara must come."
+
+"She would in any case. It may be Adrian, so I'll come too, if you'll
+let me."
+
+Let the great, capable fellow come? I should think I would. "For
+Heaven's sake, do," said I.
+
+Barbara entered swinging housewifely keys.
+
+"I'm dreadfully busy, dear. What is it?"
+
+Then she saw our two set faces and stopped short. Her quick eyes fell on
+the telegram which Jaffery had put down in the arm of a couch, and
+before we could do or say anything, she had snatched it up and read it.
+She turned pale and held her little body very erect.
+
+"Have you ordered the car?"
+
+"Yes. Jaffery's coming with us."
+
+"Good, I'll get on my coat. Send Eileen to me. I must tell her about
+house things."
+
+She went out. Jaffery laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.
+
+"What a wonder of a wife you've got!"
+
+"I don't need you to tell me that," said I.
+
+We went downstairs to put on our coats and then round to the garage to
+hurry up the car.
+
+"There's some dreadful trouble at Mr. Boldero's," I said to the
+chauffeur. "You must drive like the devil."
+
+Barbara, veiled and coated, met us at the front door. She has a trick of
+doing things by lightning. We started; Barbara and Jaffery at the back,
+I sideways to them on one of the little chair seats. We had the car
+open, as it was a muggy day. . . . It is astonishing how such trivial
+matters stick in one's mind. . . . We went, as I had ordained, like the
+devil.
+
+"Who sent that telegram?" asked Barbara.
+
+"Doria," said I.
+
+"I think it's Adrian," said Jaffery.
+
+"I think," said Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's mother.
+Either of the others would have said something definite. Ah!" she smote
+her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with spinal marrow and no
+backbone to hold it!"
+
+We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas traffic in
+the town clearing magically before us. Sometimes a car on an errand of
+life or death is recognised, given way to, like a fire engine.
+
+"What makes you so dead sure something's happened to Adrian?" Jaffery
+asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.
+
+Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears. Ever
+since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his
+novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I had given
+of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had mentioned his
+pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office, his bombastic
+rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of the Snows, and, all
+that being part and parcel of our old Adrian, we had laughed. Six months
+before I would have told Jaffery quite a different story. But now that
+Adrian had practically won through, what was the good of reviving the
+memory of ghastly apprehensions?
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "There's something behind all this."
+
+I told him. It took some time. We sped through Slough and Hounslow, and
+past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as heavy as our
+hearts.
+
+"In plain words," said Jaffery, "it's G.P.--General Paralysis of the
+Insane."
+
+"That's what I fear," said I.
+
+"And you?" He turned to Barbara.
+
+"I too. Hilary has told you the truth."
+
+"But Doria! Good God! Doria! It will kill her!"
+
+Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery's great raw hand. Only
+at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear gloves.
+
+"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to pieces
+now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."
+
+Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance
+in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double
+line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially
+organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean,
+narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able. Then
+through Chiswick, over Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London.
+All London to cross. Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was
+smitten by a blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a
+hundred yards ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer
+yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in
+startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.
+Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with
+light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
+roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black
+things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of
+colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and
+yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous,
+glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of
+mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by
+the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the
+outer a herd of subfuse brown. And in the roadway, through the
+translucent olive, the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts
+mightily and dashingly charioted.
+
+The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the mansions in
+St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule, and the
+hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened the car-door
+and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's face that he had
+been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as constant visitors of the
+Bolderos.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Don't you know, sir?"
+
+"No."
+
+He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his news,
+and bent forward and whispered to me:
+
+"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."
+
+I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of
+the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible
+account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous
+telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was all I
+could think of. The only coherent remark I heard the man make was that
+it was a dreadful thing to happen at Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand
+tight and did not say a word. The next phase I remember only too
+vividly. When the flat door opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was
+like a curtain being lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as
+we entered we were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of
+anæsthetics, disinfectants--I know not what--greeted us.
+
+The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew down the
+corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards emerged a
+professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into Doria's room.
+From the spare room came for a moment an elderly woman whom we did not
+know. The study door was flung wide open--I noticed that the jamb was
+splintered. From the drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We
+entered and found Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara
+sat by her and took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell
+us nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went out.
+He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at seeing us.
+
+"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical man is
+apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is there a Mrs.
+Freeth here?"
+
+"Yes. My wife," said I.
+
+"Thank goodness--" He drew a breath. "There's no one here capable of
+doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other woman."
+
+Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.
+
+"Mrs. Boldero is very ill--as ill as she can be. Of course you were
+aware of her condition--well--the shock has had its not very uncommon
+effect."
+
+"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.
+
+"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know nothing--I
+was summoned and found a man lying dead on the floor in that room"--he
+pointed to the study--"and a woman in a dreadful state. I've only had
+time to make sure that the poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me
+something about them?"
+
+So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who Adrian
+Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world and a bit of
+the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I don't know, for
+beating against the walls of my head was the thought that Adrian lay
+there in the room where I had seen the strange woman, lifeless and
+stiff, with the laughing eyes forever closed and the last mockery gone
+from his lips. Just then the woman appeared again. The young doctor
+beckoned to her and said a few words. Jaffery and I followed her into
+the death-chamber, leaving the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood
+and looked at all that was left of Adrian.
+
+But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I really
+knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the mansions
+then told us. But that little more I will set down here.
+
+For the past few days he had been working early and late, scarcely
+sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at five, had risen
+sleepless at seven, and having dressed and breakfasted had locked
+himself in his study. The very last page, he told Doria, was to be
+written. He was to come down to us for Christmas, with his novel a
+finished thing. At ten o'clock, in accordance with custom, when he began
+to work early, the maid came to his door with a cup of chicken-broth.
+She knocked. There was no reply. She knocked louder. She called her
+mistress. Doria hammered . . . she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror
+grips a woman. She sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din
+to awaken--well--all but the dead. The man forced the door--hence the
+splinters on the jamb--and there they found Adrian, in the great bare
+room, hanging horribly over his writing chair, with not a scrap of paper
+save his blotting-pad in front of him. He must have died almost as soon
+as he had reached his study, before he had time to take out his
+manuscript from the jealous safe. That this was so the harassed doctor
+afterwards affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination
+of the dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death--a clot
+of blood on the brain. . . .
+
+To go back . . . They found him dead. And then arose an unpicturable
+scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid woman, on the point of
+starting for a Christmas visit, took charge of the situation, sent for
+the doctor, despatched the telegram to us, and with the help of the
+porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile
+mass of sodden hysteria. Much that was fascinating and feminine in
+Adrian came from this amiable and incapable lady.
+
+We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and soda--we
+needed it--and talked of the catastrophe. As yet, of course, we knew
+nothing of the clot of blood. Presently Barbara came in and put her
+hands on my shoulders.
+
+"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your club.
+Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from Northlands, and
+will look after things with Eileen. And put off Euphemia and the others,
+if you can."
+
+And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with such
+joyous anticipation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria hovering on
+the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on a Christmas eve
+in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was Christmas Day. The
+day after, Boxing Day. The day after that, Sunday. The whole world was
+dead. And all those awful days the thin yellow fog that was not fog but
+mere blight of darkness hung over the vast city.
+
+God spare me such another Christmastide.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried
+Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother
+had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country
+cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. Doria still lay
+in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the
+stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds that strike a note of agony
+through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to
+knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her.
+
+We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and appointing
+Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the
+child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis XV cabinet
+in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a
+solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We
+found his own personal bills and receipts filed, his old letters tied up
+in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his
+lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk
+of a careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
+Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
+intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry alone,
+because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from
+impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.
+
+All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been
+found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we had placed
+the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The
+Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing
+that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered
+the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it
+locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his
+unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women,
+who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion,
+hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed,
+professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an
+inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and
+household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
+strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living,
+the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand
+it over to the publisher.
+
+So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered
+the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the
+blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating
+yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the
+morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The
+stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the
+electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its
+scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went
+to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in
+the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three
+different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter
+the quill had scrawled "God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass
+ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an
+eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to
+hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its
+heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed
+from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
+of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.
+
+"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed
+look. "We'll have our work cut out."
+
+"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as
+you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."
+
+Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose, ragged
+piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets
+unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite
+manuscript; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes,
+fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible
+memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.
+"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah
+steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude
+drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking
+over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.
+
+"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his
+beard.
+
+"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great
+relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were
+turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained
+Adrian's whimsy.
+
+"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh
+at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an
+incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish
+away, and we'll look at the second shelf."
+
+The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were
+more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a
+couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent
+scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen
+stories.
+
+"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery,
+standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous
+wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had
+pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting
+in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.
+
+"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
+found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."
+
+We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
+could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.
+
+"It will take weeks to fix it up."
+
+"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
+old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."
+
+In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
+going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
+beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or
+four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a
+dozen headed "Chapter I."
+
+"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.
+
+I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I
+examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a
+coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.
+
+"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"
+
+He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in
+brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.
+
+"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.
+
+"Thank God!" said I.
+
+He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet
+with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a
+white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written
+inscription:
+
+"The Diamond Gate. A Novel--by Thomas Castleton."
+
+"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two
+we both stood stock-still.
+
+The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily
+flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's--Tom Castleton, the one genius
+of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.
+There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too
+familiar--as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom
+Castleton from Adrian.
+
+Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.
+
+There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond
+Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian
+had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man,
+but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.
+
+We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands
+and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we
+ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are
+times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We
+found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The
+apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we
+examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into
+an awful certainty.
+
+The great epoch-making novel did not exist.
+
+It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no
+possibility of existing.
+
+"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in his
+great, hoarse bass.
+
+"God knows," said I.
+
+But even as I spoke, I knew.
+
+I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned
+Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to
+shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I
+was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and
+hugged me kindly.
+
+"Go and get warm," said he.
+
+"But this?" I pointed to the litter.
+
+"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."
+
+He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I
+crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet
+and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that
+morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just
+as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose
+some story in mitigation of the tragedy.
+
+Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down
+on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
+hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the
+shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse
+and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the
+yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of
+turning on the lights.
+
+"What have you done?" I asked.
+
+"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll bring a
+portmanteau and take it away."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Leave that to me," said he.
+
+What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was very
+glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with the
+reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as
+he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself
+like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he was a professional
+demigod. He reassured me further.
+
+"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he
+broke the silence.
+
+"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in God's
+name?"
+
+And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the cold grip
+of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was none too
+consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks,
+which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in
+terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his
+offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he
+had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture.
+
+Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not. Least of
+all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the revelation of
+his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in
+perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian. With all his faults,
+his poses, his superficialities, his secrecies, his egotisms, I never
+dreamed of him as aught but a loyal and honourable gentleman. When I
+think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul.
+What does one man know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was
+right: "We mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable
+faith in Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast
+with conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
+them part of our very selves.
+
+Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place
+made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral
+sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the
+manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his hands. Undoubtedly he was to
+arrange for its publication. Castleton's appointment to the
+professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I well remember,
+necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he
+sailed. Why did not Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the
+manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a
+question of despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were
+not parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
+characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From
+that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years,
+in his easy way, he struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for
+Doria, he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent
+to Wittekind, the publisher of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till
+later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript?
+That was what Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with
+morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
+queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
+relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence--that is the
+only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
+explain the sustained act of folly.
+
+And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
+gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
+remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
+Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
+the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
+looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
+merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
+ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
+what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
+woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
+novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
+casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
+himself to do heretofore, he had done.
+
+As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
+stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
+examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
+of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
+"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
+capacity.
+
+When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
+He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
+beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
+was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
+must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
+mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
+practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
+room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
+intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
+wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
+the condemned cell.
+
+As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
+of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
+spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
+mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
+few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a
+novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
+never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
+insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
+but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
+genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
+critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
+All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
+little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
+by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
+which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
+a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
+human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
+have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
+were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
+poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
+matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
+the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
+like, but the essential quality of the artist.
+
+And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
+months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
+never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
+such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
+life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
+and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
+became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
+told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
+wondrous book. The pity of it!
+
+How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
+to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
+would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
+the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
+he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
+sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
+impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
+out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
+should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No
+wonder he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
+accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills for
+whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for
+the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate God was
+merciful at last. He killed him.
+
+Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire--the ship-logs that Adrian
+loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and what-not, gave green and
+crimson and lavender flames.
+
+"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he said. "A
+war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of
+hell. But this sample I haven't struck before and it's the worst of the
+lot. My God! and only the day before yesterday I took him to be
+married."
+
+"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked hairs
+out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy of China,
+which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you had no idea of
+time or space."
+
+He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.
+
+"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the child
+stillborn--"
+
+I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me;
+that of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his
+eyes: "They'll both be born together."
+
+I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I said. "Both
+stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter, the more
+shudderingly awful it is."
+
+Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.
+
+"And she at the point of death--to complete the tragedy," he said below
+his breath.
+
+Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.
+
+"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried with a
+startling quaver in his deep voice.
+
+"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the best
+thing you can wish for her?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Isn't it obvious? She recovers--she will, most probably, recover;
+Jephson said so this morning--she comes back to life to find what? The
+shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's
+better that she should die now."
+
+Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his
+eyes blazed.
+
+"What do you mean--shattering of idols?"
+
+"She is bound to learn the truth."
+
+He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp,
+so that I winced with pain.
+
+"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim
+suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told
+her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of
+passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched
+fists,--the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and
+ceiling of the fog-darkened room--I shrank into my chair, for he seemed
+not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same
+deep, shaken voice.
+
+"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand."
+His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."
+
+"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."
+
+"You swear you've seen it?"
+
+"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.
+
+He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair,
+and walked for a little about the room.
+
+"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself. It's a
+matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you understand clearly
+what I mean?"
+
+"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself
+to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it can't last
+forever."
+
+Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the steel of
+his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's enemy.
+
+"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
+something out of nothing."
+
+"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've seen it,
+and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it
+matter to you what becomes of it?"
+
+"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole
+matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and
+trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you?"
+
+"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
+responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
+choose. But you've seen the outside of it."
+
+He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled a
+memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy.
+Then he turned on me.
+
+"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul
+of what you have seen this day?"
+
+I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for? But
+you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must know."
+
+He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile:
+
+"You and Barbara are one," said he.
+
+Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from
+his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheet of the
+blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God: A Novel: By
+Adrian Boldero."
+
+"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a touch of
+frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that Doria emerged
+from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they allowed me to visit
+her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost in search of a human
+occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she looked such a pitiful scrap,
+all hair and eyes. She smiled and held droopingly out to me the most
+fragile thing in hands I have ever seen.
+
+"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."
+
+"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for things to
+find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have already made
+the discovery."
+
+She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I love it
+in the spring. The dancing daffodils--"
+
+"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.
+
+"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause. "At
+first I longed to die--that was why my recovery was so slow. But
+now--odd, isn't it?"
+
+"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how great
+it is," I replied gently.
+
+"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."
+
+I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much the same.
+In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious aspiration. If it gives
+them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't they have it?
+But in Doria's case, its utterance gave me a kind of stab in the heart.
+By way of reply I patted her poor little wrist sympathetically.
+
+"When will the book be out?" she asked.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.
+
+"I suppose they're busy printing it."
+
+"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.
+
+"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time. It won't
+do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"
+
+"I will," said I.
+
+I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded
+ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor
+child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the
+subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could
+not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know
+the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave
+him Doria's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing.
+He had become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the
+disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands.
+
+I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the
+best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town;
+yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished
+chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as
+I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor-omnibuses without an
+overcoat.
+
+After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his pipe
+thoughtfully--we were in the smoking-room of a club (not the Athenæum)
+to which we both belonged--and then he roared out:
+
+"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"Well"--he grinned a little--"I'm not exactly a kind of sick-room
+flower."
+
+"I think you ought to see her--you're as much trustee and executor as I
+am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-racking
+questions."
+
+"All right, I'll go," he said.
+
+The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book
+would be published as soon as possible.
+
+"When will that be?" she asked.
+
+Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.
+
+"Is it in the printer's hands?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Why?"
+
+He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but here
+and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together, which
+Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript. He himself
+was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical task of revision.
+
+"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could not be
+given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so
+why are you taking all this time over it?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.
+
+Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please
+Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she
+complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up
+Adrian's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting
+the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara
+did her best to soothe her; but we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad
+start.
+
+A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came
+across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known
+for some years--originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer
+of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss
+our common friend.
+
+"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while.
+
+"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.
+
+"Yes. Can't make him out."
+
+"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."
+
+"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a shock,
+is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a wilderness and
+roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be persuaded to leave it."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to
+send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as well."
+
+"All this is news to me," said I.
+
+"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans, wild
+tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways,
+finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal
+conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is butter and honey to
+Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up
+with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!"
+
+At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I could
+not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate
+vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till
+three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot
+seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it
+was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the
+meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.
+The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission,
+the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model
+special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
+ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task
+after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest
+political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and
+honourable position on the paper.
+
+"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,"
+said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't
+tell him that we wouldn't."
+
+It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a
+man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred
+to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's
+Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a
+solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I
+did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in
+the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker's to give an order
+concerning Susan's riding-boots (_vide_ diary) and drove home to dinner,
+to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account
+of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the
+contented and inoffensive man.
+
+A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in
+Westminster in the forenoon--I had come up to town on business--I
+mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A
+dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I
+found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe
+in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere
+former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once
+comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did not seem to mind. The remains of
+breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear.
+Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth.
+
+"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"
+
+His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather. When the
+alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It was a hole
+for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its abominable suffocation.
+
+"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."
+
+This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+"I understood you could have gone to Persia."
+
+He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know that?"
+
+"Arbuthnot--" I began.
+
+"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by telling
+you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head!"
+
+"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You might
+hurt him."
+
+"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue quiet?"
+
+He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful anathema.
+Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any of you to know
+anything about it."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"Because I didn't."
+
+"But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?"
+
+He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and collecting a
+litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a legging from a sofa,
+pitched it into a corner.
+
+"Here. Sit down."
+
+I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying the
+half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the
+comfortable home from Harrod's Stores that Barbara had prescribed; and
+he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the heads of
+game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London Repository. It
+was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage.
+
+"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink."
+
+I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country
+gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half past
+eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar
+circumstances.
+
+"I'm going to have one anyway!"
+
+He disappeared and presently reëntered with a battered two-handled
+silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy
+of Cambridge days, which he always carried about with him on no matter
+what lightly equipped expedition--it is always a matter of regret to me
+that Jaffery, as I have mentioned before, missed his seat in the
+Cambridge boat; but when one despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it
+is found the central feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such
+as used to protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from
+the priggish judgment of university authority?--he reëntered, with this
+vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught and wiped his
+moustache with his hand.
+
+"Better have some. I've got a cask in the bedroom."
+
+"Good God!" said I, aghast. "What else do you keep there? A side of
+bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?"
+
+Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his
+bedroom.
+
+Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long, lean,
+puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the
+deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.
+
+"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a
+cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of
+your life in not going out to Persia."
+
+He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard; and,
+turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife, and Susan
+my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed
+towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate me.
+
+"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian proposition," said
+he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window at the
+infinitely reaching landscape of the chimney pots of south London, their
+grey smoke making London's unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of
+the March sky. "Just hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning
+round my neck I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which
+was very wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of
+the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away
+and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with
+white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band of
+topaz and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the immemorable
+smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle of the harness
+and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of the drivers, and in
+his heart the certainty of plucking out the secret from the soul of this
+strange land. . . .
+
+At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair enquired
+politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as the Persian
+journey was concerned the palaver was ended. He did not intend to give
+me his reasons for staying in England and I could not demand them more
+insistently. At any rate I had discovered the cause of his grumpiness.
+What creature of Jaffery's temperament could be contented with a soft
+bed in the centre of civilisation, when he had the chance of sleeping in
+verminous caravanserais with a saddle for pillow? In spite of his
+amazing predilections, Jaffery was very human. He would make a great
+sacrifice without hesitation; but the consequences of the sacrifice
+would cause him to go about like a bear with a sore head.
+
+And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having been
+admitted to her bedside, he went there every day. Flowers and fruit he
+had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a grape for Doria
+failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a pumpkin. Now he brought
+the offerings personally in embarrassing bulk. One offering was a
+gramophone which nearly drove her mad. Even in its present stage of
+development it offends the sensitive ear; but in its early days it was
+an instrument of torturing cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen
+strains music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he
+came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence
+of ravished senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and
+recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don't think the
+gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's unspoken
+message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes the thing
+played and sending him forth in quest of records of recondite and
+"unrecorded" music, she succeeded in mitigating the terror. To the
+present moment, however, I don't think Jaffery has realised that she had
+a higher æsthetic equipment than the hypnotised fox-terrier in the
+advertisement. . . . Jaffery also bought her puzzles and funny penny
+pavement toys and gallons of eau-de-cologne (which came in useful), and
+expensive scent (which she abominated), and stacks of new novels, and a
+fearsome machine of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of
+which an invalid could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the
+same time. The only thing he did not give her--the thing she craved more
+than all--was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's book.
+
+Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of Persia.
+But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have
+afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Despatched suddenly to that
+vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to
+revise on the journey: the convoy could have been attacked by a horde of
+Kurds or such-like desperadoes, all could have been slain save a
+fortunate handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an
+important political document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would
+have hated Jaffery forever after; but his chivalrous aim would have been
+accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple way
+out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to sacrifice
+his career and remain in London so as to buoy Doria up with false hope,
+all the time praying God to burn down St. Quentin's Mansions (where he
+lived) and Adrian's portmanteau of rubbish and himself all together.
+
+Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft stepped in and
+carried her to the south of France. Barbara and Jaffery and myself saw
+her off by the afternoon train at Charing Cross. She was to rest in
+Paris for the night and the next day, and proceed the following night to
+Nice. She looked the frailest thing under the sun. Her face was
+startling ivory beneath her widow's headgear. She had scarcely strength
+to lift her head. Mr. Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her
+comfort--an ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid
+compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's wedding,
+Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted her
+feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from the
+carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her tenderly on
+her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude she thanked him
+with much graciousness. He bent over her--we were standing at the door
+and could not choose but hear:
+
+"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second and
+took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You get well
+and strong."
+
+He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her
+shoulder--half her little body it seemed to be--and emerging from the
+compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm
+of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached Jornicroft.
+
+"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get into a
+smoker somewhere or the other."
+
+"But, my dear sir"--exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some amazement--"it's
+awfully kind, but why should you?"
+
+"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She can't put
+her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at every stage of
+the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned clumsy fellow handle
+her. I'll see her into the Nice train to-morrow night--perhaps I'll go
+on to Nice with you and fix her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I
+will. I shan't worry you. You won't see me, except at the right time.
+Don't be afraid."
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must confess,
+did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he had no more
+intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had ourselves.
+
+"I can't permit it--it's too kind--there's no necessity--we'll get on
+all right!" spluttered Mr. Jornicroft.
+
+"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take any
+risks."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--it's absurd--you haven't any luggage."
+
+"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested the
+impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the Encyclopædia
+Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to do with it?" His roar
+could be heard above the din of the hurrying station. "I don't want
+_luggage_." The humour of the proposition appealed to him so mightily
+that he went off into one of his reverberating explosions of mirth.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering--"Don't you worry about that."
+
+"But have you enough on you--it's an expensive journey--of course I
+should be most happy--"
+
+Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and beckoned
+to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the station
+master.
+
+"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"
+
+The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."
+
+"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a ticket
+now?"
+
+"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send him a
+wire."
+
+"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing now and
+going to Nice by the Côte d'Azur Express to-morrow night. And see after
+a seat for me, will you?"
+
+"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."
+
+The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his hands
+stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a mountainous child. We
+were all impressed by his lordly command of the railway systems of
+Europe. It was a question of credit, of course, but neither Mr.
+Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor myself could have undertaken that
+journey with a few loose shillings in his possession. For the first time
+since Adrian's death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.
+
+And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an overcoat
+travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than to save Doria's
+sacred little body from being profaned by the touch of ruder hands.
+
+Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer from train
+to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant march up the
+stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took the first train
+back straight through to London.
+
+He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of grumpiness
+on his jolly face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our
+feet--the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an
+unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but
+a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same.
+The admirable Mrs. Considine got married. A retired warrior, a recent
+widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that
+his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (_on avait
+fait continent à part_, as the French might say) during that period, a
+Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant correspondent,
+had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queen's Gate and,
+in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the admirable and unresisting
+lady. It was a matter of special license, and off went the tardily happy
+pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes.
+
+It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said Barbara. She
+thought her--no; perhaps she didn't think her--God alone knows the
+convolutions of feminine mental processes--but she proclaimed her
+anyhow--an unscrupulous woman.
+
+"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that boarding-house."
+
+"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp--I admit it's deplorable taste to change a
+name of such gentility as Considine for that of Jupp, but it isn't
+unscrupulous--Mrs. Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission
+from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the rest of her life."
+
+"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was the one
+person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what she's done for
+her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for those two old faggots
+marrying, they ought to be ashamed of themselves."
+
+Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter. Liosha
+remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's indignation
+could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine and bring her
+back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We consulted Jaffery, who as
+Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted us. Jaffery pulled a long face
+and smiled ruefully. For the first time he realised--in spite of tragic
+happenings--the comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of
+two young, well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the
+world to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too
+swore lustily at the defaulting duenna.
+
+"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.
+
+"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I.
+"Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."
+
+"That's the devil of it," he growled.
+
+"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to look after
+before you've done with this existence!"
+
+His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and saddle me
+with Barbara, I'll punch your head."
+
+He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed Barbara.
+
+"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense. What
+shall I do?"
+
+Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.
+
+I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting at the
+boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the elegant
+"_bonbonnière_" of a chamber known as the "boudoir." There was a great
+deal of ribbon and frill and photograph frame and artful feminine touch
+about it, which Liosha and, doubtless, many other inmates thought
+mightily refined.
+
+Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade us be
+seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could not have
+been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp) herself. That
+maligned lady had performed her duties during the past two years with
+characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may remark that Liosha's
+table-manners and formal demeanour were now irreproachable. Mrs.
+Considine had also taken up the Western education of the child of twelve
+at the point at which it had been arrested, and had brought Liosha's
+information as to history, geography, politics and the world in general
+to the standard of that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she
+had developed in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing,
+on her emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary
+colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver harmonies.
+Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's stockyard vocabulary,
+erasing words and expressions that might offend Queen's Gate and
+substituting others that might charm; and she had done it with a touch
+of humour not lost on Liosha, who had retained the sense of values in
+which no child born and bred in Chicago can be deficient.
+
+"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she said
+pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."
+
+"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.
+
+"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said Jaffery.
+
+"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had interfered
+with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a stone and
+everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but I've been
+taught you don't do things like that in South Kensington."
+
+"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"
+
+"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"
+
+"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.
+
+"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"
+
+"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."
+
+"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look after
+myself by this time? What do you take me for?"
+
+I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery, in his
+tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed the point
+altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about with, say to
+restaurants and theatres."
+
+"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her eyes.
+"Don't you worry!"
+
+"All the more reason for a dragon."
+
+"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I talk to
+a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and you're not
+going to find another like her in a hurry. Besides--I had sense enough
+to see that she was going to teach me things. But I don't want to be
+taught any more. I've learned enough."
+
+"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you, dear," said
+Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection against--well, any
+pretty young woman living alone is liable to chance impertinence and
+annoyance."
+
+Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to annoy me. He
+wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"--Mrs. Jardine was the keeper
+of the boarding-house--"she'll tell you a thing or two about my being
+able to keep men from annoying me."
+
+Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights
+on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up
+in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen
+who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a
+peculiarly deferential attitude towards Liosha.
+
+"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you know."
+
+"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why not take
+on the job yourself?"
+
+"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine joke.
+
+"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an air of
+seriousness.
+
+"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a hand to
+the frills and ribbons.
+
+"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the advantages
+and refining influences of a first-class English home."
+
+He pivoted round. "Oh, you be--"
+
+"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look after
+Liosha more than you do--"
+
+He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he write?
+Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting on?
+
+"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara asked
+sternly.
+
+He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in a lapse
+from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and I noticed
+just the faintest little twitching of her lip.
+
+"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner against
+his will."
+
+"But--God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I never thought
+of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a barbarian, my dear girl,
+just like yourself. If you wanted to be taken out, why on earth didn't
+you say so?"
+
+Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue out."
+
+Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away puzzled.
+There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's tone. He turned
+again and approached her with a smiling face.
+
+"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of thing,
+Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this
+evening and do a theatre afterwards."
+
+"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."
+
+Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent.
+Jaffery frowned.
+
+"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."
+
+I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had frowned and
+spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise her with a
+cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose in her throat
+and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned splendidly,
+quivering.
+
+"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon. And"--alas for
+the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's training--"I'm going to do as I
+damn well like."
+
+Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I
+exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey
+a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery pulled out
+pouch and pipe and shook his head.
+
+"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.
+
+"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the dunderheaded
+male."
+
+"I did nothing to cause these heroics."
+
+"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."
+
+"I didn't," he protested.
+
+I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so.
+Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely.
+
+"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper
+subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."
+
+"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is
+confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."
+
+"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."
+
+"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for
+pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."
+
+"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot
+who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I
+know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my
+hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It's all this
+infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."
+
+"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was
+a remarkable phenomenon--a generalisation which includes woman in
+fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."
+
+"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't
+want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm rather fond
+of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if
+it hadn't been that poor old Prescott--you know what I mean--I gave up
+thinking of her in that way at once--and now I just want to be
+friends--we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and, if I had
+thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . . But what I
+can't stand is these modern neurotics--"
+
+"You called them heroics--"
+
+"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every
+modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're taught it's
+correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have 'em."
+
+"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"
+
+Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where
+she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always
+treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the
+stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family
+as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the
+majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would
+like to know which of Jaff Chayne's ancestors had died out of their
+feather beds.
+
+"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian Mutiny, and
+his father in the Zulu War."
+
+Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne had no
+right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman
+over her. She was a free woman--she wouldn't go out to dinner with Jaff
+Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him; at which renewed
+declaration she burst into fresh weeping and wished she were dead. As a
+guardian of young and beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a
+success.
+
+Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the
+paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such other
+lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in front of
+Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the
+fit had subsided. Then she spoke.
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a silly
+schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn't
+announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."
+
+"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her grievance.
+
+"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking
+knife that lay on a little table--it was the same weapon that she had
+lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger." She threw it on the girl's
+lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a message for Mr. Chayne to come up.
+As soon as he enters you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it
+into me. Then if you like you can go downstairs and stick it into
+Hilary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to
+you, you'll feel a silly ass--such a silly ass that you'll forget to
+stick it into yourself."
+
+Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat
+little chip out of a chair-back.
+
+"What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the materials.
+
+Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha obeyed
+meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.
+
+"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now you look
+better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself beside Liosha and
+putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the way to deal with men.
+You must learn. They're only overgrown babies. Listen."
+
+And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the
+duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the
+serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor
+any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of
+belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her
+sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little
+private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions
+conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had dragged a softly
+swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said serenely:
+
+"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with pleasure. But
+the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way."
+
+I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her
+rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all very
+well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong: they
+were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was Liosha, who had
+once asked him to beat her, doing the same--woman was a more curious
+phenomenon than ever.
+
+"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he with a
+touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully good of you
+to come."
+
+She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the delicate
+little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the
+incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to
+seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We
+rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:
+
+"But we've settled nothing about a remplaçante for Mrs. Considine."
+
+"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No one can
+replace Mrs. Considine."
+
+I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently Jaffery's
+theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and, to judge by the
+faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission
+unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her independence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved with
+extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that of Mrs.
+Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal interpretation
+of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffery,
+lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth except for the
+purpose of shovelling in food, which he did, in astounding quantity.
+From what both of us gathered afterwards--and gleefully we compared
+notes--they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been
+entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he
+desired facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took
+him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an
+overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her finger
+and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all the time that
+he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat
+tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite; which was a pity,
+for the maître d'hôtel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant
+host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than
+a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she
+could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one
+after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It
+was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her _Fraises
+Diane_--vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow
+impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the
+summers of all the hills--because she would have given her soul to sit
+beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a
+tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every
+mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the
+world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English
+world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the
+well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected
+that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English
+civilisation, equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her
+Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few
+hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
+male companions. She also reflected--and for the reflection not Mrs.
+Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible--that to
+the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight,
+she counted no more than a pig or a cow--her instinctive similes, you
+must remember, were pastoral--or that peculiar damfool of a sister of
+his, Euphemia.
+
+When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one
+another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
+super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
+thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
+dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence
+and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the
+least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to
+the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery played host in the orthodox
+manner, and Liosha acknowledged attentions with a courtesy equally
+orthodox. But how much happier they both would have been on a bleak
+mountain-side eating stew out of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy
+failed to exercise mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in
+their own awful correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical
+comedy or a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have
+expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have been
+less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the play had
+caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an ironical title,
+which stupefied them with depression.
+
+When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate to open
+to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a most
+enjoyable evening.
+
+"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if you
+will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.
+
+So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance, and the
+week after that, and so on until it became a grim and terrifying
+fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the Eternal
+Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard to smother
+her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's prescription for
+the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce of it was that though
+in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown, she could not for the life
+of her regard him as a baby. So it came to pass that an unnatural pair
+continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great
+content of the high gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who
+looked on.
+
+"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled,
+one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of
+her."
+
+"That's a pity," said I.
+
+"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she looks
+so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with all the other
+women."
+
+I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your friends if
+you know how to set to work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It was a gorgeous April day--one of those days when young Spring in
+madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could
+assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but
+through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender
+leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the lilac, the swelling of
+the hawthorn buds, the pathetic immature barrenness of the walnuts.
+
+And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in their
+hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in their
+topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale butterfly here
+and there accomplished its early day, and queen wasps awakened from
+their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the tiniest winter-palaces in the
+world, sped like golden arrow tips to and from the homes they had to
+build alone for the swarms that were to come. The flower beds shone gay
+with tulips and hyacinths; in the long grass beyond the lawn and under
+the trees danced a thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped
+up in furs lay Doria on a long cane chair.
+
+She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had prophesied,
+for her full strength had not yet returned, but there she was among
+them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as though they were dancing
+in her honour. She was, however, restored to health; the great circles
+beneath her eyes had disappeared and a tinge of colour shewed beneath
+her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the first sunbonnet of the year, sat
+Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . . . Lord! It scarcely seemed two years
+since Jaffery came from Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his
+arms and was struck all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So
+thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty
+yards, away. And once again--pleasant self repetition of
+history--Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had spent a night
+at her father's house and had come down to us the evening before to
+complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go straight to the flat in
+St. John's Wood and begin her life anew with Adrian's beloved ghost, and
+she had issued orders to servants to have everything in readiness for
+her arrival, but Barbara had intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man
+of limited sympathies and brutal common sense. All of us, including
+Jaffery, who seemed to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only
+equalled by that of a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah
+as to the way to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of
+tragic memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had
+indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the home
+of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in peace with
+the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of Holies in which
+Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by vulgar tread? Our
+suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything that could arise from
+earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things. We could only prevail upon
+her to postpone her return to the flat until such time as she was
+physically strong enough to grapple with changed conditions.
+
+The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were bending over a
+book on Doria's knee--_Les Malheurs de Sophie_, which Susan, proud of
+her French scholarship, had proposed to read to Doria, who having just
+returned from France was supposed to be the latest authority on the
+language. I noticed that the severity of this intellectual communion was
+mitigated by Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little
+haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all of a
+sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the landscape
+(framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a huge and familiar
+figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this on the ground, rushed up
+to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung Susan in the air and kissed
+her, and was still laughing and making the welkin ring--that is to say,
+making a thundering noise--when I, having sped across the lawn, joined
+the group.
+
+"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"
+
+"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an earlier train.
+No good staying in town on such a morning. Besides--" He glanced at
+Doria in significant aposiopesis.
+
+"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked,
+pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why
+didn't you leave it to be called for?"
+
+"This? This little _sachet_?" He lifted it up by one finger and grinned.
+
+Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are strong!"
+
+Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift the thing
+an inch from the ground with both her hands.
+
+"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I felt as
+if I had been picked up by an iron crane."
+
+Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical
+strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen Jaffery in a
+nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from his saddle and
+wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one in each hand, and
+dash their heads together over his horse's neck. But that is the sort of
+story that Jaffery himself never told.
+
+Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had caught
+sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.
+
+"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great hand
+towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South. The
+sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh? Remember
+when we started for Nice?"
+
+He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with as much
+pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.
+
+"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.
+
+By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near distance, I
+hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is the one
+disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise happy season,
+Barbara expects me to be something between a scene-shifter and a
+Furniture Removing Van.
+
+The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we settled down.
+Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He
+held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers.
+
+"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting tenderness
+in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much longer."
+
+"Is it at the printer's?"
+
+"It's printed."
+
+Barbara and I gave each a little start--we looked at Jaffery, who was
+taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at each other. What on
+earth did the man mean?
+
+"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be flooded
+with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it up with
+Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."
+
+"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it necessary? I
+mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"
+
+"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to pass the
+proofs."
+
+Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't presume to do
+such a thing."
+
+"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.
+
+And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open the hasps
+of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs
+fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which he deposited on
+Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids fluttered as she
+fingered the precious thing. For a moment we thought she was going to
+faint. There was breathless silence. Even Susan, who had been left out
+in the cold, let the black kitten leap from her knee, and aware that
+something out of the ordinary was happening, fixed her wondering eyes on
+Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more
+reason. Of what manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed
+proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in
+the assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of
+despair?
+
+Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened her eyes
+and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long proofs. At
+once she sat bolt upright.
+
+"'_The Greater Glory_.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His title was
+'_God_.' Who has dared to change it?"
+
+[Illustration: He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs.]
+
+Her eyes flashed; her little body quivered. She flamed an incarnate
+indignation. For some reason or other she turned accusingly on me.
+
+"I knew nothing of the change," said I, "but I'm very glad to hear of it
+now."
+
+Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of what
+Jaffery had been doing with the book.
+
+"Wittekind wouldn't have the old title," cried Jaffery eagerly. "The
+public are very narrow minded, and he felt that in certain quarters it
+might be misunderstood."
+
+"Wittekind told dear Adrian that he thought it a perfect title."
+
+"Our dear Adrian," said I, pacifically, "was a man of enormous
+will-power and perhaps Wittekind hadn't the strength to stand up against
+him."
+
+"Of course he hadn't," exclaimed Doria. "Of course he hadn't when Adrian
+was alive: now Adrian's dead, he thinks he is going to do just as he
+chooses. He isn't! Not while I live, he isn't!"
+
+Jaffery looked at me from beneath bent brows and his eyes were turned to
+cold blue steel.
+
+"Hilary!" said he, "will you kindly tell Doria what we found on Adrian's
+blotting pad--the last words he ever wrote?"
+
+What he desired me to say was obvious.
+
+"Written three or four times," said I, "we found the words: 'The Greater
+Glory: A Novel by Adrian Boldero.'"
+
+"What has become of the blotting pad?"
+
+"The sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a lot of
+other unimportant papers."
+
+"And I came across further evidence," said Jaffery, "of his intention to
+rename the novel."
+
+Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "I should
+like to have had Adrian's last words," she whispered. Then bringing
+herself back to earth, she begged Jaffery's pardon very touchingly.
+Adrian's implied intention was a command. She too approved the change.
+"But I'm so jealous," she said, with a catch in her voice, "of my dear
+husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm sure you've done everything
+that was right and good, Jaffery." She held out the great bundle and
+smiled. "I pass the proofs."
+
+Jaffery took the bundle and laid it again on her lap. "It's awfully good
+of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But you can keep this
+set. I've got another, with the corrections in duplicate."
+
+She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips in a
+timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back.
+
+"I can't read it. I daren't read it. If Adrian had lived I shouldn't
+have seen it before it was published. He would have given me the finally
+bound book--an advance copy. These things--you know--it's the same to me
+as if he were living."
+
+The tears started. She rose; and we all did the same.
+
+"I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara dear. I'd rather be
+alone." She put her arm round my small daughter. "Perhaps Susan will see
+I don't break my neck across the lawn."
+
+Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and holding on to Susan, who was
+mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly towards the
+house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the bedroom door,
+she had lingered for a moment outside and had heard Auntie Doria crying
+like anything.
+
+Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous draught of
+proofs, advanced, a female David, up to Goliath Jaffery.
+
+"Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a graven
+image and be mystified in my own house. Will you have the goodness to
+explain?"
+
+Jaffery looked down on her, his head on one side.
+
+"Explain what?"
+
+"That!"
+
+She pointed to the proofs of which I had possessed myself and was
+eagerly scanning. Unblenching he met her gaze.
+
+"That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Boldero, which I, as his
+literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough
+manuscript, but he had no time to read it."
+
+They looked at one another for quite a long time.
+
+"Is that all you're going to tell me?"
+
+"That's all."
+
+"And all you're going to tell Hilary?"
+
+"Telling Hilary is the same as telling you."
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"And telling you is the same as telling Hilary."
+
+"By no manner of means," said Barbara tartly. She took him by the
+sleeve. "Come and explain."
+
+"I've explained already," said Jaffery.
+
+Barbara eyed him like a syren of the cornfields. "I'm going to dress a
+crab for lunch. A very big crab."
+
+Jaffery's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile. Barbara could
+dress crab like no one else in the world. She herself disliked the taste
+of crab. I, a carefully trained gastronomist, adored it, but a Puckish
+digestion forbade my consuming one single shred of the ambrosial
+preparation. Doria would pass it by through sheer unhappiness. And it
+was not fit food for Susan's tender years. Old Jaff knew this. One
+gigantic crab-shell filled with Barbara's juicy witchery and flanked by
+cool pink, meaty claws would be there for his own individual
+delectation. Several times before had he taken the dish, with a "One
+man, one crab. Ho! ho! ho!" and had left nothing but clean shells.
+
+"I'm going to dress this crab," said Barbara, "for the sake of the
+servants. But if you find I've put poison in it, don't blame me."
+
+She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Jaffery laughed,
+sank into a chair and tugged at his pipe.
+
+"I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing," said he.
+
+"Why?" I asked looking up from the proofs.
+
+"It's not quite up to the standard of 'The Diamond Gate.'"
+
+"I shouldn't suppose it was," said I drily.
+
+"Wittekind's delighted anyhow. It's a different _genre_; but he says
+that's all the better."
+
+Susan emerged from my study door on to the terrace.
+
+"My good fellow," said I, "yonder is the daughter of the house,
+evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read this
+wonderful novel and don't want to be disturbed till lunch."
+
+The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan finding herself in
+undisputed possession took him off to remote recesses of the kitchen
+garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile I went on reading, very
+much puzzled. Naturally the style was not that of "The Diamond Gate,"
+which was the style of Tom Castleton and not of Adrian Boldero. But was
+what I read the style of Adrian Boldero? This vivid, virile opening?
+This scene of the two derelicts who hated one another, fortuitously
+meeting on the old tramp steamer? This cunning, evocation of smells,
+jute, bilge water, the warm oils of the engine room? This expert
+knowledge so carelessly displayed of the various parts of a ship? How
+had Adrian, man of luxury, who had never been on a tramp steamer in his
+life, gained the knowledge? The people too were lustily drawn. They had
+a flavour of the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces; a deep-lunged
+folk. So that I should not be interrupted I wandered off to a secluded
+nook of the garden down the drive away from the house and gave myself up
+to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident
+following incident, every trait of character presented objectively in
+fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen pictures of grim scenes
+faultless in their definition and restraint. There was a girl in it, a
+wild, clean-limbed, woodland thing who especially moved my admiration.
+The more I read the more fascinated did I become, and the more did I
+doubt whether a single line in it had been written by Adrian Boldero.
+
+After a long spell, I took out my watch. It was twenty past one. We
+lunched at half-past. I rose, went towards the house and came upon
+Jaffery and Susan. The latter I despatched peremptorily to her
+ablutions. Alone with Jaffery, I challenged him.
+
+"You hulking baby," said I, "what's the good of pretending with me? Why
+didn't you tell me at once that you had written it yourself?"
+
+He looked at me anxiously. "What makes you think so?"
+
+"The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First," I
+continued, as he made no reply but stood staring at me in ingenuous
+discomfort, "you couldn't have got this out of poor Adrian's mush;
+secondly, Adrian hadn't the experience of life to have written it;
+thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive articles in _The Daily
+Gazette_ and have little difficulty in recognising the hand of Jaffery
+Chayne."
+
+"Good Lord!" said he. "It isn't as obvious as all that?"
+
+I laughed. "Then you did write it?"
+
+"Of course," he growled. "But I didn't want you to know. I tried to get
+as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here"--he gripped my
+shoulder--"if it's such a transparent fraud, what the blazes is going
+to happen?"
+
+To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position, having
+peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world had the
+faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming book would be
+received without shadow of question as the work of the author of "_The
+Diamond Gate_." The difference of style and treatment would be
+attributed to the marvellous versatility of the dead genius. . . .
+Jaffery's brow began to clear.
+
+"What do you think of it--as far as you've gone?"
+
+My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my appreciation. He
+positively blushed and looked at me rather guiltily, like a schoolboy
+detected in the act of helping an old woman across the road.
+
+"It's awful cheek," said he, "but I was up against it. The only
+alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and take
+the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I had written about half of
+it all in bits and pieces about three or four years ago and put it
+aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one day and read it and it
+seemed rather good, so, having the story in my head, I set to work."
+
+"And that's why you didn't go to Persia?"
+
+"How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on the
+back of a beastly camel!"
+
+He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of a laugh.
+
+"I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up; couldn't
+get along. I must have spent a week, night after night, staring at a
+blank sheet of paper. I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew
+and was going the way of Adrian. By George, it taught me something of
+the Hades the poor fellow must have passed through. I've been in pretty
+tight corners in my day and I know what it is to have the cold fear
+creeping down my spine; but that week gave me the fright of my life."
+
+"I wish you had told me," said I, "I might have helped. Why didn't you?"
+
+"I didn't like to. You see, if this idea hadn't come off, I should have
+looked such a stupendous ass."
+
+"That's a reason," I admitted.
+
+"And I didn't tell you at first because you would have thought I was
+going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could write a
+novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the impossible, like
+Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to death and you would
+have put me off."
+
+Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We hurried to
+the dining-room. Jaffery sat down before a gigantic crab.
+
+"Is it all right?" he asked.
+
+"Doria has interceded for you," said Barbara. "You owe her your life."
+
+Doria smiled. "It's the least I could do for you."
+
+Jaffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed himself in
+crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said:
+
+"Hilary has read half the book."
+
+"What do you think of it?" Barbara asked.
+
+I repeated my dithyrambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone.
+
+"I do wish you could see your way to read it," said Jaffery.
+
+"I would give my heart to," said Doria. "But I've told you why I can't."
+
+"Circumstances alter cases," said I, platitudinously. "In happier
+circumstances you would have been presented with the novelist's fine,
+finished product. As it happens, Jaffery has had to fill up little gaps,
+make bridges here and there. I'm sure if you had been well enough," I
+added, with a touch of malice, for I had not quite forgiven his leaving
+me in the dark, "Jaffery would have consulted you on many points."
+
+I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make upon her.
+Although I had reassured Jaffery, I could, scarcely conceive the
+possibility of the book being taken as the work of Adrian.
+
+"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it. You
+weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree with
+Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are so jolly
+clumsy."
+
+Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be justified?"
+
+"Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."
+
+So it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study and
+demanded the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom, where she
+remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It was right that
+she should know what was going to be published under Adrian's name.
+
+In Jaffery's presence, I disclosed to Barbara the identity of the
+author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me before lunch,
+with, perhaps, a little more shamefacedness. Were it not for reiteration
+upon reiteration of the same things in talk, life would be a stark
+silence broken only by staccato announcement of facts. At last Barbara's
+eyes grew uncomfortably moist. Impulsively she flew to Jaffery and put
+her arms round his vast shoulders--he was sitting, otherwise she could
+not have done it--and hugged him.
+
+"You're a blessed, blessed dear," she said; and ashamed of this
+exhibition of sentiment she bolted from the room.
+
+Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of
+billiards.
+
+To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room before
+dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen since lunch; an
+arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can imagine a Tanagra
+figure in black and white ivory. Her face, however, was a passion of
+excitement.
+
+"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't know
+till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things he
+describes--he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God! If only
+he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands before her eyes and
+dashed them swiftly away--"Jaffery has done his best, poor fellow. But
+oh! the bridges he speaks of--they're so crude, so crude! I can see
+every one. The murder--you remember?"
+
+It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three or four
+splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing was done.
+Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.
+
+"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.
+
+"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's
+horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to the
+imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and spoiled it.
+And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, where Fenton
+finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of London musical comedy. Adrian
+never wrote it. It's the sort of claptrap he hated. He has often told me
+so. Jaffery thought it was necessary to explain Ellina in the next
+chapter, and so in his dull way, he stuck it in."
+
+That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a low dive
+on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing seen, somewhat
+journalistic, I admit--but such as very few journalists could give.
+
+"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.
+
+"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man that had
+been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I don't know the
+difference between Adrian's work and that of a penny-a-liner like
+Jaffery?"
+
+The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and took him
+by the lapels of his dress coat.
+
+"I've read it. It's a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do want it to
+be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear--I know you've done all that
+mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But it isn't your fault if
+you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you,
+yourself, said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you--oh!--I loathe
+hurting you, dear Jaffery--but it's all the world, all eternity to
+me--couldn't you get one of Adrian's colleagues--one of the famous
+people"--she rattled off a few names--"to look through the proofs and
+revise them--just in honour of Adrian's memory? Couldn't you, dear
+Jaffery?" She tugged convulsively at the poor old giant's coat. "You're
+one of the best and noblest men who ever lived or I couldn't say this to
+you. But you understand, don't you?"
+
+Jaffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have slapped it
+physically and it would have worn the same dazed, paralysed lack of
+expression.
+
+"My life," said he, in a queer toned voice, that wasn't Jaffery's at
+all, "my life is only an expression of your wishes. I'll do as you say."
+
+"It's for Adrian's sake, dear Jaffery," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face, from the
+roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to wipe
+therefrom all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the sunny
+Reubens-like features that we all loved.
+
+"But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the book's
+worthy of Adrian?"
+
+"Oh, I do," she cried passionately. "I do. It's a work of genius. It's
+Adrian in all his maturity, in all his greatness!"
+
+The door opened.
+
+"Dinner is served, madam," said Franklin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's outburst, he
+fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After what he had done
+for her, said I, given up one of the great chances of his career,
+carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her a present of a
+brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from shame, she ought to
+go on her knees and pray God to shower blessings on his head. As it was,
+she deserved whipping.
+
+Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass--he has an Eastern
+habit of, facile vituperation--and roared about the drawing-room. The
+ladies, be it understood, had retired.
+
+"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You haven't the
+intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know I've written the
+rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she thinks I've spoiled it.
+She's perfectly justified. For the little footling services I rendered
+her on the journey, she's idiotically grateful--out of all proportion.
+As for Persia, she knows nothing about it--"
+
+"She ought to," said I.
+
+"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.
+
+"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as you're
+satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."
+
+It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and however
+understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined towards
+them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through all their
+bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would be dead in a
+week.
+
+"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor girl's
+mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying out of this
+ghastly farce."
+
+"I do, my dear chap."
+
+"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could--a labour of love. But
+it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work--which she thinks is Adrian's. To
+keep up the deception I had to crab it and say that the faults were
+mine. Naturally she believes me."
+
+"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and Adrian's
+memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and moral
+balance--what then?"
+
+"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you suppose
+I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"
+
+I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of
+saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect.
+Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second
+husband--stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her taking
+one--is but an indifferent hero to the widow who spends her life in
+burning incense before the shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We
+can't say these things to our friends. We expect them to have common
+sense as we have ourselves. But we don't, and--for the curious reason,
+based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can
+appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular
+woman--we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who
+pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to
+sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly
+disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other
+hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. In any and every case,
+however, we entirely fail to comprehend why, if Neæra is obdurate, our
+swain does not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
+Amaryllis.
+
+I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt somewhat
+impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was, casting the
+largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by
+the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to
+intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of
+it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing
+them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have
+said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not,
+and there's an end on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery,
+although--or was it because?--I recognised the bald fact that he was in
+love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.
+
+You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick you?" and
+he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned to touch my
+unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the world are you to do,
+save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your cigar? This I did. I also
+found amusement in comparing his meek wooing, like that of an early
+Italian amorist, with his rumbustious theories as to marriage by capture
+and other primitive methods of bringing woman to heel.
+
+Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick (when
+Barbara wasn't looking--for Barbara had read her a lecture on the polite
+treatment of trustees and executors) and made him more her slave than
+ever. He fetched and carried. He read poetry. He was Custodian of the
+Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was damp. He shielded her from over-rough
+incursions on the part of Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany
+of Saint Adrian. He sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her
+and hold figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch
+them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides,
+Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during which,
+touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of tender
+regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one could wish to
+meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one else, the smile
+into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt that, in her way and as
+far as her Adrian-bound emotional temperament permitted, she felt
+grateful to Jaffery. She also felt safe in his company. He was like a
+great St. Bernard dog, she declared to Barbara.
+
+These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a
+letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval,
+Jaffery had sent the proofs.
+
+"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly different
+from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its largeness of
+conception and the perfection of its kind. The alteration of a single
+word would spoil it. If an alien hand is there, it is imperceptible."
+
+At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He tossed the
+letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.
+
+"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't it? I
+do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through. This ought
+to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"
+
+"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."
+
+But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain--and how could a work
+of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible,
+had touched it?--was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came
+downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little
+knitting of the brow before which his welcoming smile faded.
+
+"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the letter.
+"Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to recognise the merits
+of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed of the critical faculty."
+
+"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me to send
+him the novel?"
+
+"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria, after the
+way of women.
+
+"And he hasn't any?"
+
+"Read the thing again."
+
+Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well, what's to be
+done now?"
+
+"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original manuscript.
+Where is it?"
+
+Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied convincingly.
+
+"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've destroyed it."
+
+"I thought everything was typed nowadays."
+
+"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an advocate
+of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I wanted to rush
+the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see why I should pamper
+them with type. Have you the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," said Doria.
+
+"Well--don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.
+
+For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought up his
+daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary life. To my
+great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.
+
+"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions for the
+manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's gone. I'm not
+unreasonable."
+
+"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers in the
+drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made Jaffery submit
+his careful editing to an expert, and you're honourably bound to accept
+the expert's verdict."
+
+"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a flash of
+her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty to keep to my
+own opinion."
+
+Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face as he
+did in moments of perplexity.
+
+"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.
+
+"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."
+
+"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco--not
+tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's encomium had aroused the
+artist's pride in his first-born. An altered word would spoil the book.
+"My dear girl," said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath
+which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very
+gently, "the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man
+of common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us
+do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as
+much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a thundering mess of it."
+
+Doria made a little gesture--a bit of a shrug--a bit of a resigned
+flicker of her hands.
+
+"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a woman
+with nobody to turn to"--she smiled with her lips, but there was no
+coordination of her eyes--"as I said before, I pass the proofs."
+
+She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving
+Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"
+
+He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the
+threshold.
+
+"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to her morbid
+vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it birth. You know
+better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you send those proofs
+straight back to the publisher. If you let her persuade you to change
+one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll tell her the whole thing,
+and damn the consequences!"
+
+My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest sense.
+They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She would no more
+think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or a baby's neck.
+
+"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said Jaffery.
+"But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying brute."
+
+"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped Barbara.
+"The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree. It's only the
+exceptional woman that can take command."
+
+I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly
+sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.
+
+"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold
+politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden
+chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open
+a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with
+a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove
+with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a
+question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have
+reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a
+little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal
+to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor
+old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
+of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
+masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
+direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian--for Jaffery is too
+splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once
+living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to
+these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation,
+deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and
+Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things,
+could, with little difficulty, divine the passionate struggle between
+love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty
+that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly
+appetited gentleman.
+
+You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am
+not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a
+barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty son of Pantagruel
+forced into the incongruous rôle of Sir Galahad. . . . During the term
+of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At
+last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more,
+permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his
+manners.
+
+The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited
+Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by
+an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night.
+But on Saturday evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for
+permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house,
+the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was
+Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's
+friend, and of course came back to us and speculated as to who and what
+this Mr. Fendihook might be.
+
+"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.
+
+"It would scarcely have been polite."
+
+We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I don't
+like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a vast deal
+too much."
+
+"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus started
+an old argument.
+
+On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the car, a
+two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and perceived
+between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly buttoned Burberry
+coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the middle of which
+projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha out.
+
+"This is Mr. Fendihook."
+
+"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.
+
+I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my
+chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by
+Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings and
+revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily attired. I
+know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against a black and
+white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a gold ring.
+
+"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good one, on
+which he had retained the band.
+
+"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."
+
+"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of all
+right here."
+
+"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha. "Ah,
+Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We followed. Mr.
+Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little shock, that he had
+kept on his gloves.
+
+"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of a blow
+would do our fair friend good."
+
+Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath the
+motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he preceded
+me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure in the middle
+of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round appreciatively and
+again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open French window.
+
+"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our friends? The
+long and the short of it, aren't they?"
+
+He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn. I told
+him their names.
+
+"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always talking
+about, her guardian or something."
+
+"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late husband."
+
+"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear, signified
+"Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his cigar. "Introduce
+me." And as I accompanied him across the lawn--"There's nothing like
+knowing everybody--getting it over at once. Then one feels at home."
+
+"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said I.
+
+"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I did." And
+the amazing creature patted me on the back.
+
+I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself delighted
+to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as conversation did not
+start spontaneously, he once more looked around, nodded at the landscape
+approvingly, and once more said "Tiptop!"
+
+"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford to retire
+and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a desirable
+residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's country house."
+
+"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?" queried
+Doria.
+
+He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."
+
+I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.
+
+Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running up.
+
+"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and say how
+d'ye do, Gwendoline."
+
+Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under the
+chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the image of
+her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the bowl of his pipe
+in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on some puzzling insect.
+
+"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor asked.
+
+"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a garden
+bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to affect my
+nerves. He peeled them off.
+
+"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried. "Catch!"
+
+He made a feint of throwing them.
+
+"Haven't you caught 'em?"
+
+"No."
+
+She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were empty.
+
+"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He flicked
+a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a ball and
+threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it gone to?"
+
+Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept forward
+fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards a flower
+bed.
+
+"Why, there it is!"
+
+He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the handkerchief hung
+limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.
+
+"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.
+
+"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever talked to
+angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."
+
+He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into the
+central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not in the
+best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught the coins
+announced their intention of sticking to them. But threats of reporting
+to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the coins dropped and jingled
+in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded him as she would a god.
+
+"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day long."
+
+He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap caught it
+in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed white strong
+teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"
+
+"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.
+
+"Two hours a day solid year in and year out--not that trick alone, of
+course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you know who I
+am--I'm the One and Only Ras Fendihook--Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and
+General Variety Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"
+
+We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.
+
+"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically. "You've never
+heard of me--and perhaps you two gentlemen are big bugs in your own
+line--and I've never heard of you. But anyhow, I never asked you, Mr.
+Chayne, to catch my gloves."
+
+"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on Susan.
+
+"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."
+
+And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the wash-leather
+gloves.
+
+"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the matinée
+performance."
+
+Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."
+
+"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the little
+one."
+
+He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour came the
+shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought Barbara flying out
+of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The yelping ceased. Mr. Ras
+Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria, Jaffery and I looked at one
+another in mutual and dismayed comprehension.
+
+"Old pal," quoted Doria.
+
+I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for his
+sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"
+
+"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a lot he
+called me."
+
+"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently. "He's--he's
+_marvelious_!"
+
+"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't express
+him."
+
+"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as mummy
+will let you."
+
+I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of that
+suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon until it
+was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved over and over
+again a tense situation. To the guest in her house Barbara was the
+perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of convention raged fury
+with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer social animal for what he
+is and suck the honey from his flowers of unconventionality. She had
+never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a butler when offered a second
+helping of pudding. She had never dreamed of the possibility of a
+strange table-neighbour laying his hand on hers and requesting her to
+"take it from me, my dear." It sent awful shivers down her spine to hear
+my august self alluded to as her "old man." She looked down her nose
+when, to the apoplectic joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest
+behaviour at meals), he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato
+into the air, caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her
+smile was that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic
+listener when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To
+her confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the
+personalities of the World of Variety.
+
+"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said
+confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off with
+that contortionist--you know who I mean--handsome chap--what's his
+name?--oh, of course you know him."
+
+My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a K.C.B.,
+assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!
+
+"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied pathetically.
+
+"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo! You must
+have heard of Romeo."
+
+I sniggered--I couldn't help it--at Barbara's face. He went on with his
+reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I, though displeased with
+Liosha for introducing such an incongruous element into my family
+circle, took the rational course of deriving from the fellow
+considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done the same as myself,
+had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian weighed heavily upon
+him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly. Doria, like my wife, I
+could see was shocked. The only two who, beside myself, enjoyed our
+guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan was nine years old and a meal
+at which a guest broke her whole decalogue of table manners at once--to
+say nothing of the performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange
+into nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently
+extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother--was a feast of
+memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha, pupil
+of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud Albanian
+chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How could she admire
+this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line, peculiarly
+accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She sat by my side,
+grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she had bestowed on us.
+She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his anecdotes, she urged him on
+to further exhibition of prowess, and in a magnificent way appeared
+unconscious of the presence at the table of her trustee and would-be
+dragon, Jaffery Chayne.
+
+After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to Mr.
+Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery, having invited
+Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having declined, with a
+polite smile, on the ground that her best Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown
+was not suitable for country roads, went off by himself in dudgeon.
+Barbara took Liosha aside and cross-examined her on the subject of Mr.
+Fendihook and as far as hospitality allowed signified her
+non-appreciation of the guest. After a time I took him into the billiard
+room, Susan following. As he was a brilliant player, giving me one
+hundred and fifty in two hundred and running out easily before I had
+made thirty, he found less excitement in the game than in narrating his
+exploits and performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things
+with the billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and
+balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I think
+that day he must have gone through his whole répertoire.
+
+The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's first words
+to Liosha were:
+
+"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"
+
+"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.
+
+He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day. But
+sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."
+
+He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee was
+rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something
+unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who was
+established on the terrace.
+
+"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked cheerfully.
+
+Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused, explaining
+that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view of the
+excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank tea in the
+afternoon.
+
+"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"
+
+The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara--"And may I drink to the
+success of that promising little affair"--he jerked a backward
+thumb--"between our pippy friend and the charming widow?"
+
+Barbara had passed the gasping stage.
+
+"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now, had made
+strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same relation of trustee
+to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs. Prescott."
+
+But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck! Here's to
+him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."
+
+He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not respond.
+A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her hand showed
+white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace, where she found
+Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet. And this is what
+happened.
+
+"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll excuse
+me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is yours. I have
+business to talk."
+
+Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my dear girl.
+I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha. As soon as they
+were out of earshot, she said:
+
+"Are you going to marry her?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Doria."
+
+Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic mood.
+
+"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your own
+business."
+
+"All right," she retorted, "I will."
+
+"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you. What do you
+mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"
+
+"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very clever
+and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."
+
+"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.
+
+They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast, they
+found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden.
+Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.
+
+"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery continued.
+
+"How dare you speak so of my friend?"
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend. And
+you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"
+
+"Shan't!" said Liosha.
+
+"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with him."
+
+There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said the same
+things over and over again. Both had worked themselves into a fury.
+
+"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."
+
+"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you mind
+yours."
+
+"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace
+yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."
+
+"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up magnificently.
+"Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man living? You insult
+me."
+
+"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed fool of
+herself--and you more than most."
+
+"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she taunted,
+and flung an arm in the direction of the house.
+
+Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."
+
+"And you leave me alone."
+
+They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned, marched
+superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through, slammed it
+in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive quarrel, free from all
+subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in Jaffery's veins. If he could have
+given her a good sound thrashing he would have been a happy man. This
+accursed civilisation paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing
+at whiskers and beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in
+the middle of the lawn.
+
+"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never bring him
+here again."
+
+"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight before
+her.
+
+"Well, ask him."
+
+"I will. Hilary!"
+
+At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook had been
+discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of widowhood to a
+quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed and bright-eyed
+Juno.
+
+"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"
+
+"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.
+
+Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been conscious of
+storms. I took her hand.
+
+"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated that it
+is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate ramifications--"
+
+"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"--I hesitated--"not quite the kind of
+person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."
+
+"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a pattern, like
+little tin soldiers."
+
+"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it goes."
+
+"Oh, go on--" Jaffery interrupted.
+
+"But--" I continued.
+
+"You'd rather not see him again?"
+
+"No," roared Jaffery.
+
+"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me. "You
+and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"
+
+I still held her hand, which was growing moist--and I suppose mine was
+too--and I didn't like to drop it, for fear of hurting her feelings. I
+gave it a great squeeze. It was very difficult for me. Personally, I
+enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and prodigiously accomplished scion of a
+vulgar race. As a mere bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should
+have taken him joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my
+microscope and studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that
+there was of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan
+who did not count, he was--I admit, deservedly--an object of loathing.
+So I squeezed Liosha's hand.
+
+"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that he's
+not quite a gentleman."
+
+"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."
+
+She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor advisedly. She
+had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before a breeze.
+
+"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."
+
+Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.
+
+"We must hook it!"
+
+Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"
+
+"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very kind.
+But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for the
+evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."
+
+"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.
+
+Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained with a
+learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the pink, fleshy
+face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered away
+down the drive.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.
+
+"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"
+
+"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.
+
+"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to dine among
+all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"
+
+"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria. "I should
+think it was rather a rise in the social scale."
+
+And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save the
+puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his interest in
+Liosha.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the reviewers and
+made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a legitimate successor
+to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit of Tom Castleton. The
+contrast was so extraordinary, so inexplicable. It was generally
+concluded that no writer but Adrian Boldero, in the world's history, had
+ever revealed two such distinct literary personalities as those that
+informed the two novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused
+universal wonder. His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained
+by English letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the
+new book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals,
+knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the press.
+In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius; for, after
+all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can put your finger
+on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom Castleton's work possessed;
+Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater Glory" vibrated with life, it was
+wide and generous, it was a capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond
+Gate," it could not rank with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David
+Copperfield." I say this in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but
+merely to present his work in true proportion. Published under his own
+name it would doubtless have received recognition; probably it would
+have made money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic
+reception it enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name
+of Adrian Boldero.
+
+Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had succeeded
+beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs of the woman he
+loved. He had also astonished himself enormously.
+
+"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that I'm not a
+mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap with brains,
+and"--he turned over a bundle of press-cuttings--"and 'poetic fancy' and
+'master of the human heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of
+things' and 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.'
+Ho! ho! ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
+years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
+complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling like
+blazes."
+
+It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
+ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
+spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His poorer
+human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now Adrian's
+restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria there would open
+a new life in which, with the past behind her, she could find a glory in
+the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom
+responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when
+Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the
+ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings
+of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever
+he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or
+perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
+Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
+reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
+blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
+reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to write on
+Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it and that of
+Jaffery Chayne?
+
+One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.
+
+"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery sacrificed
+his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together
+Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you
+treat him as if he were a dog."
+
+Doria protested. "I don't. I _am_ grateful. I don't know what I should
+do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can't
+alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work; and when I hear those
+very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied."
+
+"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by yourself,"
+said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be sane and civil."
+
+"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't the wife
+of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you again."
+
+"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and you know
+it."
+
+Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little eyrie
+in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever leaving it.
+Arbuthnot of _The Daily Gazette_ satirically enquiring whether he wanted
+a job or still yearned for a season in Mayfair he consigned, in his
+grinning way, to perdition. Change was the essence of holiday-making,
+and this was his holiday. It was many years since he had one. When he
+wanted a job he would go round to the office.
+
+"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want to keep
+your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring us up."
+
+Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he liked.
+
+The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may
+have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I dismissed the
+excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club,
+assuming my most sceptical manner.
+
+"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after her."
+
+"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound health,
+perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does want a man's
+advice, she can always turn to me."
+
+"And there's Liosha."
+
+"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable of
+looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very definitely
+to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any more interesting
+evenings out lately?"
+
+"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her off that
+low-down bounder."
+
+"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with him."
+
+He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of the
+argument.
+
+"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction, "she
+can't marry him."
+
+"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"
+
+"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar is
+married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four wives in
+fact--oh, a dreadful hound--but only one real one with a wedding ring,
+and she lives up in the north with a pack of children."
+
+"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a villain."
+
+He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was not
+Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I agreed
+with him.
+
+"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as to look
+after her."
+
+"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company. She'll
+get a bad name."
+
+"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you devoting
+his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of mischief is too
+preposterous. Try me with something else."
+
+Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was writing
+another book.
+
+He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to know. He was
+getting along famously. He had had the story in his head for a long
+time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline very picturesquely.
+Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the development of the man
+Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had happened. The born novelist
+had just discovered himself and clamoured for artistic self-expression.
+He was writing this book just because he could not help it, finding
+gladness in the mere work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and
+letting himself go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become
+of it when written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a
+matter. Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new
+novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as closely as
+"Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be the deuce to
+pay. If he published it under his own name, he would render himself
+liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from the dead author of
+"The Greater Glory," and so complicate this already complicated web of
+literary theft; and if he threw sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria
+to enable him to publish under Adrian's name, he would be performing the
+task of the altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.
+
+Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his novel,
+looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and enjoying the
+society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds of passage like
+himself, who happened to be passing through London. Being a man of
+modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food, he found his small
+patrimony and the savings from his professional earnings quite adequate
+for amenable existence. When he wanted healthy, fresh air he came down
+to us to see Susan; when he wanted anything else he went to see Doria,
+which was almost daily.
+
+Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and Penates
+consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting,
+she entered the awful room--neither servants nor friends were allowed to
+cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay
+in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy
+tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave,
+over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his
+coöperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent
+sculptor for a bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time,
+she bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion of
+Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. . . .
+And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign behests without a murmur
+and without a hint that he desired reward for his servitude. But, to
+those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed,
+to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who
+knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not
+last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one
+should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find
+august recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was
+not devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted
+everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery for his
+meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct must have
+revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath the exterior
+of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For one thing, she
+considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity perhaps blinded her
+judgment. At all events she did not realise that a change was bound to
+come in their relations. It came, inevitably.
+
+One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St. John's Wood
+flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of queer isolation
+from the world below, and from the strange world masked behind the vast
+superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said
+something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He
+also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest
+might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer
+laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a
+little sensuous charm. Doria replied sentimentally:
+
+"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of cliff, with
+the sea-gulls wheeling about it--bringing messages from the sunset lands
+across the blue, blue sea--" Poor dear! She forgot that sea lit by a
+westering sun is of no colour at all and that the blue water lies to the
+east; but no matter; Jaffery, drinking in her words, forgot it likewise.
+"Away from everything," she continued, "and two people who loved--with a
+great, great love--"
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down Maida
+Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted--the ripeness of youth
+and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained her ivory cheek--you
+will find the exact simile in Virgil. She was too desirable for
+Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in his chair--they were sitting
+face to face, so that he had his back to the motor omnibuses--and put
+his great hand on her knee.
+
+"Why not we two?"
+
+It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish--what you please; but every
+man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion
+connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration
+was made, without shadow of mistake.
+
+Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset and gulls
+and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from before her eyes,
+and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff Chayne.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You know very well what I mean."
+
+He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The three-foot
+balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles. She put out a
+hand.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so nervous."
+
+He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as if she
+had dealt him a slap in the face.
+
+"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I want
+you and I'll never be happy till I get you."
+
+She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.
+
+"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"
+
+"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.
+
+"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward glance.
+
+"Not with an obstinate devil like me."
+
+He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.
+
+"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the
+drawing-room.
+
+He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a footling
+balcony. What do you take me for?"
+
+"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave elf facing
+horrible ogre--and, either by chance or design, her hand touched and
+held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph of her late husband.
+
+"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.
+
+"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's memory
+when you say such things to me?"
+
+"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to the
+free woman he loves."
+
+"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."
+
+"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."
+
+"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of you,"--his blue
+eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his hands, but heedless she
+went on--"yes, mean and base and despicable of you to wish to betray
+him. Adrian--"
+
+"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and listen
+to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual disgusts and
+sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real live man who would
+walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail body in his great grasp,
+and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught up by a dynamo. "My love for
+you has nothing whatever to do with Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as
+one man can be to another, living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary
+and Barbara. But I want you. I've wanted you since the first moment I
+set eyes on you. You've got into my blood. You're going to love me.
+You're going to marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."
+
+He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely. She did
+not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were white and her
+face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And unconscious that
+his grip was giving her physical pain he continued:
+
+"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I heard you
+were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting. But, by
+God!"--and, not knowing what he did, he shook her backwards and
+forwards--"I'll not go on waiting for ever. You--you little bit of
+mystery--you little bit of eternity--you--you--ah!"
+
+With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not counted
+on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning, and she fell,
+knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp of horror and in an
+instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa, and on his knees beside
+her, with remorse oversurging his passion, behaved like a penitent fool,
+accusing himself of all the unforgivable savageries ever practised by
+barbaric male. Doria, who was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed
+to the door.
+
+"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."
+
+Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of
+reaction.
+
+"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."
+
+She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you out, but
+if Adrian was alive--Ha! ha! ha!--" she laughed with a touch of
+hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren rascal--how do you dare to think
+you can take the place of a man like Adrian?"
+
+[Illustration: "Go! You are nothing but a brute."]
+
+The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her up
+bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I would hold a
+cat or a rabbit.
+
+"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference between a man
+and a--"
+
+Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might have
+struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.
+
+"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going to hurt
+you."
+
+He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the lover who
+woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have thrown away
+his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed. Doria proved to
+Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration and nervous collapse,
+that she would never set eyes again upon the unqualifiable savage by
+whom her holiest sentiments had been outraged and her person
+disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a blood-curdling story into
+semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short work of her contention that
+Jaffery ought to have respected her as he would have respected the wife
+of a living friend, characterising it as morbid and indecent nonsense;
+and with regard to the physical violence she declared that it would have
+served her right had he smacked her.
+
+"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband, be
+faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man comes
+along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an honourable
+way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months all a man has
+to give, and then, when he tells you what you've known perfectly well
+all along, treat him as if he were making shameful proposals to
+you--especially a man like Jaffery; I have no patience with you."
+
+Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No one
+understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was aware. But
+when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery Chayne, she really
+thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore Barbara, rather angry at
+being brought up to London on a needless errand, involving loss of
+dinner and upset of household arrangements, administered a
+sleeping-draught and bade her wake in the morning in a less idiotic
+frame of mind.
+
+"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me later--to "behave
+like a cat" is her way of signifying a display of the vilest phases of
+feminine nature--"but I couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal
+of sense. It isn't as if I had never warned her about the way she has
+been treating Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian--I'm
+sick of his name--and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"
+
+This she said during a private discussion that night on the whole
+situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she returned to
+Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the first time in his
+life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent dinner, imploring me to
+tell him whether he should enlist for a soldier, or commit suicide, or
+lie prone on Doria's doormat until it should please her to come out and
+trample on him. He seemed rather surprised--indeed a trifle hurt--that
+neither of us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not
+Doria's--especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside of the
+scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about the
+drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.
+
+"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both of you,
+she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You--'a barren
+rascal'--you? Good God!"
+
+He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must take this
+from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on her. He
+oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He was a savage
+unfit for the society of any woman outside a wigwam.
+
+"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to bed.
+Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."
+
+The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I could not
+exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless, and with a large
+disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent him a suit of my
+meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same purpose.
+
+He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria and was
+denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned unopened. He passed
+a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose end in London during the
+height of the season. In despair he went to _The Daily Gazette_ office
+and proclaimed himself ready for a job. But for the moment the earth was
+fairly calm and the management could find no field for Jaffery's special
+activities. Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable
+weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of the
+proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the newspaper
+office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a disturber of traffic.
+Then he came down to Northlands for a while, where, for want of
+something to do, he hired himself out to my gardener and dug up most of
+the kitchen garden. His usual occupation of romping with Susan was gone,
+for she lay abed with some childish ailment which Barbara feared might
+turn into German measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or
+eating or sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless
+mood. At nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases
+wherein he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer
+the most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying
+with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when a
+merciful Providence gave him something definite to think about.
+
+It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my dressing-room
+when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding admittance, rushed in, clad
+in bath gown and slippers, flourishing a letter.
+
+"Read that."
+
+I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:
+
+     "Dear Jaff Chayne,
+
+     "As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm going
+     to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook--"
+
+I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."
+
+"He is. Read on."
+
+     "We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married at
+     Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an Albanian
+     it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in England, and
+     I would have to give up half my money to Government. But in France,
+     owing to different laws, I can get married without any fuss at all.
+     I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a lawyer, so it's all
+     right. I suppose when I am married you won't be my trustee any
+     more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and thank you for
+     all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and Barbara and
+     Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is Erasmus, but
+     you will when you know him better.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "LIOSHA PRESCOTT."
+
+The amazing epistle took my breath away.
+
+"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.
+
+"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look signified that
+it was he who intended to cause it.
+
+"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.
+
+"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He must have
+once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."
+
+I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of pity for
+our poor deluded Liosha.
+
+"We must get her out of this."
+
+"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."
+
+I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the room where
+she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in cap and
+peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with lather crinkling
+over one-half of my face, held first an indignation meeting, and then a
+council of war.
+
+"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He couldn't
+offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing bigamy, and I
+know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement; so he has invented
+this poisonous plot to get her out of England."
+
+"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said Barbara.
+
+"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?" asked
+Jaffery.
+
+I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but Barbara's
+eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws and
+formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the fact that,
+not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be sold to a young
+Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming to haggle over her
+price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in telling her wild fables
+of English life. Her ignorance in many ways was abysmal. Once having
+seen a photograph in the papers of the King in a bowler-hat she
+expressed her disappointment that he wore no insignia of royalty; and
+when I consoled her by saying that, by Act of Parliament, the King was
+obliged to wear his crown so many hours a day and therefore wore it
+always at breakfast, lunch and dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted
+my assurance with the credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara
+rebuked me for taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry
+indeed. How was she to know when and where not to believe me?
+
+"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any kind of
+plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a full account of
+it is a proof."
+
+"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled. "If
+Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."
+
+"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara. "She
+thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you know."
+
+"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said I.
+
+"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick knitting
+of the brow.
+
+"Precisely," said I.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with the fellow
+already?"
+
+"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."
+
+He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while Barbara
+discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard to Liosha.
+
+Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.
+
+"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday. Fendihook left
+last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."
+
+We regarded each other in dismay.
+
+"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from moustache
+downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When he was puzzled
+he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why should he leave the
+boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you. Because his London engagement
+was over and he had to put in a week's engagement at some provincial
+music-hall. Theatrical folks always travel on Sunday. If he was still
+working in London and wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have
+chosen Sunday. We can easily see by the advertisements in the morning
+paper. His London engagement was at the Atrium."
+
+"I've got the _Daily Telegraph_ here," said Barbara.
+
+She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken condition to
+which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest search among the
+ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement page. The attractions at
+the Atrium were set out fully; but the name of Ras Fendihook did not
+appear.
+
+"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where did she
+write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown pocket.
+"Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday afternoon. So
+she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was written on her own
+note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address, and then held it up
+before us. "See anything queer about this?"
+
+We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."
+
+"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come along. I can
+tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I seem to be a bit
+of an ass. Besides--you'll come, won't you?"
+
+"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."
+
+"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be prepared to
+come to Havre--all over France, if necessary."
+
+"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast coolness of
+the proposal.
+
+"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."
+
+"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave Susan."
+
+"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you can't."
+He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."
+
+"Where?" I asked, stupidly.
+
+"Wherever I take you."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--" I remonstrated.
+
+He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack his bag,
+and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."
+
+He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.
+
+"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by yourself?"
+
+"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me and I met
+the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help me to save a
+woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find somebody else."
+
+"Of course I'll come," said I.
+
+"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a breakfast."
+
+He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman heroes
+rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy, bellowing
+fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the normal tones of
+the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.
+
+I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that we should
+be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other people's lives?"
+
+She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's just
+because we've done nothing--nothing otherwise to justify our existence.
+We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and Susan. If we didn't
+take a share of other people's troubles we should die of congestion of
+the soul."
+
+I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the steady
+vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at a moment's
+notice for anywhere--perhaps Havre, perhaps Marseilles, perhaps
+Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which wouldn't suit
+me--anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving Jaffery might choose to
+ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with my translation of
+Firdusi. . . .
+
+"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin to put in
+an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs.
+Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately done
+black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we were
+calling in question the moral character of her establishment. She did
+not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone. She was not in
+the habit of putting such enquiries to her guests.
+
+"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on Thursday. It was
+not my business to associate the two departures in any way."
+
+By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an old
+client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had been
+touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come without much
+ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms, paid her bill and
+departed with her trunks.
+
+"When did she give notice to leave you?"
+
+"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then she came
+with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things were packed
+and ready to be brought downstairs."
+
+"What address did she give to the cabman?"
+
+Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter. Jaffery
+repeated his question.
+
+"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.
+
+I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded it as the
+most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on me.
+
+"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying instructions--covering up
+her tracks. When she got to Westminster she told the driver to cross the
+bridge--and what railway station is the other end of the bridge?"
+
+"Waterloo," said I.
+
+"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from Southampton
+the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny, believe me."
+
+I said no more.
+
+The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his pocket.
+
+"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this
+district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."
+
+"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.
+
+"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was something
+fishy about it."
+
+"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne, and I'm
+surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my character. I had a
+short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday enclosing four other letters
+which she asked me to stamp and post, as I owed her fourpence change on
+her bill."
+
+"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.
+
+"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.
+
+"But the postmark on the envelope."
+
+She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been destroyed.
+
+"Then where is she?" I asked.
+
+"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at once."
+
+So after a visit to my bankers--for I am not the kind of person to set
+out for Santa Fé de Bogotà with twopence halfpenny in my pocket--and
+after a hasty lunch at a restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient
+disgust--"Why the dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if
+we're to fool about wasting time over lunch?"--but as I explained, if I
+don't have regular meals, I get a headache--and after having made other
+sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase of a toothbrush,
+an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin, admirable fellow that
+he is, invariably forgets to put into my case, we started for
+Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth Road we went, through
+Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the Surrey Downs rolling warm in
+the sunshine, through Farnham, through grey, dreamy Winchester, past St.
+Cross, with its old-world almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill
+and down to Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a
+quarter. Jaffery drove.
+
+We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the various
+places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in Southampton.
+We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the Royal, the Star, the
+Dolphin, the Polygon--and found no trace of the runaways. Jaffery
+interviewed officials at the stations and docks, dapper gentlemen with
+the air of diplomatists, tremendous fellows in uniform, policemen,
+porters, with all of whom he seemed to be on terms of familiar
+acquaintance; but none of them could trace or remember such a couple
+having crossed by the midnight boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were
+their names down on the list of those who had secured berths in advance
+for this Saturday night.
+
+"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not displeased at
+my masterful friend's failure.
+
+"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly means
+that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on Monday. If it
+was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've only to wait and
+catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement, which is possible, he
+and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that case we'll cross ourselves
+and track them down."
+
+"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I murmured.
+
+"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement he must
+be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must be working in
+the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place besides this is
+Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only seventeen miles."
+
+"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
+comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to dine
+at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the car drove
+off.
+
+"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."
+
+"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow night's
+boat."
+
+"There isn't one on Sundays."
+
+"Then Monday night's boat."
+
+"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet him on
+the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down on my leg
+above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I should like to
+take you on an expedition. It would do you a thundering lot of good."
+
+We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of enquiries
+as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining Southsea could we find
+a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook, and still less of the obscure
+Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel. We dined very well. On that I
+insisted--without much expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me
+for a Sybarite and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on
+account of succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
+excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we felt
+that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it so
+gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back to
+Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on the
+off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to catch the
+Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I cheerfully
+contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre. And as Jaffery
+(also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining me with juicy
+stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt equal to any
+dare-devil adventure.
+
+We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
+South-Western Hotel--the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our uncertainty
+as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain.
+Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and
+obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was
+nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of
+darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid
+illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers--"St.
+Malo"--"Cherbourg"--"Jersey"--"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the
+Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and
+stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a stick at its master's
+feet.
+
+One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants
+swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the
+aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms
+encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all
+seemed alike--just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct,
+like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all
+around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures
+mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the
+slither and thud of trunks being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail
+of the packed wedge disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I
+went to the aft gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had
+seen Fendihook or Liosha.
+
+A second train produced results equally barren.
+
+There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We went
+aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.
+
+My method of travel has always been to arrange everything beforehand
+with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains and boats I have
+thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear therefore that there were
+no berths free and that we should have to pass the night either on the
+windy deck or in the red-plush discomfort of the open saloon caused me
+not unreasonable dismay. I had to choose and I chose the saloon.
+Jaffery, of course, chose the raw winds of heaven. All night I did not
+get a wink of sleep. There was a gross fellow in the next section of
+red-plush whose snoring drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long
+after they had cleared away the remains of supper from the long central
+table chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
+world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the popping
+of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three a minute. I
+understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the human brain. I
+devised exquisite means of removing him from a nauseated world. Then
+there was a lamp which swung backwards and forwards and searched my
+eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I covered them.
+
+What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife and child
+and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got out to sea.
+There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of
+stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly hate a ship to do. And I
+was fully dressed and it seemed as if all the tender parts of my body
+were tied up with twine. What was I doing in this galley?
+
+When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning over me and
+all was deathly still.
+
+"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is there a
+fog?"
+
+"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of Havre."
+
+"What time is it?" I asked.
+
+"Half-past six."
+
+"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said I, lying
+down again.
+
+He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.
+
+The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck of
+Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.
+
+"What a ghastly night!"
+
+"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped over
+twenty miles."
+
+There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate numbers
+on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the companion
+onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the releasing gangway.
+I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans. The sky was overcast.
+It was very cold. The universe had an uncared-for, unswept appearance,
+like a house surprised at dawn, before the housemaids are up. The forced
+appearance of a well-to-do philosopher at such an hour was nothing less
+than an outrage. I glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and
+turned down its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool
+thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in
+charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I
+glanced over my shoulder.
+
+"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.
+
+At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us
+turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's
+eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm. Her
+eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then she
+turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just beyond
+the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even further away.
+The gangway was fixed and the movement of the conglomerate mass began.
+Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.
+
+"There's the brute waiting for her."
+
+And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a smile on
+his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the foot of the
+gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence, sought us anxiously
+with his gaze; then with an air of bravado waved his hat--a hard white
+felt--and cried out: "Cheer O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and
+linking his arm through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers
+hurrying across the stones to the custom-sheds.
+
+"Stop," Jaffery roared.
+
+They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook would
+have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the stream into a
+clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us. When we had struggled
+our slow way down and reached the quay she advanced a few steps looking
+very terrible in her wrath.
+
+"How dare you follow me?"
+
+"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an imperious
+gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the stern of the
+boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging, and a sergeant de
+ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.
+
+"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I didn't
+play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play dragon with
+a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."
+
+"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said jauntily.
+
+"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone. "You
+know very well why I'm here."
+
+"Jaff Chayne--" Liosha began.
+
+He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."
+
+"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."
+
+"He has got to tell me, not you."
+
+"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said Fendihook, with
+sudden nastiness.
+
+"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."
+
+"How are you going to do it?"
+
+Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter--"
+
+"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?" snarled
+Fendihook.
+
+"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."
+
+"Sure," said Liosha.
+
+"And are you going to marry this lady?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Why didn't you marry her in England?"
+
+"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here--we don't want any of
+your interference." And she planted herself by the side of her abductor,
+glaring defiance at Jaffery.
+
+Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and an
+Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and would
+forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little skunk!"
+
+The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked swiftly at
+Fendihook.
+
+"Wasn't it true what you told me?"
+
+"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in England as
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+She paid no attention to me.
+
+"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.
+
+Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that rot
+seriously, you silly cuckoo?"
+
+Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly. For the
+first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her candid mind.
+
+"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise to marry
+her in France."
+
+"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"
+
+"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."
+
+"Who says I can't?"
+
+"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."
+
+"I've divorced her."
+
+"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing. I've
+found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character."
+
+Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes
+burning.
+
+"He's married already--" she gasped.
+
+"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."
+
+Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for
+Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round
+Fendihook's throat.
+
+"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron strength.
+Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as white as a sheet.
+I tapped him on the arm.
+
+"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if you don't
+want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a scared look,
+"you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You had better stick
+to the sort you're accustomed to."
+
+"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."
+
+"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne. With my
+own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like and"--I made an
+expressive gesture--"throw him clean away."
+
+"Right O!" said he.
+
+He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck me. I
+overtook him.
+
+"Where are you staying in Havre?"
+
+He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know for?"
+
+"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be if we
+chanced upon the same hotel."
+
+"I'm staying at the Phares--the swagger one on the beach near the
+Casino."
+
+"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye, old pal," said he.
+
+He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.
+
+I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood
+unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down.
+Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but
+now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation.
+
+"Let her go!" I whispered.
+
+Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without moving
+her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have known exactly
+what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat helplessly.
+
+"_Monsieur_," said a voice close by, and we saw our little blue-bloused
+porter. He explained that he had been seeking us everywhere. If we did
+not make haste we would lose the Paris train.
+
+I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not pressed for
+time; but this little outside happening broke the situation.
+
+"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said Jaffery.
+
+She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground a
+leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
+extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.
+
+"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.
+
+"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides, we'll have
+to stay the night."
+
+"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."
+
+"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."
+
+An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she wore
+cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly unconcerned with
+such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken face to all the world. I
+felt intensely sorry for her. She realised now from what a blatant
+scoundrel she had been saved; but she still bitterly resented our
+intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped naked walking between
+them"--that was her primitive account later of her state of mind.
+
+"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."
+
+She nodded, without looking at me.
+
+"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."
+
+She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but she
+remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
+mechanically to her declarations.
+
+On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the cheery sun
+had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a glorious day. The
+luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took an open cab and rattled
+through the narrow flag-paved streets of the harbour quarter of the
+town. As we emerged into a more spacious thoroughfare, suddenly from a
+gaudy column at the corner flared the name of Ras Fendihook. I caught
+the heading of the _affiche_: "Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery
+was solved. Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left
+London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an
+engagement out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question:
+"Why Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
+of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had eyes
+for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We passed another
+column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early
+hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni's was flung.
+We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to
+be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit déjeuner downstairs.
+Liosha left us without saying a word.
+
+Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good _café au lait_, gladdened
+by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning's work, quite a
+different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the
+sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before. My urbane dismissal of
+Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory. The glow of conscious heroism
+warmed me, even like last night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind.
+After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and
+sending up to Liosha's room a bunch of red roses we bought at a
+florist's hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the
+matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his
+pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding
+of its _sous_, it is what you will. But it lives a spacious,
+out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like
+provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks abroad. It indulges in
+its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is intensely conscious of
+family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom. It is not Sundayfied
+into our vacuous boredom. It clings to the picturesque, in which it
+finds its dignified delight. The little soldier clad in blue tunic and
+red trousers struts along with his _fiancée_ or _maîtresse_ on his arm;
+the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the
+cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks
+syrup at a neighbouring table in your café. The work-girls, even on
+Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly
+street. The curé in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday
+happens not to be the _jour de repos hebdomadaire_ ordained by law, in
+their blue _sarreau_; the peasants from outlying villages--the men in
+queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
+dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black,
+with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and
+greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous
+cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an
+inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with
+their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned
+waiters standing by café tables--all these types are distinct, picked
+out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the
+stage is dressed.
+
+So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day,
+I replied:
+
+"Sit here."
+
+"Don't you want to see the place?"
+
+"The place," said I, "is parading before us."
+
+"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."
+
+"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in
+a mood for jaunts."
+
+"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her.
+Oh, that swine of a blighter!"
+
+His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth
+time we went over the story.
+
+"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go
+back to the boarding-house."
+
+"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."
+
+"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary,
+there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew
+the right way to take her."
+
+The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I
+assented to Jaffery's proposition.
+
+"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish
+gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and
+honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock
+for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled
+herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."
+
+And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us
+past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman
+would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to
+soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her
+into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in
+fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid
+figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white
+gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the
+morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her
+lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.
+
+We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.
+
+"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."
+
+We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked
+steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.
+
+"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."
+
+"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather
+indiscreet."
+
+"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.
+
+"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your
+breakfast?"
+
+She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she
+have now? I sent a waiter for café-au-lait and a brioche and lectured
+her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a
+smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism
+with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for
+the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the
+little tray and the _verseur_ poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
+her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.
+
+"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We
+watched the London trains carefully."
+
+"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to
+bed at once."
+
+"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you
+doing at Southsea?"
+
+"Staying with Emma--Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick
+that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her
+to put me up."
+
+"So that's why you went on Thursday?"
+
+"That's why."
+
+"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
+Considine--I mean Mrs. Jupp--into your confidence?"
+
+"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to
+Havre--to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff
+Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."
+
+We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue
+that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday
+for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no
+Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris.
+Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from
+London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy
+out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His
+fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to
+accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst
+of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of
+his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
+worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage
+back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway
+network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into
+the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure
+he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left
+penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp
+swallowed her up forever.
+
+For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul
+must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had
+guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey.
+Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his
+instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit
+of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be
+posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to
+the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to
+Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.
+
+She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon
+the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all
+day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the
+town from his swagger hotel on the _plage_, we carried out Jaffery's
+proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight
+from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of
+fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged
+needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
+grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
+sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a
+deep breath.
+
+"Oh, let us all come and live here."
+
+We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the
+fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few
+belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to
+the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch
+at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and
+afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery
+was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing,
+and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended
+solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy
+gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled
+her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
+sipped _crême de menthe_ with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a
+naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds
+itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away.
+Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet--or
+rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of
+blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her
+wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the
+first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a
+spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy--she was
+dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
+immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the
+same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing
+and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.
+
+To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's
+category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many
+restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his
+benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile
+exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl
+it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be
+felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At
+Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand
+to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and
+ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would
+have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with
+grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the
+deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.
+
+It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the
+fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The
+smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed
+conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery
+suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the
+edge of the inspiring cliffs?
+
+"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he
+throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."
+
+Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick
+ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the
+wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought
+of the Winged Victory.
+
+"I'm not a bit tired," she said.
+
+But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists,
+she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary
+to his desires?" and settled down beside him.
+
+So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea
+and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a
+steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny
+golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact
+giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke
+the spell.
+
+"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed
+him."
+
+Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.
+
+"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.
+
+"I did strike him once."
+
+"Oh?" said I.
+
+"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the
+details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But
+she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I
+was an honest woman and talked about marriage."
+
+Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear,"
+said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders--it was the full shrug of the un-English
+child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away.
+"He was so funny."
+
+"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
+remonstrance.
+
+"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was
+different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much.
+You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave
+like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to
+dinner."
+
+Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."
+
+"What can I say?"--she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't
+to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think
+it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into
+the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say
+it was not ladylike--but he--he did not say so. He laughed. His friends
+used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off
+my stays"--she threw out her hands largely--"ouf!"
+
+"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.
+
+"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd
+of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big
+difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low
+voice.
+
+I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for
+her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can
+understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some
+moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new
+white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible
+something--something, for want of a better word, like a ripple--sweep
+through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her
+neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.
+
+"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.
+
+She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and
+clutched his shoulder.
+
+"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
+understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
+prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
+breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
+hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."
+
+Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
+spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.
+
+"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
+forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
+words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
+Chayne, the mountains of Albania."
+
+"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
+remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"
+
+She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
+swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
+now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
+I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
+things."
+
+"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.
+
+"And what have you done?"
+
+"I've broken out of prison and run away."
+
+"That's what I did," said Liosha.
+
+Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
+her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.
+
+"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
+comes to."
+
+No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
+had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
+wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
+restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
+him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
+given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
+been so kind to me."
+
+"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
+as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
+beads."
+
+"So do I," said Liosha.
+
+I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
+chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
+consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment
+afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of
+babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to
+my feet and pursued them.
+
+"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the
+decencies of civilised life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+"_Arrêtez! 'Arrêtez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.
+
+We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The
+chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and
+disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side
+to side of the Boulevard Maritime.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in
+characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and
+laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking
+fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a
+curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he
+carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having
+subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.
+
+"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the
+door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at
+Tortoni's."
+
+Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took
+off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed
+manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a
+stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next
+Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established
+himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
+Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the
+partition. The car started.
+
+"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From
+Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports
+thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"
+
+"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
+"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."
+
+"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."
+
+"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.
+
+"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.
+
+"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
+"He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."
+
+"Remember that night off Vigo?"
+
+"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
+go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
+time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
+responsible for the saving of his ship.
+
+"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.
+
+"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.
+
+"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
+included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."
+
+Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
+holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
+side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
+hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
+from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
+It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
+thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
+violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
+desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
+two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.
+
+"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"
+
+"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
+grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
+ship."
+
+He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
+entertainment of a pretty woman.
+
+"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.
+
+"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
+doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
+that I love the sea."
+
+With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
+Restaurant and Café Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
+thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
+enjoying the Sunday afternoon _apéritif_.
+
+"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
+crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
+Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
+table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
+I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
+chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
+was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain
+Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink
+than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an
+appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.
+
+"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with
+yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"
+
+"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross
+Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."
+
+"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.
+
+I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese
+East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."
+
+"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.
+
+"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda
+into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me,
+exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his
+drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us--for he was not a
+spontaneously communicative man--that he now had a very good command:
+steamship _Vesta_, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but
+sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he
+had ever set eyes on.
+
+"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."
+
+Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.
+
+"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"
+
+"Yes, worse luck."
+
+"Why worse luck?" I asked.
+
+"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.
+
+Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar
+before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden
+at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.
+
+"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.
+
+Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
+Chayne?"
+
+Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth
+showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his
+hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder--"Why not? You and I. Out of this
+rotten civilisation?"
+
+Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I.
+I thought he was going mad.
+
+"Would you like it?" he asked.
+
+"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her
+face.
+
+Captain Maturin leaned forward.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly
+there's no accommodation for ladies."
+
+Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
+sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
+did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
+any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
+cabin? There's always one."
+
+"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."
+
+Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
+his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
+crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
+very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
+and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.
+
+"Let us have a private palaver about this."
+
+They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
+Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
+disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:
+
+"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"
+
+"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.
+
+"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
+her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
+hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."
+
+I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
+craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.
+
+"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
+believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
+another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
+in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
+Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
+food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
+sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
+a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
+seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
+always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
+see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
+does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
+about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
+misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
+suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and
+always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the
+wind--to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods
+catching fire, and the wheezing mediæval boilers bursting and sending
+you all to glory--"
+
+I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on
+hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed
+interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:
+
+"I should love it! I should love it!"
+
+"But it's lunatic," said I.
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But the proprieties."
+
+She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out
+her hands towards me.
+
+"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff
+Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari
+to London?"
+
+"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"
+
+It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to
+defensive sombreness admitted its significance.
+
+"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same."
+She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.
+"If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any
+difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara
+that."
+
+"I will do so--" said I.
+
+"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not
+going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over
+another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the
+proprieties"--she snapped her fingers--"they be--they be anything'd!"
+
+To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank
+the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the
+manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
+anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.
+
+"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will
+always be in the way."
+
+"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.
+
+We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now
+about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by
+the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.
+
+"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands
+the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and
+North and South Amerikee,' come."
+
+"But this is midsummer madness," said I.
+
+"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously
+caught a waiter by the arm. "_Même chose pour tout le monde_." He
+flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it?
+The _Vesta_ isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No
+luxuries. I hope you understand."
+
+"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.
+
+"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you
+mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as
+one of the crew?"
+
+"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the
+binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."
+
+"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
+incredulity.
+
+"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux
+aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.
+
+"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.
+
+"The _what_?" I asked.
+
+"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me
+have dunnage."
+
+"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a
+parrot in a cage."
+
+Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light
+mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to
+become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we passed through the customs this
+morning?"
+
+"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his
+third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him
+along? I told him he'd come in useful."
+
+"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man,
+give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
+They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be
+arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of
+expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _petite
+vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier
+voyage--'_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka_'?"
+
+"Four months," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in
+time."
+
+I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
+difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
+nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates
+belonging to a woman who is not my wife.
+
+There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the
+others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins
+and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated
+argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them
+from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with
+excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of
+thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so
+tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and
+apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted
+mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Café-Restaurant,
+where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not
+one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a
+schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might
+have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or
+cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
+clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
+plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table,
+after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the
+information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to
+Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it
+more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the
+performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty;
+but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in
+Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of
+having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman
+of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
+finery, who was sitting next to him.
+
+Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before
+turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's
+outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new
+deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts,
+he would see to their adequate reception.
+
+"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he,
+with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and
+clamping in a steamer's machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes
+filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour--"There's still
+time."
+
+"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all
+my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."
+
+If I am not urbane, I am nothing.
+
+He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
+rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy
+process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the
+trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to
+Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the
+hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain
+upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
+middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and
+respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in
+a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
+and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner
+recesses of the hotel.
+
+Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in
+France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with
+traditions of _le flègme britannique_; but there was not much _flègme_
+about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.
+
+There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after
+her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively
+artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there
+was the bill to pay. We sat down again.
+
+"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one
+of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of
+getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner
+instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."
+
+I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in
+those terms to Liosha."
+
+"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
+cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.
+
+"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."
+
+"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I
+contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
+But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short
+of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the
+morning."
+
+"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."
+
+"Give them to me now," said I.
+
+He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up,
+some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should
+crop up."
+
+He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document,
+which I put into my letter case.
+
+"And what about letters?"
+
+"Don't want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the
+plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right
+again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a
+schedule of dates."
+
+"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.
+
+"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only
+one woman in the world."
+
+"Let us have a final drink," said I.
+
+We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.
+
+When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her
+way to Madagascar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County
+of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
+I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am
+not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my
+person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot
+keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and
+Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer
+containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so
+forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
+desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are
+trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My
+other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any
+rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying
+on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a
+freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case
+wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on
+my arrival at Northlands.
+
+"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this
+thing."
+
+But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept
+the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to
+the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's
+flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.
+
+"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not
+going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."
+
+"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable
+length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it.
+If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the
+topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description
+you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly
+miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."
+
+I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship
+_Vesta_.
+
+As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's
+Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be
+a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened
+myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the
+small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery
+left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of
+housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an
+hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal
+appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his
+books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos,
+of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
+and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care
+upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which
+reposed--most useful piece of furniture--in the middle of the
+hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the
+place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention
+on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the
+tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one
+drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it
+into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the
+original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper
+and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer
+of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his
+bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and
+looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed
+two photographs on his dressing-table--one of his mother, whom I
+remembered, and, one of Doria--these I laid face downwards so that the
+light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from
+beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling
+paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark
+alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was
+nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour
+and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the
+drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat,
+summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter
+with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow
+that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a
+friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
+labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and
+myself had, at least, one thing in common--videlicet, the keyless habit.
+I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden
+_trait-d'union_. Now I had found it.
+
+And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial
+Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the _Vesta_. The
+weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the
+meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about
+cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west
+coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard
+enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a
+matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a
+short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips
+considerably later--for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to
+the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe--they had made
+their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they
+apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the
+deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been
+procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to
+pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their
+communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so
+happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us,"
+wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid
+fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her
+hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just
+imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing
+in wet and dirt. . . .
+
+About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all
+too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit
+since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us
+once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.
+She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the
+terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that
+she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her
+reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.
+Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his
+constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now
+that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
+neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.
+After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she
+admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He
+had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a
+beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill
+Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and
+Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?
+
+"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
+morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
+disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back
+in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One
+would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."
+
+"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."
+
+"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a
+man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that
+dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What
+respectable woman--well, what honest woman, according to the term of the
+lower classes--would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"
+
+"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry
+her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question
+of marriage or anything else between them."
+
+"_Sancta simplicitas!_" She shook her head from side to side and looked
+at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The
+best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the
+type."
+
+"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.
+
+She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her
+ready sureness:
+
+"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among
+literary people."
+
+"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."
+
+"You're as bemused as Barbara."
+
+"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied
+an individual, which you haven't."
+
+She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way--Paul and
+Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"
+
+"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it--what the dickens does it matter
+to you?"
+
+"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.
+
+"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious
+intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished
+him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If
+he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't
+he? What would it have to do with you?"
+
+"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting
+on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more
+insulting."
+
+"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had
+swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She
+was eaten up with jealousy.
+
+"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being
+always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what
+they've got to say for themselves."
+
+She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and
+ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a
+matter of perfect indifference to me."
+
+I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
+Jaffery's--practically--last words to me were: 'There's only one woman
+in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to
+prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"--with the tips of
+her fingers she brushed my hair--"you really are a simple old dear!"
+
+"All the same--" I began.
+
+"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I
+didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you
+have one."
+
+She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down _Les Fleurs du
+Mal_. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.
+
+Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline.
+It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back
+again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not
+only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him
+would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another
+story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned
+her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She
+regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough,
+with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
+back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would
+treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my
+conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact
+that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously
+jealous of Liosha.
+
+It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara
+and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I
+would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a
+mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on
+the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We
+revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled
+with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our
+faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every
+August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and
+other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
+marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
+nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.
+
+Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having
+subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the
+normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands,
+coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were
+given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and
+swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with
+paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had
+struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera,
+had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side
+by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could
+not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
+Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake,
+had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the
+trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in
+disgraceful fringes.
+
+"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
+anything but utterly miserable."
+
+"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.
+
+"Well, it's her own skin."
+
+"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.
+
+What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last
+word.
+
+The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards
+Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted
+flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her
+father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a
+series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its
+sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her
+unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she
+asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity
+rather than indifference.
+
+Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's
+list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from
+the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did
+the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on
+this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation
+swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these
+nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on
+public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to
+remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory
+was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her.
+Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold
+enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any
+longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do
+his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
+"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a
+tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how
+could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to
+his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not
+let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily
+assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar
+number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of
+far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a
+beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and
+tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to
+be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.
+
+"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
+executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after
+his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."
+
+Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have
+asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would
+have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook,
+and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been
+the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out
+with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.
+
+"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might
+have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."
+
+A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an
+_édition de luxe_ of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like
+Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and
+illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of
+copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one
+of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the
+commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul
+would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn
+list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an _édition
+de luxe_ of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth
+while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author,
+surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally
+sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied
+by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer.
+Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden
+aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an _édition de
+luxe_. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other
+sales showed signs of exhaustion.
+
+"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he
+sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
+woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
+her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
+he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
+but you. Do advise me."
+
+I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
+a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
+It ran:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."
+
+I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
+mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
+right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.
+
+But I have regretted that telegram ever since.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
+quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
+_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
+thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
+correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
+Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
+preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
+abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
+found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
+journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
+hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
+University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
+hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
+scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
+writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
+Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
+gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
+was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
+descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
+professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
+with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
+satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
+Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
+plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre
+come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish
+hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with
+the naïveté of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of
+dates and addresses--I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
+certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or
+horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I
+could give him but little comfort.
+
+Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken
+chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to
+reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores
+of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to
+picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul
+clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a
+deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions
+and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual
+promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the
+dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha,
+was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch
+of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy,
+bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
+relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
+life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence
+for having been spared so dreadful an experience.
+
+Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have
+their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual
+enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract
+from one of his letters:
+
+"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time.
+Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you
+sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha.
+Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that
+was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived
+all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore.
+She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing
+gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the
+wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work
+you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health
+and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of
+her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep
+her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as
+cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the
+cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about
+their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody
+has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What
+do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering
+blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly
+imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling.
+They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them,
+these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst
+and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a
+kind of freemasonry between them.
+
+"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The
+first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at
+the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The
+mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then
+he came up to Liosha--you and Barbara should have seen her--it was
+sultry, not a breath of air--and she just had on a thin bodice open at
+her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was
+bareheaded.
+
+"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'
+
+"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the
+skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed
+Juno; you know her way.
+
+"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'
+
+"'Enjoyment--!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came
+over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying
+to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'
+
+"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman--what you would
+call a Swede--a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the
+worse for wear. Liosha says:
+
+"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'
+
+"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'
+
+"'What was it all about?'
+
+"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that
+mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him
+a ----, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."
+
+It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe
+me, they were enough to annoy anybody.
+
+"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck
+for a minute.'
+
+"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.
+
+"'What's the matter?'
+
+"Why did you call Petersen a ----?' she asked pleasantly and
+word-perfect.
+
+"'Cos he is one.'
+
+"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you
+both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of
+it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't
+shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again,
+I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'
+
+"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have
+consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had
+attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in
+perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In
+either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls
+the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex
+told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on,
+placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair.
+They felt that if she were drawn into a mêlée she would use a knife with
+the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced
+interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you
+remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making
+the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men
+looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at
+the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At
+last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
+without looking at him.
+
+"'All right, mate.'
+
+"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo,
+missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft
+the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck
+towards me, as pleased as Punch."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.
+
+Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in
+full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African
+continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of
+Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these
+travel-pictures in articles to _The Daily Gazette_, which, supplemented
+by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to
+read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape
+Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other
+apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing
+copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter
+entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty
+_Vesta_ wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
+disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and
+making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.
+If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I
+remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to
+microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and
+imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you
+exactly what was taken out of the _S.S. Vesta_ and what was put into
+her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To
+do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
+transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter
+of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called
+comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it.
+Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On
+one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by
+glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a
+derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are
+lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with
+greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the
+cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.
+And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter,
+by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
+unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I
+cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of
+men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You
+must imagine, I say, the _S.S. Vesta_ repeating this monotonous
+performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper,
+all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
+scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
+fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du propriétaire_,
+among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
+the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
+Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
+children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
+yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
+which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
+story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
+relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
+chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
+out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
+best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
+residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
+this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
+away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
+word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
+Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
+his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
+Liosha.
+
+As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
+put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
+letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
+were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
+central figure in many a picture.
+
+Here, I say, is another extract:
+
+     "Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
+     worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
+     after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
+     and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
+     I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
+     settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
+     I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
+     tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
+     managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
+     shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in
+     another long stretch. . . .
+
+     "She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
+     the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
+     wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
+     his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
+     I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
+     strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
+     and again, when it's my watch--I'm on the starboard watch, you
+     know--I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands
+     for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.
+     And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts,
+     and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her
+     face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
+     deck--and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a
+     woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of
+     bacon and eggs--my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of
+     fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early
+     morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the
+     Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the
+     good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your
+     nose up at it--but you've never been hungry in your life! and there
+     hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the
+     permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our
+     comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's
+     a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
+     spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
+     cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.
+
+     "Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
+     result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
+     considered the matter gravely.
+
+     "'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
+     luck so far, have I?'
+
+     "I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'
+
+     "'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said.
+     'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to
+     meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'
+
+     "She rose--we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light--and leaned
+     over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her.
+     She was silent for a bit. Then she said:
+
+     "'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry
+     a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat
+     me--and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'
+
+     "She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
+     talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
+     who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
+     would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
+     Honest--I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great
+     Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as
+     decent a sort as you please."
+
+It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon
+gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's
+interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells
+us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and
+second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful
+attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind
+which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's
+toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and
+Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of
+the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more--with
+a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created
+Liosha.
+
+Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:
+
+     "A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria.
+     If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought
+     some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach
+     home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough
+     only on the outside.
+
+     "Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her
+     by the donkey-man. . . ."
+
+There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long
+account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company
+including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and
+navigation. But you see--he switches off at once to Liosha and the
+trivial records of the humdrum day.
+
+At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the
+Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:
+
+     "Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can
+     scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
+     dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
+     rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
+     ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
+     a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
+     shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
+     colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
+     straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
+     packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
+     mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
+     had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
+     straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
+     port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
+     turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
+     other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
+     inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
+     didn't like it; no one liked it.
+
+     "When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and
+     began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering
+     crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five
+     degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting
+     both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to
+     catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I
+     know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the
+     rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my
+     feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid
+     daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me?
+     Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and
+     looked just like a man. I roared:
+
+     "'Clear out. This is no place for you.'
+
+     "'I'm coming. Go along down.'
+
+     "She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as much
+     of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.
+
+     "'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'
+
+     "Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What the
+     this, that and the other were we waiting for?
+
+     "'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'
+
+     "'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn soon
+     make you,' cried Andrews.
+
+     "He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of the
+     cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of devils. He
+     was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of courtesy, but at
+     the moment he didn't care who went down into the hold, or who was
+     killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted and the crazy
+     old tub didn't go down.
+
+     "So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down we
+     were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
+     peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
+     some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
+     quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
+     able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
+     huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
+     quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
+     they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
+     know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
+     muscles about to snap--queer feeling that--and I think I'm about as
+     tough as they make 'em.
+
+     "Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight
+     of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
+     you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
+     running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got
+     jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were
+     knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know
+     what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of
+     the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He
+     looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the
+     iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along,
+     barging into everything--it was blowing half a gale--and once I
+     fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
+     and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
+     cook, sick of fever--I think he's a blighted malingerer--was the
+     only creature there. I routed him out, in the dim mephitic place
+     reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in his charge. Then I
+     went back through the drenching seas to the hatch. There was just
+     enough room for a man's body to squeeze through down the ladder. I
+     went down into the same hell-broth of sweat and confusion. The
+     ground you stood upon might have been the back of a super-Titanic
+     butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent term. It was a helpless
+     scuttering surge of men and vast wooden cubes. Most of the men had
+     torn off their upper garments and fought half naked, the sweat
+     glistening on their skins in the feeble light. Soon the heat became
+     unbearable and I too tore off jersey and shirt. Liosha joined me
+     and we worked together without speaking. Her long thick hair had
+     come down and she had hastily tied it in a knot, just as you might
+     tie a knot in a towel, and she had thrown off things like everybody
+     else and only a flimsy cotton, sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's
+     called, drenched through and sticking to her, made a pretence of
+     covering her from her waist.
+
+     "You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
+     your time--if you could--for the roll, and push and then scramble
+     with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out of the way
+     of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with fantastic
+     murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring of the
+     storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller
+     lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every
+     plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.
+
+     "We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast, and
+     were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
+     anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
+     twilight--just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down the
+     ladder where the hatch was open,--hanging on to edges and corners
+     of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave, vibrated
+     in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus of
+     cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand clear!'
+     Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I stumbled
+     and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding crate,
+     two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung aside,
+     to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by
+     the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing
+     the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the
+     deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood
+     streaming from her head.
+
+     [Illustration: Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung
+     aside.]
+
+     "In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of another
+     fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before realised the
+     appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her bunk aft; I
+     sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances from the
+     ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far she was
+     injured. . . .
+
+     "Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
+     But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
+     lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
+     skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
+     A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
+     her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
+     clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
+     hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
+     seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
+     I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
+     about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
+     refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."
+
+And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit of a
+scrawl from Liosha--her complete account of the incident:
+
+     "We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo go
+     loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the head
+     and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it gave
+     me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."
+
+Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to them.
+Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event in the
+amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved by a woman
+at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how heroic in action and
+how magnanimous in after modesty, does not forget it either. Although he
+had been credited (to his ingenuous delight) by reviewers of "The
+Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's
+nature, I have never met a more dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings
+with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on
+Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.
+
+     "Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last _Vesta_ letters,
+     "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I
+     take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her.
+     And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has
+     adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great,
+     spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns
+     Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's
+     ways are wonderful but weird."
+
+He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
+epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
+motherliness.
+
+"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of
+country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The
+morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and
+called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very
+pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle,
+arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's
+account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her
+solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man
+who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different
+kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
+at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when
+tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes
+also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I
+recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many
+puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's
+personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to
+town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more
+psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my
+stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to
+lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with
+Doria.
+
+Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking
+terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer
+office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian Boldero, doors
+flew open, and Doria marched straight away into Wittekind's comfortably
+furnished private room. Wittekind himself, tall, loose-limbed,
+courteous, the least tradesman-like person you can imagine, rose to
+receive her. For some reason or the other, or more likely against
+reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug little man hiding crafty
+eyes behind spectacles; but here he was, obviously a man of good
+breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly and gave her to understand
+that she was the one person in the world whom he had been longing to
+meet. And the office was not a sort of human _charcuterie_ hung round
+with brains of authors for sale, but a quiet, restful place to which
+valuable prints on the walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an
+air of distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
+bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old armchair
+with a beautiful back--she was sensitive to such things--and spoke of
+Adrian as of his own blood brother. She had not anticipated such warmth
+of genuine feeling, or so fine an appreciation of her Adrian's work.
+
+"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only to you in
+my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep your
+husband's memory green. But it is green, thank goodness. How do I know?
+By two signs. One that people wherever the English language is spoken
+are eagerly reading his books--I say reading, because you deprecate the
+purely commercial side of things; but you must forgive me if I say that
+the only proof of all their reading is the record of all their buying.
+And when people buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they
+also discuss him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
+advertisement and an _édition de luxe_. But it is only the little man
+that needs the big drum."
+
+"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an _édition de luxe_ would be
+such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care a bit about the money,"
+she went on with a splendid disregard of her rights that would have sent
+a shiver down the incorporated back of the Incorporated Society of
+Authors, "I'm only too willing to contribute towards the expense. Please
+understand me. It's a tribute and a monument."
+
+"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said Wittekind.
+
+"But my husband--"
+
+"--isn't dead," said he.
+
+"Oh!" said Doria. "Then--"
+
+"The time for your _édition de luxe_ is not yet."
+
+"Yet? But--you don't think Adrian's work is going to die?"
+
+She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.
+
+"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that he is
+among the immortals. But an _édition de luxe_ now would be a wanton _Hic
+jacet_."
+
+All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business
+from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of
+Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her
+account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul--or across
+whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained
+to immobility.
+
+"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr. Wittekind,"
+she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to leave Adrian's
+reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come to see you before."
+"I wish you had," said he.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but--"
+
+"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's a
+splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."
+
+"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.
+
+"Well--so prompt."
+
+"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
+unconscionable time," said Doria.
+
+"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do. Your
+husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled together.
+He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time, although it was a
+labour of love."
+
+"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind," she
+cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see exactly
+what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried! Why do your
+printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"
+
+"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays. They print
+from a typed copy."
+
+"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original manuscript."
+
+Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero. From two
+typed copies--one in England and one in America."
+
+"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you Adrian's
+original manuscript with his revisions."
+
+"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I read the
+typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your husband's manuscript."
+
+"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's manuscript."
+
+"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."
+
+Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great dark eyes
+grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand on the writing
+desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was sitting. He rose, too.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
+manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're making
+some extraordinary mistake."
+
+"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."
+
+Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow me."
+
+He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me at
+once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this. Mr. Forest
+is my literary adviser--everything goes through his hands."
+
+They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember the
+Boldero manuscripts?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"
+
+"Typescript."
+
+"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original manuscript?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"
+
+"I'm sure it hasn't."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Forest."
+
+The reader retired.
+
+"You see," said Wittekind.
+
+"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate' and 'The
+Greater Glory'?"
+
+"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of knowing."
+
+"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers and
+destroyed by the printers."
+
+"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling misunderstanding.
+Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a distinguished man--and a man of
+unblemished honour. A word or two will clear up everything."
+
+"He's in Madagascar."
+
+"Then wait till he comes back."
+
+Doria insisted--and who in the world can blame her for insisting?
+
+"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm not--not to the
+extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne has told me definitely
+that those two manuscripts came to your office, that the books were
+printed from them and that they were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour--and I have also
+given you independent testimony--that no manuscript of your husband's
+has ever entered this office."
+
+"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
+destroyed?"
+
+"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the proofs.
+Typed copy may or may not be returned."
+
+"But autograph copy is valuable?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of money?"
+
+"Quite a lot of money."
+
+"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"
+
+"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne would be
+incapable."
+
+"And you've never seen any of it?"
+
+"I've given you my word of honour."
+
+"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.
+
+"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.
+
+She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.
+
+"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You have
+nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She looked up
+at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give explanations. In
+the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's memory in your hands--to
+keep green, as you say"--tears came into her eyes--"and you will, won't
+you?"
+
+The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent over her,
+still holding her hand.
+
+"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers have our
+ideals--and our purest is to distribute through the world the works of a
+man of genius."
+
+So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on urgent
+business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full of the
+virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a full
+account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations of
+Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for having
+counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have thrown every
+possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I ought to have
+foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one weak spot in our web
+of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven by necessity from the
+paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault.
+Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I
+have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in
+mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and
+suspicious cross-examination.
+
+"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"
+
+"Yes," I lied.
+
+"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," I lied again.
+
+"Was it among Adrian's papers?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the printers,
+he destroyed it."
+
+"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has also
+got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want them for?"
+
+"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer, because I
+don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know nothing whatever
+about them."
+
+"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done for me,"
+said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know something."
+
+From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of view, she
+was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful. If she had
+brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts
+and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge
+would have flayed me alive. . . . Put yourself in her place for a
+minute--God knows I tried to do so hard enough--and you will see the
+logic of her position, all through. She was not a woman of broad human
+sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole
+being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life;
+it was concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
+flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to bear
+with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had happened to cloud
+her faith. She had come up against many incomprehensible things: the
+delay in publication of Adrian's book; the change of title; the burning
+of Adrian's last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures
+that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo
+of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the
+literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them--not without
+protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of
+things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her
+outrageously. I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.
+
+But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor Barbara do? We
+sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while
+Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library,
+inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts. And I dared
+not know anything at all about them. She had every reason to reproach
+me.
+
+Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame Hilary.
+When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special
+department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's management of
+financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side
+of things. It has worked very well. This silly muddle about the
+manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."
+
+"But it does matter," cried Doria.
+
+And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by
+the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of
+her passionate self craved their possession. We argued futilely, as
+people must, who haven't the ghost of a case.
+
+"But why has Jaffery lied?"
+
+"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again perjuring
+myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me. As I've told
+you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went through together.
+We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.' Possibly," said I, with a
+despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it
+with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it,
+and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer's. Now that I
+remember, he did say something of the kind."
+
+"Yes, he did," said Barbara.
+
+Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're merely
+saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see through you"--I
+have already apologised to you for our being the unconvincing liars that
+we were--"you know nothing more about it than I do. You ought to, as
+I've already said. But you don't. In fact, you know considerably less.
+Shall I tell you where the manuscripts are at the present moment?"
+
+"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who has come
+to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine how utterly
+wearied we were with the whole of the miserable business. "Let us wait
+till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very long."
+
+"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't condemn a
+man without a hearing?"
+
+Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend. And
+when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful than when
+she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then she gets really
+angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."
+
+I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem to
+detect anything particularly wrong about it.
+
+"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't do
+anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at that."
+
+"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I don't want
+to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can help. But that's
+where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of them"--and she pointed to the
+key of Jaffery's flat hanging with its staring label against my library
+wall.
+
+Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to Jaffery. But
+again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our heads and demanded
+Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their
+existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind
+of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable
+that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable
+that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
+therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
+satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we
+confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious dealings. If it
+were only to gain time in order to think and consult, we had to refer
+her to the absent Jaffery.
+
+"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a deuce of a
+mess."
+
+"I'm afraid we are."
+
+"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs, with no
+thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig and about
+anything outside our nice comfortable sty."
+
+"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.
+
+"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm roused."
+
+We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the disastrous
+topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and discussed the modern
+tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on being in the forefront of
+progress, and found no dramatic salvation outside the most advanced
+productions of the Incorporated Stage Society. I pleaded for beauty,
+which she called wedding-cake. She pleaded for courage and truth in the
+presentation of actual life, which I called dull and stupid photography
+which any dismal fool could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely
+profitless argument.
+
+"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to your silly
+old early Victorian platitudes!"
+
+"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own home by
+one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."
+
+So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If only, I
+thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a fascinating
+little person she might be. And I understood how it had come to pass
+that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her so desperately.
+
+The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the planting of
+some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs, came through my
+library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried to her.
+
+"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying to
+lunch."
+
+No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara, was
+waiting to take her to the station.
+
+"I'll see you into the train," said I.
+
+"Oh, please don't trouble."
+
+"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the slope to the
+front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin with the luggage.
+Doria and I drove to the station. For the few minutes before the train
+came in we walked up and down the platform. She was in high spirits,
+full of jest and laughter. An unwonted flush in her cheeks and a
+brightness in her deep eyes rendered her perfectly captivating.
+
+"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such a long
+time," I said.
+
+The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good in the
+world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de Jouvence for
+weary people."
+
+That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a
+short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for
+our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever
+before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we
+had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had
+been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned
+me from my contemplative occupation.
+
+"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.
+
+"Have you written to Rogers?"
+
+Rogers was a plumber.
+
+"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a letter
+from a clean-minded man."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to be
+unusable."
+
+"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this household
+in his awful hands?"
+
+"He does."
+
+"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."
+
+"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to have
+done it three days ago."
+
+So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
+conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I turned
+in my chair, holding it up in my hand.
+
+"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"
+
+I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice that the
+pipes--". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes on the wall, "what
+has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"
+
+There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it, impertinently
+and nakedly bright. The labelled key had vanished.
+
+"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.
+
+I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the household
+from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in frantic search,
+and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses and wives and
+children to help, only to discover that I have had the wretched object
+in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is Barbara to this wolf-cry
+that if I came up to her without my head and informed her that I had
+lost it, she would be profoundly sceptical.
+
+But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I declared, "and
+I saw it this morning."
+
+"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant you it was
+there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our attention to it."
+
+"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met in a
+sudden stare.
+
+"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"
+
+"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to me in the
+garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally animated and
+demonstrative at the station--your sex's little guileful way ever since
+the world began. She had the stolen key about her. She's going straight
+to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those manuscripts."
+
+"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them, because
+they don't exist."
+
+"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
+everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up in
+the place!"
+
+"Do you mean--?" she cried aghast.
+
+"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."
+
+"I'll come with you," said Barbara.
+
+So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to London. We
+alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter came out to
+receive us.
+
+"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"
+
+"No, sir, not to my knowledge."
+
+We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a strain.
+
+"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.
+
+"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said I.
+
+[Illustration: And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.]
+
+"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the porter.
+
+"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her ready
+common-sense, took me aside and whispered:
+
+"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with us?"
+
+In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney that
+Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.
+
+"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."
+
+"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."
+
+We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered
+the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug,
+lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows,
+it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken
+little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she
+scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and
+snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole
+fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon
+straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy
+and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and
+speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she
+fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are
+written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.
+
+We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
+revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to Northlands. It
+was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct foresaw madness if we
+took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her father's house, her natural
+refuge, was equally impossible. For what explanation could we have given
+to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors
+to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of
+diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy;
+which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
+gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:
+
+"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to go. I
+can't ask father--and I can't go back home. It would drive me mad."
+
+Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
+flat--haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable Presence,
+the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented country
+bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To save her
+reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the
+chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew.
+Further attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara
+could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the
+temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by
+disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken
+likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has
+the secret--but she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
+uncertainty.
+
+Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I, when I
+went through the place in order to make arrangements for closing it
+altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the condemned cell where
+Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been sacrosanct; not a thing had
+been disturbed; there was the iron safe empty, but yet a grim receptacle
+of abominable secrets; the quill pen, its point stained with idle ink,
+lay on the office writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there
+under a clump of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in
+the corner stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a
+syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
+even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated
+it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had
+affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the
+cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting
+despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. But now
+Doria knew. He had lost her love, the rock on which he had built his
+hope of salvation. He was damned to eternity. It is the supreme and
+unspeakable horror of eternal life that you cannot dash your head
+against a wall and plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful
+Presence of Adrian was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly
+walls. . . .
+
+I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again. Of
+course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not have
+slept in that flat for anything in the world.
+
+I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in
+order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had
+ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old
+portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I
+did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the tragic
+lumber to Northlands, and having made a bonfire in a corner of the
+kitchen garden, burned the whole lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the
+evidence of Adrian's guilt, I could not at the time imagine. It was only
+later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn
+the papers in his flat, because he had no fire--only the electric
+radiator. You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six
+thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his
+idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his
+next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
+cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and
+throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two
+voyages that year--if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage--at a
+moment's notice. In each case he had not had occasion to call at his
+chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made. As for
+discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to
+discover them? Such friends as he had would never pry into his private
+concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole
+matter to them was unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's
+Mansions, he considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that
+he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That I
+bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to
+destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long time I felt
+the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms. If I had been
+a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I
+have always prided myself on being--not the last word, for that would
+not be consonant with my natural modesty--but, say, the penultimate word
+of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
+ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
+brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other's
+bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless
+fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to
+anybody.
+
+The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great
+fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever
+set Humpty-Dumpty up again.
+
+Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
+interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. _Moi qui
+vous parle_, I have read all of them; and I like them. I have even seen
+some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the Agamemnon given by
+the boys of Bradfield College, in their model open-air Greek theatre,
+built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat gripped from beginning to end
+by the tremendous drama. I am not talking foolishly. I know as much as
+the ordinary man need know about Greek tragedy. But in spite of
+Aristotle (who ought to have been strangled at birth, like all other
+bland doctrinaires--and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none
+been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the
+pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a bison was
+clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not draw for
+nuts)--in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the theorists, I assert
+that, as far as my experience goes, in the ordinary wary modern life to
+which we are accustomed, doom and inevitableness do not matter a hang.
+If we have any common-sense we can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course,
+if a woman marries a congenital idiot there are bound to be
+ructions--here we are entering the domain of pathology, which is as
+doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent.
+of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The
+history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of
+coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist
+that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to
+look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an
+Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is
+another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I
+do not desire to discuss the subject. I only maintain that, had it not
+been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret would never have been discovered
+a second time. I cannot see any doom about it. A series of sheer, silly
+accidents on the part of Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to
+face with these incriminating papers. As for her having gained access
+to the flat without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation
+on her part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken
+some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable
+stairs.
+
+I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles; but in
+view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What useful purpose
+would have been served? He would have left the steamship _Vesta_ and
+travelled post-haste overland, dragging with him a resentful Liosha, and
+rushed like a mad bull into an upheaval in which he could have no place.
+We had arranged by correspondence that, after he had parted from the
+good Captain Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to
+leave Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with
+her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be far
+better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their lunatic
+adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at Northlands to break
+the disastrous tidings. It would give us time to watch Doria and see
+what direction the resultant of the forces now tearing her soul would
+take.
+
+"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I can't be
+bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended for a year."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a great
+pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax, and she
+had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered the
+apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and hugged
+her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a few silly
+words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room fire, and rushed
+out into the garden and cut the last poor lingering autumn roses, and,
+returning, cast them into her lap. And we talked hard about the roses;
+and I told her which were Madame Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de
+Salisbury, and which Frau Karl Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady
+Hillingdon. We did not refer at all to unhappy things.
+
+It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the veil of
+her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any fool could
+have divined it. Together with far less shattering of idols has many a
+woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor Doria's case it was
+not only the shattering of idols.
+
+"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I can't
+go on living here for ever."
+
+"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and you're only
+just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets. Why do you want
+to go?"
+
+We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp morning and
+the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their leaves around us in
+a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen lay sodden on the grass
+borders. Here and there a surviving blossom of antirrhinum swaggered
+among its withered brethren as if to maintain the illusion of summer. A
+partridge or two whirred across the path from copse to meadow. The
+gentle sadness of the autumn day had moved her to discourse on the
+mutability of mundane things. Hence, by chain of association, I suppose,
+her sudden remark.
+
+"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the dreamy
+peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such a long
+time--for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad pet--biting the
+hand that fed me."
+
+I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.
+
+"It's true. While the three of you--you and Barbara and Jaffery--were
+doing for me what has never been done for another human being, I was all
+the time snarling and snapping. I can't make out how you can bear the
+sight of me." She clenched her hands and straightened her arms down
+tense. "The thought of it scorches me," she cried suddenly.
+
+"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we understood it
+all. How could we blame you?"
+
+We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods to whom
+human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion on which to
+tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the father of lies. I
+am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was a warm-hearted
+philanthropist, who has never received due credit, and that the devil
+having seized hold of his discovery perverted it to his own diabolical
+uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing that devils, whether they
+promote ancient Gehennas or modern companies, have been doing since the
+world began.
+
+"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The horrible
+things I said and did--the ghastliness of it--"
+
+"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let this
+mere fringe of tragedy worry you."
+
+She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most
+unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.
+
+"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening irritation?
+The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it doesn't kill. And for
+some reason"--she threw out her little gloved hands--"the big thing
+hasn't killed me--it has paralysed me. The springs of feeling"--she
+clutched her bosom--"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I
+can't explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone
+through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up
+altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you call
+it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for the
+torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an appealing
+touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean to go on in this
+wild way. I thought I had a better hold on myself."
+
+"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to one who
+has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of Adrian."
+
+She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the gravel path.
+I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a few paces, before
+either of us spoke.
+
+"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to unburden. There
+never was an Adrian."
+
+"There was indeed," said I, warmly.
+
+"Yours. Not mine."
+
+"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.
+
+She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great eyes
+gleamed black ice.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+I went straight to bed-rock.
+
+"He was the father of your dead child," said I.
+
+Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the drive. "I
+can only thank God that the child didn't live."
+
+Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to hold
+Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till now when I
+heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know that she had
+never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate directness.
+
+"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.
+
+"I am as God made me."
+
+"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake--in order to get you."
+
+She dismissed the argument with a gesture.
+
+"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable torment of
+those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at creation."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we turned
+and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:
+
+"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain out,--his when he
+was alive--and mine now. The thought of it will freeze my soul for all
+eternity. I can't tell you what I feel." She cast out her hands
+imploringly to the autumn fields. "I pity him as I would pity some one
+remote from me--a criminal whom I might have seen done to death by awful
+tortures. It's a matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all
+the understanding. But I can't find the pardon."
+
+"That will come," said I.
+
+"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."
+
+Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to argue
+about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her point of
+view, she was mercilessly right.
+
+"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all this time
+I've been living, first on stolen property and now on charity--Jaffery's
+charity--and he hasn't even had a word of thanks. Quite the contrary."
+Again she laughed the shrill, dead laugh. "You see, I must go home--to
+my father's--I'm strong enough now--and start my life, such as it is,
+all over again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money.
+Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."
+
+"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's not the
+man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you don't like to
+keep the money--I appreciate your feelings--you can devote it to
+philanthropic purposes."
+
+"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this fraud--this false
+reputation--to go on forever?"
+
+"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by throwing
+such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody living were
+suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's no reason to
+blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."
+
+"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the secret?" she
+asked anxiously.
+
+"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else," said I.
+
+"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things public,
+I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the disgrace."
+
+"To poor Adrian," said I.
+
+She flashed a quick, defiant glance.
+
+"To me."
+
+"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He
+sinned--the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it. He's
+expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not yours,
+that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so irrevocably wrapped up
+in him"--I pursued my advantage--"that you feel yourself a partner in
+his guilt. Which means that you love him still."
+
+She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her shoulder. Then,
+all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an agony of sobs and
+tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and put my arm round her
+and let her sob herself out.
+
+After that we did not speak of Adrian.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous voyage.
+
+     "Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us
+     Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to all.
+
+     "JAFFERY."
+
+Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in his
+proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading than to
+make a détour through London. Rooms were got ready. In the one destined
+for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of trunks which the Great
+Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time. The next day I took the car
+to Reading and waited for the train.
+
+From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a moment
+afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier, redder
+than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook me in his
+lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and Liosha all rocked
+and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and, before I could recover,
+Liosha threw her arms round my neck and kissed me. A porter who picked
+up my hat restored me to mental equipoise. Then I looked at them, and
+anything more splendid in humanity than that simple, happy pair of
+gigantic children I have never seen in my life. I, too, felt the
+laughter of happiness swell in my heart, for their gladness at the sight
+of me was so true, so unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed
+aloud foolishly. It is good to be loved, especially when you've done
+nothing particular to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two
+loved me.
+
+"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.
+
+"Magnificent," said I.
+
+She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a gipsy
+swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health. When I had
+parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of soft increase
+in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh had hardened down
+into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her splendour. And there
+seemed to be more authority in her radiant face and a new masterfulness
+and a quicker intelligence in her brown eyes. I noticed that it was she
+who first broke away from the clamour of greeting and gave directions as
+to the transport of their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail
+of his eye; then turned to me with a bass chuckle.
+
+"We're a sort of Jaff Chayne and Co., according to her, and she thinks
+she's managing director. Ho! ho! ho!" He put his arm round my shoulder
+and suddenly grew serious. "How's everybody?"
+
+"Flourishing," said I.
+
+"And Doria?"
+
+"At Northlands."
+
+"She knows I'm coming?"
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+Liosha joined us, accompanied by a porter, carrying their exiguous
+baggage. We walked to the exit, without saying much, and settled
+ourselves in the limousine, my guests in the back seat, I on one of the
+little chairs facing them. We started.
+
+"My dear old chap," said I, leaning forward. "I've got something to tell
+you. I didn't like to write about it. But it has got to be told, and I
+may as well get it over now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a subdued and half-scared Jaffery who greeted Barbara and Susan
+at our front door. The jollity had gone out of him. He was nothing but a
+vast hulk filled with self-reproach. It was his fault, his very grievous
+and careless fault for having postponed the destruction of the papers,
+and for having left them loose and unsecured in his rooms. He all but
+beat his breast. If Doria had died of the shock his would be the blame.
+He saluted Barbara with the air of one entering a house of mourning.
+
+"You mustn't look so woe-begone," she said. "Something like this was
+bound to happen. I have dreaded it all along--and now it has happened
+and the earth hasn't come to an end."
+
+We stood in the hall, while Franklin divested the visitors of their
+outer wraps and trappings.
+
+"And, Liosha," Barbara continued, throwing her arms round as much of
+Liosha as they could grasp--she had already kissed her a warm
+welcome--"it's a shame, dear, to depress you the moment you come into
+the place. You'll wish you were at sea again."
+
+"I guess not," said Liosha. "I know now I'm among folks who love me.
+Isn't that true, Susan?"
+
+"Daddy loves you and mummy loves you and I adore you," cried Susan.
+
+Whereupon there was much hugging of a spoiled monkey.
+
+We went upstairs. At the drawing-room door Barbara gave me one of her
+queer glances, which meant, on interpretation, that I should leave her
+alone with Jaffery for a few minutes so that she could pour the balm of
+sense over his remorseful soul, and that in the meantime it would be
+advisable for me to explain the situation to Liosha. Aloud, she said,
+before disappearing:
+
+"Your old room, Liosha, dear--you'll find everything ready."
+
+In order to carry out my wife's orders, I had to disentangle Susan from
+Liosha's embrace and pack her off rueful to the nursery. But the promise
+to seat her at lunch between the two seafarers brought a measure of
+consolation.
+
+"Come into the library, Liosha," said I, throwing the door open. I
+followed her and settled her in an armchair before a big fire; and then
+stood on the hearthrug, looking at her and feeling rather a fool. I
+offered her refreshment. She declined. I commented again on her fine
+physical appearance and asked her how she was. I drew her attention to
+some beautiful narcissi and hyacinths that had come from the greenhouse.
+The more I talked and the longer she regarded me in her grave, direct
+fashion, the less I knew how to tell her, or how much to tell her, of
+Doria's story. The drive had been a short one, giving time only for a
+narration of the facts of the discovery. Liosha, although accepting my
+apology, had sat mystified; also profoundly disturbed by Jaffery's
+unconcealed agitation. Her life with him during the past four months had
+drawn her into the meshes of the little drama. For her own sake, for
+everybody's sake, we could not allow her to remain in complete
+ignorance. . . . I gave her a cigarette and took one myself. After the
+first puff, she smiled.
+
+"You want to tell me something."
+
+"I do. Something that is known only to four people in the world--and
+they're in this house."
+
+"If you tell me, I guess it'll be known only to five," said Liosha.
+
+To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to insult
+truth itself.
+
+"All right," said I. "You'll be the fifth and last." And then, as simply
+as I could, I told her all there was to know. She grasped the literary
+details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found afterwards that the
+long months of the voyage had not been entirely taken up with the
+cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there had been long
+stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things under heaven, and
+aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her mental horizon had
+broadened prodigiously through constant association with a cultivated
+man. . . . When I reached the point in my story where Jaffery gave up
+the Persian expedition, she gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips
+worked in their familiar quiver.
+
+"He must have loved her to do that," she said in a low voice.
+
+I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous affair, the
+more was I convinced that it would he better for her to understand
+clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria. You see, I knew all along,
+as all along I hope I have given you to understand--ever since the day
+when she asked him to beat her with a golf-stick--that the poor girl
+loved Jaffery, heart and soul. I knew also that she made for herself no
+illusions as to Jaffery's devotion to Doria. On that point her words to
+me at Havre had left me in no doubt whatever. But since Havre all sorts
+of extraordinary things had happened. There had been their intimate
+comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few
+months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards
+Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional
+subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel to tell her of
+the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man
+she loved and the other woman. But her unflinching bravery and her great
+heart demanded it. And as I told her, walking nervously about the room,
+she followed me with her steadfast eyes.
+
+"So that's why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me."
+
+"I suppose so," said I.
+
+"If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her out of
+the window."
+
+"I dare say. But you wouldn't have been Jaff Chayne."
+
+"That's true," she assented. "No man like him ever walked the earth. And
+how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I can't imagine."
+
+"Her head was full of another man, you see."
+
+"Oh yes, I see," she said with a touch of contempt. "And such a man! You
+were fond of him I know. But he was a sham. He used to look on me, I
+remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the Zoological Gardens. It
+never occurred to him that I had sense. He was a fool."
+
+Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she had ever
+expressed an opinion regarding Adrian. We had assumed that, having
+touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy figure in her
+mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned us, she had viewed
+him with entire indifference. But her keen feminine brain had picked out
+the fatal flaw in poor Adrian's character, the shallow glitter that made
+us laugh and the want of vision from which he died.
+
+"Go on," said Liosha.
+
+I continued. In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for setting
+Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She understood. False
+gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped, had for a time the
+mystifying power of concealing their falsehood. And during that time
+they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus, flaming Joves to poor
+mortal Semeles. Liosha quite understood.
+
+I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard,
+uncomprehending, in the car.
+
+"And that's how it stands," said I.
+
+I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I turned aside
+and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for a while, resting
+her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her deep tones:
+
+"Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!"
+
+Tears flooded her eyes.
+
+"By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature."
+
+"I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose. "I guess I must have a
+clean up before lunch," and she made for the door.
+
+I looked at my watch. "You just have time," said I.
+
+I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in front of the
+fire. Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the serene young
+barbarian who had come to us two and a half years before blandly
+characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she would not let her buy
+a stocked chicken incubator and take it to the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie
+wolf from the noble Great Dane. Her nature had undergone remarkable
+developments. As Jaffery had prophesied at Havre, she treated things in
+a big way, and she had learned restraint, not the restraint of
+convention, for not a convention would have stopped her from doing what
+she chose, but the restraint of self-discipline. And she had learned
+pity. A year ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every
+woman's reason for hating. A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in
+her heart. If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family
+had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks before
+her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt whether she
+would have cut off one single head.
+
+A tap at the window aroused me. It was Jaffery in the rain, which had
+just begun to fail, seeking admittance. I let him in.
+
+"This is an awful business, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+From which I gather that for once Barbara's soothing had been of little
+avail.
+
+"Have you seen Doria yet?" I asked.
+
+He shook his head. "Barbara is with her. She's coming in to lunch."
+
+At the anti-climax, I smiled. "That shews she's not quite dead yet."
+
+But to Jaffery it was no smiling matter. "Look here, Hilary," he said
+hoarsely, "don't you think it would be better for me to cut the whole
+thing and go away right now?"
+
+"Go away--?" I stared at him. "What for?"
+
+"Why should I force myself on that poor, tortured child? Think of her
+feelings towards me. She must loathe the sound of my name."
+
+"Jaff Chayne," said I, "I believe you're afraid of mice."
+
+He frowned. "What the blazes do you mean?"
+
+"You're in a blue funk at the idea of meeting Doria."
+
+"Rot," said Jaffery.
+
+But he was.
+
+Franklin summoned us to luncheon. We went into the drawing-room where
+the rest of our little party were assembled, Susan and her governess,
+Liosha, Barbara and Doria. Doria stepped forward valiantly with
+outstretched hand, looking him squarely in the face.
+
+"Welcome back, Jaffery. It's good to see you again."
+
+Jaffery grew very red and bending over her hand muttered something into
+his beard.
+
+"You'll have to tell me about your wonderful voyage."
+
+"There was nothing so wonderful about it," said Jaffery.
+
+That was all for the moment, for Barbara hustled us into the
+dining-room. But the terrible meeting that both had dreaded was over.
+Nobody had fainted or shed tears; it was over in a perfectly well-bred
+way. At lunch Susan, between Liosha and Jaffery, became the centre of
+attention and saved conversation from constraint.
+
+To Doria, who had lingered at Northlands, in order to lose no time in
+setting herself right with Jaffery,--her own phrase--the ordinary table
+small-talk would have been an ordeal. As it was, she sat on my left,
+opposite Liosha, lending a polite ear to the answers to Susan's eager
+questions. The child had not received such universal invitation to
+chatter at mealtime since she had learned to speak. But, in spite of her
+inspiring assistance, a depressing sense of destinies in the balance
+pervaded the room, and we were all glad when the meal came to an end.
+Susan, refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to
+the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship _Vesta_. Barbara
+and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I, after a
+perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for a while on
+different things, the child's robustious health, the garden, the
+weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal fashion as
+assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought downstairs. At last
+Barbara said:
+
+"I must go and write some letters."
+
+And I said: "I'm going to have my afternoon nap."
+
+Both the others cried out with simultaneous anxiety and scarlet faces:
+
+"Oh, don't go, Barbara, dear."
+
+"Can't you cut the sleep out for once?"
+
+"I must!" said Barbara.
+
+"No," said I.
+
+And we left our nervous ogre and our poor little elf to fight out
+between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps it was
+cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come to mutual
+understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had the afternoon
+before them. It was pouring with rain. They had nothing else to do. In
+order that they should be undisturbed, Barbara had given orders that we
+were not at home to visitors. Besides, we were actuated by motives not
+entirely altruistic. If I seem to have posed before you as a
+noble-minded philanthropist, I have been guilty of careless
+misrepresentation. At the best I am but a not unkindly, easy-going man
+who loathes being worried. And I (and Barbara even more than myself) had
+been greatly worried over our friends' affairs for a considerable
+period. We therefore thought that the sooner we were freed from these
+worries the better for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts
+against their joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.
+
+"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going to
+happen?"
+
+"She'll marry him, of course."
+
+"She won't," said I.
+
+"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."
+
+"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that young
+woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against Jaffery."
+
+"If," she said. "But you haven't."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"All right," said Barbara.
+
+We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to become of
+Liosha?"
+
+Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."
+
+"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall be."
+
+"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.
+
+"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
+drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity and
+realised failure; the woman--as it seemed to me, smoking reflectively in
+my library armchair, for sleep was impossible--the woman in the calm of
+desperation. The man who had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to
+shield her from harm, who lavished on her all the devotion and
+tenderness of his simple heart; the woman who owed him her life, and,
+but for fool accident and her own lack of faith in him, would still be
+owing him the twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not
+met, or exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
+John's Wood flat, when he had told her that he loved her, and by the
+sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the ground;
+since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and contempt,
+when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed him into fury;
+when, white with realisation that the secret was about to escape from
+his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had gone blindly into the
+street. Now facing each other for the first time after many months, they
+remembered all too poignantly that parting. The barren rascal who stood
+before her was the man who had written every word of Adrian's triumphant
+second novel, and had given it to her out of the largesse of his love.
+And he had borne with patience all her imperious strictures and had
+obeyed all her crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her--quixotically
+fooled her, it is true--but fooled her as never woman had been fooled in
+the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren rascal, all the
+time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never had he uttered one
+disparaging word. And he had secured the insertion of a life of Adrian
+in the next supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography; and he
+had helped her to set up that staring white marble monument in Highgate
+Cemetery, with its lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested
+in such a Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through
+Hell-fire. No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No
+wonder the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
+And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she was
+alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she stood face to
+face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose loving hand had
+unwittingly kindled that burning torment?
+
+The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had plucked
+out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she regard the
+man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt, the contempt of
+pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I could not take my mind
+off those two closeted together. What was happening? Again and again I
+went over the whole disastrous story. What would be the end? I wearied
+myself for a long, long time with futile speculation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering lip and
+tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by my side and
+buried her head on the arm of the chair and began to cry wretchedly.
+
+"My dear, my dear," said I, bewildered by this tornado of misery. "My
+dear," said I, putting an arm round her shoulders, "what is the matter?"
+
+"I'm a fool," she wailed. "I know I'm a fool, but I can't help it. I
+went in there just now. I didn't know they were there. Susan's music
+mistress came and I had to go out of the nursery--and I went into the
+drawing-room. Oh, it's hard, Hilary, dear--it's damned hard."
+
+"My poor Liosha," said I.
+
+"There doesn't seem to be a place in the world for me."
+
+"There's lots of places in our hearts," I said as soothingly as I could.
+But the assurance gave her little comfort. Her body shook.
+
+"I wish the cargo had killed me," she said.
+
+I waited for a little, then rose and made her sit in my chair. I drew
+another near her.
+
+"Now," said I. "Tell me all about it."
+
+And she told me in her broken way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She walked into the drawing-room thinking to find Barbara. Instead, she
+sailed into a surging sea of passion. Doria crouched on a sofa hiding
+her face--the flame, poor little elf in the Nessus shirt, had been
+lapping her round, and with both hands outstretched she motioned away
+Jaffery who stood over her.
+
+"Don't touch me, don't touch me! I couldn't bear it!" she cried; and
+then, aware of Liosha's sudden presence, she started to her feet. Liosha
+did not move. The two women glared at each other.
+
+"What do you mean by coming in here?" cried Doria.
+
+"You had better leave us, Liosha," said Jaffery sombrely.
+
+But Liosha stood firm. The spurning of Jaffery by Doria struck a chord
+of the heroic that ran through her strange, wild nature. If this man she
+loved was not for her, at least no other woman should scorn him. She
+drew herself up in her full-bosomed magnificence.
+
+"Instead of telling him not to touch you, you little fool, you ought to
+fall at his feet. For what he has done for you, you ought to steal the
+wide world and give it to him. And you refuse your footling little
+insignificant self. If you had a thousand selves, they wouldn't be
+enough for him."
+
+"Stop!" shouted Jaffery.
+
+She wheeled round on him. "Hold your tongue, Jaff Chayne. I guess I've
+the right, if anybody has, to fix up your concerns."
+
+"What right?" Doria demanded.
+
+"Never mind." She took a step forward. "Oh, no; not that right! Don't
+you dare to think it. Jaff Chayne doesn't care a tinker's curse for me
+that way. But I have a right to speak, Jaff Chayne. Haven't I?"
+
+Jaffery's mind went back to the Bedlam of the slithering cargo. He
+turned to Doria.
+
+"Let her say what she wants."
+
+"I want nothing!" cried Liosha. "Nothing for myself. Not a thing! But I
+want Jaff Chayne to be happy. You think you know all he has done for
+you, but you don't. You don't know a bit. They offered him thousands of
+pounds to go to Persia, and he would have come back a great man, and he
+didn't go because of you."
+
+"Persia? I never heard of that," said Doria.
+
+"The job didn't suit me," Jaffery growled.
+
+"And you told her all about it?"
+
+"No, he didn't," said Liosha. "Hilary told me to-day."
+
+"I take your word for it," said Doria coldly. "It only shows that I'm
+under one more obligation than I thought to Mr. Chayne."
+
+From what I could gather, the word "obligation" infuriated Liosha. She
+uttered an avalanche of foolish things. And Jaffery (for what is man in
+a woman's battle but an impotent spectator?) looked in silence from one:
+to the other; from the little ivory, black and white Tanagra figure to
+the great full creature whom he had seen, but a few days ago, with the
+salt spray in her hair and the wind in her vestments. And at last she
+said:
+
+"If I were a woman like you and wouldn't marry a man who loved me like
+Jaff Chayne, and who had done for me all that Jaff Chayne had done for
+you, I'd pray to God to blast me and fill my body with worms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then she burst out of the room, and, like a child seeking
+protection, came and threw herself down by my side.
+
+What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me up till
+three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he poured into
+his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in embarrassing
+silence, until Doria spoke:
+
+"She misunderstood--when she came in. Quite natural. It was your touch
+of pity that I couldn't bear. I wasn't repelling you, as she seemed to
+think."
+
+"It cut me to the heart to see you in such grief," said Jaffery. "I only
+thought of comforting you."
+
+"I know." She sat on a chair by the window and looked out at the pouring
+rain.
+
+"Tell me," she said, without turning round, "what did she mean by saying
+she had the right to interfere in your affairs?"
+
+"She saved my life at the risk of her own," replied Jaffery.
+
+"I see. And you saved my life once; so perhaps you have rights over
+me."
+
+"That would be damnable!" he cried. "Such a thought has never entered my
+head."
+
+"It is firmly fixed in mine," said Doria.
+
+She sat for a while, with knitted brows deep in thought. Jaffery stood
+dejectedly by the fire, his hands in his pockets. Presently she rose.
+
+"Besides saving my life and doing for me the things I know, there must
+be many things you've done for me that I never heard of--like this
+sacrifice of the Persian expedition. Liosha was right. I ought to go on
+my knees to you. But I can't very well do that, can I?"
+
+"No," replied Jaffery, scrabbling at whiskers and beard. "That would be
+stupid. You mustn't worry about me at all. Whatever I did for you, my
+dear, I'd do a thousand times over again!"
+
+"You must have your reward, such as it is. God knows you have earned
+it."
+
+"Don't talk about rights or rewards," said he. "As I've said repeatedly
+this afternoon, I've forfeited even your thanks."
+
+"And I've said I forgive you--if there's anything to forgive," she
+smiled, just a little wearily. "So that is wiped out. All the rest
+remains. Let us bury all past unhappiness between us two."
+
+"I wish we could. But how?"
+
+"There is a way."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"You make things somewhat hard for me. You might guess. But I'll tell
+you. Liosha again was right. . . . If you want me still, I will marry
+you. Not quite yet; but, say, in six months' time. You are a
+great-hearted, loyal man"--she continued bravely, faltering under his
+gaze--"and I will learn to love you and will devote my life to making
+you happy."
+
+She glanced downwards with averted head, awaiting some outcry of
+gladness, surrendering herself to the quick clasp of strong arms. But
+no outcry came, and no arms clasped. She glanced up, and met a stricken
+look in the man's eyes.
+
+For Jaffery could not find a word to utter. A chill crept about his
+heart and his blood became as water. He could not move; a nightmare
+horror of dismay held him in its grip. The inconceivable had happened.
+He no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted his thoughts for
+over two years, for whom he had made quixotic sacrifices, for whom he
+had made a mat of his great body so that she should tread stony paths
+without hurt to her delicate feet, was his now for the taking--nobly
+self-offered--and with all the world as an apanage he could not have
+taken her. The phenomenon of sex he could not explain. Once he had
+desired her passionately. The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired
+his blood. He had fought with beasts. He had wrestled with his soul in
+the night watches. He had loved her purely and sweetly, too. But now, as
+she stood before him, recoiling a little from his fixed stare of pain,
+though she had suffered but little loss in beauty and in that of her
+which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that he
+desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the idealised love
+he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams. Not that he would not
+still do her infinite service. The pathos of her broken life moved him
+to an anguish of pity. For her soothing he would give all that life held
+for him, save one thing--which was no longer his to give. Another man
+glib of tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an
+abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He could
+not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life. His nature was
+too primitive. He could only stare in spellbound affright at the icy
+barrier that separated him from Doria.
+
+"I see," she said tonelessly, moving slowly away from him. "Your
+feelings have changed. I am sorry."
+
+Then he found power of motion and speech. He threw out his arms. "My
+God, dear, forgive me!" he groaned, and sat down and clutched his head
+in his hands. She returned to the window and looked out at the rain. And
+there she fought with her woman's indignant humiliation. And there was a
+long, dead silence, broken only by the faintly heard notes of Susan's
+piano in the nursery and the splash of water on the terrace.
+
+Presently all that was good in Doria conquered. She crossed the room and
+laid a light hand on Jaffery's head. It was the finest moment in her
+life.
+
+"One can't help these things. I know it too well. And no hearts are
+broken. So it's all for the best."
+
+He groaned again. "I didn't know. I'd like to shoot myself."
+
+She smiled, conscious of feminine superiority. "If you did, I should
+die, too. I tell you, it's all for the best. I love you as I never loved
+you before. I usen't to love you a little bit. But I should have had to
+learn to love you as a wife--and it might have been difficult."
+
+A moment afterwards she appeared in the library, serenely
+matter-of-fact. Liosha started round in her chair and looked defiantly
+at her rival.
+
+"Would both of you mind coming into the drawing-room for a minute?"
+
+We followed her. She held the door, which I was about to shut, and left
+it open. Before Jaffery had time to rise at our entrance, I caught sight
+of him sitting as she had left him, great clumps of his red hair
+sticking through his fingers. His face was a picture of woe. I can
+imagine nothing more like it than that of a conscience smitten lion.
+Doria ran her arm through mine and kept me near the doorway.
+
+"I've asked Jaffery to marry me," she said, in a steady voice, "and he
+doesn't want to. It's because he loves a much better woman and wants to
+marry her."
+
+Then while Jaffery and Liosha gasped in blank astonishment, she swung me
+abruptly out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
+
+"There," she said, and flung up her little bead, "what do you think of
+that?"
+
+"Magnificent," said I, "but bewildering. Did Jaffery really--?"
+
+In a few words, she put me into possession of the bare facts.
+
+"I'm not sorry," she added. "Sometimes I love Jaffery--because he's so
+lovable. Sometimes I hate him--because--oh, well--because of Adrian. You
+can't understand."
+
+"I'm not altogether a fool," said I.
+
+"Well, that's how it is. I would have worn myself to death to try to
+make him happy. You believe me?"
+
+"I do indeed, my dear," I replied. And I replied with unshakable
+conviction. She was a woman who once having come under the domination of
+an idea would obey it blindly, ruthlessly, marching straight onwards,
+looking neither to right nor left. The very virtue that had made her
+overcruel to him in the past would have made her overkind to him in the
+future. Unwittingly she had used a phrase startlingly true. She would
+have worn herself to death in her determination to please. Incidentally
+she would have driven him mad with conscientious dutifulness.
+
+"He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she said. "But
+we needn't speak of it any more. I'm not the woman for him. Liosha is.
+It's all over. I'm glad. At any rate, I've made atonement--at least,
+I've tried--as far as things lay in my power."
+
+I took both her hands, greatly moved by her courage.
+
+"And what's going to happen to you, my dear?"
+
+"Now that all this is straight," she replied, with a faint smile, "I can
+turn round and remake my life. You and Barbara will help."
+
+"With all our hearts," said I.
+
+"It won't be so hard for you, ever again, I promise. I shall be more
+reasonable. And the first favour I'll ask you, dear Hilary, is to let me
+go this afternoon. It would be a bit of a strain on me to stay."
+
+"I know, my dear," I said. "The car is at your service."
+
+"Oh, no! I'll go by train."
+
+"You'll do as you're told, young woman, and go by car."
+
+At this rubbishy speech, the tears, for the first time, came into her
+eyes. She pulled down my shoulders--I am rather lank and tall--and
+kissed me.
+
+"You're a dear," she said, and went off in search of Barbara.
+
+I returned to my library, rang the bell, and gave orders for the
+chauffeur to stand at Mrs. Boldero's disposal. Then I sat down at a
+loose end, very much like a young professional man, doctor or
+estate-agent, waiting for the next client. And like the young
+professional man at a loose end, I made a pretence of looking through
+papers. Presently I became aware that I only had to open a window in
+order to summon a couple of clients at once. For there in the gathering
+November dusk and in the rain--it had ceased pouring, but it was
+drizzling, and therefore it was rain--I saw our pair of delectable
+savages strolling across the wet, sodden lawn, in loverlike proximity,
+for all the world as though it were a flowery mead in May. I might have
+summoned them, but it would have been an unprofessional thing to do.
+Instead, I drew my curtains and turned on the light, and continued to
+wait. I waited a long time. At last Barbara rushed in.
+
+"Doria's ready."
+
+"You've heard all about it?" She nodded. "I said there would be no
+marriage," I remarked blandly.
+
+"You said she wouldn't marry him. I said she would. And so she would, if
+he had let her. I know you're prepared to argue," she said, rather
+excitedly, "but it's no use. I was right all the time."
+
+I yielded.
+
+"You're always right, my dear," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell you
+about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the
+drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still sore,
+and childishly anxious that I should not account him a traitor and a
+scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human touch, told me, as I
+have already stated, over and over again, until I yawned for weariness
+in the small hours of the morning, what had taken place in his
+staggering interview with Doria; but as regards Liosha, he was shyly
+evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a very simple affair. She had told
+me bluntly that when the two men, Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the
+scene of Balkan desolation in which she was the central figure, Jaffery
+was the one who caused her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way
+she had loved him ever since that extraordinary moment. And though
+Jaffery has never confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as
+Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, _sans le savoir_, so, without knowing it,
+was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from Northlands in
+Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. _Quien sabe?_ But he imagined
+himself to be in love with a moonbeam. And the moonbeam shot like a
+glamorous, enchanted sword between him and Liosha, and kept them apart
+until the moment of dazed revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam
+was merely a pale, earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien
+to his every instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from
+the goddess of his idolatry.
+
+[Illustration: There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as
+war correspondent. Liosha is there, too.]
+
+That is how I explain--and I have puzzled my head into aching over any
+other possible explanation--the attitude of Jaffery towards Liosha on
+the _Vesta_ voyage. Well, my conjectures are of not much value. I have
+done my best to put the facts, as I know them, before you; and if you
+are interested in the matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's
+content. "Look here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my
+mind to new conditions, "what about your new novel?"
+
+He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you going to
+finish it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born novelist?"
+
+"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"
+
+"I don't," said I.
+
+He walked about the library in his space--occupying way.
+
+"I'm going to tear the damned thing up! I'm never going to write a novel
+again. I cut it out altogether. It's the least I can do for her."
+
+"Isn't that rather quixotic?" I asked.
+
+"Suppose it is. What have you to say against it?"
+
+"Nothing," said I.
+
+"Well, keep on saying it," replied Jaffery, with the steel flash in his
+eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were married. Our vicar performed the ceremony. I gave the bride
+away. Liosha revealed the feminine kink in her otherwise splendid
+character by insisting on the bridal panoply of white satin, veil and
+orange blossoms. I confess she looked superb. She looked like a Valkyr.
+A leather-visaged war correspondent, named Burchester, whom I had never
+seen before, and have not seen since, acted as best man. Susan, tense
+with the responsibilities of office, was the only bridesmaid. Mrs. Jupp
+(late Considine) and her General were our only guests. Doria excused
+herself from attendance, but sent the bride a travelling-case fitted
+with a myriad dazzling gold-stoppered bottles and a phantasmagoria of
+gold-mounted toilette implements.
+
+And then they went on their honeymoon. And where do you think they went?
+They signed again on the steamship _Vesta_. And Captain Maturin gave
+them his cabin, which is more than I would have done, and slept, I
+presume, in the dog-hole. And they were as happy as the ship was
+abominable.
+
+Now, as I write, there is a war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is
+there as the correspondent of _The Daily Gazette_. Liosha is there, too,
+as the inseparable and peculiarly invaluable companion of Jaffery
+Chayne. They live impossible lives. But what has that got to do with you
+or me? They like it. They adore it. A more radiantly mated pair the
+earth cannot produce. Their two-year-old son is learning the practice of
+the heroic virtues at Cettinje, while his parents loaf about
+battlefields in full eruption.
+
+"Poor little mite!" says Barbara.
+
+But I say:
+
+"Lucky little Pantagruel!"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jaffery
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2005 [EBook #14669]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAFFERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<div class="figcenter"><a name="Frontispiece" id=
+"Frontispiece"></a> <a href="images/001.jpg"><img src=
+"images/001.jpg" width="45%" alt="" title="" /></a><br />
+<b>It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with<br />
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (<i><a href="#page165">See
+page 165</a></i>)</b>
+<br /></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h1>JAFFERY</h1>
+<h3>BY</h3>
+<h2>WILLIAM J. LOCKE</h2>
+<div class="center">ILLUSTRATIONS BY<br />
+F. MATANIA<br />
+<br />
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY<br />
+<br />
+1915<br />
+<br />
+Press of<br />
+J.J. Little &amp; Ives Company<br />
+New York, U.S.A.</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>TO MY WIFE</h2>
+<p>This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial
+affection I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many
+happy hours and many dreams that we have shared.</p>
+<p>You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago,
+with the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I
+wrote. You remember the excitement of ending it before the
+Christmas of 1913; so that we could start with free consciences,
+early in the New Year, on our Egyptian journey.</p>
+<p><i>C'est bien loin, tout cela</i>! War overtook it in its serial
+course; and now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an
+expression of the moods and fancies almost of a past
+incarnation.</p>
+<p>These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to
+people our home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real,
+as big-hearted as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet
+sometimes they seem still to live. . . . While correcting the final
+proofs we have been tempted to modify the end, to bring the story
+of Jaffery more or less up to date; but we have felt that any
+addition would be out of key, so far are we from that happy
+Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last words.</p>
+<p>Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over
+there, across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his
+soldier's work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And
+don't you feel that one day he will come again and we shall hear
+his mighty voice thundering across the lawn. . . ?</p>
+<p>W.J.L.</p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<div class="center"><a href="#CHAPTER_I"><b>CHAPTER I</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_II"><b>CHAPTER II</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_III"><b>CHAPTER III</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IV"><b>CHAPTER IV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_V"><b>CHAPTER V</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VI"><b>CHAPTER VI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VII"><b>CHAPTER VII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_VIII"><b>CHAPTER VIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_IX"><b>CHAPTER IX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_X"><b>CHAPTER X</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XI"><b>CHAPTER XI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XII"><b>CHAPTER XII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIII"><b>CHAPTER XIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIV"><b>CHAPTER XIV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XV"><b>CHAPTER XV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVI"><b>CHAPTER XVI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVII"><b>CHAPTER XVII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII"><b>CHAPTER XVIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XIX"><b>CHAPTER XIX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XX"><b>CHAPTER XX</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXI"><b>CHAPTER XXI</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXII"><b>CHAPTER XXII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII"><b>CHAPTER XXIII</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV"><b>CHAPTER XXIV</b></a><br />
+<a href="#CHAPTER_XXV"><b>CHAPTER XXV</b></a></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<div class="center">
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td align='right'>Facing</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>&nbsp;</td>
+<td align='right'>Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>extraordinary sureness and gentleness</td>
+<td align='right'><i><a href=
+"#Frontispiece">Frontispiece</a></i></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i064.jpg">64</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i080.jpg">78</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i190.jpg">186</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>"Go! You're nothing but a brute"</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i234.jpg">228</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i308.jpg">300</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>heap of a woman</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i325.jpg">316</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td>as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too</td>
+<td align='right'><a href="#i361.jpg">350</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="center">THE<br />
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE<br />
+YEAR-BOOK<br />
+<br />
+A <i>bon-mot</i> for each day in<br />
+every year, selected from<br />
+this popular author's works.<br />
+<br />
+<i>Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net</i></div>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+<p>I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend,
+Jaffery Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following
+account of that dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say
+that I have been egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A
+man of my somewhat urbane and dilettante temperament does not do
+these things without being worried into them. I had the
+inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my wife), and she agreed, at
+the time, dutifully, that I ought to record our friend Jaffery's
+doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the first suggestion,
+the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the "egging on" is
+merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene
+insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge,
+all the facts of the story&mdash;although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian
+Boldero and poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the
+imbroglio, counted themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor
+wretch (a man must get home somewhere), was in the nursery; and
+that, finally, if she had been taught English grammar and spelling
+at school, she would have dispensed entirely with my pedantic
+assistance and written the story herself. Anyhow, man-like, I am
+broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't very much matter.
+Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I know they are
+one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so futile a
+thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
+self-appointed and fantastic task.</p>
+<p>But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that
+if it had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
+half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
+confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only
+to a man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to
+a man. On the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister
+women and her brother men which, but for her, would never reach a
+man's ears. So by combining the information obtained from our
+family encyclop&aelig;dia under the feminine heading of China with
+that obtained under the masculine heading of Philosophy, I can,
+figuratively speaking, like the famous student, issue my treatise
+on Chinese Philosophy.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago,
+when the parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves
+wantonly to the sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as
+I sat at my table, with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which
+I caught with the tail of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance,
+my quiet outlook on greenery and colour was obscured by a human
+form. I may mention that my study-table is placed in the bay of a
+window, on the ground floor. It is a French window, opening on a
+terrace. Beyond the parapet of the terrace, the garden, with its
+apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its lawn, its beds of tulips,
+its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts of other pleasant
+things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron railings
+separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow, when
+she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
+in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious
+cow. Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I
+digress. . . .</p>
+<p>I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife.
+She looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair
+<i>blond comme les bl&eacute;s</i>, and her mocking cornflower blue
+eyes, and her mutinous mouth, which has never yet (after all these
+years) assumed a responsible parent's austerity. She wore a fresh
+white dress with coquettish bits of blue about the bodice. In her
+hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper, the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i>, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.</p>
+<p>"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"</p>
+<p>She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal
+of spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and
+laburnum, that I put down my pen and I smiled.</p>
+<p>"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."</p>
+<p>"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand
+Meeting, next month, of the Hafiz Society."</p>
+<p>"I wonder," said Barbara, "why Hafiz always makes me think of
+sherbet."</p>
+<p>I remonstrated, waving a dismissing hand.</p>
+<p>"If that's all you've got to say&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"But it isn't."</p>
+<p>She crossed the threshold, stepped in, swished round the end of
+my long oak table and took possession of my library. I wheeled
+round politely in my chair.</p>
+<p>"Then, what is it?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Have you read the paper this morning?"</p>
+<p>"I've glanced through the <i>Times</i>," said I.</p>
+<p>She patted her handful of bedclothing and let fall a blanket and
+a bed-spread or two&mdash;("Look at my beautifully, orderly folded
+<i>Times</i>," said I, with an indicatory gesture) She looked and
+sniffed&mdash;and shed Vallombrosa leaves of the <i>Daily
+Telegraph</i> about the library until she had discovered the page
+for which she was searching. Then she held a mangled sheet before
+my eyes.</p>
+<p>"There!" she cried, "what do you think of that?"</p>
+<p>"What do I think of what?" I asked, regarding the acre of
+print.</p>
+<p>"Adrian Boldero has written a novel!"</p>
+<p>"Adrian?" said I. "Well, my dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is
+capable of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He
+might write a sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth
+or steal the tin cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be
+still the same beautiful, charming, futile Adrian."</p>
+<p>Barbara pished and insisted. "But this is apparently a wonderful
+novel. There's a whole column about it. They say it's the most
+astounding book published in our generation. Look! A work of
+genius."</p>
+<p>"Rubbish, darling," said I, knowing my Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Take the trouble to read the notice," said Barbara, thrusting
+the paper at me in a superior manner.</p>
+<p>I took it from her and read. She was right. Somebody calling
+himself Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond
+Gate," which a usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to
+be a work of genius. He sketched the outline of the story,
+indicated its peculiar wonder. The review impressed me.</p>
+<p>"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else&mdash;not our
+Adrian."</p>
+<p>"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"</p>
+<p>"Thousands," said I.</p>
+<p>She pished again and tossed her pretty head.</p>
+<p>"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all
+about it."</p>
+<p>She departed through the library door into the recesses of the
+house where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of
+my presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied
+my thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the
+more I read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of
+"The Diamond Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same
+person.</p>
+<p>You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom
+Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after
+the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one
+another's shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the
+quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals
+and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed
+with admirable lack of reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged
+one another pretty accurately and remained devoted friends. There
+were other men, of course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and
+each of us had our little separate circle; we did not form a mutual
+admiration society and advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive,
+Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a
+quiet way, we recognised our quadruple union of hearts, and talked
+amazing rubbish and committed unspeakable acts of lunacy and
+dreamed impossible dreams in a very delightful, and perhaps
+unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our middle and late
+thirties&mdash;all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien
+grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He was
+the son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to
+talk to us of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as
+though they were haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied
+him! And he was forever writing plays which he read to us; which
+plays, I remember, were always on the verge of being produced by
+Irving. We believed in him firmly. He alone of the little crew had
+a touch of genius.</p>
+<p>Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and
+would certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to
+discipline and, because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from
+the University at the beginning of his third year, certainly did
+not show a sign of it. Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote
+poems for the Cambridge Review, and became Vice-President of the
+Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy waistcoats, and shuddered
+at Dickens because his style was not that of Walter Pater. For
+myself, Hilary Freeth&mdash;well&mdash;I am a happy nonentity. I
+have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
+accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few
+founder's shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium,
+enable me to gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the
+other three mattered. They were definite&mdash;Jaffery, blatantly
+definite; Adrian Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively
+definite; Tom Castleton, romantically definite. And poor old Tom
+was dead. Dear, impossible, feckless fellow. He took a first class
+in the Classical Tripos and we thought his brilliant career was
+assured&mdash;but somehow circumstances baffled him; he had a
+terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking pupils, acting,
+free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the meanwhile,
+died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He secured
+a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
+us&mdash;Jaffery and Adrian and I&mdash;saw him off at Southampton.
+He never reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old
+Tom!</p>
+<p>So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking
+out at my Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to
+the old days and then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I
+flourished, a comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing
+something idiotically desperate somewhere or the other&mdash;he was
+a war-correspondent by trade (as regular an employment as that of
+the maker of hot-cross buns), and a desperado by
+predilection&mdash;I had not heard from him for a year; and now
+Adrian&mdash;if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
+he&mdash;had written an epoch-making novel.</p>
+<p>But Adrian&mdash;the precious, finnikin Adrian&mdash;how on
+earth could he have written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond
+doubt he was a clever fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the
+Law Tripos and had done well in his Bar examination. But after
+fourteen years or so he was making twopence halfpenny per annum at
+his profession. He made another three-farthings, say, by selling
+elegant verses to magazines. He dined out a great deal and spent
+much of his time at country houses, being a very popular and
+agreeable person. His other means of livelihood consisted of an
+allowance of four hundred a year made him by his mother. Beyond the
+social graces he had not distinguished himself. And now&mdash;</p>
+<p>"It <i>is</i> Adrian," cried my wife, bursting into the library.
+"I knew it was. He has had several other glorious reviews which we
+haven't seen. Isn't it splendid?"</p>
+<p>Her eyes danced with loyalty and gladness. Now that I too knew
+it was our Adrian I caught her enthusiasm.</p>
+<p>"Splendid," I echoed. "To think of old Adrian making good at
+last! I'm more than glad. Telephone at once, dear, for a copy of
+the book."</p>
+<p>"Adrian is bringing one with him. He's coming down to dine and
+stay the night. He said he had an engagement, but I told him it was
+rubbish, and he's coming."</p>
+<p>Barbara had a despotic way with her men friends, especially with
+Adrian and Jaffery, who, each after his kind, paid her very pretty
+homage.</p>
+<p>"And now, I've got a hundred things to do, so you must excuse
+me," said Barbara&mdash;for all the world as if I had invited her
+into my library and was detaining her against her will.</p>
+<p>My reply was smilingly ironical. She disappeared. I returned to
+Hafiz. Soon a bumble-bee, a great fellow splendid in gold and black
+and crimson, blundered into the room and immediately made furious
+racket against a window pane. Now I can't concentrate my mind on
+serious things, if there's a bumble-bee buzzing about. So I had to
+get up and devote ten minutes to persuading the dunderhead to leave
+the glass and establish himself firmly on the piece of paper that
+would waft him into the open air and sunlight. When I lost sight of
+him in the glad greenery I again came back to my work. But two
+minutes afterwards my little seven year old daughter, rather the
+worse for amateur gardening, and holding a cage of white mice in
+her hand, appeared on the threshold, smiled at me with refreshing
+absence of apology, darted in, dumped the white mice on an open
+volume of my precious Turner Macan's edition of Firdusi, and
+clambering into my lap and seizing pencil and paper, instantly
+ordained my participation in her favourite game of "head, body and
+legs."</p>
+<p>An hour afterwards a radiant angel of a nurse claimed her for
+purposes of ablution. I once more returned to Hafiz. Then Barbara
+put her head in at the door.</p>
+<p>"Haven't you thought how delighted Doria will be?"</p>
+<p>"I haven't," said I. "I've more important things to think
+about."</p>
+<p>"But," said Barbara, entering and closing the door with soft
+deliberation behind her and coming to my side&mdash;"if Adrian
+makes a big success, they'll be able to marry."</p>
+<p>"Well?" said I.</p>
+<p>"Well," said she, with a different intonation. "Don't you
+see?"</p>
+<p>"See what?"</p>
+<p>It is wise to irritate your wife on occasion, so as to manifest
+your superiority. She shook me by the collar and stamped her
+foot.</p>
+<p>"Don't you care a bit whether your friends get married or
+not?"</p>
+<p>"Not a bit," said I.</p>
+<p>Barbara lifted the Macan's Firdusi, still suffering the
+desecration of the forgotten cage of white mice, onto my manuscript
+and hoisted herself on the cleared corner of the table.</p>
+<p>"Doria is my dearest friend. She did my sums for me at school,
+although I was three years older. If it hadn't been for us, she and
+Adrian would never have met."</p>
+<p>"That I admit," I interrupted. "But having started on the path
+of crime we're not bound to pursue it to the end."</p>
+<p>"You're simply horrid!" she cried. "We've talked for years of
+the sad story of these two poor young things, and now, when there's
+a chance of their marrying, you say you don't care a bit!"</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, rising, "what with you and Adrian and a
+bumble-bee and the child and two white mice, and now Doria, my
+morning's work is ruined. Let us go out into the garden and watch
+the starlings resting in the walnut trees. Incidentally we might
+discuss Doria and Adrian."</p>
+<p>"Now you're talking sense," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So we went into the garden&mdash;and discussed the formation
+next autumn of a new rose-bed.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>By the afternoon train came Adrian, impeccably vestured and
+feverish with excitement. Two evening papers which he brandished
+nervously, proclaimed "The Diamond Gate" a masterpiece. The book
+had been only out a week&mdash;(we country mice knew nothing of
+it)&mdash;and already, so his publisher informed him, repeat orders
+were coming in from the libraries and distributing agents.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind, my publisher, declares it's going to be the biggest
+thing in first novels ever known. And though I say it as shouldn't,
+dear old Hilary,"&mdash;he clapped me on the shoulder&mdash;"it's a
+damned fine book."</p>
+<p>I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his
+manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a
+smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had
+conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured
+me in the shade. At one leap he had mounted to planes beyond our
+dreams. All this his attitude betokened. He removed the hand from
+my shoulder and flourished it in a happy gesture.</p>
+<p>"My fortune's made," he cried.</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow," I asked, "why have you sprung this
+surprise on us? I had no idea you were writing a novel."</p>
+<p>He laughed. "No one had. Not even Doria. It was on her account I
+kept it secret. I didn't want to arouse possible false hopes. It's
+very simple. Besides, I like being a dark horse. It's exciting.
+Don't you remember how paralysed you all were when I got my First
+at Cambridge? Everybody thought I hadn't done a stroke of
+work&mdash;but I had sweated like mad all the time."</p>
+<p>This was quite true, the sudden brilliance of the end of
+Adrian's University career had dazzled the whole of his
+acquaintance. Barbara, impatient of retrospect, came to the
+all-important point.</p>
+<p>"How does Doria take it?"</p>
+<p>He turned on her and beamed. He was one of those dapper,
+slim-built men who can turn with quick grace.</p>
+<p>"She's as pleased as Punch. Gave it to old man Jornicroft to
+read and insisted on his reading it. He's impressed. Never thought
+I had it in me. Can't see, however, where the commercial value of
+it comes in."</p>
+<p>"Wait till you show him your first thumping cheque," sympathised
+my wife.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to," he exclaimed boyishly. "I might have done it
+this afternoon. Wittekind was off his head with delight and if I
+had asked him to give me a bogus cheque for ten thousand to show to
+old man Jornicroft, he would have written it without a murmur."</p>
+<p>"How much did he really write a cheque for this afternoon?" I
+asked, knowing (as I have said before) my Adrian.</p>
+<p>Barbara looked shocked. "Hilary!" she remonstrated.</p>
+<p>But Adrian laughed in high good humour. "He gave me a hundred
+pounds on account."</p>
+<p>"That won't impress Mr. Jornicroft at all," said I.</p>
+<p>"It impressed my tailor, who cashed it, deducting a quarter of
+his bill."</p>
+<p>"Do you mean to say, my dear Adrian," I questioned, "that you
+went to your tailor with a cheque for a hundred pounds and said, `I
+want to pay you a quarter of what I owe you, will you give me
+change?'"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"But why didn't you pass the cheque through your banking account
+and post him your own cheque?"</p>
+<p>"Did you ever hear such an innocent?" he cried gaily. "I wanted
+to impress him, I did. One must do these things with an air. He
+stuffed my pockets with notes and gold&mdash;there has never been
+any one so all over money as I am at this particular
+minute&mdash;and then I gave him an order for half-a-dozen suits
+straight away."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" I cried aghast. "I've never had six suits of clothes
+at a time since I was born."</p>
+<p>"And more shame for you. Look!" said he, drawing my wife's
+attention to my comfortable but old and deliberately unfashionable
+raiment. "I love you, my dear Barbara, but you are to blame."</p>
+<p>"Hilary," said my wife, "the next time you go to town you'll
+order half-a-dozen suits and I'll come with you to see you do it.
+Who is your tailor, Adrian?"</p>
+<p>He gave the address. "The best in London. And if you go to him
+on my introduction&mdash;Good Lord!"&mdash;it seemed to amuse him
+vastly&mdash;"I can order half-a-dozen more!"</p>
+<p>All this seemed to me, who am not devoid of a sense of humour
+and an appreciation of the pleasant flippancies of life, somewhat
+futile and frothy talk, unworthy of the author of "The Diamond
+Gate" and the lover of Doria Jornicroft. I expressed this opinion
+and Barbara, for once, agreed with me.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Let us be serious. In the first place you oughtn't to
+allude to Doria's father as 'old man Jornicroft.' It isn't
+respectful."</p>
+<p>"But I don't respect him. Who could? He is bursting with money,
+but won't give Doria a farthing, won't hear of our marriage, and
+practically forbids me the house. What possible feeling can one
+have for an old insect like that?"</p>
+<p>"I've never seen any reason," said Barbara, who is a brave
+little woman, "why Doria shouldn't run away and marry you."</p>
+<p>"She would like a shot," cried Adrian; "but I won't let her. How
+can I allow her to rush to the martyrdom of married misery on four
+hundred a year, which I don't even earn?"</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch. "It's time, my friends," said I, "to dress
+for dinner. Afterwards we can continue the discussion. In the
+meanwhile I'll order up some of the '89 Pol Roger so that we can
+drink to the success of the book."</p>
+<p>"The '89 Pol Roger?" cried Adrian. "A man with '89 Pol Roger in
+his cellar is the noblest work of God!"</p>
+<p>"I was thinking," Barbara remarked drily, "of asking Doria to
+spend a few days here next week."</p>
+<p>"All I can say is," he retorted, with his quick turn and smile,
+"that you are the Divinity Itself."</p>
+<p>So, a short time afterwards, a very happy Adrian sat down to
+dinner and brought a cultivated taste to the appreciation of a now,
+alas! historical wine, under whose influence he expanded and told
+us of the genesis and the making of "The Diamond Gate."</p>
+<p>Now it is a very odd coincidence, one however which had little,
+if anything, to do with the curious entanglement of my friend's
+affairs into which I was afterwards drawn, but an odd coincidence
+all the same, that on passing from the dining room with Adrian to
+join Barbara in the drawing room, I found among the last post
+letters lying on the hall table one which, with a thrill of
+pleasure, I held up before Adrian's eyes.</p>
+<p>"Do you recognise the handwriting?"</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried he. "It's from Jaffery Chayne. And"&mdash;he
+scanned the stamp and postmark&mdash;"from Cettinje. What the deuce
+is he doing there?"</p>
+<p>"Let us see!" said I.</p>
+<p>I opened the letter and scanned it through; then I read it
+aloud.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Dear Hilary,</p>
+<br />
+<p>"A line to let you know that I'm coming back soon. I haven't
+quite finished my job&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"What was his job?"</p>
+<p>"Heaven knows," I replied. "The last time I heard from him he
+was cruising about the Sargasso Sea."</p>
+<p>I resumed my reading.</p>
+<p>"&mdash;for the usual reason, a woman. If it wasn't for women
+what a thundering amount of work a man could get through.
+Anyhow&mdash;I'm coming back, with an encumbrance. A wife. Not my
+wife, thank Olympus, but another man's wife&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Poor old devil!" cried Adrian. "I knew he would come a mucker
+one of these days!"</p>
+<p>"Wait," said I, and I read&mdash;</p>
+<p>"&mdash;poor Prescott's wife. I don't think you ever knew
+Prescott, but he was a good sort. He died of typhoid. Only quaggas
+and yaks and other iron-gutted creatures like myself can stand
+Albania. I'm escorting her to England, so look out for us. How's
+everybody? Do you ever hear of Adrian? If so, collar him. I want to
+work the widow off on him. She has a goodish deal of money and is a
+kind of human dynamo. The best thing in the world for Adrian."</p>
+<p>Adrian confounded the fellow. I continued&mdash;</p>
+<p>"Prepare then for the Dynamic Widow. Love to Barbara, the fairy
+grasshopper&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Who's that?"</p>
+<p>"My daughter, Susan Freeth. The last time he saw her, she was
+hopping about in a green jumper&mdash;Barbara would give you the
+elementary costume's commercial name."</p>
+<p>"&mdash;and yourself," I read. "By the way, do you know of a
+granite-built, iron-gated, portcullised, barbicaned, really
+comfortable home for widows?</p>
+<p>Yours, Jaffery."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Without waiting for comment from Adrian, I went with the letter
+into the drawing room, he following. I handed it to Barbara, who
+ran it through.</p>
+<p>"That's just like Jaffery. He tells us nothing."</p>
+<p>"I think he has told us everything," said I.</p>
+<p>"But who and what and whence is this lady?"</p>
+<p>"Goodness knows!" said I.</p>
+<p>"Therefore, he has told us nothing," retorted Barbara. "My own
+belief is that she's a Brazilian."</p>
+<p>"But what," asked Adrian, "would a lone Brazilian female be
+doing in the Balkans?"</p>
+<p>"Looking for a husband, of course," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>And like all wise men when staggered by serene feminine
+asseveration we bowed our heads and agreed that nothing could be
+more obvious.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+<p>Some weeks passed; but we heard no more of Jaffery Chayne. If he
+had planted his widow there, in Cettinje, and gone off to Central
+Africa we should not have been surprised. On the other hand, he
+might have walked in at any minute, just as though he lived round
+the corner and had dropped in casually to see us.</p>
+<p>In the meantime events had moved rapidly for Adrian. Everybody
+was talking about his book; everybody was buying it. The rare
+phenomenon of the instantaneous success of a first book by an
+unknown author was occurring also in America. Golden opinions were
+being backed by golden cash. Adrian continued to draw on his
+publishers, who, fortunately for them, had an American house.
+Anticipating possible alluring proposals from other publishers,
+they offered what to him were dazzling and fantastic terms for his
+next two novels. He accepted. He went about the world wearing
+Fortune like a halo. He achieved sudden fame; fame so widespread
+that Mr. Jornicroft heard of it in the city, where he promoted (and
+still promotes) companies with monotonous success. The result was
+an interview to which Adrian came wisely armed with a note from his
+publisher as to sales up to date, and the amazing contract which he
+had just signed. He left the house with a father's blessing in his
+ears and an affianced bride's kisses on his lips. The wedding was
+fixed for September. Adrian declared himself to be the happiest of
+God's creatures and spent his days in joy-sodden idleness. His
+mother, with tears in her eyes, increased his allowance.</p>
+<p>The book that created all this commotion, I frankly admit, held
+me spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most
+enthusiastic reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I
+had ever read. It was a modern high romance of love and pity, of
+tears iridescent with laughter, of strong and beautiful though
+erring souls; it was at once poignant and tender; it vibrated with
+drama; it was instinct with calm and kindly wisdom. In my humility,
+I found I had not known my Adrian one little bit. As the shepherd
+of old who had a sort of patronizing affection for the
+irresponsible, dancing, flute-playing, goat-footed creature of the
+woodland was stricken with panic when he recognised the god, so was
+I convulsed when I recognised the genius of my friend Adrian. And
+the fellow still went on dancing and flute-playing and I stared at
+him open-mouthed.</p>
+<p>Mr. Jornicroft, who was a widower, gave a great dinner party at
+his house in Park Crescent, in honour of the engagement. My wife
+and I attended, fishes somewhat out of water amid this brilliant
+but solid assembly of what it pleased Barbara to call
+"merchantates." She expressed a desire to shrink out of the glare
+of the diamonds; but she wore her grandmother's pearls, and, being
+by far the youngest and prettiest matron present, held her own with
+the best of them. There were stout women, thin women, white-haired
+women, women who ought to have been white-haired, but were not;
+sprightly and fashionable women; but besides Barbara, the only
+other young woman was Doria herself.</p>
+<p>She took us aside, as soon as we were released from the formal
+welcome of Mr. Jornicroft, a thickset man with a very bald head and
+heavy black moustache.</p>
+<p>"The sight of you two is like a breath of fresh air. Did you
+ever meet with anything so stuffy?"</p>
+<p>Now, considering that all these prosperous folks had come to do
+her homage I thought the remark rather ungracious.</p>
+<p>"It's apt to be stuffy in July in London," I said.</p>
+<p>She laid her hand on Barbara's wrist and pointed at me with her
+fan.</p>
+<p>"He thinks he's rebuking me. But I don't care. I'm glad to see
+him all the same. These people mean nothing but money and
+music-halls and bridge and restaurants&mdash;I'm so sick of it. You
+two mean something else."</p>
+<p>"Don't speak sacrilegiously of restaurants, even though you are
+going to marry a genius," said I. "There is one in Paris to which
+Adrian will take you straight&mdash;like a homing bird."</p>
+<p>"Wherever Adrian takes me, it will be beautiful," she said
+defiantly.</p>
+<p>My little critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly
+adorable in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly
+made, with dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a
+sensitive nose and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried
+her head high and, for so diminutive a person, appeared vastly
+important.</p>
+<p>Adrian, released from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles,
+to greet us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion
+to Barbara and my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from
+strict monogamy dealt me a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is
+only one man in the universe worthy of being so regarded by a
+woman; and he is oneself. Every true-minded man will agree with me.
+She was inordinately proud of him; proud too of herself in that she
+had believed in him and given him her love long before he became
+famous. Adrian's eyes softened as they met the glance. He turned to
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"It's in a crowd like this that she looks so mysterious&mdash;an
+Elemental; but whether of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, I shall spend
+my life trying to discover."</p>
+<p>The faintest flush possible mounted to that pure ivory-white
+cheek of hers. She laughed and caught me by the arm.</p>
+<p>"I must carry you to Lady Bagshawe&mdash;you're taking her in to
+dinner. Her husband is Master of the Organ-Grinders'
+Company&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"No, no, Doria," said I.</p>
+<p>"&mdash;Well, it's some city company&mdash;I don't
+know&mdash;and she is a museum of diseases and a gazetteer of cure
+places. Now you know where you are."</p>
+<p>She led me to Lady Bagshawe. Soon afterwards we trooped down to
+dinner, during which I learned more of my inside than I knew
+before, and more of that of Lady Bagshawe than any of her most
+fervent adorers in their wildest dreams could have ever hoped to
+ascertain; during which, also, I endeavoured to convince an
+unknown, but agreeable lady on my left that I did not play polo,
+whereat, it seemed, her eight brothers were experts; and that Omar
+Khayyam was a contemporary not of the Prophet Isaiah, but of
+William the Conqueror. As for the setting&mdash;I am not an
+observant man&mdash;but I had an impression of much gold and silver
+and rare flora on the table, great gold frames enclosing (I doubt
+not) costly pictures on the walls, many desirable jewels on
+undesirable bosoms, strong though unsympathetic masculine faces,
+and such food and drink as Lucullus, poor fellow, did not live long
+enough to discover.</p>
+<p>When the ladies retired, and we moved up towards our host, I
+found myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile
+depravity of a gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard,
+the other arguing on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian
+loan. A vacant chair happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in
+hand, came round the table and sat down.</p>
+<p>"How are you getting on?"</p>
+<p>"Well," said I. "Very well." I sipped my port. I recognised
+Cockburn 1870.</p>
+<p>"You seemed rather at a loose end."</p>
+<p>"When one has 1870 port to drink," said I, "why fritter away its
+flavour in vain words?"</p>
+<p>"It is damned good port," Adrian admitted.</p>
+<p>"Earth holds nothing better," said I.</p>
+<p>We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us. I
+confess that I rather surrendered myself to the wine. A little
+taper for cigarettes happened to be in front of me; I held my glass
+in its light and lost myself in the wine's pure depths of mystery
+and colour; and my mind wandered to the lusty sunshine of
+"Lusitanian summers" that was there imprisoned. I inhaled its
+fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and spacious generosity. Wine,
+like bread and oil&mdash;"God's three chief words"&mdash;is a thing
+of itself&mdash;a thing of earth and air and sun&mdash;one of the
+great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the
+eyes of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern
+Italy has its fascination for me, in that it is essentially
+something apart from the dust and empty racket of the world; how
+much more then this radiant vintage suddenly awakened from its
+slumber in the darkness of forty years. So I mused, as I think an
+honest man is justified in musing, soberly, over a great wine, when
+suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's face. He too was musing; but
+musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed to have swept his face
+and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his half-emptied glass,
+with the short stem of which his fingers were nervously toying.
+There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine flowed over the
+cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came back,
+manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to Mr.
+Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
+wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as
+one might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee
+came and liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found
+myself in heart to heart conversation with my neighbour on the
+right, a florid, simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's
+Sheriff of the City of London, whose consuming ambition was to
+become a member of the Athen&aelig;um Club. When I informed him
+that I was privileged to enter that Valley of Dry Bones&mdash;my
+late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous Master of
+Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions, I
+think, before I was born&mdash;my sugar broker almost fell at my
+feet and worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were
+overrun with Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of
+episcopicide to no avail, he refused to be disillusioned. I told
+him that on the occasion of my last visit to the
+Megatherium&mdash;Thackeray, I explained&mdash;a Royal Academician,
+with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate "The
+Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the
+austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room
+story which was current at my preparatory school&mdash;and that in
+the library I ran into an equally desolate, though even less
+familiar Archdeacon, who seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and
+never let me go until he had impressed upon my mind the name and
+address of the only man in London who could cut clerical gaiters.
+But the simple child of sugar would have his way. There was but one
+Valhalla in London, and it was built by Decimus Burton.</p>
+<p>After that we joined the ladies for an unimportant half hour or
+so, and then Barbara and I took our leave. As we were motoring
+home&mdash;we live some thirty miles out of London&mdash;we
+discussed the dinner party, according to the way of married folks,
+home-bound after a feast, and I mentioned the trivial incident of
+Adrian and the broken glass. Why should his face have been so
+haggard when he had everything to make him happy?</p>
+<p>"He was thinking of Mr. Jornicroft's previous insulting
+behaviour."</p>
+<p>"How do you know?"</p>
+<p>"He told me," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I never knew Adrian to be seriously vindictive," said I.</p>
+<p>"It strikes me, my dear," replied Barbara, taking my hand, "that
+you are an old ignoramus."</p>
+<p>And this from a woman who actively glories in not knowing how
+many "r's" there are in "harassed."</p>
+<p>She nestled up to me. "We're not going abroad in August, are
+we?"</p>
+<p>"What?" I cried, "leave the English country during the only part
+of the year that is not 'deformed with dripping rains or withered
+by a frost'? Certainly not."</p>
+<p>"But we did last year, and the year before."</p>
+<p>"Pure accident. The year before, Susan was recovering from the
+measles and you had some pretty frocks which you thought would look
+lovely at Dinard. And last year you also had some frocks and
+insisted that Houlgate was the only place where Susan could avoid
+being stricken down by scarlet-fever."</p>
+<p>"Anyhow," said my wife, "we're not going away this year, for
+I've fixed up with Doria and Adrian to spend August at
+Northlands."</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me so at once? Why did you ask me whether
+we were going away?"</p>
+<p>"Because I knew we weren't," she answered.</p>
+<p>In putting two questions at the same time, I blundered. The
+first was a poser and might have elicited some interesting
+revelation of feminine mental process. In forlorn hope I repeated
+it.</p>
+<p>"Why, I've told you, stupid," said Barbara. "You've no objection
+to their coming, have you?"</p>
+<p>"Good Lord, no. I'm delighted."</p>
+<p>"From the way you've argued, any one would have thought you
+didn't want them."</p>
+<p>Outraged by the illogic, I gasped; but she broke into a
+laugh.</p>
+<p>"You silly old Hilary," she said. "Don't you see that Doria must
+get her trousseau together and Adrian must find a house or a flat,
+that has to be decorated and furnished, and the poor child hasn't a
+mother or any sensible woman in the world to look after her but
+me?"</p>
+<p>"I see," said I, "that you intend having the time of your
+life."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>My prevision proved correct. In August came the engaged couple
+and every day Barbara took them up to town and whirled them about
+from house-agent to house-agent until she found a flat to suit
+them, and then from emporium to emporium until she found furniture
+to suit the flat, and from raiment-vendor to raiment-vendor until
+she equipped Doria to suit the furniture. She used to return almost
+speechless with exhaustion; but pantingly and with the glaze of
+victory in her eyes, she fought all her battles o'er again and told
+of bargains won. In the meantime had it not been for Susan, I
+should have lived in the solitude of an anchorite. We spent much
+time in the garden which we (she less conscious of irony than I)
+called our desert island. I was Robinson Crusoe and she was Man
+Friday, and on the whole we were quite happy; perhaps I should have
+been happier in a temperature of 80&deg; in the shade if I had not
+been forced to wear the Polar bear rug from the drawing-room in
+representation of Crusoe's goatskins. I did suggest that I should
+be Robinson Crusoe's brother, who wore ordinary flannels, and that
+she should be Woman Wednesday. But Susan saw through the subterfuge
+and that game didn't work. One afternoon, however, Barbara,
+returning earlier than usual, caught us at it and expressing horror
+and indignation at the uses to which the bearskin was put,
+metaphorically whipped me and sent me to bed as being the elder of
+the naughty ones. After that we played at fairies in a glade, which
+was much cooler.</p>
+<p>It was in the evenings that I was loneliest; for then Barbara
+went early to bed, and the lovers strolled about together in the
+moonlight. With the intention, half-malicious, half-pitiful, of
+filling up my time, Doria taught me a new and complicated Patience.
+Then finally, when Doria, having spent a couple of polite minutes
+in the drawing-room, had retired, and when I was tired out from the
+strain of the day and half-asleep through weariness, Adrian would
+mix himself the longest possible brandy and soda, light the longest
+possible cigar and try to keep me up all night listening to his
+conversation.</p>
+<p>At last, one Friday evening, while I was engaged in my forlorn
+and unprofitable game, the butler entered the drawing-room with
+unperturbed announcement:</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne on the telephone, sir."</p>
+<p>I sent the card table flying amid the wreckage of my lay-out and
+rushed to the telephone.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! That you, Jaff?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, old man. Very much me. A devil of a lot of me. How are
+you?"</p>
+<p>His strong bass boomed through the receiver. I have always found
+a queer comfort in Jaffery's voice. It wraps you round about in
+thundering waves. We exchanged the commonplaces of delighted
+greeting. I asked:</p>
+<p>"When did you arrive?"</p>
+<p>"A couple of days ago."</p>
+<p>"Why on earth didn't you let me know at once?"</p>
+<p>I heard him laugh. "I'll tell you when I see you. By the way,
+can Barbara have me for the week-end?"</p>
+<p>This was like Jaffery. Most men would have asked me, taking
+Barbara for granted.</p>
+<p>"Barbara would have you for the rest of time," said I. "And so
+would Susan. I'll expect you by the 11 o'clock train."</p>
+<p>"Right," said he.</p>
+<p>"And, I say!"</p>
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+<p>"Talking of fair ladies&mdash;what about&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, Hell!" came Jaffery's great voice. "She's here right
+enough."</p>
+<p>"Where?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"The Savoy. So is Euphemia&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother
+as a little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape.</p>
+<p>"Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?"</p>
+<p>"She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears.</p>
+<p>"Why not bring her down with Euphemia?"</p>
+<p>"I want a couple of days off. I want a good quiet time, with no
+female women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as
+you know, I love to distraction."</p>
+<p>"But will Euphemia be all right with her?"</p>
+<p>I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the
+"problem" was.</p>
+<p>"Right as rain. Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow
+night to a lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City
+Temple on Sunday. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone
+system of Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and
+merciless. Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been
+allowed to converse further I might have told him that another
+female woman, Doria Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he
+might not have come. Jaffery was always a queer fish where women
+were concerned. Not a chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean
+fish, now hot, now cold. I have seen him shrink like a sensitive
+plant in the presence of an ingenue of nineteen and royster in
+Pantagruelian fashion with a mature member of the chorus of the
+Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly, a scared Joseph, from
+the allurements of the charming wife of a Right Honourable Sir
+Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in front of an
+obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street. I do
+not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating
+that my dear old Jaffery had no morals. He had&mdash;lots of them.
+He was stuffed with them. But what they were, neither he nor I nor
+any one else was ever able to define. As a general rule, however,
+he was shy of strange women, and to that category did Doria
+belong.</p>
+<p>When the lovers came in I told them my news. Adrian expressed
+extravagant delight. A little tiny cloud flitted over Doria's
+brow.</p>
+<p>"Shall I like him?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"You'll adore him," cried Adrian.</p>
+<p>"I'll try to, dear, because he seems to mean so much to you. Are
+you going up to town with us to-morrow?"</p>
+<p>"There's only a morning's fitting at a dressmaker&mdash;no place
+for me," he laughed. "I'll stay and welcome old Jaffery."</p>
+<p>Again the most transient of tiny little clouds. But I could not
+help thinking that if Jaffery had been a woman instead of a mere
+man, there would have been a thunderstorm.</p>
+<p>When we were alone Adrian threw himself into a chair.</p>
+<p>"Women are funny beings," he said. "I do believe Doria is
+jealous of old Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"You have every reason to be proud," said I, "of your
+psychological acumen."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+<p>A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of
+the train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of
+great sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his
+turn, shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck
+wondering heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself
+between us, linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down
+the quiet country platform. A porter followed with his
+suit-case.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"</p>
+<p>"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.</p>
+<p>"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople&mdash;you
+remember Robson of Pembroke&mdash;fussy little
+cock-sparrow&mdash;he'd just come from England and was full of it.
+You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"</p>
+<p>Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release
+himself and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub
+himself ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.</p>
+<p>"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the
+subway. "Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em.
+That's the pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives
+and families. I'm coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter.
+How are they?"</p>
+<p>I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station
+yard, where his eye fell upon a familiar object.</p>
+<p>"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"</p>
+<p>The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient,
+ancient car, the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment
+(together with the impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not
+allow me to sell. It had been a splendid thing in those far-off
+days. It kept me in health. It made me walk miles and miles along
+unknown and unfrequented roads. In the aggregate I must have spent
+months of my life doing physical culture exercises underneath it.
+You got into it at the back; it was about ten feet high, and you
+started it at the side by a handle in its midriff. But I loved it.
+It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and insulted
+it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go. But
+Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
+rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
+adventure.</p>
+<p>"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I
+don't keep a fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the
+donkey-cart. Get in and don't be so fastidious&mdash;unless you're
+afraid&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no
+attempt to enter the car.</p>
+<p>"Barbara gone away?"</p>
+<p>I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed
+by Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly
+unconcealed.</p>
+<p>"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
+business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."</p>
+<p>His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
+Northlands without Barbara&mdash;" He shook his head.</p>
+<p>We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though
+she choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were
+half way up the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who
+later on harnessed the donkey to her and pulled her into the
+motor-house. We dismounted, however, in the drive. A tiny figure in
+a blue smock came scuttling over the sloping lawn. The next thing I
+saw was the small blue patch somewhere in the upland region of
+Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth from him idiotic exclamations
+which are not worth chronicling, accompanied by a duet of bass and
+treble laughter. Then he set her astride of his bull neck and
+pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to hold.</p>
+<p>"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.</p>
+<p>She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish
+shock in her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an
+elephant with a robin on his head, unconscious of her weight. We
+mounted to the terrace in front of the house and having established
+my guests in easy chairs, I went indoors to order such drink as
+would be refreshing on a sultry August noon. When I returned I
+found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee, questioning Adrian, after
+the manner of a primitive savage, on the subject of "The Diamond
+Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity, dazzling our
+simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.</p>
+<p>"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked
+Jaffery. "Do you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a
+pen and jab it into a piece of paper, and&mdash;tchick!&mdash;up
+comes a golden sovereign every time he does it."</p>
+<p>Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she
+commanded.</p>
+<p>"I haven't got a pen," said he.</p>
+<p>"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
+Jaffery's knee.</p>
+<p>Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father
+of a feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I
+think, rather tactfully.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old
+daddy hasn't got one."</p>
+<p>"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have
+you got one?"</p>
+<p>"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a
+golden pen in your mouth."</p>
+<p>The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his
+face and a doll in his mouth&mdash;the Archangel Gabriel, commonly
+known as Gabs, and so termed on account of his archi-angelic
+disposition, a hideous mongrel with a white patch over one eye and
+a brown patch over the other, with the nose of a collie and the
+legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a fox-terrier, whose
+mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold assertion that
+he was a Zanzibar bloodhound&mdash;the lucky advent of this
+pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from
+the somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the
+rescue or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to
+it to explain the mystery of the golden pen.</p>
+<p>"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said
+I, waving a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic
+widow?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene
+and sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll
+tell you about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar
+way, showing two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between
+the hair on lip and chin.</p>
+<p>"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What
+were you doing in Albania, for instance?"</p>
+<p>"Prospecting," said he.</p>
+<p>"In what&mdash;gold, coal, iron?"</p>
+<p>"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of
+these days&mdash;and one of these days very soon&mdash;in the
+Balkans. From Scutari to Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming
+triangle&mdash;it's going to be a battlefield. The war
+correspondent who goes out there not knowing his ground will be a
+silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So poor old
+Prescott&mdash;you must know Prescott of Reuter's?&mdash;anyhow
+that was the chap&mdash;poor old Prescott and I went out exploring.
+When he pegged out with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his
+widow down at Cettinje where I have some pals, and started out
+again on my own. That's all."</p>
+<p>He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always
+had to provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his
+throat.</p>
+<p>"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your
+adventures," said Adrian.</p>
+<p>Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if
+you'll give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and
+white handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.</p>
+<p>But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and
+for the next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his
+wanderings. He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his
+experiences, even those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the
+laughter got into his speech, so that many amusing episodes were
+told in the roars of a hilarious lion.</p>
+<p>Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
+Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
+front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door,
+appeared to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and
+almost hugged her. And there they stood holding on to each other's
+hands and smiling into each other's faces and saying how well they
+looked, regardless of the fact that they were blocking the way for
+Doria, who remained in the car, I had to move them on with the
+reminder that they had the whole week-end for their effusions.
+Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to Doria then, for the first
+time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery blinked at her oddly as
+he held her little gloved fingers in his enormous hand. And,
+indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very striking object to
+come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's vision, with her
+chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath which her
+great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white face.</p>
+<p>She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then
+after a fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so
+much of you."</p>
+<p>He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze
+of admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's
+waist. The ladies went indoors to take off their things,
+accompanied by Adrian, who wanted a lover's word with Doria on the
+way. Jaffery followed her with his eyes until she had disappeared
+at the corner of the hall-stairs. Then he took me by the arm and
+led me up towards the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Doria Jornicroft," said I.</p>
+<p>"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my
+life."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I
+with a laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged
+to Adrian."</p>
+<p>He dropped my arm. "Do you mean&mdash;she's going to marry
+him?"</p>
+<p>"Next month," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not
+enlighten me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The
+most pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce
+didn't you tell me before?"</p>
+<p>"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought
+we would give you as long a respite as possible."</p>
+<p>"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that
+Adrian's fianc&eacute;e was knocking around I'd have lumped her in
+my heart with Barbara and Susie."</p>
+<p>"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.</p>
+<p>His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy
+old Adrian getting married!"</p>
+<p>"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get
+married. I'm married."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you&mdash;you were born to be married," he said
+crushingly.</p>
+<p>"And so are you," I retorted.</p>
+<p>"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in
+petticoats, whom I should have to swear to love, honour and
+obey&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears
+obedience."</p>
+<p>"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"</p>
+<p>His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
+adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her
+tail in the air and scampered away, in terror.</p>
+<p>"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor,
+you can always cut them when you like."</p>
+<p>"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends
+and makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I
+know 'em? They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to
+Rio."</p>
+<p>He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage
+as an institution. It was most useful and salutary&mdash;apparently
+because it provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions
+wherein to exist. The multitude of harmless, necessary males (like
+myself) were doomed to it. But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to
+which he belonged, whose untamable and omni-concupiscent essence
+kept them outside the dull conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen
+hundred women at once, scattered within the regions of the seven
+circumferential seas. He loved them all. Woman as woman was the joy
+of the earth. It was only the silly spectrum of civilisation that
+broke Woman up into primary colours&mdash;black, yellow, brunette,
+blonde&mdash;he damned civilisation.</p>
+<p>"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one
+would think you were a devil of a fellow."</p>
+<p>"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory,
+or rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of
+those men who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs
+with air, who must get out into the wilds if they're to
+live&mdash;God! I'd sooner be snowed up on a battlefield than smirk
+at a damned afternoon tea-party any day in the week! If I want a
+woman, I like to take her by her hair and swing her up behind me on
+the saddle and ride away with her&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"</p>
+<p>"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But
+that's my attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would
+be for me to tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of
+a thing in petticoats."</p>
+<p>"You're a blessed innocent," said I.</p>
+<p>Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined
+us on the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his
+philosophy, caught him by the shoulders and shook him in
+pain-dealing exuberance. Old Adrian was going to be married. He
+wished him joy. Yet it was no use his wishing him joy because he
+already had it&mdash;it was assured. That exquisite wonder of a
+girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially lucky devil. He,
+Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .</p>
+<p>"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to
+you," said I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and
+swung her up behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her.
+It's a little way Jaffery has."</p>
+<p>In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face,
+Jaffery grew red.</p>
+<p>"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy
+that he was.</p>
+<p>And I shut up&mdash;not because he commanded, but because
+Barbara, like spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at
+noontide, appeared on the terrace.</p>
+<p>Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy
+Jaffery and Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they
+should sit next each other. He helped the child to impossible
+viands, much to my wife's dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories
+of Bulgaria, somewhat to her puzzledom, but wholly to her delight.
+But when he proposed to fill her silver mug (which he, as
+godfather, had given her on her baptism) with the liquefied dream
+of Paradise that Barbara, <i>sola mortalium</i>, can prepare,
+consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and borage
+and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
+Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the
+crystal jug of joy poised in his hand.</p>
+<p>"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"</p>
+<p>"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your
+mother's hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child
+and fill up your own glass."</p>
+<p>"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
+Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer
+holiday!"</p>
+<p>At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing
+a handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to
+some cold beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he
+declined. No Christian butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After
+a longish absence he returned to the table with half the joint on
+his plate. Susan regarded it wide-eyed.</p>
+<p>"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an
+audible whisper.</p>
+<p>"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle
+Adrian, if I don't get enough to eat!"</p>
+<p>"And Aunt Doria?"</p>
+<p>Again he reddened&mdash;but he turned to Doria and bowed.</p>
+<p>"In my quality of ogre only&mdash;a <i>bonne bouche</i>," said
+he.</p>
+<p>It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan
+began the inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some
+dereliction with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to
+speak, hustled out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology
+for his Gargantuan appetite discoursed on the privations of travel
+in uncivilised lands. A lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine
+and a hazelnut for dinner. We were to fancy the infinite
+accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he devoured cold beef and
+talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof interest of one
+who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a new kind of
+hippopotamus.</p>
+<p>The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which
+faces due east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the
+elbow and swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which
+the remaining three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought
+he was out of earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My
+wife, with the responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe
+knitted in her brow, discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I,
+to whom the quality of the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his
+wife were to dry themselves and that of the sheets between which
+their housemaid was to lie, were matters of black and awful
+indifference, gave my more worthily applied attention to one of a
+new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its merits but
+lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
+pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when
+Jaffery's voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the
+discriminating nicety out of my head. I lazily shifted my position
+and watched the pair.</p>
+<p>"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic
+and all that," Jaffery was saying&mdash;his light word about an
+ogre at lunch was not a bad one; sitting side by side on the low
+parapet they looked like a vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine
+black-haired elf&mdash;she had taken off her hat&mdash;engaged in a
+conversation in which the elf looked very much on the
+defensive&mdash;"and you're always tracking down motives to their
+roots, and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of
+things&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual
+woman's nature, the blatant universalist has his points."</p>
+<p>"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like
+a dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against
+glass panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches
+off. Do you see what I'm driving at?"</p>
+<p>Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away
+his corona corona&mdash;a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and
+ninety-nine men out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had
+religiously preserved two inches of ash on his)&mdash;and hauled
+out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could not hear what she said. When
+she had finished, he edged a span nearer.</p>
+<p>"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple
+sort of savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian
+complications of feeling. I've had in my life"&mdash;he stuck pouch
+and pipe on the stone beside him&mdash;"I've had in my life just a
+few men I've loved&mdash;I don't count women&mdash;men&mdash;men
+I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one cares for
+people?"</p>
+<p>She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.</p>
+<p>"The latest was poor Prescott&mdash;he has just pegged
+out&mdash;you'll hear soon enough about Prescott. There was Tom
+Castleton&mdash;has Adrian told you about Castleton&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>Again she shook her head.</p>
+<p>"He will&mdash;of course&mdash;a wonder of a fellow&mdash;up
+with us at Cambridge. He's dead. There only remains Hilary, our
+host, and Adrian."</p>
+<p>As far as I could gather&mdash;for she spoke in the ordinary
+tones of civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression
+that he was whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest
+bull&mdash;as far as I could gather, she said:</p>
+<p>"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than
+Mr. Freeth and Adrian."</p>
+<p>"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't.
+If I was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no
+prospect of earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and
+say, 'Keep me for the rest of my life'&mdash;and they would do
+it"</p>
+<p>"And would you do the same for either of them?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and
+towered over her.</p>
+<p>"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
+children's children."</p>
+<p>He sat down again in confusion at having been led into
+hyperbole. But he took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands,
+somewhat to her alarm&mdash;for, in her world, she was not
+accustomed to gigantic males laying unceremonious hold of
+her&mdash;</p>
+<p>"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this&mdash;that
+if Adrian's wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go
+away and cut my throat"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
+willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends;
+whereupon he caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the
+terrace towards us, shouting out his news.</p>
+<p>"I've fixed it up with Doria"&mdash;he turned his head&mdash;"I
+can call you Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission&mdash;what else
+could she do? "We're going to be friends. And I say, Barbara,
+they'll want a wedding-present. What shall I give 'em? What would
+you like?"</p>
+<p>The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had
+followed demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for
+from the drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who
+marched up straight to Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"A lady to see you, sir"</p>
+<p>"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"</p>
+<p>He stared at Franklin, in dismay.</p>
+<p>"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put
+her down at the back entrance. She would not give her name."</p>
+<p>"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+<p>"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of
+a desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the
+slip."</p>
+<p>Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"</p>
+<p>Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:</p>
+<p>"The dynamic widow," said he.</p>
+<p>"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She
+has no business to come running after you like this. She must be
+taught manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"</p>
+<p>She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing,
+thereby demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her
+own house.</p>
+<p>Presently Franklin reappeared.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Prescott," said he.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+<p>That there should have been in the uncommon-tall young woman of
+buxom stateliness and prepossessing features, attired (to the mere
+masculine eye) in quite elegant black raiment&mdash;a thing called,
+I think, a picture hat, broad-brimmed with a sweeping ostrich
+feather, tickled my especial fancy, but was afterwards reviled by
+my wife as being entirely unsuited to fresh widowhood&mdash;what
+there should have been in this remarkable Junoesque young person
+who followed on the heels of Franklin to strike terror into
+Jaffery's soul, I could not, for the life of me, imagine. In the
+light of her personality I thought Barbara's <i>coup de
+th&eacute;&acirc;tre</i> rather cruel. . . . Of course Barbara
+received her courteously. She, too, was surprised at her outward
+aspect, having expected to behold a fantastic personage of comic
+opera.</p>
+<p>"I am very pleased to see you, Mrs. Prescott."</p>
+<p>Liosha&mdash;I must call her that from the start, for she exists
+to me as Liosha and as nothing else&mdash;shook hands with Barbara,
+making a queer deep formal bow, and turned her calm, brown eyes on
+Jaffery. There was just a little quarter-second of silence, during
+which we all wondered in what kind of outlandish tongue she would
+address him. To our gasping astonishment she said with an
+unmistakable American intonation: "Mr. Chayne, will you have the
+kindness to introduce me to your friends?"</p>
+<p>I broke into a nervous laugh and grasped her hand "Pray allow
+me. I am Mr. Freeth, your much honoured host, and this is my wife,
+and . . . Miss Jornicroft . . . and Mr. Boldero. Mr. Chayne has
+been deceiving us. We thought you were an Albanian."</p>
+<p>"I guess I am," said the lady, after having made four
+ceremonious bows, "I am the daughter of Albanian patriots. They
+were murdered. One day I'm going back to do a little murdering on
+my own account."</p>
+<p>Barbara drew an audible short breath and Doria instinctively
+moved within the protective area of Adrian's arm. Jaffery, with
+knitted brow, leaned against one of the posts supporting the old
+wistaria arbour and said nothing, leaving me to exploit the
+lady.</p>
+<p>"But you speak perfect English," said I.</p>
+<p>"I was raised in Chicago. My parents were employed in the
+stockyards of Armour. My father was the man who slit the throats of
+the pigs. He was a dandy," she said in unemotional tones&mdash;and
+I noticed a little shiver of repulsion ripple through Barbara and
+Doria. "When I was twelve, my father kind of inherited lands in
+Albania, and we went back. Is there anything more you'd like to
+know?"</p>
+<p>She looked us all up and down, rather down than up, for she
+towered above us, perfectly unconcerned mistress of the situation.
+Naturally we made mute appeal to Jaffery. He stirred his huge bulk
+from the post and plunged his hands into his pockets.</p>
+<p>"I should like to know, Liosha," said he, in a rumble like
+thunder, "why you have left my sister Euphemia and what you are
+doing here?"</p>
+<p>"Euphemia is a damn fool," she said serenely. "She's a freak.
+She ought to go round in a show."</p>
+<p>"What have you been quarrelling about?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"I never quarrel," she replied, regarding him with her calm
+brown eyes. "It is not dignified."</p>
+<p>"Then I repeat, most politely, Liosha&mdash;what are you doing
+here?"</p>
+<p>She looked at Barbara. "I guess it isn't right to talk of money
+before strangers."</p>
+<p>Barbara smiled&mdash;glanced at me rebukingly. I pulled forward
+a chair and invited the lady to sit&mdash;for she had been standing
+and her astonishing entrance had flabbergasted ceremonious
+observance out of me. Whilst she was accepting my belated courtesy,
+Barbara continued to smile and said:</p>
+<p>"You mustn't look on us as strangers, Mrs. Prescott. We are all
+Mr. Chayne's oldest and most intimate friends."</p>
+<p>"Do tell us what the row was?" said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Liosha took calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a
+pleasant-faced and by no means an antagonistic assembly&mdash;even
+Doria's curiosity lent her a semblance of a sense of
+humour&mdash;she relaxed her Olympian serenity and laughed a
+little, shewing teeth young and strong and exquisitely white.</p>
+<p>"I am here, Jaff Chayne," she said, "because Euphemia is a damn
+fool. She took me this morning to your big street&mdash;the one
+where all the shops are&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"My dear lady," said Adrian, "there are about a hundred miles of
+such streets in London."</p>
+<p>"There's only one&mdash;" she snapped her fingers, recalling the
+name&mdash;"only one Regent Street, I ever heard of," she replied
+crushingly. "It was Regent Street. Euphemia took me there to shew
+me the shops. She made me mad. For when I wanted to go in and buy
+things she dragged me away. If she didn't want me to buy things why
+did she shew me the shops?" She bent forward and laid her hand on
+Barbara's knee. "She must he a damn fool, don't you think so?"</p>
+<p>Said Barbara, somewhat embarrassed:</p>
+<p>"It's an amusement here to look at shops without any idea of
+buying."</p>
+<p>"But if one wants to buy? If one has the money to buy?&mdash;I
+did not want anything foolish. I saw jewels that would buy up the
+whole of Albania. But I didn't want to buy up Albania. Not yet. But
+I saw a glass cage in a shop window full of little chickens, and I
+said to Euphemia: 'I want that. I must have those chickens.' I
+said, 'Give me money to go in and buy them.' Do you know, Jaff
+Chayne, she refused. I said, 'Give me my money, my husband's money,
+this minute, to buy those chickens in the glass cage.' She said she
+couldn't give me my husband's money to spend on chickens."</p>
+<p>"That was very foolish of her," said Adrian solemnly, "for if
+there's one thing the management of the Savoy Hotel love, it's
+chicken incubators. They keep a specially heated suite of
+apartments for them."</p>
+<p>"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not.
+She knows less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She
+refused. I saw an automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me
+to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he will give me the money.' He asked where Mr.
+Jaff Chayne was. I said he was staying with Mr. Freeth, at
+Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not a fool like Euphemia. I
+remember. I left Euphemia standing on the sidewalk with her mouth
+open like that"&mdash;she made the funniest grimace in the
+world&mdash;"and the automobile brought me here to get some money
+to buy the chickens." She held out her hand to Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Confound the chickens," he cried. "It's the taxi I'm thinking
+of&mdash;ticking out tuppences, to say nothing of the mileage.
+Liosha," said he, in a milder roar, "it's no use thinking of buying
+chickens this afternoon. It's Saturday and the shops are shut. You
+go home before that automobile has ticked out bankruptcy and ruin.
+Go back to the Savoy and make your peace with Euphemia, like a good
+girl, and on Monday I'll talk to you about the chickens."</p>
+<p>She sat up straight in her chair.</p>
+<p>"You must take me somewhere else. I've got no use for
+Euphemia."</p>
+<p>"But where else can I take you?" cried Jaffery aghast.</p>
+<p>"I don't know. You know best where people go to in England.
+Doesn't he?" She included us all in a smile.</p>
+<p>"But you must go back to Euphemia till Monday, at any rate."</p>
+<p>"And she has arranged such a nice little programme for you,"
+said Adrian. "A lecture on Tolstoi to-night and the City Temple
+to-morrow. Pity to miss 'em."</p>
+<p>"If I saw any more of Euphemia, I might hurt her," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord!" said Jaffery. "But you must go somewhere." He turned
+to me with a groan. "Look here, old chap. It's awfully rough luck,
+but I must take her back to the Savoy and mount guard over her so
+that she doesn't break my poor sister's neck."</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"How far would you go?" Adrian asked politely, with the air of
+one seeking information.</p>
+<p>"Oh, shut up, you idiot," Jaffery turned on him savagely. "Can't
+you see the position I'm in?"</p>
+<p>"I'm very sorry you're angry, Jaff Chayne," said Liosha with a
+certain kind dignity. "But these are your friends. Their house is
+yours. Why should I not stay here with you?"</p>
+<p>"Here? Good God!" cried Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady
+manners.</p>
+<p>"The very thing," said I.</p>
+<p>Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I
+protested, growing warmer in our protestations as the argument
+continued. Nothing would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to
+entertain Mrs. Prescott. Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm.</p>
+<p>"But why shouldn't they have me? When a stranger asks for
+hospitality in Albania he is invited to walk right in and own the
+place. Is it refused in England?"</p>
+<p>"Strangers don't ask," growled Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It would make life much more pleasant if they did," said
+Barbara, smiling. "Mrs. Prescott, this bear of a guardian or
+trustee or whatever he is of yours, makes a terrible
+noise&mdash;but he's quite harmless."</p>
+<p>"I know that," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"He does what I tell him," the little lady continued, drawing
+herself up majestically beside Jaffery's great bulk. "He's going to
+stay here, and so will you, if you will so far honour us."</p>
+<p>Liosha rose and bowed. "The honour is mine."</p>
+<p>"Then will you come this way&mdash;I will shew you your
+room."</p>
+<p>She motioned to Liosha to precede her through the French window
+of the drawing-room. Before disappearing Liosha bowed again. I
+caught up Barbara.</p>
+<p>"My dear, what about clothes and things?"</p>
+<p>"My dear," she said, "there's a telephone, there's a taxi,
+there's a maid, there's the Savoy hotel, and there's a train to
+bring back maid and clothes."</p>
+<p>When Barbara takes command like this, the wise man effaces
+himself. She would run an Empire with far less fuss than most
+people devote to the running of a small sweet-stuff shop. I smiled
+and returned to the others. Jaffery was again filling his huge
+pipe.</p>
+<p>"I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>Adrian burst out laughing "But she's immense, your widow! The
+most refreshing thing I've seen for many a day. The way she clears
+the place of the cobwebs of convention! She's great. Isn't she,
+Doria?"</p>
+<p>"I can quite understand Mr. Chayne finding her an uncomfortable
+charge."</p>
+<p>"Thank you," said Jaffery, with rather unnecessary vehemence. "I
+knew you would be sympathetic." He dropped into a chair by her
+side. "You can't tell what an awful thing it is to be responsible
+for another human being."</p>
+<p>"Heaps of people manage to get through with it&mdash;every
+husband and wife&mdash;every mother and father."</p>
+<p>"Yes; but not many poor chaps who are neither father nor husband
+are responsible for another fellow's grown-up widow."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled. "You must find her another husband."</p>
+<p>"That's a great idea. Will you help me? Before I knew of
+Adrian's great good fortune, I wrote to Hilary&mdash;ho! ho! ho!
+But we must find somebody else."</p>
+<p>"Has she any money?" asked Doria, who smiled but faintly at the
+jocular notion of a Liosha-bound Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Prescott left her about a thousand a year. He was pretty well
+off, for a war-correspondent."</p>
+<p>"I don't think she'll have much difficulty. Do you know," she
+added, after a moment or two of reflection, "if I were you, I would
+establish her in a really first-class boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"Would that be a good way?" Jaffery asked simply.</p>
+<p>She nodded. "The best. She seems to have fallen foul of your
+sister."</p>
+<p>"The dearest old soul that ever lived," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"That's why. I'm sure I know your sister perfectly. The daughter
+of an Albanian patriot who used to kill pigs in Chicago&mdash;why,
+what can your poor sister do with her? Your sister is much older
+than you, isn't she?"</p>
+<p>"Ten years. How did you guess?"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled with feminine wisdom. "She's the gentlest maiden
+lady that ever was. It's only a man that could have thought of
+saddling her with our friend. Well&mdash;that's impossible. She
+would be the death of your sister in a week. You can't look after
+her yourself&mdash;that wouldn't be proper."</p>
+<p>"And it would be the death of me too!" said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"You can't leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the
+poor woman would die of boredom. The only thing that remains is the
+boarding-house."</p>
+<p>Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen
+Goth receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.</p>
+<p>"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."</p>
+<p>"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not
+displayed enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.</p>
+<p>So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on
+the mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
+exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective
+hearts. Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and
+hungry convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could
+hold her own; she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to
+the type for whom vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had
+made no vows, save of loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided
+they are kept, are perfectly consistent with a man's falling
+hopelessly, despairingly in love with his friend's affianced bride.
+And, as far as Barbara and myself have been able to make out, it
+was during this intimate talk that Jaffery fell in love with Doria.
+Of course, what the French call <i>le coup de foudre</i>, the
+thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had first beheld Doria
+alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise the stupefying
+effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at her little
+feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.</p>
+<p>The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a
+hitherto undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed,
+beetle-browed ogress of a wife. Why he married her has never been
+told. Why the mortal male whom we meet for the first time at a
+dinner party has married the amazing mortal female sitting
+somewhere on the other side of the table is an insoluble mystery,
+and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we expect to know
+about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of matrimony is
+concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The ogre
+marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
+love&mdash;and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised
+as humdrum, there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever
+told again in the world worth the hearing&mdash;we have quite a
+different condition of affairs. Did you ever hear of an ogre
+sighing himself to a shadow for love of a gap-toothed ogress? No.
+He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending his ogress-wife to
+Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin princess. There
+he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a wraith of a
+creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and stars. He
+stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy, feathery
+tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand. Its
+touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his
+arm. He has a mighty respect for her. He could take her up in his
+fingers and eat her like a quail&mdash;the one satisfactory method
+of eating a quail is unfortunately practised only by
+ogres&mdash;but he does not want to eat her. He goes on his knees,
+and invites her to chew any portion of him that may please her
+dainty taste. In short he makes the very silliest ass of himself,
+and the elfin princess, who of course has come into contact with
+the Real Beautiful Young Man of the Story Books, won't have
+anything to do with the Ogre; and if he is more rumbustious than he
+ought to be, generally finds a way to send him packing. And so the
+poor Ogre remains, planted there. The Fairy Tales, I remark again,
+are very true in demonstrating that the Ogre loves the elf and not
+the Ogress. But all the same they are deucedly unsympathetic
+towards the poor Ogre. The only sympathetic one I know is Beauty
+and the Beast; and even that is a mere begging of the question, for
+the Beast was a handsome young nincompoop of a Prince all the
+time!</p>
+<p>Barbara says that this figurative, allusive adumbration of
+Jaffery's love affair is pure nonsense. Anything less like an ogre
+than our overgrown baby of a friend it would he impossible to
+imagine. But I hold to my theory; all the more because when Adrian
+and I returned from our stroll round the garden, we found Jaffery
+standing over her, legs apart, like a Colossus of Rhodes, and
+roaring at her like a sucking dove. I noticed a scared,
+please-don't-eat-me look in her eyes. It was the ogre (trying to
+make himself agreeable) and the princess to the life.</p>
+<p>Presently tea was brought out, and with it came Barbara, a quiet
+laugh about her lips, and Liosha, stately and smiling. My wife to
+put her at her ease (though she had displayed singularly little
+shyness), after dealing with maid and taxi, had taken her over the
+house, exhibited Susan at tea in the nursery, and as much of
+Doria's trousseau as was visible in the sewing-room. The
+approaching marriage aroused her keen interest. She said very
+little during the meal, but smiled embarrassingly on the engaged
+pair. Jaffery stood glumly devouring cucumber sandwiches, till
+Barbara took him aside.</p>
+<p>"She's rather a dear, in spite of everything, and I think you're
+treating her abominably."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grew scarlet beneath the brick-coloured glaze.</p>
+<p>"I wouldn't treat any woman abominably, if I could help it."</p>
+<p>"Well, you can help it&mdash;" and taking pity on him, she
+laughed in his face. "Can't you take her as a joke?"</p>
+<p>He glanced quietly at the lady. "Rather a heavy one," he
+said.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow come and talk to us and be civil to her. Imagine she's
+the Vicar's wife come to call."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's elementary sense of humour was tickled and he broke
+out into a loud guffaw that sent the house cat, a delicate
+mendicant for food, scuttling across the lawn. The sight of the
+terror-stricken animal aroused the rest of the party to harmless
+mirth.</p>
+<p>"Tell me, Mrs. Prescott," said Adrian, "was he allowed to do
+that in Albania?"</p>
+<p>"I guess there aren't many things Jaff Chayne can't do in
+Albania," replied Liosha. "He has the <i>bessas</i> that carry him
+through and he's as brave as a lion."</p>
+<p>"I suppose you like brave men?" said Doria.</p>
+<p>"A woman who married a coward would be a damn
+fool&mdash;especially in Albania. I guess there aren't many in my
+mountains."</p>
+<p>"I wish you would tell us about your mountains," said Barbara
+pleasantly.</p>
+<p>"And at the same time," said I, "Jaff might let us hear his
+story. That is to say if you have no objection, Mrs. Prescott."</p>
+<p>"With us," said Liosha, "the guest is expected to talk about
+himself; for if he's a guest he's one of the family."</p>
+<p>"Shall I go ahead then?" asked Jaffery, "and you chip in
+whenever you feel like it?"</p>
+<p>"That would be best," replied Liosha.</p>
+<p>And having lit a cigarette and settled herself in her
+deck-chair, she motioned to Jaffery to proceed. And there in the
+shade of the old wistaria arbour, surrounded by such dainty
+products of civilisation as Adrian (in speckless white flannels and
+violet socks) and the tea-table (in silver and egg-shell china)
+this pair of barbarians told their tale.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+<p>It is some years now since that golden August afternoon, and my
+memory of the details of the story of Liosha as told by Jaffery and
+illustrated picturesquely by the lady herself is none of the most
+precise. Incidentally I gathered, then and later in the
+smoking-room from Jaffery alone, a prodigious amount of information
+about Albania which, if I had imprisoned it in writing that same
+evening as the perfect diarist is supposed to do, would have been
+vastly useful to me at the present moment. But I am as a diarist
+hopelessly imperfect. I stare, now, as I write, at the bald,
+uninspiring page. This is my entry for Aug. 4th, 19&mdash;.</p>
+<p>"Weighed Susan. 4 st. 3.</p>
+<p>"Met Jaffery at station.</p>
+<p>"Albanian widow turned up unexpectedly after lunch. Fine woman.
+Going to be a handful. Staying week-end. Story of meeting and
+Prescott marriage.</p>
+<p>"Promised Susan a donkey ride. Where the deuce does one get
+donkeys warranted quiet and guaranteed to carry a lady? <i>Mem:</i>
+Ask Torn Fletcher.</p>
+<p>"<i>Mem:</i> Write to Launebeck about cigars."</p>
+<p>Why I didn't write straight off to Launebeck about the cigars,
+instead of "mem-ing" it, may seem a mystery. It isn't. It is a
+comfortable habit of mine. Once having "mem-ed" an unpleasant thing
+in my diary, the matter is over. I dismiss it from my mind. But to
+return to Liosha&mdash;I find in my entry of sixty-two words
+thirty-five devoted to Susan, her donkey and the cigars, and only
+twenty-seven to the really astonishing events of the day. Of course
+I am angry. Of course I consult Barbara. Of course she pats the
+little bald patch on the top of my head and laughs in a superior
+way and invents, with a paralysing air of verity, an impossible
+amplification of the "story of meeting and Prescott marriage." And
+of course, the frivolous Jaffery, now that one really wants him, is
+sitting astride of a cannon, and smoking a pipe and, notebook and
+pencil in hand, is writing a picturesque description of the
+bungling decapitation by shrapnel of the general who has just been
+unfolding to him the whole plan of the campaign, and consequently
+is provokingly un-getatable by serious persons like myself<a name=
+"FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class=
+"fnanchor">[A]</a>.</p>
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href=
+"#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Hilary is
+writing at the end of the late Balkan war.&mdash;W.J.L.</p>
+</div>
+<p>So for what I learned that day I must trust to the elusive
+witch, Memory. I have never been to Albania. I have never wanted to
+go to Albania. Even now, I haven't the remotest desire to go to
+Albania. I should loathe it. Wherever I go nowadays, I claim as my
+right bedroom and bath and viands succulent to the palate and
+tender to the teeth. My demands are modest. But could I get them in
+Albania? No. Could one travel from Scutari to Monastir in the same
+comfort as one travels from London to Paris or from New York to
+Chicago? No. Does any sensible man of domestic instincts and
+scholarly tastes like to find himself halfway up an inaccessible
+mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed desperadoes in
+fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of pistols, daggers
+and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical demonstration
+with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with a mania
+of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your repose,
+to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call the
+flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They
+were made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other
+irresponsible phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit,
+as windscreens and water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can
+assume very pretty colours, owing to varying atmospheric
+conditions; and the more jagged and unenticing they are, the
+greater is their specious air of stupendousness. . . . At any rate
+they are hindrances to convenient travel and so I go among them as
+little as possible.</p>
+<p>To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and
+Liosha, Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to
+live in. It is divided into three religious sects, then re-divided
+into heaven knows how many tribes. What it will be when it gets
+autonomy and a government and a parliament and picture-palaces no
+one yet knows. But at the time when my two friends met it was in
+about as chaotic a condition as a jungle. Some tribes acknowledged
+the rule of the Turk. Others did not. Every mountainside had a
+pretty little anarchical system of its own. Every family had a
+pretty little blood feud with some other family. Accordingly every
+man was handy with knife and gun and it was every maiden's dream to
+be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel in the
+neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
+prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he
+lived, I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been
+betrothed years before. The price her father demanded was high. Not
+only did he hold a notable position on his mountain, but he had
+travelled to the fabulous land of America and could read and write
+and could speak English and could handle a knife with peculiar
+dexterity. Again, Liosha was no ordinary Albanian maiden. She too
+had seen the world and could read and write and speak English. She
+had a will of her own and had imbibed during her Chicago childhood
+curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine independence. Being
+beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize bride worth (in
+her father's eyes) her weight in gold.</p>
+<p>It was to try to reduce this excessive valuation that the young
+cutthroat visited his father's house. During the night two
+families, one of whom had a feud with the host and another with the
+guest, each attended by an army of merry brigands, fell upon the
+sleeping homestead, murdered everybody except Liosha, who managed
+to escape, plundered everything plunderable, money, valuables,
+household goods and live stock, and then set fire to the house and
+everything within sight that could burn. After which they marched
+away singing patriotic hymns. When they had gone Liosha crept out
+of the cave wherein she had hidden, and surveyed the scene of
+desolation.</p>
+<p>"I tell you, I felt just mad," said Liosha at this stage of the
+story.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>I remember Barbara and Doria staring at her open-mouthed.
+Instead of fainting or going into hysterics or losing her wits at
+the sight of the annihilation of her entire kith and
+kin&mdash;including her bridegroom to be&mdash;and of her whole
+worldly possessions, Liosha "felt just mad," which as all the world
+knows is the American vernacular for feeling very angry.</p>
+<p>"It was enough to turn any woman into a raving lunatic," gasped
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Guess it didn't turn me," replied Liosha contemptuously.</p>
+<p>"But what did you do?" asked Dora.</p>
+<p>"I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with
+that crowd." She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i064.jpg" id="i064.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/064.jpg"><img src="images/064.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.</b></div>
+<p>"And that's where we came in, don't you see?" interposed Jaffery
+hastily.</p>
+<p>You can imagine the scene. The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red
+and hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain
+path on ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of
+despair where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.</p>
+<p>Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form
+acquaintance. She told her story to the two horror-stricken men.
+British instinct cried out for justice. They would take her
+straight to the Vali or whatever authority ruled in the wild land,
+so that punishment should be inflicted on the murderers. But she
+laughed at them. It would take an army to dislodge her enemies from
+their mountain fastnesses. And who could send an army but the
+Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his head over the
+massacre of a few Christians? As for a local government, the
+<i>mallisori</i>, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any. The
+Englishmen swore softly. Liosha nodded her head and agreed with
+them. What was to be done? The Englishmen, alter giving her food
+and drink which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place
+where she could find relations or friends. Again she laughed
+scornfully.</p>
+<p>"All my relations lie there"&mdash;she pointed to the smoking
+ruins. "And I have no friends. And as for your escorting
+me&mdash;why I guess it would be much more use my escorting
+you."</p>
+<p>"And where would you escort us?"</p>
+<p>"God knows," she said.</p>
+<p>Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world,
+homeless and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were
+responsible to God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who
+spoke the English of the stockyards of Chicago. Again what was to
+be done? They could take her back to Scutari, whence they had come,
+in the hope of finding a Roman Catholic sisterhood. The proposal
+evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm. Liosha being convinced that they
+would turn her into a nun&mdash;the last avocation in the world she
+desired to adopt. Her simple idea was to go out to America, like
+her father, return with many bags of gold and devote her life to
+the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of her enemies.
+When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she replied that
+she would work in the packing-houses like her mother. But how, they
+asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago? "It must
+come from you!" she said. And the men looked at each other, feeling
+mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves.
+Then, being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she
+asked them what they were doing in Albania. They explained. They
+were travellers from England, wandering for pleasure through the
+Balkans. They had come from Scutari, as far as they could, in a
+motor-car. Liosha had never heard of a motor-car. They described it
+as a kind of little railway-engine that didn't need rails to run
+upon. At the foot of the mountains they had left it at a village
+inn and bought the ragged ponies. They were just going ahead
+exploring.</p>
+<p>"Do you know the way?" she asked with a touch of contempt.</p>
+<p>They didn't.</p>
+<p>"Then I guess I'll guide you. You pay me wages every day until
+you're tired and I'll use the money to go out to Chicago." And
+seeing them hesitate, she added: "No one's going to hurt me. A
+woman is safe in Albania. And if I'm with you, no one will hurt
+you. But if you go on by yourselves you'll very likely get
+murdered."</p>
+<p>Fantastic as was her intention, they knew that, as far as they
+themselves were concerned, she spoke common-sense. So it came to
+pass that Liosha, having left them for a few moments to take grim
+farewell of the charred remains of her family lying hidden beneath
+the smouldering wreckage, returned to them with a calm face,
+mounted one of the ponies and pointing before her, led the way into
+the mountains.</p>
+<p>Now, if old Jaff would only sit down and write this absurd
+Odyssey in the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to
+me, he would produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But
+he never will. As a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few
+Westerners have done and learned useful bits of language and made
+invaluable friends, and although he appreciated the journey's
+adventurous and humorous side, it did not afford him complete
+satisfaction. A day or two after their start, Prescott began to
+shew signs of peculiar interest in their guide. In spite of her
+unquestioning readiness to shoulder burdens, Prescott would run to
+relieve her. Liosha has assured me that Jaffery did the
+same&mdash;and indeed I cannot conceive Jaffery allowing a female
+companion to stagger along under a load which he could swing onto
+his huge back and carry like a walnut. To go further&mdash;she
+maintains that the two quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation
+of her labours, so much so, that often before they had ended their
+quarrel, she had performed the task in dispute. This of course
+Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was there, paid to do certain
+things, and she had to do them. The way Prescott spoiled her and
+indulged her, as though she were a little dressed-up cat in a
+London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman accustomed to
+throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head, was simply
+sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's
+infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. Jaffery
+talked (not before Liosha, but to Adrian and myself, that night,
+after the ladies had gone to bed) as if the girl had woven a Vivien
+spell around his poor friend. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's
+way. . . .</p>
+<p>At all events, whether Jaffery was jealous or not, it is certain
+that Prescott fell wildly, blindly, overwhelmingly in love with
+Liosha. Considering the close intimacy of their lives; considering
+that they were in ceaseless contact with this splendid creature,
+untrammelled by any convention, daughter of the earth, yet chaste
+as her own mountain winds; and considering that both of them were
+hot-blooded men, the only wonder is that they did not fly at each
+other's throats, or dash in each other's heads with stones, after
+the fashion of prehistoric males. It is my well-supported
+conviction, however, that Jaffery, honest old bear, seeing his
+comrade's very soul set upon the honey, trotted off and left him to
+it, and made pretence (to satisfy his ursine conscience) of
+growling his sarcastic disapproval.</p>
+<p>"The devil of it was," he declared that night, with a sweep of
+his arm that sent a full glass of whiskey and soda hurtling across
+space to my bookshelves and ruining some choice bindings&mdash;"the
+devil of it was," said he, after expressing rueful contrition,
+"that she treated him like a dog, whereas I could do anything I
+liked with her. But she married him."</p>
+<p>Of course she married him. Most Albanian young women in her
+position would have married a brave and handsome Englishman of
+incalculable wealth&mdash;even if they had not Liosha's ulterior
+motives. And beyond question Liosha had ulterior motives. Prescott
+espoused her cause hotly. He convinced her that he was a power in
+Europe. As a Reuter correspondent he did indeed possess power. He
+would make the civilised world ring with this tale of bloodshed and
+horror. He would beard Sultans in their lairs and Emperors in their
+dens. He would bring down awful vengeance on the heads of her
+enemies. How Sultans and Emperors were to do it was as obscure as
+at the horror-filled hour of their first meeting. But a man
+vehemently in love is notoriously blind to practical
+considerations. Prescott put his life into her hands. She accepted
+it calmly; and I think it was this calmness of acceptance that
+infuriated Jaffery. If she had been likewise caught in the
+whirlpool of a mad passion, Jaffery would have had nothing to say.
+But she did not (so he maintained) care a button for Prescott, and
+Prescott would not believe it. She had promised to marry him. That
+ideal of magnificent womanhood had promised to marry him. They were
+to be married&mdash;think of that, my boy!&mdash;as soon as they
+got back to Scutari and found a British Consul and a priest or two
+to marry them. "Then for God's sake," roared Jaffery, "let us trek
+to Scutari. I'm fed up with playing gooseberry. The Giant
+Gooseberry. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>So they shortened their projected journey and, making a circuit,
+picked up the motor-car&mdash;a joy and wonder to Liosha. She
+wanted to drive it&mdash;over the rutted wagon-tracks that pass for
+roads in Albania&mdash;and such was Prescott's infatuation that he
+would have allowed her to do so. But Jaffery sat an immovable
+mountain of flesh at the wheel and brought them safely to Scutari.
+There arrangements were made for the marriage before the British
+Vice-Consul. On the morning of the ceremony Prescott fell ill. The
+ceremony was, however, performed. Towards evening he was in high
+fever. The next morning typhoid declared itself. In two or three
+days he was dead. He had made a will leaving everything to his
+wife, with Jaffery as sole executor and trustee.</p>
+<p>This sorry ending of poor Prescott's romance&mdash;I never knew
+him, but shall always think of him as a swift and vehement
+spirit&mdash;was told very huskily by Jaffery beneath the wistaria
+arbour. Tears rolled down Barbara's and Doria's cheeks. My wife's
+sympathetic little hand slid into Liosha's. With her other hand
+Liosha fondled it. I am sure it was rather gratitude for this
+little feminine act than poignant emotion that moistened Liosha's
+beautiful eyes.</p>
+<p>"I haven't had much luck, have I?"</p>
+<p>"No, my poor dear, you haven't," cried Barbara in a gush of
+kindness.</p>
+<p>In the course of a few weeks to have one's affianced husband
+murdered and one's legal though nominal husband spirited away by
+disease, seemed in the eyes of my gentle wife to transcend all
+records of human tragedy. Very soon afterwards she made a pretext
+for taking Liosha away from us, and I had the extraordinary
+experience of seeing my proud little Barbara, who loathes the
+caressive insincerities prevalent among women, cross the lawn with
+her arm around Liosha's waist.</p>
+<p>The rest of the bare bones of the story I have already told you.
+Jaffery, after burying his poor comrade, took ship with Liosha and
+went to Cettinje, where he entrusted her to the care of old friends
+of his, the Austrian Consul and his wife, and made her known as the
+widow of Prescott of Reuter's to the British diplomatic
+authorities. Then having his work to do, he started forth again, a
+heavy-hearted adventurer, and, when it was over, he picked up
+Liosha, for whom Frau von Hagen had managed to procure a stock of
+more or less civilised raiment, and brought her to London to make
+good her claim, under Prescott's will, to her dead husband's
+fortune.</p>
+<p>Now this is Jaffery all over. Put him on a battlefield with guns
+going off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of
+a herd of crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation,
+and will telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of
+the born journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life,
+which a child of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and
+he is scared to death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for
+instance, when he arrived in London, or any other sensible woman,
+say, like Frau von Hagen of Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a
+timid maiden lady of forty-five, from her tea-parties and
+Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge Wells, and plants
+her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this disconcerting
+product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady was at her
+wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born baby or
+a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to this
+type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
+the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing
+the fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.</p>
+<p>"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
+day&mdash;they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk
+before dinner&mdash;"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi!
+My dear Jaffery! And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the
+girl to church, why not her own church, the Brompton Oratory or
+Farm Street?"</p>
+<p>"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship&mdash;she
+still calls it Popish, poor dear&mdash;to save her soul alive, or
+anybody else's soul," replied Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara.
+"She's even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal.
+I'll see to Liosha."</p>
+<p>Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous
+of her, but he couldn't dream of it.</p>
+<p>"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And
+there's Franklin. Come to dinner."</p>
+<p>"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha,
+who sat on my right, refreshingly free in her table manners
+(embarrassingly so to my most correct butler), was equally free in
+her speech. She provided me with excellent entertainment. I learned
+many frank truths about Albanian women, for whom, on account of
+their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed the most scathing
+contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, were full size.
+Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
+disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
+grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
+great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth
+Century product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue
+Laundry, merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha,
+for all her yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise
+annoy her enemies, did not greatly regret the loss of the
+distinguished young Albanian cutthroat who was her affianced. Had
+he lived she would have spent the rest of her days in saying, like
+Melisande, "I am not happy." She would have been an instrument of
+pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving drudge, while he went
+triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among the scattered
+Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a whole-hearted
+detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that the
+death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that
+it might have done.</p>
+<p>You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian,
+wanted to run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds
+of civilisation. His daughter (woman the world over) was all for
+hunting. He had spent twenty years in America. By a law of
+gravitation, natural only in that Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago,
+he had come across an Albanian wife. . . .</p>
+<p>Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me
+tell you a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery
+Chayne or Liosha&mdash;except perhaps to shew that there is no
+reason why a Tierra del Fuegan foundling should not run across his
+long-lost brother on Michigan Avenue, and still less reason why
+Albanian male should not meet Albanian female in Armour's
+stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged on, as I said
+on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't see why I
+should not put into them anything I choose.</p>
+<p>An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received
+a representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to
+interview him. The interviewer was a typical American reporter,
+blue-eyed, high cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung,
+courteous, intensely alive, desirous to get to the heart of my
+friend's mystery, and charmingly responsive to his frank welcome.
+They talked. My friend, to give the young man his story, discoursed
+on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of the conglomeration of all
+the races under Heaven. To point his remarks and mark his contrasts
+he used the words "we English" and "you Americans." After a time
+the young man smiled and said: "But am not an American&mdash;at
+least I'm an American citizen, but I'm not a born American."</p>
+<p>"But," cried my friend, "you're the essence of America."</p>
+<p>"No," said the young man, "I'm an Icelander."</p>
+<p>Thus it was natural for Liosha's father to find an Albanian wife
+in Chicago. She too was superficially Americanised. When they
+returned to Albania with their purely American daughter, they at
+first found it difficult to appear superficial Albanians. Liosha
+had to learn Albanian as a foreign language, her parents and
+herself always speaking English among themselves. But the call of
+the blood rang strong in the veins of the elders. Robbery and
+assassination on the heroic scale held for the man an irresistible
+attraction, and he acquired great skill at the business; and the
+woman, who seems to have been of a lymphatic temperament, sank
+without murmuring into the domestic subjection into which she had
+been born. It was only Liosha who rebelled. Hence her complicated
+attitude towards life, and hence her entertaining talk at the
+dinner table.</p>
+<p>I enjoyed myself. So, I think, did everybody. When the ladies
+rose, Jaffery, who was nearest the door, opened it for them to pass
+out, Barbara, the last, lingered for a second or two and laid her
+hand on Jaffery's arm and looked up at him out of her teasing blue
+eyes.</p>
+<p>"My dear Jaff," she said, "what kind of a dinner do you eat when
+you <i>are</i> hungry?"</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+<p>Barbara having freed Jaffery from immediate anxieties with
+regard to Liosha, easily persuaded him to pay a longer visit than
+he had proposed. A telephonic conversation with a first distracted,
+then conscience-smitten and then much relieved Euphemia had for
+effect the payment of bills at the Savoy and the retreat of the
+gentle lady to Tunbridge Wells. Liosha remained with us, pending
+certain negotiations darkly carried on by my wife and Doria in
+concert. During this time I had some opportunity of observing her
+from a more philosophic standpoint and my judgment was&mdash;I will
+not say formed&mdash;but aided by Barbara's confidential
+revelations. When not directly thwarted, she seemed to be
+good-natured. She took to Susan&mdash;a good sign; and Susan took
+to her&mdash;a better. Finding that her idea of happiness was to
+sprawl about the garden and let the child run over her and inveigle
+her into childish games and call her "Loshie" (a disrespectful mode
+of address which I had all the pains in the world in persuading
+Barbara to permit) and generally treat her as an animate instrument
+of entertainment, we smoothed down every obstacle that might lie in
+this particular path to beatitude. So many difficulties were
+solved. Not only were we spared the problem of what the deuce to do
+with Liosha during the daytime, but also Barbara was able to send
+the nurse away for a short and much needed holiday. Of course
+Barbara herself undertook all practical duties; but when she
+discovered that Liosha experienced primitive delight in bathing
+Susan&mdash;Susan's bath being a heathen rite in which ducks and
+fish and swimming women and horrible spiders played orgiac parts,
+and in getting up at seven in the morning&mdash;("Good God! Is
+there such an hour?" asked Adrian, when he heard about it)&mdash;in
+order to breakfast with Susan, and in dressing and undressing her
+and brushing her hair, and in tramping for miles by her side while
+with Basset, her vassal, in attendance, Susan rode out on her pony;
+when Barbara, in short, became aware of this useful infatuation,
+she pandered to it, somewhat shamelessly, all the time, however,
+keeping an acute eye on the zealous amateur. If, for instance,
+Liosha had picked a bushel of nectarines and had established
+herself with Susan, in the corner of the fruit garden, for a
+debauch, which would have had, for consequence, a child's funeral,
+Barbara, by some magic of motherhood, sprang from the earth in
+front of them with her funny little smile and her "Only
+one&mdash;and a very ripe one&mdash;for Susan, dear Liosha." And in
+these matters Liosha was as much overawed by Barbara as was
+Susan.</p>
+<p>This, I repeat, was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she
+would have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my
+child was naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She
+was <i>rarissinia avis</i> in the lands of small girls&mdash;one of
+the few points on which Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement.
+No one could have helped falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in
+the case of Liosha, who was an out-of-the-way, incalculable sort of
+creature&mdash;it was a good sign. Perhaps, considering the short
+period during which I had her under close observation, it was the
+best sign. She had grievous faults.</p>
+<p>One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, Barbara burst into
+my dressing-room.</p>
+<p>"Reynolds has given me notice."</p>
+<p>"Oh," said I, not desisting (as is the callous way of husbands
+the world over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of my
+tie. "What for?"</p>
+<p>"Liosha has just gone for her with a pair of scissors."</p>
+<p>"Horrible!" said I, getting the ends even. "I can imagine
+nothing more finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat
+with nail scissors, especially when the subject is unwilling."</p>
+<p>Barbara pished and pshawed. It was no occasion for levity.</p>
+<p>"I agree," said I. The dressing hour is the calmest and most
+philosophic period of the day.</p>
+<p>Barbara came up to me blue eyed and innocent, and with a
+traitorous jerk, undid my beautiful white bow.</p>
+<p>"There, now listen."</p>
+<p>And I, dilapidated wretch, had to listen to the tale of crime.
+It appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a
+ready-made gown&mdash;a model gown I believe is the correct
+term&mdash;insisted on her being properly corseted. Liosha,
+agonisingly constricted, rebelled. The maid was obdurate. Liosha
+flew at her with a pair of scissors. I think I should have done the
+same. Reynolds bolted from the room. So should I have done. I
+sympathised with both of them. Reynolds fled to her mistress, and,
+declaring it to be no part of her duty to wait on tigers, gave
+notice.</p>
+<p>"We can't lose Reynolds," said I.</p>
+<p>"Of course we can't."</p>
+<p>"And we can't pack Liosha off at a moment's notice, so as to
+please Reynolds."</p>
+<p>"Oh, you're too wise altogether," said my wife, and left me to
+the tranquil completion of my dressing.</p>
+<p>Liosha came down to dinner very subdued, after a short, sharp
+interview with Barbara, who, for so small a person, can put on a
+prodigious air of authority. As a punishment for bloodthirsty
+behaviour she had made her wear the gown in the manner prescribed
+by Reynolds; and she had apologised to Reynolds, who thereupon
+withdrew her notice. So serenity again prevailed.</p>
+<p>In some respects Liosha was very childish. The receipt of
+letters, no matter from whom&mdash;even bills, receipts and
+circulars&mdash;gave her overwhelming joy and sense of importance.
+This harmless craze, however, led to another outburst of ferocity.
+Meeting the postman outside the gate she demanded a letter. The man
+looked through his bundle.</p>
+<p>"Nothing for you this morning, ma'am."</p>
+<p>"I wrote to the dressmaker yesterday," said Liosha, "and you've
+got the reply right there."</p>
+<p>"I assure you I haven't," said the postman.</p>
+<p>"You're a liar," cried Liosha, "and I guess I'm going to
+see."</p>
+<p>Whereupon Liosha, who was as strong as a young horse, sprang to
+death-grapple with the postman, a puny little man, pitched him onto
+the side of the road and calmly entered into felonious possession
+of His Majesty's mails. Then finding no letter she cast the whole
+delivery over the supine and gasping postman and marched
+contemptuously into the house.</p>
+<p>The most astonishing part of the business was that in these
+outbreaks of barbarity she did not seem to be impelled by blind
+rage. Most people who heave a postman about a peaceful county would
+do so in a fit of passion, through loss of nerve-control. Not so
+Liosha. She did these things with the bland and deadly air of an
+inexorable Fate.</p>
+<p>The perspiration still beads on my brow when I think of the
+cajoling and bribing and blustering and lying I had to practise in
+order to hush up the matter. As for Liosha, both Jaffery and I
+rated her soundly. I explained loftily that not so many years ago,
+transportation, lifelong imprisonment, death were the penalties for
+the felony which she had committed.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i080.jpg" id="i080.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/080.jpg"><img src="images/080.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.</b></div>
+<p>"You ought to have a jolly good thrashing," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes
+of angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall
+table and handed it to the red-bearded giant.</p>
+<p>"I guess I do," she said. "Beat me."</p>
+<p>And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her
+at her word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing
+without a murmur. What was one to do with such a woman?</p>
+<p>Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek.
+Gradually she raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was
+startled to see the most extraordinary doglike submission. He
+frowned portentously and shook his head. Her lips worked, and after
+a convulsive sob or two, she threw herself on the ground, clasped
+his knees, and to our dismay burst into a passion of weeping.
+Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture, like a fairy
+tornado, released us from our embarrassing position. She
+annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.</p>
+<p>"Oh, go away, both of you, go away!"</p>
+<p>So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.</p>
+<p>Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very
+pleasantly. Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight
+(it was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course.
+Adrian and Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to
+justify my position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard
+at a Persian Grammar. Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime
+arranging for Liosha's future. Her organising genius had brought
+Doria's suggestion as to the First Class London Boarding House into
+the sphere of practical things. The Boarding House idea alone would
+not work; but, combine it with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran
+on wheels.</p>
+<p>"Even you," said Barbara, as though I were a sort of
+Schopenhauer, a professional disparager of her sex&mdash;"even you
+have a high opinion of Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>I had. Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine. She was
+not very beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very
+angelic or very anything&mdash;but she was one of those women of
+whom everybody has a high opinion. The impoverished widow of an
+Indian soldierman, with a son soldiering somewhere in India, she
+managed to do a great deal on very small means. She was a woman of
+the world, a woman of character. She knew how to deal with people
+of queer races. Heaven indicated her for appointment by Barbara as
+Liosha's duenna in the Boarding House. Mrs. Considine, herself
+compelled to live in these homes for the homeless, gladly accepted
+the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who happened then
+to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away, so to
+speak, with her contract in her pocket. It was part of the
+programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha's
+education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil
+into her a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and
+gradually root out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to
+death. It was a capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of
+a smile, in which, seeing Barbara's shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I
+suppressed the irony.</p>
+<p>When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most
+care-free fellow alive. His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude
+towards Liosha changed. He established himself as fellow slave with
+her under the whip of Susan's tyranny. It did one good to see these
+two magnificent creatures sporting together for the child's, and
+incidentally their own, amusement. For the first time during their
+intercourse they met on the same plane.</p>
+<p>"She's really quite a good sort," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more
+touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed
+so anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
+puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
+herself to read him little lectures.</p>
+<p>"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him
+one day.</p>
+<p>"Do you think I am?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said
+apologetically&mdash;"when there's one for me to do. And when there
+isn't I kind of prepare myself for the next. For instance I've got
+to keep myself always fit."</p>
+<p>"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
+superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self
+that matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of
+self-development. If a human being is the same at the end of a year
+as he was at the beginning he has made no spiritual progress."</p>
+<p>Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived,"
+said he.</p>
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+<p>"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from
+one year's end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent,
+and so, that I don't live."</p>
+<p>"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every
+one must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the
+conscious striving after spiritual progress is so
+necessary&mdash;and you seem to put it aside. It is such waste of
+life."</p>
+<p>"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.</p>
+<p>She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see&mdash;well,
+what do you do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make
+notes about them in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the
+future. When you come across anything to kill, you kill it. It also
+pleases you to come across anything that calls for an exercise of
+strength. When there is a war or a revolution or anything that
+takes you to your real work, as you call it, you've only got to go
+through it and report what you see."</p>
+<p>"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every
+chap that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign.
+And it isn't every chap that can <i>see</i> the things he ought to
+write about. That's when the training comes in."</p>
+<p>Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession,
+my dear Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the
+Alpha and Omega of things? Don't you see? The real life is
+intellectual, spiritual, emotional. What are your ideals?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools of eyes
+lay the spirituality that made her a mystery so sacred. He, great
+hulking fellow, was a gross lump of clay. Ideals?</p>
+<p>"I don't suppose I have any," said he.</p>
+<p>"But you must. Everybody has, to a certain extent."</p>
+<p>"Well, to ride straight and tell the truth&mdash;like the
+ancient Persians, I suppose it was the Persians&mdash;anyway it's a
+sort of rough code I've got."</p>
+<p>"Have you read Nietzsche?" she asked suddenly.</p>
+<p>He frowned perplexedly. "Nietzsche&mdash;that's the mad superman
+chap, isn't it? No. I've not read a word."</p>
+<p>"I do wish you would. You'll find him so exhilarating. You might
+possibly agree with a lot of what he says. I don't. But he sets you
+thinking."</p>
+<p>She sketched her somewhat prim conception of the Nietzschean
+philosophy, and after listening to it in dumb wonder, he promised
+to carry out her wishes. So, when I came down to my library that
+evening dressed for dinner, I found him, still in morning clothes,
+with "Thus Spake Zarathustra" on his knees, and a bewildered
+expression on his face.</p>
+<p>"Have you read this, Hilary?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I.</p>
+<p>"Understand it?"</p>
+<p>"More or less."</p>
+<p>"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria
+understands it too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he
+rose ponderously and looked down on me with serious
+eyes&mdash;"what the Hell is it all about?"</p>
+<p>I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before
+rushing up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time
+to expound a philosophic system."</p>
+<p>Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression
+and the Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the
+essentials of life, we should have been met with bellows of rude
+and profane derision. I don't believe he had even roughly
+considered what kind of an individuality he had, still less
+enquired into the state of his spiritual being. But the flip of a
+girl he professed so much to despise came along and reduced him to
+a condition of helpless introspection. I cannot say that it lasted
+very long. Psychology and metaphysics and &aelig;sthetics lay
+outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his own
+simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it
+an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual
+superiority. On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the
+subtler mental qualities, videlicet his similitude of the
+bumble-bee; now, however, he went further, declaring himself, to a
+subrident host, to be a chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with
+savages. He would listen, with childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of
+tongue, exchanging with Doria the shibboleths of the Higher Life.
+He had been considerably impressed by Adrian as the author of a
+successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader of the stars with
+Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.</p>
+<p>Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had
+laughed over him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had
+guessed (with Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt,
+found in his humility something pathetic which was lost to Adrian.
+The latter only saw the blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews
+and sinews, at the mercy of anything in petticoats, from Susan
+upward. I disagreed. He was not at the mercy of Liosha.</p>
+<p>"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library,
+Jaffery having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about
+in mortal terror of her?"</p>
+<p>"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an
+abominable nuisance&mdash;a millstone round his neck&mdash;a
+responsibility&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too
+probable huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and
+Doria he knows he's safe&mdash;spared the worst&mdash;so he yields
+and they pick him up&mdash;look at him and stand him on his head
+and do whatever they darn well like to him; but with Liosha he
+knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued, after having lit a
+cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his way. With
+Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of
+marriage or nothing."</p>
+<p>"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon
+think of marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."</p>
+<p>"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal
+funk lest his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her
+pedestal and with resistless hands take him away and marry
+him."</p>
+<p>"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the
+day," said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of
+observation."</p>
+<p>For some unaccountable reason Adrian's pale face flushed
+scarlet. He broke out vexedly:</p>
+<p>"I don't see what my imaginative work has got to do with the
+trivialities of ordinary life. As a matter of fact," he added,
+after a pause, "the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and
+it's the same imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with
+Jaffery and this unqualifiable lady."</p>
+<p>"All right, my dear man," said I, pacifically. "Probably you're
+right and I'm wrong. I was only talking lightly. And speaking of
+imagination&mdash;what about your next book?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, damn the next book," said he, flicking the ash off his
+cigarette. "I've got an idea, of course. A jolly good idea. But I'm
+not worrying about it yet."</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He threw his cigarette into the grate. How, in the name of
+common sense, could he settle down to work? Wasn't his head full of
+his approaching marriage? Could he see at present anything beyond
+the thing of dream and wonder that was to be his wife? I was a
+cold-blooded fish to talk of novel-writing.</p>
+<p>"But you'll have to get into it sometime or other," said I.</p>
+<p>"Of course. As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down
+to a normal life in the flat."</p>
+<p>"What does Doria think of the new idea?"</p>
+<p>Thousands who knew him not were looking forward to Adrian
+Boldero's new book. We, who loved him, were peculiarly interested.
+Somehow or other we had not touched before so intimately on the
+subject. To my surprise he frowned and snapped impatient
+fingers.</p>
+<p>"I haven't told Doria anything about it. It isn't my way. My
+work's too personal a thing, even for Doria. She understands. I
+know some fellows tell their plots to any and everybody&mdash;and
+others, if they don't do that, lay bare their artistic souls to
+those near and dear to them. Well, I can't. A word, no matter how
+loving, of adverse criticism, a glance even that was not
+sympathetic would paralyse me, it would shatter my faith in the
+whole structure I had built up. I can't help it. It's my nature. As
+I told you two or three months ago, it has always been my instinct
+to work in the dark. I instanced my First at Cambridge. How much
+more powerful is the instinct when it's a question of a vital
+created thing like a novel? My dear Hilary, you're the man I'm
+fondest of in the world. You know that. But don't worry me about my
+work. I can't stand it. It upsets me. Doria, heart of my heart and
+soul of my soul, has promised not to worry me. She sees I must be
+free from outside influences&mdash;no matter how closely
+near&mdash;but still outside. And you must promise too."</p>
+<p>"My dear old boy," said I, somewhat confused by this impassioned
+exposition of the artistic temperament, "you've only got to express
+the wish&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"I know," said he. "Forgive me." He laughed and lit another
+cigarette. "But Wittekind and the editor of <i>Fowler's</i> in
+America&mdash;I've sold him the serial rights&mdash;are shrieking
+out for a synopsis. I'm damned if I'm going to give 'em a synopsis.
+They get on my nerves. And&mdash;we're intimate enough friends, you
+and I, for me to confess it&mdash;so do our dearest Barbara and old
+Jaff, and you yourself, when you want to know how I'm getting on.
+Look, dear old Hilary"&mdash;he laughed again and threw himself
+into an armchair&mdash;"giving birth to a book isn't very much
+unlike giving birth to a baby. It's analogical in all sorts of
+ways. Well, some women, as soon as the thing is started, can talk
+quite freely&mdash;sweetly and delicately&mdash;I haven't a word to
+say against them&mdash;to all their women friends about it. Others
+shrink. There's something about it too near their innermost souls
+for them to give their confidence to anyone. Well, dear old
+Hilary&mdash;that's how I feel about the novel."</p>
+<p>He spoke from his heart. I understood&mdash;like Doria.</p>
+<p>"Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls it 'the sorrowful, great
+gift,'" said I. "We who haven't got it can only bow to those who
+have."</p>
+<p>Adrian rose and took a few strides about the library.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I've been talking a lot of inflated nonsense. It
+must sound awfully like swelled head. But you know it isn't, don't
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Don't he an idiot," said I. "Let us talk of something
+else."</p>
+<p>We did not return to the subject.</p>
+<p>In the course of time came Mrs. Considine to carry off Liosha to
+the First Class Boarding House which she had found in Queen's Gate.
+Liosha left us full of love for Barbara and Susan and I think of
+kindly feeling for myself. A few days afterwards Jaffery went off
+to sail a small boat with another lunatic in the Hebrides. A little
+later Doria and Adrian went to pay a round of short family visits
+beginning with Mrs. Boldero. So before August was out, Barbara and
+Susan and I found ourselves alone.</p>
+<p>"Now," said I, "I can get through some work."</p>
+<p>"Now," said Barbara, "we can run over to Dinard."</p>
+<p>"What?" I shouted.</p>
+<p>"Dinard," she said, softly. "We always go. We only put it off
+this year on account of visitors."</p>
+<p>"We definitely made up our minds," I retorted, "that we weren't
+going to leave this beautiful garden. You know I never change my
+mind. I'm not going away."</p>
+<p>Barbara left the room, whistling a musical comedy air.</p>
+<p>We went to Dinard.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+<p>There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by
+writing descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so
+many pebbly facts into such a small compass. They know the names of
+everybody who attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of
+poor relations. With the cold accuracy of an encyclop&aelig;dia,
+and with expert technical discrimination, they mention the various
+fabrics of which the costumes of bride and bridesmaids were
+composed. They catalogue the wedding presents with the correct
+names of the donors. They remember what hymns were sung and who
+signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the honeymoon.
+They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
+departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their
+accounts naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be
+faithful records of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word
+that brings a scene before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are
+never collected and published in book form.</p>
+<p>Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria
+and Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away
+and presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This
+is a full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in
+useful some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in
+bodily."</p>
+<p>I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end
+it in despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure
+up to my mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it
+back to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.</p>
+<p>And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as
+legally and irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of
+a distinguished congregation assembled in a fashionable London
+church could marry them. Of what actually took place I have the
+confused memory of the mere man. I know that it was magnificent.
+All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft were splendidly united.
+Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria, dark eyed, without
+a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek, looked more
+elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was best man,
+vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by the
+altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
+set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
+mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . .
+. Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and
+shook hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude
+of one accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving
+from church to reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox
+manner of the superior husband, at the modern wedding.</p>
+<p>"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic
+of marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and
+never knew his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring
+but the symbol of the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the
+expression of a hope for a prolific union? The satin slipper tied
+on to the carriage or thrown after it? Good luck? No such thing. It
+was once part of the marriage ceremony for the bridegroom to tap
+the wife with a shoe to symbolise his assertion of and her
+acquiescence in her entire subjection."</p>
+<p>"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara
+sweetly. "Did you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."</p>
+<p>I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do
+with the subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"</p>
+<p>She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course
+not."</p>
+<p>Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.</p>
+<p>It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in
+Park Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage.
+He had been very hearty and booming all the time, the human
+presentment of a devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great
+laugh thundering cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected
+the heterogeneous gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and
+pursy lips vibrated into smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have
+never attended, and I am sure it was nothing but Jaffery's
+pervasive influence that infused vitality into the deadly and
+decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich Silenic
+personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of
+Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and
+apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail
+of Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had
+managed to make a journalistic reputation as a great war and
+foreign correspondent. Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an
+inch or two aside. I saw him mingle with an alien crowd, and, by
+what On the surface appeared to be sheer brute full-bloodedness,
+compel them to his will. The wedding was not to be a hollow clang
+of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all hearts. In order
+that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be memorable he had
+instinctively put out the forces that had carried him unscathed
+through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men. He
+could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had
+started the working of the sap of life.</p>
+<p>As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an
+Elizabethan spaciousness. . . . There was no hugger-mugger escape
+of travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal
+progress through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of
+the Ceremonies, exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted
+them to their glittering carriage and pair&mdash;and, unconscious
+of anthropological truth, threw the slipper of woman's humiliation.
+The carriage drove off amid the cheers of the multitude. Jaffery
+stood and watched it until it disappeared round the curve. In my
+eagerness to throw the unnecessarily symbolic rice I had followed
+and stayed a foot or two away from him; and then I saw his face
+change&mdash;just for a few seconds. All the joyousness was
+stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists
+of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and
+unclenched themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly
+he gulped something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me
+by the shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you
+wish you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or
+Honolulu&mdash;wherever you chose without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He
+linked his arm in mine, and said in what he thought was a whisper:
+"For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to find a real drink."</p>
+<p>We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons
+were set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda
+and poured it down his throat.</p>
+<p>"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.</p>
+<p>"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his
+frock coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me
+a suit of armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."</p>
+<p>I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see
+that transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the
+discomfort of the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with
+the swallowing of the huge jorum of alcohol.</p>
+<p>Of course I told Barbara all about it&mdash;it is best to
+establish your wife in the habit of thinking you tell her
+everything&mdash;and she was more than usually gentle to Jaffery.
+We carried him down with us to Northlands that afternoon, calling
+at his club for a suit-case. In the car he tucked a very tired and
+comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his great arm. There was
+something pathetically tender in the gathering of the child to him.
+Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the harmonics of
+chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were alone
+together, she said with tears very near her eyes:</p>
+<p>"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"</p>
+<p>"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the
+tongue of an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still
+earth-bound."</p>
+<p>The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her
+hand.</p>
+<p>"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love
+you."</p>
+<p>For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is
+praise indeed.</p>
+<p>"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are
+going to be happy?"</p>
+<p>"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two
+people can possibly be."</p>
+<p>She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were
+both of them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods.
+I avowed absolute agreement.</p>
+<p>"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if
+Jaffery had come along first and there had been no question of
+Adrian. Would they have been happy?"</p>
+<p>Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you
+satisfied? You have made one match&mdash;you, and you'll pardon me
+for saying so, not Heaven&mdash;and now you want to unmake it and
+make a brand-new hypothetical one."</p>
+<p>"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."</p>
+<p>I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain,
+kissed her and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled,
+conscious of triumph over me.</p>
+<p>During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the
+part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his
+homelessness&mdash;she had an eerie way of treading on delicate
+ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn. That was his home. He
+had no possessions.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got
+about three hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London
+Repository, to say nothing of skins and as fine a collection of
+modern weapons as you ever saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up
+style to-morrow."</p>
+<p>"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a
+dinner plate or a fork?"</p>
+<p>"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be
+called for in all the shops of London."</p>
+<p>He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture.
+I laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a
+thousand pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of
+household clutter, he certainly is that household clutter's
+potential owner. Between us we developed this incontrovertible
+proposition.</p>
+<p>"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's
+Stores and purchase a comfortable home?"</p>
+<p>"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for
+the interior of China the day after to-morrow."</p>
+<p>"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.</p>
+<p>"The interior of China?" I re&euml;choed, with masculine
+definiteness.</p>
+<p>"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into
+hysterics if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me,
+Barbara. It would do him a thundering lot of good."</p>
+<p>At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately.
+I need not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the
+interior of China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long
+he would be away.</p>
+<p>"A year or two," he replied casually.</p>
+<p>"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no
+conception of time and space."</p>
+<p>"A couple of years pass pretty quick," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"So does a lifetime," said I.</p>
+<p>Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the
+amenities of civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again.
+In vain he pleaded his job, the valuable copy he would send to his
+paper. I proved to him it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he
+could not understand why we should be startled by the announcement
+that within forty-eight hours he would be on his way to lose
+himself for a couple of years in Crim Tartary.</p>
+<p>"Suppose I sprang a thing like that on you," said I. "Suppose I
+told you I was starting to-morrow morning for the South Pole. What
+would you say?"</p>
+<p>"I should say you were a liar. Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>In his mirth he rubbed his hands and feet together like a
+colossal fly. The joke lasted him for the rest of the evening.</p>
+<p>So, the next morning Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as
+ever I get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We
+felt sad; not only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something
+in the quiet backwater of our life, but also because we knew that
+he went away a less happy man than he had come. This time it was
+not sheer <i>Wanderlust</i> that had driven him into the
+wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of escaping from the
+unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he betook himself
+would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . . It was
+just as well he had gone, said Barbara.</p>
+<p>A man of intense appetites and primitive passions, like Jaffery,
+for all his loyalty and lovable childishness, was better away from
+the neighbour's wife who had happened to engage his affections. If
+he lost his head. . . .</p>
+<p>I had once seen Jaffery lose his head and the spectacle did not
+make for edification. It was before I was married, when Jaffery,
+during his London sojourn, had the spare bedroom in a set of rooms
+I rented in Tavistock Square. At a florist's hard by, a young
+flower seller&mdash;a hussy if ever there was one&mdash;but
+bewitchingly pretty&mdash;carried on her poetical avocation; and of
+her did my hulking and then susceptible friend become ragingly
+enamoured. I repeat, she was a hussy. She had no intention of
+giving him more than the tip of her pretty little shoe to kiss; but
+Jaffery, reading the promise of secular paradise in her eyes, had
+no notion of her little hard intention. He squandered himself upon
+her and she led him a dog's life. Of course I remonstrated, argued,
+implored. It was like asking a hurricane politely not to blow. Her
+name I remember was Gwenny. One summer evening she had promised to
+meet him outside the house in Tavistock Square&mdash;he had
+arranged to take her to some Earl's Court Exhibition, where she
+could satiate a depraved passion for switch-backs, water-chutes and
+scenic railways. At the appointed hour Jaffery stood in waiting on
+the pavement. I sat on the first floor balcony, alternately reading
+a novel and watching him with a sardonic eye. Presently Gwenny
+turned the corner of the square&mdash;our house was a few doors
+up&mdash;and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the
+square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in
+the height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously
+accompanied by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young
+man; his arm was round her waist, and her arm was around his, in
+the approved enlinkment of couples in her class who are keeping
+company, or, in other words, are, or are about to be, engaged to be
+married. A curious shock vibrated through Jaffery's frame. He
+flamed red. He saw red. Gwenny shot a supercilious glance and
+tossed her chin. Jaffery crossed the road and barred their path. He
+fished in his pocket for some coins and addressed the scrubby man,
+who, poor wretch, had never heard of Jaffery's existence.</p>
+<p>"Here's twopence to go away. Take the twopence and go away. Damn
+you&mdash;take the twopence."</p>
+<p>The man retreated in a scare.</p>
+<p>"Won't you take the twopence? I should advise you to."</p>
+<p>Anybody but a born fool or a hero would have taken the twopence.
+I think the scrubby man had the makings of a hero. He looked up at
+the blazing giant.</p>
+<p>"You be damned!" said he, retreating a pace.</p>
+<p>Then, suddenly, with the swiftness of a panther, Jaffery sprang
+on him, grasped him in the back by a clump of clothes&mdash;it
+seemed, with one hand, so quickly was it done&mdash;and hurled him
+yards away over the railings. I can still see the flight of the
+poor devil's body in mid air until it fell into a holly-bush. With
+another spring he turned on the paralysed Gwenny, caught her up
+like a doll and charged with her now screaming violently against
+the shut solid oak front door. A flash of instinct suggested a
+latchkey. Holding the girl anyhow, he fumbled in his pocket. It was
+an August London evening. The Square was deserted; but at Gwenny's
+shrieks, neighbouring windows were thrown up and eager heads
+appeared. It was very funny. There was Jaffery holding a squalling
+girl in one arm and with the other exploring available pockets for
+his latchkey. I had one of the inspirations of my life. I rushed
+into my bedroom, caught up the ewer from my washstand, went out
+onto the extreme edge of the balcony and cast the gallon or so of
+water over the heads of the struggling pair. The effect was
+amazing. Jaffery dropped the girl. The girl, once on her feet, fled
+like a cat. Jaffery looked up idiotically. I flourished the empty
+jug. I think I threatened to brain him with it if he stirred. Then
+people began to pour out of the houses and a policeman sprang up
+from nowhere. I went down and joined the excited throng. There was
+a dreadful to-do. It cost Jaffery five hundred pounds to mitigate
+the righteous wrath of the young man in the holly-bush, and save
+himself from a dungeon-cell. The scrubby young man, who, it
+appeared, had been brought up in the fishmongering trade, used the
+five hundred pounds to set up for himself in Ealing, where very
+shortly afterwards Gwenny joined him, and that, save an enduring
+ashamedness on the part of Jaffery, was the end of the matter.</p>
+<p>So, if Jaffery did lose his head over Doria, there might be the
+devil to pay. We sighed and reconciled ourselves to his exile in
+Crim Tartary. After all, it was his business in life to visit the
+dark places of the earth and keep the world informed of history in
+the making. And it was a business which could not possibly be
+carried on in the most cunningly devised home that could be
+purchased at Harrod's Stores.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+<p>In the course of time Adrian and Doria returned from Venice,
+their heads full of pictures and lagoons and palaces, and took
+proud possession of their spacious flat in St. John's Wood. They
+were radiantly happy, very much in love with each other. Having
+brought a common vision to bear upon the glories of nature and art
+which they had beheld, they were spared the little squabbles over
+matters of &aelig;sthetic taste which often are so disastrous to
+the serenity of a honeymoon. Touchingly they expounded their views
+in the first person plural. Even Adrian, whom I must confess to
+have regarded as an unblushing egotist, seldom delivered himself of
+an egotistical opinion. "We don't despise the Eclectics," said he.
+And&mdash;"We prefer the Lombardic architecture to the purely
+Venetian," said Doria. And "we" found good in Italian wines and
+"we" found nothing but hideousness in Murano glass. They were,
+therefore, in perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The
+only difference I could see between them was that Adrian loved to
+wallow in the comfort of a club or another person's house, but
+insisted on elegant austerity in his own home, whereas Doria loved
+elegant austerity everywhere. So they had a pure Jacobean entrance
+hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire bedroom, and as far as I
+could judge by the barrenness of the apartment, a Spartan study for
+Adrian.</p>
+<p>On our first visit, they triumphantly showed us round the
+establishment. We came last to the study.</p>
+<p>"No really fine imaginative work," said Adrian, with a wave of
+the hand indicating the ascetic table and chair, the iron safe, the
+bookcase and the bare walls&mdash;"no really fine imaginative work
+can be done among luxurious surroundings. Pictures distract one's
+attention, arm-chairs and sofas invite to sloth. This is my ideal
+of a novelist's workshop."</p>
+<p>"It's more like a workhouse," said Barbara, with a shiver. "Or a
+condemned cell. But even a condemned cell would have a plank bed in
+it."</p>
+<p>"You don't understand a bit," said Doria, with a touch of
+resentment at adverse criticism of her paragon's idiosyncrasies,
+"although Adrian has tried to explain it to you. It's specially
+arranged for concentration of mind. If it weren't for the necessity
+of having something to sit upon and something to write at and a few
+necessary reference books and a lock-up place, we should have had
+nothing in the room at all. When Adrian wants to relax and live his
+ordinary human life, he only has to walk out of the door and there
+he is in the midst of beautiful things."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I quite see, dear," said Barbara, with a familiar little
+flash in her blue eyes. "But do you think a leather seat for that
+hard wooden chair&mdash;what the French call a
+<i>rond-de-cuir</i>&mdash;would very greatly impair the poor
+fellow's imagination?"</p>
+<p>"It might be economical, too," said I, "in the way of saving
+shininess!&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Adrian laughed. "It does look a bit hard, darling," said he.</p>
+<p>"We'll get a leather seat to-day," replied Doria.</p>
+<p>But she did not smile. Evidently to her the spot on which Adrian
+sat was sacrosanct. The room was the Holy of Holies where mortal
+man put on immortality. Flippant comment sounded like blasphemy in
+her ears. She even grew somewhat impatient at our lingering in the
+august precincts, although they had not yet been consecrated by
+inspired labour. Their unblessed condition was obvious. On the
+large library table were a couple of brass candlesticks with fresh
+candles (Adrian could not work by electric light), a couple of
+reams of scribbling paper, an inkpot, an immaculate blotting pad,
+three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's whimsies to write
+always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an office
+stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this last
+monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination
+and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road,
+but not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of
+challenge from Doria, I forebore to make ignorant criticism.</p>
+<p>In the bedroom while Barbara was putting on her veil and
+powdering her nose (this may be what grammarians call a <i>hysteron
+proteron</i>&mdash;but with women one never can tell)&mdash;Doria
+broke into confidences not meet for masculine ears.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"Oh, darling," she cried, looking at Barbara with great
+awe-stricken eyes, "you can't tell what it means to be married to a
+genius like Adrian. I feel like one of the Daughters of Men that
+has been looked upon by one of the Sons of God. It's so strange. In
+ordinary life he's so dear and human&mdash;responsive, you know, to
+everything I feel and think&mdash;and sometimes I quite forget he's
+different from me. But at others, I'm overwhelmed by the thought of
+the life going on inside his soul that I can never, never
+share&mdash;I can only see the spirit that conceived 'The Diamond
+Gate'&mdash;don't you understand, darling?&mdash;and that is even
+now creating some new thing of wonder and beauty. I feel so little
+beside him. What more can I give him beyond what I have given?"</p>
+<p>Barbara took the girl's tense face between her two hands and
+smiled and kissed her.</p>
+<p>"Give him," said she, "ammoniated quinine whenever he
+sneezes."</p>
+<p>Then she laughed and embraced the Heavenly One's wife, who, for
+the moment, had not quite decided whether to feel outraged or not,
+and discoursed sweet reasonableness.</p>
+<p>"I should treat your genius, dear, just as I treat my stupid old
+Hilary."</p>
+<p>She proceeded to describe the treatment. What it was, I do not
+know, because Barbara refused to tell me. But I can make a shrewd
+guess. It's a subtle scheme which she thinks is hidden from me; but
+really it is so transparent that a babe could see through it. I,
+like any wise husband, make, however, a fine assumption of
+blindness, and consequently lead a life of unruffled comfort.</p>
+<p>Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my
+doubts. Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old
+Hilary's chair and worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent
+wife and I've no fault to find with her; but she has never done
+that, and she is the last woman in the world to counsel any wife to
+do it. Personally, I should hate to be worshipped. In worship hours
+I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a sense of congruity can
+imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship would bore me to
+paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as the new
+hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more he
+was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration
+he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette&mdash;a way
+which Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown
+with the grape on Mount Cithaeron&mdash;and a way of exhaling a
+cloud of smoke, holier than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of
+the adorer, which moved me at once to envy and exasperation.</p>
+<p>Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either
+in their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands
+than in St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of
+upholstered furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox
+on his tongue and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while
+Doria, chin on palm, and her great eyes set on him, drank in all
+the wonder of this miraculous being.</p>
+<p>I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the
+man."</p>
+<p>Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of
+view. . . .</p>
+<p>"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking.
+When she has turned him into the idiot&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.</p>
+<p>"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"</p>
+<p>"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I.
+"The unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole
+consistency."</p>
+<p>Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but
+found none, the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a
+while and then, quickly, a smile replaced the frown.</p>
+<p>"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she
+said sweetly.</p>
+<p>I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates
+of a torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she
+vanished from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned
+high-falutin' phrase is the best description I can give of the
+elusive uncapturable nature of this wife of mine. It is a pity that
+she has so little to do with the story of Jaffery which I am trying
+to relate, for I should like to make her the heroine. You see, I
+know her so well, or imagine I do, which comes to the same thing,
+and I should love to present you with a solution, of this
+perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled conundrum that is
+Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a <i>raisonneur</i> in
+the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the background.
+<i>Paullo majora canamus</i>. Let us come to the horses.</p>
+<p>All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha. As deputies for
+the absent trustee we received periodical reports from the
+admirable Mrs. Considine, and entertained both ladies for an
+occasional week-end. On the whole, her demeanour in the Queen's
+Gate boarding-house was satisfactory. At first trouble arose over a
+young curly haired Swiss waiter who had won her sympathy in the
+matter of a broken heart. She had entered the dining-room when he
+was laying the table and discovered him watering the knives and
+forks with tears. Unaccustomed to see men weep, she enquired the
+cause. He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a woeful tale of a
+faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and well-to-do. He had
+looked forward to marry her at the end of the year, and to pass an
+unruffled life in the snugness of the <i>delicatessen</i> shop
+which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had
+announced her engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among
+the chitterlings and liver-sausages was shattered. Herr Gott! what
+was he to do? Liosha counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and
+assassination of his rival. To kill another man for her was the
+surest way to a woman's heart. The waiter approved the scheme, but
+lacked the courage&mdash;also the money to go to Neuchatel. Liosha,
+espousing his cause warmly, gave him the latter at once. The former
+she set to work to instil into him. She waylaid him at odd corners
+in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and sought to
+inspire him with the true Balkan spirit. She even supplied him with
+an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp. At last, the poor craven,
+finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the
+mistress of the boarding-house protection against his champion.
+Mrs. Considine, called into consultation, was informed that Mrs.
+Prescott must either cease from instigating the waiters to commit
+murder or find other quarters. Liosha curled a contemptuous
+lip.</p>
+<p>"If you think I'm going to have anything more to do with the
+little skunk, you're mistaken."</p>
+<p>And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room,
+approached her with the tray, she waved him off.</p>
+<p>"See here," she said calmly, "just you keep out of my way or I
+might tread on you."</p>
+<p>Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the
+genteel assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole
+difficulty by bolting from the house, never to return.</p>
+<p>When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter,
+Liosha shrugged her shoulders and laughed.</p>
+<p>"I guess," she said, "if a man loves a woman strongly enough to
+cry for her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted
+in, without being told."</p>
+<p>"But you don't seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to
+take the life of a human being," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I can understand how you feel," Liosha admitted. "But I don't
+feel about it the same as you. I've been brought up different."</p>
+<p>"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father
+made his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished
+with the pigs he took on humans who displeased him."</p>
+<p>"And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she
+extracted a promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a
+knife into anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so
+doing.</p>
+<p>But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace,
+Liosha led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house. If she
+now and then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits
+and free expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them
+a chronic topic of conversation. A large though somewhat scornful
+generosity also established her in their esteem. She would lend or
+give anything she possessed. When one of the forlorn and
+woollen-shawled old maids fell ill, she sat up of nights with her,
+and in spite of her ignorance of nursing, which was as vast as that
+of a rhinoceros, magnetised the fragile lady into well-being. I
+think she was fairly happy. If London had been situated amid gorges
+and crags and ravines and granite cliffs she would have been
+completely so. She yearned for mountains. Mrs. Considine to satisfy
+this nostalgia took her for a week's trip to the English Lakes. She
+returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for unimportant
+undulations, and declaring her preference for London. So in London
+she remained.</p>
+<p>In these early stages of our acquaintance with Liosha, she
+counted in our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even
+in the crises of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not
+rob us of our night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy
+personality whose quaint vagaries afforded us constant amusement
+than as an intense human soul. The working out of her destiny did
+not come within the sphere of our emotional sympathies like that of
+Adrian and Doria. The latter were of our own kind and class, bound
+to us not only by the common traditions of centuries, but by ties
+of many years' affection. It is only natural that we should have
+watched them more closely and involved ourselves more intimately in
+their scheme of things.</p>
+<p>The first fine rapture of house-pride having grown calm, the
+Bolderos settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life
+tempered by the amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian
+worked, Doria read Dante and attended performances of the
+Intellectual Drama; when Adrian relaxed, she cooked dainties in a
+chafing dish and accompanied him to Musical Comedy. They
+entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out into cultivated
+society. The Art of Life, they declared, was to catch atmosphere,
+whatever that might mean. Adrian explained, with the gentle pity of
+one addressing himself to the childish intelligence.</p>
+<p>"It's merely the perfect freedom of mental adaptation. To
+discuss pragmatism while eating oysters would be destructive to the
+enjoyment afforded by the delicate sense of taste, whereas, to let
+one's mind wander from the plane of philosophic thought when
+preparing for a Hauptmann or a Strindberg play would lead to
+nothing less than the disaster of disequilibrium."</p>
+<p>Saying this he caught my cold, unsympathetic gaze, but I think I
+noticed the flicker of an eyelid. Doria, however, nodded, in
+wide-eyed approval. So I suppose they really did practise between
+themselves these modal gymnastics. They were all of a piece with
+the "atmospheres" evoked in the various rooms of the flat. To
+Barbara and myself, comfortable Philistines, all this appeared
+exceeding lunatic. But every married couple has a right to lay out
+its plan of happiness in its own way. If we had made taboo of
+irrelevant gossip between the acts of a serious play our evening
+would have been a failure. Theirs would have been, and, in fact,
+was a success. Connubial felicity they certainly achieved: and what
+else but an impertinence is a criticism of the means?</p>
+<p>Easter came. They had been married six months. "The Diamond
+Gate" had been published for nearly a year and was still selling in
+England and America. Adrian flourishing his first half-yearly
+cheque in January had vowed he had no idea there was so much money
+in the world. He basked in Fortune's sunshine. But for all the
+basking and all the syllabus of the perfect existence, and all his
+unquestionable love for Doria, and all her worship for him together
+with its manifestation in her admirable care for his material
+well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began to strike me as
+a man lacking some essential of happiness. They spent a week or so
+with us at Northlands. Adrian confessed dog-weariness. His looks
+confirmed his words. A vertical furrow between the brows and a
+little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair
+moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face. In
+moments of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a
+squint, appeared in his blue eyes. He was no longer debonair, no
+longer the lightly laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox
+seeing flippancy in the Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in
+Little Tich. He was morose and irritable. He had acquired a nervous
+habit of secretly rubbing his thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips
+when Doria, in her pride, spoke of his work, which amounted almost
+to ill-breeding. It was only late at night during our last smoke
+that he assumed a semblance of the old Adrian; and by that time he
+had consumed as much champagne and brandy as would have rendered
+jocose the prophet Jeremiah.</p>
+<p>He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From
+Doria we learned the cause. For the last three months he had been
+working at insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight
+he breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic
+workroom and remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he
+began a three-hour spell of work. At night a four hours'
+spell&mdash;from nine to one, if they had no evening engagement,
+from midnight to four o'clock in the morning if they had been
+out.</p>
+<p>"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of
+this maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't
+let him do it. He is killing himself."</p>
+<p>"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting
+out creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous
+novelists whom I meet at the Athen&aelig;um have told me so
+themselves. Even prodigious people like Sir Walter Scott and
+Zola&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist
+must be a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why&mdash;those two
+that you've mentioned&mdash;they slung out stuff by the bucketful.
+It didn't matter to them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the
+rhythm and the balance and the beauty of every sentence he
+writes&mdash;to say nothing of the subtlety of his analysis and the
+perfect drawing of his pictures. My dear, good people"&mdash;she
+threw out her hands in an impatient gesture&mdash;"you don't know
+what you're talking about. How can you? It's impossible for you to
+conceive&mdash;it's almost impossible even for me to
+conceive&mdash;the creative workings of the mind of a man of
+genius. Four hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four
+hours a day is stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But
+you can't imagine that work like Adrian's is to be done in this
+dead mechanical way."</p>
+<p>"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My
+admiration for Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I
+repeat that no human brain since the beginning of time has been
+capable of spinning cobwebs of fancy for twelve hours a day, day in
+and day out for months at a time. Look at your husband. He has
+tried it. Does he sleep well?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Has he a hearty appetite?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Is he a light-hearted, cheery sort of chap to have about the
+place?"</p>
+<p>"He's naturally tired, after his winter's work," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"He's played out," said I, "and if you are a wise woman, you'll
+take him away for a couple of months' rest, and when he gets back,
+see that he works at lower pressure."</p>
+<p>Doria promised to do her best; but she sighed.</p>
+<p>"You don't realise Adrian's iron will."</p>
+<p>Once more I recognised with a shock that I did not know my
+Adrian. I used to think one could blow the thistledown fellow about
+whithersoever one pleased. Of the two, Doria seemed to have
+unquestionably the stronger will-power.</p>
+<p>"Surely," said I, "you can twist him round your little
+finger."</p>
+<p>Doria sighed again&mdash;and a wanly indulgent smile played
+about her lips.</p>
+<p>"You two dear people are so sensible, that it makes me almost
+angry to see how you can't begin to understand Adrian. As a man, of
+course I have a certain influence over him. But as an
+artist&mdash;how can I? He's a thing apart from me altogether. I
+know perfectly well that thousands of artists' wives wreck their
+happiness through sheer, stupid jealousy of their husbands' art.
+I'm not such a narrow-minded, contemptible woman." She threw her
+little head up proudly. "I should loathe myself if I grudged one
+hour that Adrian gave to his work instead of to me."</p>
+<p>This time Barbara and I sighed, for we realised how vain had
+been our arguments. Our considerably greater knowledge of life, our
+stark common-sense, our deep affection for Adrian counted as naught
+beside the fact that we had no experience whatever in the rearing
+of a genius.</p>
+<p>That word "genius" came too often from Doria's lips. At first it
+irritated me; then I heard it with morbid detestation. In the
+course of a more or less intimate conversation with Adrian, I let
+slip a mild expression of my feelings. He groaned
+sympathetically.</p>
+<p>"I wish to heaven she wouldn't do it," said he. "It puts a man
+into such a horrible false position towards himself. It's beautiful
+of her, of course&mdash;it's her love for me. But it gets on my
+nerves. Instead of sitting down at my desk with nothing in my mind
+but my day's work to slog through, I hear her voice and I have to
+say to myself, 'Go to. I am a genius. I mustn't write like any
+common fellow. I must produce the work of a genius.' It really
+plays the devil with me."</p>
+<p>He walked excitedly about the library, flourishing a cigar and
+scattering the ash about the carpet. I am pernicketty in a few ways
+and hate tobacco ash on my carpet; every room in the house is an
+arsenal of ash trays. In normal mood Adrian punctiliously observed
+the little laws of the establishment. This scattering of cigar ash
+was a sign of spiritual convulsion.</p>
+<p>"Have you explained the matter to Doria?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He halted before me performing his new uncomfortable trick of
+slithering thumb over finger tips.</p>
+<p>"No," he snapped. "How can I?"</p>
+<p>I replied, mildly, that it seemed to be the simplest thing in
+the world. He broke away impatiently, saying that I couldn't
+understand.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, though what there was to understand in so
+elementary a proposition goodness only knows. I was beginning to
+resent this perpetual charge of non-intelligence.</p>
+<p>"I think we had better clear out," he said. "I'm only a damned
+nuisance. I've got this book of mine on the brain"&mdash;he held up
+his head with both hands&mdash;"and I'm not a fit companion for
+anybody."</p>
+<p>I adjured him in familiar terms not to talk rubbish. He was here
+for the repose of country things and freedom from day-infesting
+cares. Already he was looking better for the change. But I could
+not refrain from adding:</p>
+<p>"You wrote 'The Diamond Gate' without turning a hair. Why should
+you worry yourself to death about this new book?"</p>
+<p>When he answered I had the shivering impression of a wizened old
+man speaking to me. The slight cast I had noticed in his blue eyes
+became oddly accentuated.</p>
+<p>"'The Diamond Gate,'" he said, peering at me uncannily, "was
+just a pretty amateur story. The new book is going to stagger the
+soul of humanity."</p>
+<p>"I wish you weren't such a secretive devil," said I. "What's the
+book about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It will do
+you good."</p>
+<p>I put my arm round his shoulders and my hand gave him an
+affectionate grip. My heart ached for the dear fellow, and I
+longed, in the plain man's way, to break down the walls of reserve,
+which like those of the Inquisition Chamber, I felt were closing
+tragically upon him.</p>
+<p>"Come, come," I continued. "Get it out. It's obvious that the
+thing is suffocating you. I'll tell nobody&mdash;not even that
+you've told me&mdash;neither Doria nor Barbara&mdash;it will be the
+confidence of the confessional. You'll be all the better for it.
+Believe me."</p>
+<p>He shrugged himself free from my grasp and turned away; his
+nervous fingers plucked unconsciously at his evening tie until it
+was loosened and the ends hung dissolutely over his shirt
+front.</p>
+<p>"You're very good, Hilary," said he, looking at every spot in
+the room except my eyes. "If I could tell you, I would. But it's an
+enormous canvas. I could give you no idea&mdash;" The furrow
+deepened between his brows&mdash;"If I told you the scheme you
+would get about the same dramatic impression as if you read, say,
+the letter R, in a dictionary. I'm putting into this novel," he
+flickered his fingers in front of me&mdash;"everything that ever
+happened in human life."</p>
+<p>I regarded him in some wonder.</p>
+<p>"My dear fellow," said I, "you can't compress a Liebig's Extract
+of Existence between the covers of a six-shilling novel."</p>
+<p>"I can," said he, "I can!" He thumped my writing table, so that
+all the loose brass and glass on it rattled. "And by God! I'm going
+to do it."</p>
+<p>"But, my dearest friend," I expostulated, "this is absurd. It's
+megalomania&mdash;<i>la folie des grandeurs</i>."</p>
+<p>"It's the divinest folly in the world," said he.</p>
+<p>He threw a cigar stump into the fireplace and poured himself out
+and drank a stiff whisky and soda. Then he laughed in imitation of
+his familiar self.</p>
+<p>"You dear prim old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going
+to come straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and
+twentieth centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. And
+now, good-night."</p>
+<p>He laughed, waved his arm in a cavalier gesture and went from
+the room, slamming the door masterfully behind him.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+<p>We kept the unreasonable pair at Northlands as long as we could,
+doing all that lay in our power to restore Adrian's idiotically
+impaired health. I motored him about the county; I took him to
+golf, a pastime at which I do not excel; and I initiated him into
+the invigorating mysteries of playing at robbers with Susan. We
+gave a carefully selected dinner-party or two, and accepted on his
+behalf a few discreet invitations. At these
+entertainments&mdash;whether at Northlands or elsewhere&mdash;we
+caused it to be understood that the lion, being sick, should not be
+asked to roar.</p>
+<p>"It's so trying for him," said Doria, "when people he doesn't
+know come up and gush over 'The Diamond Gate'&mdash;especially now
+when his nerves are on edge."</p>
+<p>On the occasion of our second dinner-party, the guests having
+been forewarned of the famous man's idiosyncrasies, no reference
+whatever was made to his achievements. We sat him between two
+pretty and charming women who chattered amusingly to him with what
+I, who kept an eye open and an ear cocked, considered to be a very
+subtly flattering deference. Adrian responded with adequate
+animation. As an ordinary clever, well-bred man of the world he
+might have done this almost mechanically; but I fancied that he
+found real enjoyment in the light and picturesque talk of his two
+neighbours. When the ladies left us, he discussed easy politics
+with the Member for our own division of the County. In the
+drawing-room, afterwards, he played a rubber at bridge, happened to
+hold good cards and smiled an hour away. When the last guest
+departed, he yawned, excused himself on the ground of healthy
+fatigue and went straight off to bed. Barbara and I congratulated
+ourselves on the success of our dinner-party. The next day Adrian
+went about as glum as a dinosaur in a museum, and conveyed, even to
+Susan's childish mind, his desire for solitude. His hang-dog
+dismalness so affected my wife, that she challenged Doria.</p>
+<p>"What in the world is the matter with him, to-day?"</p>
+<p>Doria drew herself up and flashed a glance at Barbara&mdash;they
+were both little bantams of women, one dark as wine, the other fair
+as corn. If ever these two should come to a fight, thought I who
+looked on, it would be to the death.</p>
+<p>"Your friends are very charming, my dear, and of course I've
+nothing to say against them; but I was under the impression that
+every educated person in the English-speaking world knew my
+husband's name, and I consider the way he was ignored last night by
+those people was disgraceful."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear Doria," cried Barbara, aghast, "we thought that
+Adrian was having quite a good time."</p>
+<p>"You may think so, but he wasn't. Adrian's a gentleman and plays
+the game; but you must see it was very galling to him&mdash;and to
+me&mdash;to be treated like any stockbroker&mdash;or
+architect&mdash;or idle man about town."</p>
+<p>"You are unfortunate in your examples," said I, intervening
+judicially. "Pray reflect that there are architects alive whose
+artistic genius is not far inferior to Adrian's."</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean," she snapped.</p>
+<p>"No, we don't, dear," said Barbara dangerously. "We think you're
+a little idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. We took the
+trouble to tell every one of those people that Adrian hated any
+reference to his work, and like decent folk they didn't refer to
+it. There&mdash;now round upon us."</p>
+<p>The pallor deepened a shade in Doria's ivory cheek.</p>
+<p>"You have put me in the wrong, I admit it. But I think it would
+have been better to let us know."</p>
+<p>What could one do with such people? I was inclined to let them
+work out their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but
+Barbara decided otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree
+of lunacy as warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain
+duty to look after them. So we continued to look after our genius
+and his worshipper, and we did it so successfully that before he
+left us he recovered his sleep in some measure, and lost the
+squinting look of strain in his eyes.</p>
+<p>On the morning of their departure I mildly counselled him to
+temper his fine frenzy with common-sense.</p>
+<p>"Knock off the night work," said I.</p>
+<p>He frowned, fidgeted with his feet.</p>
+<p>"I wish to God I hadn't to work at all," said he. "I hate it!
+I'd sooner be a coal-heaver."</p>
+<p>"Bosh!" said I. "I know that you're an essentially idle beggar;
+but you're as proud as Punch of your fame and success and all that
+it means to you."</p>
+<p>"What does it mean after all?"</p>
+<p>"If you talk in that pessimistic way," I said, "you'll make me
+cry. Don't. It means every blessed thing in the world to you. At
+any rate it has meant Doria."</p>
+<p>"I suppose that's true," he grunted. "And I suppose I am
+essentially idle. But I wish the damned thing would get written of
+its own accord. It's having to sit down at that infernal desk that
+gets on my nerves. I have the same horrible apprehension of
+it&mdash;always have&mdash;as one has before a visit to the
+dentist, when you know he's going to drill hell into you."</p>
+<p>"Why do you work in such a depressing room?" I asked. "If I were
+shut up alone in it, I would stick my nose in the air and howl like
+a dog."</p>
+<p>"Oh, the room's all right," said he. Then he looked away
+absently and murmured as if to himself, "It isn't the room."</p>
+<p>"Then what is it?" I persisted.</p>
+<p>He turned with a dreary sort of smile. "It's the born butterfly
+being condemned to do the work of the busy bee."</p>
+<p>A short while afterwards we saw them drive off and watched the
+car disappear round the bend of the drive.</p>
+<p>"Well, my dear," said I, "thank goodness I'm not a man of
+genius."</p>
+<p>"Amen!" said Barbara, fervently.</p>
+<p>As soon as they had settled down in their flat, Adrian began to
+work again, in the same unremitting fashion. The only concession he
+made to consideration of health was to go to bed immediately on his
+return from dinner-parties and theatres instead of spending three
+or four hours in his study. Otherwise the routine of toil went on
+as before. One afternoon, happening to be in town and in the
+neighbourhood of St. John's Wood, I called at the flat with the
+idea of asking Doria for a cup of tea. I also had in my pocket a
+letter from Jaffery which I thought might interest Adrian. The maid
+who opened the door informed me that her mistress was out. Was Mr.
+Boldero in? Yes; but he was working.</p>
+<p>"That doesn't matter," said I. "Tell him I'm here."</p>
+<p>The maid did not dare disturb him. Her orders were absolute. She
+could not refuse to admit me, seeing that I was already in the
+hall; but she stoutly refused to announce me. I argued with the
+damsel.</p>
+<p>"I may have business of the utmost importance with your
+master."</p>
+<p>She couldn't help it. She had her orders.</p>
+<p>"But, my good Ellen," said I&mdash;the minx had actually been in
+our service a couple of years before!&mdash;"suppose the place were
+on fire, what would you do?"</p>
+<p>She looked at me demurely. "I think I should call a policeman,
+sir."</p>
+<p>"You can call one now," said I, "for I'm going to announce
+myself. Don't tell me I'll have to walk over your dead body first,
+for it won't do."</p>
+<p>I know it is not looked upon as a friendly act to interrupt a
+man in his work and to disregard the orders given to his servants,
+but I was irritated by all this Grand Llama atmosphere of
+mysterious seclusion. Besides, I had been walking and felt just a
+little hot and dusty and thirsty, and I felt all the hotter,
+dustier and thirstier for my argument with Ellen.</p>
+<p>"I'll announce myself," I said, and marched to the door of
+Adrian's study. It was locked. I rapped at the door.</p>
+<p>"Who's there?" came Adrian's voice.</p>
+<p>"Me. Hilary."</p>
+<p>"What's the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I happen to be a guest under your roof," said I, with a touch
+of temper.</p>
+<p>"Wait a minute," said he.</p>
+<p>I waited about two. Then the door was unlocked and opened and I
+strode in upon Adrian who looked rather pale and dishevelled.</p>
+<p>"Why the deuce," said I, "did you keep me hanging about like
+that?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry," he replied. "But I make it a fixed rule to put away
+my work"&mdash;he waved a hand towards the safe&mdash;"whenever
+anybody, even Doria, wants to come into the room."</p>
+<p>I glanced around the cheerless place. There were no traces of
+work visible. Save that the quill pens and blotting pad were inky,
+his library table seemed as immaculate, as unstained by toil, as it
+did on the occasion of my first visit.</p>
+<p>"You needn't have made all that fuss," said I. "I only dropped
+in for a second or two. I wanted to ask for a drink and to show you
+a letter from Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"Oh, Jaffery!" He smiled. "How's the old barbarian getting
+on?"</p>
+<p>"Tremendously. He's the guest of a Viceroy and living in
+sumptuousness. Read for yourself."</p>
+<p>I took from my pocket letter and envelope. Now I am a man who
+keeps few letters and no envelopes. The second post bringing
+Jaffery's epistle had just arrived when I was leaving Northlands
+that morning, and it was but an accident of haste that the envelope
+had not been destroyed. I took the opportunity of tearing it up
+while Adrian was reading. With the pieces in my hand, I peered
+about the room.</p>
+<p>"What are you looking for?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Your waste-paper basket."</p>
+<p>"Haven't got such a thing."</p>
+<p>I threw my litter into the grate.</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to pander to the curiosity of housemaids," he
+replied rather irritably.</p>
+<p>"What do you do with your waste paper, then?"</p>
+<p>"Never have any," he said, with his eyes on Jaffery's
+letter.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" I cried. "Do you pigeon-hole bills and
+money-lenders' circulars and second-hand booksellers' catalogues
+and all their wrappers?"</p>
+<p>He folded up the letter, took me by the arm and regarded me with
+a smile of forced patience.</p>
+<p>"My dear Hilary, can't you ever understand that this room is
+just a workshop and nothing else? Here I think of nothing but my
+novel. I would as soon think of conducting my social correspondence
+in the bathroom. If you want to see the waste-paper basket where I
+throw my bills and unanswered letters from duchesses, and the
+desk&mdash;I share it with Doria&mdash;where I dash off my
+brilliant replies to money-lenders, come into the drawing-room.
+There, also, I shall be able to give you a drink."</p>
+<p>My eyes, following an unconscious glance from his, fell upon a
+new and hitherto unnoticed object&mdash;a little table, now
+startlingly obvious, in a corner of the all but unfurnished room,
+bearing a tray with half full decanter, syphon and glass.</p>
+<p>"You've got all I want here," said I.</p>
+<p>"No. That's mere stimulant. <i>Sapit lucernam</i>. It has a
+horrible flavour of midnight oil. There's not what you understand
+by a drink in it. Let's get out of the accursed hole."</p>
+<p>He dragged me almost by force into the drawing-room, where he
+entertained me courteously. It was curious to observe how his
+manner changed in&mdash;I have to use the Boldero jargon&mdash;in
+the different atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his
+whisky&mdash;a present from old man Jornicroft, a rare blend which
+just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's word, he declared, was
+delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and there a one in the
+City of London were able to procure. In its flavour, said he,
+lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me a
+Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On
+enquiry as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I
+learned that since eminent tenors and divas had sung into
+gramophones, the standard had appreciated.</p>
+<p>"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can
+afford it."</p>
+<p>For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
+drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington
+Station under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and
+afterwards at home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I
+had loosely and playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic,
+without a thought as to the exact significance of the term. Now a
+horrible thought harassed me. Had I been precise without knowing
+it?</p>
+<p>Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy
+of their working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard
+of are such fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which
+Adrian surrounded himself. Why should he put himself under lock and
+key? Why should he not allow human eye to fall, even from the
+distance prescribed by good manners, upon his precious manuscript?
+Why need he use care so scrupulous as not to expose even torn up
+bits of rough draft to the ancillary publicity of a waste-paper
+basket? Soundness of mind did not lie that way. The terms in which
+he alluded to his book were not those of a sane man filled with the
+joy of his creation. None of us, not even Doria, knew how the story
+was progressing. He had signed a contract with an American editor
+for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in the middle of
+May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered. Doria told
+Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much of
+the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
+putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with
+him, calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I
+had been right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to
+the malady and shivered.</p>
+<p>Suddenly, a day or two afterwards, came news that, to some
+extent, relieved my mind.</p>
+<p>While the Bolderos were at breakfast, a cable arrived from the
+Editor. It ran: "Unless half of manuscript is delivered to-day at
+London Office will cancel contract." Adrian read it, frowned and
+handed it to Doria. It seems that in all business matters she had
+his confidence.</p>
+<p>"Well, dear?" she said, looking up at him.</p>
+<p>He broke out angrily. "Did you ever hear such amazing insolence?
+I give this pettifogging tradesman the privilege of publishing my
+novel in his rubbishy periodical and he dares to dictate terms to
+me! Half a novel, indeed! As if it were half a bale of calico. The
+besotted fool! As well ask a clock-maker to deliver half a
+clock."</p>
+<p>"Argument by analogy is rather dangerous," she said gently,
+seeking to turn aside his wrath with a smile. "It's not quite the
+same thing. Can't you give him something to go on with?"</p>
+<p>"I can, but I won't. I'll see him damned first." He turned to
+the maid and demanded a telegraph form.</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do?"</p>
+<p>"I'm going to teach him a lesson. He thinks I'm going to be
+taken in by his bluff and run round with a brown paper parcel to
+Fleet Street or wherever his beastly office is. He's mistaken.
+There," he wrote the cable hurriedly and read it aloud, "'Shall not
+deliver anything. Only too glad to cancel contract.' He'll he the
+most surprised and disgusted man in America!"</p>
+<p>"Need you put it quite like that?" said Doria.</p>
+<p>"It's the only way to make him understand. He has been buzzing
+round me like a wasp for the past month. Now he's squashed. And
+now," said he, getting up and lighting a cigarette, "I'm not going
+to do another stroke of work for three months."</p>
+<p>It was the news of this last announcement that relieved my mind:
+not the story of Adrian's intolerable treatment of the editor,
+which was of a piece with his ordinary attitude towards his own
+genius. The capriciousness of the resolution startled me; but I
+approved whole-heartedly. I would have counselled immediate change
+of scene, had not Adrian anticipated my advice by rushing off then
+and there to Cook's and taken tickets to Switzerland. Having some
+business in town, I motored up with Barbara earlier than I need
+have done, and we saw them off at Victoria Station. Adrian, in
+holiday spirits, talked rather loudly. Now that he was free from
+the horror of that bestial vampire sucking his blood&mdash;that was
+his way of referring to the long suffering and hardly used
+editor&mdash;life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his spirit
+could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean.
+He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months
+communing with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain
+heights, three months calm discipline of the soul&mdash;that was
+what he needed. Then to work, and in another three months,
+<i>currente calamo</i>, the book would be written.</p>
+<p>"And what is Doria going to do on top of the Matterhorn?" asked
+my wife.</p>
+<p>Doria cried out, "Oh, don't tease. We're not going near the
+Matterhorn. We're going to read beautiful books, and see beautiful
+things and think beautiful thoughts." She dragged Barbara a step or
+two aside. "Don't you think this is the best thing that could have
+happened?" she asked, with her anxious, earnest gaze.</p>
+<p>"The very, very best, dear," replied Barbara gently.</p>
+<p>And indeed it was. If ever a man realised himself to be on the
+verge of the abyss, I am sure it was Adrian Boldero. Some haunting
+fear was set at the back of his laughing eyes&mdash;the expression
+of an animal instinct for self-preservation which discounted the
+balderdash about the soaring yet disciplined soul.</p>
+<p>I whispered to Doria: "Don't go too far into the wilds out of
+reach of medical advice."</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>"You're taking away a sick man."</p>
+<p>"Do you really think so?"</p>
+<p>"I do," said I.</p>
+<p>She looked to right and left and then at me full in the face,
+and she gripped my hand.</p>
+<p>"You're a good friend, Hilary. God knows I thank you."</p>
+<p>From which I clearly understood that her passionately loyal
+heart was grievously sore for Adrian.</p>
+<p>During their absence abroad, which lasted much longer than three
+months, we heard fairly regularly from Doria; twice or thrice from
+Adrian. After a time he grew tired of mountaintops and solitude and
+declared that his inspiration required steeping in the past,
+communion with the hallowed monuments of mankind. So they wandered
+about the old Italian cities, until he discovered that the one
+thing essential to his work was the gaiety of cosmopolitan society;
+whereupon they went the round of French watering-places, where
+Adrian played recklessly at baccarat and spent inordinate sums on
+food. And all the time Doria wrote glowingly of their doings.
+Adrian had put the book out of his head, was always in the best of
+spirits. He had completely recovered from the strain of work and
+was looking forward joyously to the final spurt in London and the
+achievement of the masterpiece.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile we played the annual comedy of our August migration;
+the only change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West
+Coast of Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One
+gleam of joy irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn&mdash;the news
+that Jaffery, his mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would
+be home for Christmas. Our host and hostess were sporting folk with
+red, weatherbeaten faces and a mania (which they expected us to
+share) for salmon-fishing in the pouring rain. As neither Barbara
+nor I were experts&mdash;I always trembled lest a strong young fish
+getting hold of the end of Barbara's line should whisk her over
+like a feather into the boiling current&mdash;and as for myself, I
+prefer the more contemplative art of bottom fishing from a punt in
+dry weather&mdash;our friends caught all the salmon, while we
+merely caught colds in the head. Many an hour of sodden misery was
+cheered by the whispered word of comfort: Jaffery would be home for
+Christmas. And when, at ten o'clock in the evening, just as we were
+beginning to awake from the nightmare of the day, and to desire
+sprightly conversation, our host and hostess fell into a lethargy,
+and staggered off to slumber, we beguiled the hour before bedtime
+with talk of Jaffery's homecoming.</p>
+<p>At last we escaped and took the good train south. The Bolderos
+had already returned to London. They came to spend our first
+week-end at Northlands. Adrian professed to be in the robustest of
+health and to have not a care in the world. The holiday, said he,
+had done him incalculable good. Already he had begun to work in the
+full glow of inspiration. We thought him looking old and
+hag-ridden, but Doria seemed happy. She had her own reason for
+happiness, which she confided to Barbara. It would be early in the
+New Year. . . . Her eyes, I noticed, were filled with a new and
+wonderful love for Adrian. On the Sunday afternoon as we were
+sauntering about the garden, Adrian touched upon the subject in a
+man's shy way when speaking to his fellow man.</p>
+<p>"Why," said I with a laugh, "that's just about the time you
+expect the book to be out."</p>
+<p>He gave me a queer, slanting look. "Yes," said he, "they'll both
+be born together."</p>
+<p>That night, to my consternation and sorrow, he went to bed quite
+fuddled with whisky.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+<p>Never shall I forget that Christmastide. Its shadow has fallen
+on every Christmas since then. And, in the innocent insolence of
+our hearts, we had planned such a merry one. It was the first since
+our marriage that we were spending at Northlands, for like dutiful
+folk we had hitherto spent the two or three festival days in the
+solid London house of Barbara's parents. Her father, Sir Edward
+Kennion, retired Permanent Secretary of a Government Office, was a
+courtly gentleman with a faultless taste in old china and wine, and
+Lady Kennion a charming old lady almost worthy of being the mother
+of Barbara. To speak truly, I had always enjoyed my visits. But
+when the news came that, for the sake of the dear lady's health,
+the Kennions were starting for Bermuda, in the middle of December,
+it did not strike us desolate. On the contrary Barbara clapped her
+hands in undisguised glee.</p>
+<p>"It will do mother no end of good, and we can give Susan a real
+Christmas of her own."</p>
+<p>So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to
+have a roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a
+widowed cousin of mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children;
+and we sent out invitations to the <i>ban</i> and <i>arri&egrave;re
+ban</i> of the county's juvenility, to say nothing of that of
+London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having accounted satisfactorily for
+Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope in a Christian spirit, of
+our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be with us. Why not ask
+his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion affection for each
+other. Then there was Liosha. Both she and Jaffery met in Susan's
+heart, and it was Susan's Christmas. With Liosha would come Mrs.
+Considine, admirable and lonely woman. We trusted to luck and to
+Mrs. Considine's urbane influence for amenable relations between
+Liosha and Euphemia Chayne. With Jaffery in the house, Adrian and
+Doria must come. Last Christmas they had spent in the country with
+old Mrs. Boldero; old Mrs. Boldero was, therefore, summoned to
+Northlands. In the lightness of our hearts we invited Mr.
+Jornicroft. After the letter was posted my spirits sank. What in
+the world would we do with ponderous old man Jornicroft? But in the
+course of a few posts my gloom was lightened by a refusal. Mr.
+Jornicroft had been in the habit for many years of spending
+Christmas at the King's Hotel, Hastings, and had already made his
+arrangements.</p>
+<p>"Who else is there?" asked Barbara.</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I. "This is a modest country house, not an
+International Palace Hotel. Including Eileen's children and their
+governess and nurse and Doria's maid, we shall have to find
+accommodation for fifteen people."</p>
+<p>"Nonsense!" she said. "We can't do it."</p>
+<p>"Count up," said I.</p>
+<p>I lit a cigar and went out into the winter-stricken garden, and
+left her reckoning on her fingers, with knitted brow. When I
+returned she greeted me with a radiantly superior smile.</p>
+<p>"Who said it couldn't be done? I do wish men had some kind of
+practical sense. It's as easy as anything."</p>
+<p>She unfolded her scheme. As far as my dazed wits could grasp it,
+I understood that I should give up my dressing-room, that the maids
+should sleep eight in a bed, that Franklin, our excellent butler,
+should perch in a walnut-tree and that planks should be put up in
+the bath-rooms for as many more guests as we cared to invite.</p>
+<p>"That is excellent," said I, "but do you realise that in this
+house party there are only three grown men&mdash;three ha'porth of
+grown men" (I couldn't forbear allusiveness) "to this intolerable
+quantity of women and children?"</p>
+<p>"But who is preventing you from asking men, dear? Who are
+they?"</p>
+<p>I mentioned my old friend Vansittart; also poor John Costello's
+son, who would most likely be at a loose end at Christmas, and one
+or two others.</p>
+<p>"Well have them, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So four unattached men were added to the party. That made
+nineteen. When I thought of their accommodation my brain reeled. In
+order to retain my wits I gave up thinking of it, and left the
+matter to Barbara.</p>
+<p>We were going to have a mighty Christmas. The house was filled
+with preparations. Susan and I went to the village draper's and
+bought beautifully coloured cotton stockings to hang up at her
+little cousins' bedposts. We stirred the plum pudding. We planned
+out everything that we should like to do, while Barbara, without
+much reference to us, settled what was to be done. In that way we
+divided the labour. Old Jaffery, back from China, came to us on the
+twentieth of December, and threw himself heart and soul into our
+side of the work. He took up our life just as though he had left it
+the day before yesterday&mdash;just the same sun-glazed hairy red
+giant, noisy, laughter-loving and voracious. Susan went about
+clapping her hands the day he arrived and shouting that Christmas
+had already begun.</p>
+<p>The first thing he did was to clamour for Adrian, the man of
+fame. But the three Bolderos were not coming till the
+twenty-fourth. Adrian was making one last glorious spurt, so Doria
+said, in order to finish the great book before Christmas. We had
+not seen much of them during the autumn. Trivial circumstances had
+prevented it. Susan had had measles. I had been laid up with a
+wrenched knee. One side happened to be engaged when the other
+suggested a meeting. A trumpery series of accidents. Besides,
+Adrian, with his new lease of health and inspiration, had plunged
+deeper than ever into his work, so that it was almost impossible to
+get hold of him. On the few occasions when he did emerge from his
+work-room into the light of friendly smiles, he gave glowing
+accounts of progress. He was satisfying his poet's dreams. He was
+writing like an inspired prophet. I saw him at the beginning of
+December. His face was white and ghastly, the furrow had deepened
+between his brows, and the strained squint had become permanent in
+his eyes. He laughed when I repeated my warnings of the spring.
+Small wonder, said he, that he did not look robust; virtue was
+going from him into every drop of ink. He could easily get through
+another month.</p>
+<p>"And then"&mdash;he clapped me on the shoulder&mdash;"my
+boy&mdash;you shall see! It will be worth all the <i>enfantement
+prodigieux</i>. You thought I was going off my chump, you dear old
+fuss-box. But you were wrong. So did Doria&mdash;for a week or two.
+Bless her! she's an artist's wife in ten million."</p>
+<p>"Have you thought of a title?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"'God'," said he. "Yes&mdash;'God'&mdash;short like that. Isn't
+it good?"</p>
+<p>I cried out that it was in the worst possible taste. It would
+offend. He would lose his public. The Non-conformists and
+Evangelicals would be frightened by the very name. He lost his
+temper and scoffed at my Early Victorianism. "Little Lily and her
+Pet Rabbit" was the kind of title I admired. He was going to call
+it "God."</p>
+<p>"My dear fellow, call it what you please," said I, anxious to
+avoid a duel of plates and glasses, for we were lunching on
+opposite sides of a table at his club.</p>
+<p>"I please to call it," said he, "by the only conceivable title
+that is adequate to such a work." Then he laughed, with a gleam of
+his old charm, and filled up my wine glass. "Anyhow, Wittekind, who
+has the commercial end of things in view, thinks it's ripping." He
+lifted his glass. "Here's to 'God.'"</p>
+<p>"Here's to the new book under a different name," said I.</p>
+<p>When I told Barbara about this, she rather agreed with
+Wittekind. It all depended on the matter and quality of the book
+itself.</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow," said I, abhorrent of dissension, "thank Heaven
+the wretched composition's nearly finished."</p>
+<p>On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
+offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine.
+Jaffery met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the
+hour before bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in
+which neither my wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor
+myself were allowed to participate. When nurses sounded the
+retreat, our two Brobdingnagians appeared in the drawing-room,
+radiant, and dishevelled, with children sticking to them like
+flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side of Jaffery,
+unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman against
+physical man, with three children&mdash;two in her generous arms
+and one on her back&mdash;to his mere pair&mdash;that I realised,
+with the shock that always attends one's discovery of the obvious,
+the superb Olympian greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six
+feet to his six feet two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way
+of burly men. She held herself as erect as a redwood pine. The
+depth of her bosom, in its calm munificence, defied the vast, thick
+heave of his shoulders. Her lips were parted in laughter shewing
+magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one could read all the
+mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her hair was
+anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins. Her
+barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted,
+just for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they
+stood, male and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern
+garb. Clap a pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight
+suit of chain mail, moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his
+red sweeping moustache, his red beard, his intense blue eyes
+staring out of a red face; dress Liosha in flaming maize and
+purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a gold torque through her
+hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under autumn bracken;
+strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity&mdash;it was an
+unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the
+G&ouml;tterd&auml;mmerung.</p>
+<p>I can only speak according to the impression produced by their
+entrance on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling
+lady of plump unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy,
+could not understand it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes,
+she saw nothing more in Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and
+considered Liosha far too big for a drawing-room.</p>
+<p>When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery
+surveyed with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the
+fire. Then in his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the
+arm.</p>
+<p>"They're too grown up for us, Liosha. Let's leave 'em. Come and
+I'll teach you how to play billiards."</p>
+<p>So off they went, to the satisfaction of Barbara and myself.
+Nothing could be better for our Christmas merriment than such
+relations of comradeship. We had the cheeriest of dinners that
+evening. If only, said Jaffery, old Adrian and Doria were with us.
+Well, they were coming the next day, together with Euphemia and the
+four unattached men. As I said before, I had given up enquiring
+into the lodging of this host, but Barbara, doubtless, as is her
+magic way, had caused bedrooms and beds to smile where all had been
+blank before. She herself was free from any care, being in her
+brightest mood; and when Barbara gave herself up to gaiety she was
+the most delicious thing in the wide world.</p>
+<p>In the morning the shadow fell. About eleven o'clock Franklin
+brought me a telegram into the library where Jaffery and I were
+sitting. I opened it.</p>
+<p>"<i>Terrible calamity. Come at once. Boldero</i>."</p>
+<p>I passed it to Jaffery. "My God!" said he, and we stared at each
+other. Franklin said:</p>
+<p>"Any answer, sir?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. 'Boldero. Coming at once.' And order the car round
+immediately&mdash;for London. Also ask Mrs. Freeth kindly to come
+here. Say the matter's important." Franklin withdrew. "It's
+Adrian," said I, my mind rushing back to my horrible apprehensions
+of the summer.</p>
+<p>"Or Doria. I understood&mdash;" He waved a hand.</p>
+<p>"Then Barbara must come."</p>
+<p>"She would in any case. It may be Adrian, so I'll come too, if
+you'll let me."</p>
+<p>Let the great, capable fellow come? I should think I would. "For
+Heaven's sake, do," said I.</p>
+<p>Barbara entered swinging housewifely keys.</p>
+<p>"I'm dreadfully busy, dear. What is it?"</p>
+<p>Then she saw our two set faces and stopped short. Her quick eyes
+fell on the telegram which Jaffery had put down in the arm of a
+couch, and before we could do or say anything, she had snatched it
+up and read it. She turned pale and held her little body very
+erect.</p>
+<p>"Have you ordered the car?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. Jaffery's coming with us."</p>
+<p>"Good, I'll get on my coat. Send Eileen to me. I must tell her
+about house things."</p>
+<p>She went out. Jaffery laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.</p>
+<p>"What a wonder of a wife you've got!"</p>
+<p>"I don't need you to tell me that," said I.</p>
+<p>We went downstairs to put on our coats and then round to the
+garage to hurry up the car.</p>
+<p>"There's some dreadful trouble at Mr. Boldero's," I said to the
+chauffeur. "You must drive like the devil."</p>
+<p>Barbara, veiled and coated, met us at the front door. She has a
+trick of doing things by lightning. We started; Barbara and Jaffery
+at the back, I sideways to them on one of the little chair seats.
+We had the car open, as it was a muggy day. . . . It is astonishing
+how such trivial matters stick in one's mind. . . . We went, as I
+had ordained, like the devil.</p>
+<p>"Who sent that telegram?" asked Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Doria," said I.</p>
+<p>"I think it's Adrian," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I think," said Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's
+mother. Either of the others would have said something definite.
+Ah!" she smote her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with
+spinal marrow and no backbone to hold it!"</p>
+<p>We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas
+traffic in the town clearing magically before us. Sometimes a car
+on an errand of life or death is recognised, given way to, like a
+fire engine.</p>
+<p>"What makes you so dead sure something's happened to Adrian?"
+Jaffery asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.</p>
+<p>Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears.
+Ever since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches
+to his novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I
+had given of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had
+mentioned his pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office,
+his bombastic rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of
+the Snows, and, all that being part and parcel of our old Adrian,
+we had laughed. Six months before I would have told Jaffery quite a
+different story. But now that Adrian had practically won through,
+what was the good of reviving the memory of ghastly
+apprehensions?</p>
+<p>"Tell me," said Jaffery. "There's something behind all
+this."</p>
+<p>I told him. It took some time. We sped through Slough and
+Hounslow, and past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as
+heavy as our hearts.</p>
+<p>"In plain words," said Jaffery, "it's G.P.&mdash;General
+Paralysis of the Insane."</p>
+<p>"That's what I fear," said I.</p>
+<p>"And you?" He turned to Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I too. Hilary has told you the truth."</p>
+<p>"But Doria! Good God! Doria! It will kill her!"</p>
+<p>Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery's great raw
+hand. Only at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear
+gloves.</p>
+<p>"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to
+pieces now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."</p>
+<p>Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main
+entrance in the world into any great city, with bare room for a
+criminal double line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn
+traffic, an officially organised murder-trap for all save the
+shrinking pedestrian on the mean, narrow, greasy side-walk, we
+crawled as fast as we were able. Then through Chiswick, over
+Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London. All London to cross.
+Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was smitten by a
+blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a hundred yards
+ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer yellow, almost
+olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in startling
+meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured. Though
+it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with light,
+but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
+roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of
+black things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria
+of colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of
+red and yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands,
+instantaneous, glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm
+reflections of mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an
+agglutinated yet moving mass by the shop fronts, the inner stream a
+garish pink ribbon of faces, the outer a herd of subfuse brown. And
+in the roadway, through the translucent olive, the swirling traffic
+seemed like armies of ghosts mightily and dashingly charioted.</p>
+<p>The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the
+mansions in St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule,
+and the hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened
+the car-door and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's
+face that he had been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as
+constant visitors of the Bolderos.</p>
+<p>"What's the matter?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Don't you know, sir?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his
+news, and bent forward and whispered to me:</p>
+<p>"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."</p>
+<p>I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague
+memory of the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some
+unintelligible account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted
+the ambiguous telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was
+dead. That was all I could think of. The only coherent remark I
+heard the man make was that it was a dreadful thing to happen at
+Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand tight and did not say a word.
+The next phase I remember only too vividly. When the flat door
+opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was like a curtain being
+lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as we entered we
+were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of
+an&aelig;sthetics, disinfectants&mdash;I know not
+what&mdash;greeted us.</p>
+<p>The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew
+down the corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards
+emerged a professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into
+Doria's room. From the spare room came for a moment an elderly
+woman whom we did not know. The study door was flung wide
+open&mdash;I noticed that the jamb was splintered. From the
+drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We entered and found
+Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara sat by her and
+took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell us
+nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went
+out. He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at
+seeing us.</p>
+<p>"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical
+man is apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is
+there a Mrs. Freeth here?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. My wife," said I.</p>
+<p>"Thank goodness&mdash;" He drew a breath. "There's no one here
+capable of doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other
+woman."</p>
+<p>Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Boldero is very ill&mdash;as ill as she can be. Of course
+you were aware of her condition&mdash;well&mdash;the shock has had
+its not very uncommon effect."</p>
+<p>"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.</p>
+<p>"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know
+nothing&mdash;I was summoned and found a man lying dead on the
+floor in that room"&mdash;he pointed to the study&mdash;"and a
+woman in a dreadful state. I've only had time to make sure that the
+poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me something about them?"</p>
+<p>So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who
+Adrian Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world
+and a bit of the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I
+don't know, for beating against the walls of my head was the
+thought that Adrian lay there in the room where I had seen the
+strange woman, lifeless and stiff, with the laughing eyes forever
+closed and the last mockery gone from his lips. Just then the woman
+appeared again. The young doctor beckoned to her and said a few
+words. Jaffery and I followed her into the death-chamber, leaving
+the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood and looked at all that
+was left of Adrian.</p>
+<p>But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I
+really knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the
+mansions then told us. But that little more I will set down
+here.</p>
+<p>For the past few days he had been working early and late,
+scarcely sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at
+five, had risen sleepless at seven, and having dressed and
+breakfasted had locked himself in his study. The very last page, he
+told Doria, was to be written. He was to come down to us for
+Christmas, with his novel a finished thing. At ten o'clock, in
+accordance with custom, when he began to work early, the maid came
+to his door with a cup of chicken-broth. She knocked. There was no
+reply. She knocked louder. She called her mistress. Doria hammered
+. . . she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror grips a woman. She
+sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din to
+awaken&mdash;well&mdash;all but the dead. The man forced the
+door&mdash;hence the splinters on the jamb&mdash;and there they
+found Adrian, in the great bare room, hanging horribly over his
+writing chair, with not a scrap of paper save his blotting-pad in
+front of him. He must have died almost as soon as he had reached
+his study, before he had time to take out his manuscript from the
+jealous safe. That this was so the harassed doctor afterwards
+affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination of the
+dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death&mdash;a
+clot of blood on the brain. . . .</p>
+<p>To go back . . . They found him dead. And then arose an
+unpicturable scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid
+woman, on the point of starting for a Christmas visit, took charge
+of the situation, sent for the doctor, despatched the telegram to
+us, and with the help of the porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The
+elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile mass of sodden hysteria.
+Much that was fascinating and feminine in Adrian came from this
+amiable and incapable lady.</p>
+<p>We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and
+soda&mdash;we needed it&mdash;and talked of the catastrophe. As
+yet, of course, we knew nothing of the clot of blood. Presently
+Barbara came in and put her hands on my shoulders.</p>
+<p>"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your
+club. Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from
+Northlands, and will look after things with Eileen. And put off
+Euphemia and the others, if you can."</p>
+<p>And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with
+such joyous anticipation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria
+hovering on the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on
+a Christmas eve in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was
+Christmas Day. The day after, Boxing Day. The day after that,
+Sunday. The whole world was dead. And all those awful days the thin
+yellow fog that was not fog but mere blight of darkness hung over
+the vast city.</p>
+<p>God spare me such another Christmastide.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+<p>The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had
+buried Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us.
+His mother had been put into a train that would carry her to the
+quiet country cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her
+sorrow. Doria still lay in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious,
+perhaps fortunately, of the stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds
+that strike a note of agony through a house of death. And it was
+many days before she awoke to knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed
+with her.</p>
+<p>We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and
+appointing Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his
+wife and the child that was to come, among his private papers in
+the Louis XV cabinet in the drawing-room. We had consulted his
+bankers and put matters in a solicitor's hands with a view to
+probate. Everything was in order. We found his own personal bills
+and receipts filed, his old letters tied up in bundles and
+labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his lease, his
+various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk of a
+careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
+Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
+intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry
+alone, because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search
+from impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.</p>
+<p>All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs
+had been found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we
+had placed the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on
+the sales of "The Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the
+safe in the study, knowing that it held nothing but the manuscript,
+and indeed we had not entered the forbidding room in which our poor
+friend had died. We kept it locked, out of half foolish and half
+affectionate deference to his unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara,
+most exquisitely balanced of women, who went in and out of the
+death-chamber without any morbid repulsion, hated the door of the
+study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed, professed relief
+from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an inmate of the
+flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and household
+things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
+strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the
+living, the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the
+safe and hand it over to the publisher.</p>
+<p>So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and
+entered the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn
+apart, and the blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of
+unilluminating yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been
+laid since the morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered
+with dim grey ash. The stale smell of the week's fog hung about the
+place. I turned on the electric light. With its white distempered,
+pictureless walls, and its scanty office furniture, the room looked
+inexpressibly dreary. We went to the library table. A quill pen lay
+on the blotting pad, its point in the midst of a couple of square
+inches of idle arabesques. On three different parts of the pad
+marked by singularly little blotted matter the quill had scrawled
+"God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass ash-tray I noticed
+three cigarettes, of each of which only about an eighth of an inch
+had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to hang at the
+end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its heavy door
+swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed from
+bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
+of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.</p>
+<p>"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a
+perplexed look. "We'll have our work cut out."</p>
+<p>"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as
+carefully as you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of
+method."</p>
+<p>Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose,
+ragged piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of
+the sheets unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages
+of definite manuscript; these we put aside; others contained
+jottings, notes, fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of
+names, incomprehensible memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one
+has stuck in my memory. "Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the
+false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah steps in." Other sheets were covered
+with meaningless phrases, the crude drawings that the writing man
+makes mechanically while he is thinking over his work, and
+arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.</p>
+<p>"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in
+his beard.</p>
+<p>"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in
+great relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We
+were turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I
+explained Adrian's whimsy.</p>
+<p>"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a
+laugh at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even
+an incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the
+rubbish away, and we'll look at the second shelf."</p>
+<p>The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There
+were more pages of consecutive composition&mdash;of such we sorted
+out perhaps a couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the
+same incoherent scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of
+scenarios of a dozen stories.</p>
+<p>"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said
+Jaffery, standing over me. There was but one chair in the
+room&mdash;Adrian's famous wooden writing chair with the leathern
+pad for which Barbara had pleaded, the chair in which the poor
+fellow had died, and I was sitting in it, as I sorted the
+manuscript which rose in masses on the table.</p>
+<p>"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting
+together those found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can
+make of them."</p>
+<p>We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the
+salvage. We could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless
+brow.</p>
+<p>"It will take weeks to fix it up."</p>
+<p>"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
+old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."</p>
+<p>In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their
+order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page
+with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more
+than three or four of such consecutive pages. We were confused,
+too, by at least a dozen headed "Chapter I."</p>
+<p>"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.</p>
+<p>I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the
+more I examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the
+nucleus of a coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me
+start in my chair.</p>
+<p>"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"</p>
+<p>He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned
+together in brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in
+front of me.</p>
+<p>"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of
+the pile.</p>
+<p>"Thank God!" said I.</p>
+<p>He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to
+my feet with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the
+face, on a white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the
+hand-written inscription:</p>
+<p>"The Diamond Gate. A Novel&mdash;by Thomas Castleton."</p>
+<p>"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second
+or two we both stood stock-still.</p>
+<p>The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script
+hastily flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's&mdash;Tom
+Castleton, the one genius of our boyish brotherhood, who had died
+on his voyage to Australia. There was no mistake. The great square
+virile hand was only too familiar&mdash;as different from Adrian's
+precise, academical writing as Tom Castleton from Adrian.</p>
+<p>Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been
+committed.</p>
+<p>There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The
+Diamond Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom
+Castleton. Adrian had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man.
+Not only from a dead man, but from the dead friend who had loved
+and trusted in him.</p>
+<p>We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up
+his hands and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the
+safe. Quickly we ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves
+to speak. There are times when words are too idle a medium for
+interchange of thought. We found nothing different from the
+contents of the two upper shelves. The apparently coherent
+manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we examined it. A
+sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into an awful
+certainty.</p>
+<p>The great epoch-making novel did not exist.</p>
+<p>It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have
+had no possibility of existing.</p>
+<p>"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in
+his great, hoarse bass.</p>
+<p>"God knows," said I.</p>
+<p>But even as I spoke, I knew.</p>
+<p>I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the
+Condemned Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I
+began to shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto
+unnoticed cold. I was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm
+round my shoulders and hugged me kindly.</p>
+<p>"Go and get warm," said he.</p>
+<p>"But this?" I pointed to the litter.</p>
+<p>"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."</p>
+<p>He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room,
+where I crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and
+benumbed feet and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn
+for the better that morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands
+for the day. It was just as well she had gone, I thought. I should
+have a few hours to compose some story in mitigation of the
+tragedy.</p>
+<p>Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He
+sat down on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and
+his shoulders hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer
+tricks with the shadows on his bearded face, making him look old
+and seamed with coarse and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze
+the room was filled with the yellow darkness that was thickening
+outside; yet we did not think of turning on the lights.</p>
+<p>"What have you done?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll
+bring a portmanteau and take it away."</p>
+<p>"What are you going to do with it?"</p>
+<p>"Leave that to me," said he.</p>
+<p>What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was
+very glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself
+with the reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was
+his job, as he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he
+conducted himself like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he
+was a professional demigod. He reassured me further.</p>
+<p>"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire.
+Presently he broke the silence.</p>
+<p>"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in
+God's name?"</p>
+<p>And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the
+cold grip of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was
+none too consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up
+side-tracks, which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to
+speak of Adrian in terms that did not tear our hearts. As a
+despoiler of the dead, his offence was rank. But we had loved him;
+and we still loved him, and he had expiated his crime by a year's
+unimaginable torture.</p>
+<p>Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not.
+Least of all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the
+revelation of his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things
+more or less in perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian.
+With all his faults, his poses, his superficialities, his
+secrecies, his egotisms, I never dreamed of him as aught but a
+loyal and honourable gentleman. When I think of him, I tremble
+before the awful isolation of the human soul. What does one man
+know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was right: "We
+mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable faith in
+Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast with
+conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
+them part of our very selves.</p>
+<p>Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the
+first place made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain
+warped his moral sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom
+Castleton had put the manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his
+hands. Undoubtedly he was to arrange for its publication.
+Castleton's appointment to the professorship in Australia had been
+a sudden matter, as I well remember, necessitating a feverish
+scramble to get his affairs in order before he sailed. Why did not
+Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the manuscript
+straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a question of
+despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were not
+parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
+characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death.
+From that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work.
+For years, in his easy way, he struggled against it, until,
+perhaps, desperate for Doria, he succumbed. What script,
+type-written or hand-written, he sent to Wittekind, the publisher
+of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till later. But why did he
+not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript? That was what
+Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with morbid
+psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
+queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
+relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence&mdash;that
+is the only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a
+psychologist, can explain the sustained act of folly.</p>
+<p>And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he
+accepted it gay and debonair, what could have been the state of
+that man's soul? I remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's
+face, at Mr. Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the
+joy from it, and the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the
+light of knowledge I looked back and recognised the feverishness of
+a demeanour that had been merely gay before. Well . . . he had been
+swept off his feet. If any man ever loved a woman passionately and
+devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For what it may be worth, put that to
+his credit: he sinned for love of a woman. And the rest? The tragic
+rest? His undertaking to write another novel? Indomitable
+self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless, casual lover
+of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set himself to do
+heretofore, he had done.</p>
+<p>As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
+stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
+examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for
+lack of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel
+to eclipse "The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had
+no doubt of his capacity.</p>
+<p>When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of
+guilt. He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's
+work, the beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self,
+the genius that was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this
+light-hearted enthusiasm, must have run a vein of cunning,
+invariable symptom of an unbalanced mind, which prompted secrecy,
+the secrecy which he had always loved to practise, and inspired him
+with the idea of the mysterious, secret room. The latter originated
+in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an intellectual Bluebeard's
+chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken wife would respect.
+It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into the condemned
+cell.</p>
+<p>As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in
+the midst of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly
+seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just
+consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole
+literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems,
+who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am
+aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his
+imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to
+write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which
+would outrival a universally proclaimed work of genius. And he had
+no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially critical; and the
+critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man. All critics are
+clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a little less
+than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was, by a
+barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
+which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative
+work in a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to
+interpret human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if
+you or I, who have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on
+horseback correctly, were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It
+did not seem to enter the poor fellow's head that the novelist, in
+no matter how humble a way, no matter how infinitesimal the
+invisible grain of muse may be, must have the especial,
+incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you like, but the
+essential quality of the artist.</p>
+<p>And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all
+those months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination.
+He had never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his
+character scheme, such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at
+one elusive vision of life, after another. His mind had become a
+medley of tags of the comedy and tragedy of human things. The more
+confused, the more universal became the poor limited vision. The
+whole of illimitable life, he had told me in his flogged, crazed
+exaltation, was to be captured in this wondrous book. The pity of
+it!</p>
+<p>How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day
+understand&mdash;that is to say, if he had retained it. The
+hypothesis of madness comforted. I would give much to feel that he
+had really believed in his progress with the work, that his
+assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If he had deceived
+himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had sat down day
+after day, with the appalling consciousness of his impotence, there
+have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted out, in this
+world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he should
+have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No wonder
+he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
+accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills
+for whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after
+night for the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At
+any rate God was merciful at last. He killed him.</p>
+<p>Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire&mdash;the ship-logs
+that Adrian loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and
+what-not, gave green and crimson and lavender flames.</p>
+<p>"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he
+said. "A war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every
+conceivable sort of hell. But this sample I haven't struck before
+and it's the worst of the lot. My God! and only the day before
+yesterday I took him to be married."</p>
+<p>"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked
+hairs out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy
+of China, which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you
+had no idea of time or space."</p>
+<p>He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.</p>
+<p>"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the
+child stillborn&mdash;"</p>
+<p>I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had
+smitten me; that of his words in September, and of the queer
+slanting look in his eyes: "They'll both be born together."</p>
+<p>I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I
+said. "Both stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter,
+the more shudderingly awful it is."</p>
+<p>Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.</p>
+<p>"And she at the point of death&mdash;to complete the tragedy,"
+he said below his breath.</p>
+<p>Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.</p>
+<p>"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried
+with a startling quaver in his deep voice.</p>
+<p>"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the
+best thing you can wish for her?"</p>
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+<p>"Isn't it obvious? She recovers&mdash;she will, most probably,
+recover; Jephson said so this morning&mdash;she comes back to life
+to find what? The shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My
+dear old Jaff, it's better that she should die now."</p>
+<p>Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow,
+and his eyes blazed.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean&mdash;shattering of idols?"</p>
+<p>"She is bound to learn the truth."</p>
+<p>He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty
+grasp, so that I winced with pain.</p>
+<p>"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any
+dim suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who
+told her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden
+fit of passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with
+clenched fists,&mdash;the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken
+shadow on wall and ceiling of the fog-darkened room&mdash;I shrank
+into my chair, for he seemed not a man but one of the primal forces
+of nature. He shouted in the same deep, shaken voice.</p>
+<p>"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You
+understand." His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You
+have seen it."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."</p>
+<p>"You swear you've seen it?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.</p>
+<p>He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through
+his hair, and walked for a little about the room.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself.
+It's a matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you
+understand clearly what I mean?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend
+myself to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it
+can't last forever."</p>
+<p>Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the
+steel of his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's
+enemy.</p>
+<p>"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
+something out of nothing."</p>
+<p>"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've
+seen it, and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the
+hell does it matter to you what becomes of it?"</p>
+<p>"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the
+whole matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor
+and trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
+responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
+choose. But you've seen the outside of it."</p>
+<p>He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled
+a memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a
+copy. Then he turned on me.</p>
+<p>"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a
+human soul of what you have seen this day?"</p>
+<p>I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for?
+But you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must
+know."</p>
+<p>He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted
+smile:</p>
+<p>"You and Barbara are one," said he.</p>
+<p>Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper
+from his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top
+sheet of the blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God:
+A Novel: By Adrian Boldero."</p>
+<p>"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the
+fire.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+<p>The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a
+touch of frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that
+Doria emerged from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they
+allowed me to visit her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost
+in search of a human occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she
+looked such a pitiful scrap, all hair and eyes. She smiled and held
+droopingly out to me the most fragile thing in hands I have ever
+seen.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."</p>
+<p>"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for
+things to find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have
+already made the discovery."</p>
+<p>She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I
+love it in the spring. The dancing daffodils&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.</p>
+<p>"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause.
+"At first I longed to die&mdash;that was why my recovery was so
+slow. But now&mdash;odd, isn't it?"</p>
+<p>"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how
+great it is," I replied gently.</p>
+<p>"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."</p>
+<p>I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much
+the same. In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious
+aspiration. If it gives them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's
+name, shouldn't they have it? But in Doria's case, its utterance
+gave me a kind of stab in the heart. By way of reply I patted her
+poor little wrist sympathetically.</p>
+<p>"When will the book be out?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.</p>
+<p>"I suppose they're busy printing it."</p>
+<p>"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.</p>
+<p>"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time.
+It won't do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"</p>
+<p>"I will," said I.</p>
+<p>I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that
+confounded ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought
+in the poor child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it.
+It formed the subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw
+trouble. I could not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the
+present I did not know the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I
+redeemed my promise and gave him Doria's message. He received it
+with a grumpy nod and said nothing. He had become somewhat grumpy
+of late, even when I did not broach the disastrous topic, and made
+excuses for not coming down to Northlands.</p>
+<p>I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather.
+At the best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow
+conditions of town; yet there he was week after week, staying in a
+poky set of furnished chambers in Victoria Street, and doing
+nothing in particular, as far as I could make out, save riding on
+the tops of motor-omnibuses without an overcoat.</p>
+<p>After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his
+pipe thoughtfully&mdash;we were in the smoking-room of a club (not
+the Athen&aelig;um) to which we both belonged&mdash;and then he
+roared out:</p>
+<p>"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Well"&mdash;he grinned a little&mdash;"I'm not exactly a kind
+of sick-room flower."</p>
+<p>"I think you ought to see her&mdash;you're as much trustee and
+executor as I am. You might also save Barbara and myself from
+nerve-racking questions."</p>
+<p>"All right, I'll go," he said.</p>
+<p>The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the
+book would be published as soon as possible.</p>
+<p>"When will that be?" she asked.</p>
+<p>Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.</p>
+<p>"Is it in the printer's hands?"</p>
+<p>"Not yet."</p>
+<p>"Why?"</p>
+<p>He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but
+here and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together,
+which Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript.
+He himself was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical
+task of revision.</p>
+<p>"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could
+not be given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very
+much to do, so why are you taking all this time over it?"</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.</p>
+<p>Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not
+greatly please Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related
+this conversation, she complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct.
+He had no right to hang up Adrian's great novel on account of his
+own wretched business. Letting the latter slide would have been a
+tribute to his dead friend. Barbara did her best to soothe her; but
+we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad start.</p>
+<p>A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I
+came across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I
+had known for some years&mdash;originally I think through Jaffery.
+I accepted the offer of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men
+will, we began to discuss our common friend.</p>
+<p>"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a
+while.</p>
+<p>"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.</p>
+<p>"Yes. Can't make him out."</p>
+<p>"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."</p>
+<p>"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a
+shock, is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a
+wilderness and roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be
+persuaded to leave it."</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We
+had to send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as
+well."</p>
+<p>"All this is news to me," said I.</p>
+<p>"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans,
+wild tribes&mdash;a matter of great danger and subtle
+politics&mdash;railways, finance&mdash;the whole hang of the
+international situation and internal conditions&mdash;a big
+scoop&mdash;everything that usually is butter and honey to Jaff
+Chayne&mdash;an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed
+up with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in
+town!"</p>
+<p>At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I
+could not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in
+immaculate vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes!
+Jaffery dancing till three o'clock in the morning! It was all very
+comic, and Arbuthnot seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too.
+But, on the other hand, it was all very incomprehensible. To
+Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence. He
+was a Mercury who took himself seriously. The more remote and rough
+and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it.
+He had never spared himself. He had been a model special
+correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
+ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a
+task after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the
+greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his
+peculiar and honourable position on the paper.</p>
+<p>"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like
+that," said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In
+fact we didn't tell him that we wouldn't."</p>
+<p>It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had
+never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If
+it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play
+Boswell to Jaffery's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to
+him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my
+unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or
+two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the
+bootmaker's to give an order concerning Susan's riding-boots
+(<i>vide</i> diary) and drove home to dinner, to a comfortable chat
+with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day's
+doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and
+inoffensive man.</p>
+<p>A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening
+to be in Westminster in the forenoon&mdash;I had come up to town on
+business&mdash;I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street,
+and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient
+duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket
+and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even
+a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an
+electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did
+not seem to mind. The remains of breakfast were on the table which
+the dingy servitor began to clear. Jaffery rose from the depths of
+his easy chair like an agile mammoth.</p>
+<p>"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"</p>
+<p>His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather.
+When the alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It
+was a hole for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its
+abominable suffocation.</p>
+<p>"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"</p>
+<p>He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."</p>
+<p>This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.</p>
+<p>"I understood you could have gone to Persia."</p>
+<p>He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know
+that?"</p>
+<p>"Arbuthnot&mdash;" I began.</p>
+<p>"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by
+telling you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head!"</p>
+<p>"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You
+might hurt him."</p>
+<p>"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue
+quiet?"</p>
+<p>He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful
+anathema. Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any
+of you to know anything about it."</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Because I didn't."</p>
+<p>"But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?"</p>
+<p>He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and
+collecting a litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a
+legging from a sofa, pitched it into a corner.</p>
+<p>"Here. Sit down."</p>
+<p>I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying
+the half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the
+comfortable home from Harrod's Stores that Barbara had prescribed;
+and he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the
+heads of game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London
+Repository. It was the impersonal abode of the male bird of
+passage.</p>
+<p>"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink."</p>
+<p>I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded
+country gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at
+half past eleven in the morning, except under the stress of
+peculiar circumstances.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to have one anyway!"</p>
+<p>He disappeared and presently re&euml;ntered with a battered
+two-handled silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription,
+a rowing trophy of Cambridge days, which he always carried about
+with him on no matter what lightly equipped expedition&mdash;it is
+always a matter of regret to me that Jaffery, as I have mentioned
+before, missed his seat in the Cambridge boat; but when one
+despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it is found the central
+feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such as used to
+protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from the
+priggish judgment of university authority?&mdash;he re&euml;ntered,
+with this vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught and
+wiped his moustache with his hand.</p>
+<p>"Better have some. I've got a cask in the bedroom."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" said I, aghast. "What else do you keep there? A side
+of bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?"</p>
+<p>Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in
+his bedroom.</p>
+<p>Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long,
+lean, puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to
+hear the deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.</p>
+<p>"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and
+lighting a cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of
+the chances of your life in not going out to Persia."</p>
+<p>He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard;
+and, turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife,
+and Susan my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly
+disposed towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate
+me.</p>
+<p>"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian
+proposition," said he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking
+out of the window at the infinitely reaching landscape of the
+chimney pots of south London, their grey smoke making London's
+unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of the March sky. "Just
+hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning round my neck I
+could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which was very
+wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of the
+London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away
+and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with
+white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band
+of topaz and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the
+immemorable smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle
+of the harness and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of
+the drivers, and in his heart the certainty of plucking out the
+secret from the soul of this strange land. . . .</p>
+<p>At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair
+enquired politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as
+the Persian journey was concerned the palaver was ended. He did not
+intend to give me his reasons for staying in England and I could
+not demand them more insistently. At any rate I had discovered the
+cause of his grumpiness. What creature of Jaffery's temperament
+could be contented with a soft bed in the centre of civilisation,
+when he had the chance of sleeping in verminous caravanserais with
+a saddle for pillow? In spite of his amazing predilections, Jaffery
+was very human. He would make a great sacrifice without hesitation;
+but the consequences of the sacrifice would cause him to go about
+like a bear with a sore head.</p>
+<p>And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having
+been admitted to her bedside, he went there every day. Flowers and
+fruit he had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a
+grape for Doria failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a
+pumpkin. Now he brought the offerings personally in embarrassing
+bulk. One offering was a gramophone which nearly drove her mad.
+Even in its present stage of development it offends the sensitive
+ear; but in its early days it was an instrument of torturing
+cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen strains music of the
+spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he came to see her,
+and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence of ravished
+senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and
+recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don't think
+the gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's
+unspoken message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes
+the thing played and sending him forth in quest of records of
+recondite and "unrecorded" music, she succeeded in mitigating the
+terror. To the present moment, however, I don't think Jaffery has
+realised that she had a higher &aelig;sthetic equipment than the
+hypnotised fox-terrier in the advertisement. . . . Jaffery also
+bought her puzzles and funny penny pavement toys and gallons of
+eau-de-cologne (which came in useful), and expensive scent (which
+she abominated), and stacks of new novels, and a fearsome machine
+of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of which an
+invalid could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the
+same time. The only thing he did not give her&mdash;the thing she
+craved more than all&mdash;was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's
+book.</p>
+<p>Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of
+Persia. But I could not help thinking that this same Persian
+journey might have afforded a solution of the whole difficulty.
+Despatched suddenly to that vaguely known country, he could have
+taken the mythical manuscript to revise on the journey: the convoy
+could have been attacked by a horde of Kurds or such-like
+desperadoes, all could have been slain save a fortunate handful,
+and the manuscript could have been looted as an important political
+document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would have hated
+Jaffery forever after; but his chivalrous aim would have been
+accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple
+way out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to
+sacrifice his career and remain in London so as to buoy Doria up
+with false hope, all the time praying God to burn down St.
+Quentin's Mansions (where he lived) and Adrian's portmanteau of
+rubbish and himself all together.</p>
+<div><a name="page165" id="page165"></a></div>
+<p>Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft
+stepped in and carried her to the south of France. Barbara and
+Jaffery and myself saw her off by the afternoon train at Charing
+Cross. She was to rest in Paris for the night and the next day, and
+proceed the following night to Nice. She looked the frailest thing
+under the sun. Her face was startling ivory beneath her widow's
+headgear. She had scarcely strength to lift her head. Mr.
+Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her comfort&mdash;an
+ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid
+compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's
+wedding, Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted
+her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from
+the carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her
+tenderly on her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude
+she thanked him with much graciousness. He bent over her&mdash;we
+were standing at the door and could not choose but hear:</p>
+<p>"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"</p>
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+<p>"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second
+and took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You
+get well and strong."</p>
+<p>He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her
+shoulder&mdash;half her little body it seemed to be&mdash;and
+emerging from the compartment joined us on the platform. He put a
+great finger on the arm of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached
+Jornicroft.</p>
+<p>"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get
+into a smoker somewhere or the other."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear sir"&mdash;exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some
+amazement&mdash;"it's awfully kind, but why should you?"</p>
+<p>"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She
+can't put her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at
+every stage of the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned
+clumsy fellow handle her. I'll see her into the Nice train
+to-morrow night&mdash;perhaps I'll go on to Nice with you and fix
+her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I will. I shan't worry
+you. You won't see me, except at the right time. Don't be
+afraid."</p>
+<p>Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must
+confess, did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he
+had no more intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had
+ourselves.</p>
+<p>"I can't permit it&mdash;it's too kind&mdash;there's no
+necessity&mdash;we'll get on all right!" spluttered Mr.
+Jornicroft.</p>
+<p>"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take
+any risks."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow&mdash;it's absurd&mdash;you haven't any
+luggage."</p>
+<p>"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested
+the impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the
+Encyclop&aelig;dia Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to
+do with it?" His roar could be heard above the din of the hurrying
+station. "I don't want <i>luggage</i>." The humour of the
+proposition appealed to him so mightily that he went off into one
+of his reverberating explosions of mirth.</p>
+<p>"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering&mdash;"Don't you worry about
+that."</p>
+<p>"But have you enough on you&mdash;it's an expensive
+journey&mdash;of course I should be most happy&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and
+beckoned to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the
+station master.</p>
+<p>"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"</p>
+<p>The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a
+ticket now?"</p>
+<p>"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send
+him a wire."</p>
+<p>"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing
+now and going to Nice by the C&ocirc;te d'Azur Express to-morrow
+night. And see after a seat for me, will you?"</p>
+<p>"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his
+hands stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a
+mountainous child. We were all impressed by his lordly command of
+the railway systems of Europe. It was a question of credit, of
+course, but neither Mr. Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor
+myself could have undertaken that journey with a few loose
+shillings in his possession. For the first time since Adrian's
+death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.</p>
+<p>And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an
+overcoat travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than
+to save Doria's sacred little body from being profaned by the touch
+of ruder hands.</p>
+<p>Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer
+from train to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant
+march up the stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took
+the first train back straight through to London.</p>
+<p>He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of
+grumpiness on his jolly face.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+<p>About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our
+feet&mdash;the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a
+sense of an unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic
+forces, it was but a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it
+startled us all the same. The admirable Mrs. Considine got married.
+A retired warrior, a recent widower, but a celibate of twenty years
+standing owing to the fact that his late wife and himself had
+occupied separate continents (<i>on avait fait continent &agrave;
+part</i>, as the French might say) during that period, a
+Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant
+correspondent, had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in
+Queen's Gate and, in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the
+admirable and unresisting lady. It was a matter of special license,
+and off went the tardily happy pair to Margate, before we had
+finished rubbing our eyes.</p>
+<p>It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said
+Barbara. She thought her&mdash;no; perhaps she didn't think
+her&mdash;God alone knows the convolutions of feminine mental
+processes&mdash;but she proclaimed her anyhow&mdash;an unscrupulous
+woman.</p>
+<p>"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that
+boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp&mdash;I admit it's deplorable
+taste to change a name of such gentility as Considine for that of
+Jupp, but it isn't unscrupulous&mdash;Mrs. Jupp did not happen to
+be charged with a mission from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the
+rest of her life."</p>
+<p>"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was
+the one person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what
+she's done for her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for
+those two old faggots marrying, they ought to be ashamed of
+themselves."</p>
+<p>Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter.
+Liosha remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's
+indignation could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine
+and bring her back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We
+consulted Jaffery, who as Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted
+us. Jaffery pulled a long face and smiled ruefully. For the first
+time he realised&mdash;in spite of tragic happenings&mdash;the
+comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of two young,
+well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the world
+to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too swore
+lustily at the defaulting duenna.</p>
+<p>"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.</p>
+<p>"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I.
+"Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."</p>
+<p>"That's the devil of it," he growled.</p>
+<p>"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to
+look after before you've done with this existence!"</p>
+<p>His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and
+saddle me with Barbara, I'll punch your head."</p>
+<p>He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense.
+What shall I do?"</p>
+<p>Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.</p>
+<p>I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting
+at the boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the
+elegant "<i>bonbonni&egrave;re</i>" of a chamber known as the
+"boudoir." There was a great deal of ribbon and frill and
+photograph frame and artful feminine touch about it, which Liosha
+and, doubtless, many other inmates thought mightily refined.</p>
+<p>Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade
+us be seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could
+not have been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp)
+herself. That maligned lady had performed her duties during the
+past two years with characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may
+remark that Liosha's table-manners and formal demeanour were now
+irreproachable. Mrs. Considine had also taken up the Western
+education of the child of twelve at the point at which it had been
+arrested, and had brought Liosha's information as to history,
+geography, politics and the world in general to the standard of
+that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she had developed
+in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing, on her
+emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary
+colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver
+harmonies. Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's
+stockyard vocabulary, erasing words and expressions that might
+offend Queen's Gate and substituting others that might charm; and
+she had done it with a touch of humour not lost on Liosha, who had
+retained the sense of values in which no child born and bred in
+Chicago can be deficient.</p>
+<p>"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she
+said pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."</p>
+<p>"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had
+interfered with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a
+stone and everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but
+I've been taught you don't do things like that in South
+Kensington."</p>
+<p>"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"</p>
+<p>"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"</p>
+<p>"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"</p>
+<p>"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."</p>
+<p>"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look
+after myself by this time? What do you take me for?"</p>
+<p>I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery,
+in his tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed
+the point altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about
+with, say to restaurants and theatres."</p>
+<p>"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her
+eyes. "Don't you worry!"</p>
+<p>"All the more reason for a dragon."</p>
+<p>"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I
+talk to a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and
+you're not going to find another like her in a hurry.
+Besides&mdash;I had sense enough to see that she was going to teach
+me things. But I don't want to be taught any more. I've learned
+enough."</p>
+<p>"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you,
+dear," said Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection
+against&mdash;well, any pretty young woman living alone is liable
+to chance impertinence and annoyance."</p>
+<p>Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to
+annoy me. He wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"&mdash;Mrs.
+Jardine was the keeper of the boarding-house&mdash;"she'll tell you
+a thing or two about my being able to keep men from annoying
+me."</p>
+<p>Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few
+sidelights on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in
+subtlety they made up in physical effectiveness. There were not
+many spruce young gentlemen who, after a week's residence in that
+establishment, did not adopt a peculiarly deferential attitude
+towards Liosha.</p>
+<p>"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you
+know."</p>
+<p>"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why
+not take on the job yourself?"</p>
+<p>"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine
+joke.</p>
+<p>"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an
+air of seriousness.</p>
+<p>"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a
+hand to the frills and ribbons.</p>
+<p>"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the
+advantages and refining influences of a first-class English
+home."</p>
+<p>He pivoted round. "Oh, you be&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look
+after Liosha more than you do&mdash;"</p>
+<p>He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he
+write? Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting
+on?</p>
+<p>"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara
+asked sternly.</p>
+<p>He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in
+a lapse from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and
+I noticed just the faintest little twitching of her lip.</p>
+<p>"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner
+against his will."</p>
+<p>"But&mdash;God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I
+never thought of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a
+barbarian, my dear girl, just like yourself. If you wanted to be
+taken out, why on earth didn't you say so?"</p>
+<p>Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue
+out."</p>
+<p>Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away
+puzzled. There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's
+tone. He turned again and approached her with a smiling face.</p>
+<p>"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of
+thing, Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the
+Carlton this evening and do a theatre afterwards."</p>
+<p>"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."</p>
+<p>Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked
+magnificent. Jaffery frowned.</p>
+<p>"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."</p>
+<p>I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had
+frowned and spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise
+her with a cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose
+in her throat and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned
+splendidly, quivering.</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon.
+And"&mdash;alas for the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's
+training&mdash;"I'm going to do as I damn well like."</p>
+<p>Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I
+exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could
+convey a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery
+pulled out pouch and pipe and shook his head.</p>
+<p>"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.</p>
+<p>"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the
+dunderheaded male."</p>
+<p>"I did nothing to cause these heroics."</p>
+<p>"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."</p>
+<p>"I didn't," he protested.</p>
+<p>I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had
+done so. Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed
+savagely.</p>
+<p>"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in
+proper subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."</p>
+<p>"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet.
+He is confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."</p>
+<p>"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."</p>
+<p>"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it
+for pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."</p>
+<p>"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft
+idiot who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by
+the mile. I know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have
+eaten out of my hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the
+Canton. It's all this infernal civilisation. It has spoiled
+her."</p>
+<p>"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that
+woman was a remarkable phenomenon&mdash;a generalisation which
+includes woman in fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."</p>
+<p>"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I
+didn't want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm
+rather fond of her. She appeals to me as something big and
+primitive. Long ago, if it hadn't been that poor old
+Prescott&mdash;you know what I mean&mdash;I gave up thinking of her
+in that way at once&mdash;and now I just want to be
+friends&mdash;we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and,
+if I had thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . .
+But what I can't stand is these modern neurotics&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"You called them heroics&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by
+every modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're
+taught it's correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where
+to have 'em."</p>
+<p>"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom,
+where she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed,
+had always treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had
+stuck pigs in the stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family,
+quite as good a family as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes
+and great chieftains, the majority of whom had been most gloriously
+slain in warfare. She would like to know which of Jaff Chayne's
+ancestors had died out of their feather beds.</p>
+<p>"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian
+Mutiny, and his father in the Zulu War."</p>
+<p>Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne
+had no right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a
+female policeman over her. She was a free woman&mdash;she wouldn't
+go out to dinner with Jaff Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she
+hated him; at which renewed declaration she burst into fresh
+weeping and wished she were dead. As a guardian of young and
+beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a success.</p>
+<p>Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the
+paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such
+other lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in
+front of Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she
+waited till the fit had subsided. Then she spoke.</p>
+<p>"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a
+silly schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder
+you didn't announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her
+grievance.</p>
+<p>"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a
+murderous-looking knife that lay on a little table&mdash;it was the
+same weapon that she had lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger."
+She threw it on the girl's lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a
+message for Mr. Chayne to come up. As soon as he enters you can
+stick it into him. Then you can stick it into me. Then if you like
+you can go downstairs and stick it into Hilary. And having
+destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to you, you'll
+feel a silly ass&mdash;such a silly ass that you'll forget to stick
+it into yourself."</p>
+<p>Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a
+neat little chip out of a chair-back.</p>
+<p>"What do you want me to do?"</p>
+<p>"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the
+materials.</p>
+<p>Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha
+obeyed meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.</p>
+<p>"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now
+you look better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself
+beside Liosha and putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the
+way to deal with men. You must learn. They're only overgrown
+babies. Listen."</p>
+<p>And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the
+duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the
+serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither
+I nor any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud
+of belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her
+sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the
+little private sitting-room next door whither, according to the
+instructions conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had
+dragged a softly swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said
+serenely:</p>
+<p>"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with
+pleasure. But the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent
+way."</p>
+<p>I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her
+rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all
+very well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the
+wrong: they were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was
+Liosha, who had once asked him to beat her, doing the
+same&mdash;woman was a more curious phenomenon than ever.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he
+with a touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully
+good of you to come."</p>
+<p>She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the
+delicate little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was
+healed, the incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi
+at a quarter to seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we
+must be going. We rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:</p>
+<p>"But we've settled nothing about a rempla&ccedil;ante for Mrs.
+Considine."</p>
+<p>"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No
+one can replace Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently
+Jaffery's theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and,
+to judge by the faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily
+conscious of a mission unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her
+independence.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved
+with extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that
+of Mrs. Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal
+interpretation of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so
+dignified that Jaffery, lest he should offend, was afraid to open
+his mouth except for the purpose of shovelling in food, which he
+did, in astounding quantity. From what both of us gathered
+afterwards&mdash;and gleefully we compared notes&mdash;they were
+vastly polite to each other. He might have been entertaining the
+decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he desired
+facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took him
+in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an
+overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her
+finger and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all
+the time that he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to
+begin. She sat tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite;
+which was a pity, for the ma&icirc;tre d'h&ocirc;tel, given a free
+hand by her barbarously ignorant host, had composed a royal menu.
+As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than a chit of sixteen. Over the
+quails a great silence reigned. Hers she could not touch, but she
+watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one after the other, whole,
+down his throat: and she adored him for it. It was her ideal of
+manly gusto. She nearly wept into her <i>Fraises
+Diane</i>&mdash;vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a
+drift of snow impregnated by all the distillations of all the
+flowers of all the summers of all the hills&mdash;because she would
+have given her soul to sit beside him on the table with the bowl on
+her lap and feed him with a tablespoon and, for her share of it,
+lick the spoon after his every mouthful. But it had been drummed
+into her that she was a woman of the world, the fashionable and all
+but incomprehensible world, the English world. She looked around
+and saw a hundred of her sex practising the well-bred deportment
+that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected that to all of
+those women gently nurtured in this queer English civilisation,
+equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her Albanian
+fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few hours
+before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
+male companions. She also reflected&mdash;and for the reflection
+not Mrs. Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was
+responsible&mdash;that to the man whom she yearned to feed with
+great tablespoonfuls of delight, she counted no more than a pig or
+a cow&mdash;her instinctive similes, you must remember, were
+pastoral&mdash;or that peculiar damfool of a sister of his,
+Euphemia.</p>
+<p>When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite
+to one another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
+super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
+thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
+dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of
+silence and then they talked of the things that did not interest
+them in the least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk
+being essential to the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery
+played host in the orthodox manner, and Liosha acknowledged
+attentions with a courtesy equally orthodox. But how much happier
+they both would have been on a bleak mountain-side eating stew out
+of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy failed to exercise
+mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in their own awful
+correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical comedy or
+a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have
+expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have
+been less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the
+play had caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an
+ironical title, which stupefied them with depression.</p>
+<p>When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate
+to open to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a
+most enjoyable evening.</p>
+<p>"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if
+you will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"</p>
+<p>"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance,
+and the week after that, and so on until it became a grim and
+terrifying fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the
+Eternal Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard
+to smother her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's
+prescription for the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce
+of it was that though in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown,
+she could not for the life of her regard him as a baby. So it came
+to pass that an unnatural pair continued to meet and mystify and
+misunderstand each other to the great content of the high gods and
+of one unimportant human philosopher who looked on.</p>
+<p>"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery
+growled, one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get
+anything out of her."</p>
+<p>"That's a pity," said I.</p>
+<p>"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she
+looks so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with
+all the other women."</p>
+<p>I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your
+friends if you know how to set to work.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+<p>It was a gorgeous April day&mdash;one of those days when young
+Spring in madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of
+summer. She could assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of
+the sunshine, but through all the travesty peeped her laughing
+youth, the little tender leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom
+of the lilac, the swelling of the hawthorn buds, the pathetic
+immature barrenness of the walnuts.</p>
+<p>And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in
+their hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in
+their topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale
+butterfly here and there accomplished its early day, and queen
+wasps awakened from their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the
+tiniest winter-palaces in the world, sped like golden arrow tips to
+and from the homes they had to build alone for the swarms that were
+to come. The flower beds shone gay with tulips and hyacinths; in
+the long grass beyond the lawn and under the trees danced a
+thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped up in furs lay
+Doria on a long cane chair.</p>
+<p>She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had
+prophesied, for her full strength had not yet returned, but there
+she was among them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as
+though they were dancing in her honour. She was, however, restored
+to health; the great circles beneath her eyes had disappeared and a
+tinge of colour shewed beneath her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the
+first sunbonnet of the year, sat Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . .
+. Lord! It scarcely seemed two years since Jaffery came from
+Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his arms and was struck
+all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So thought I,
+looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty
+yards, away. And once again&mdash;pleasant self repetition of
+history&mdash;Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had
+spent a night at her father's house and had come down to us the
+evening before to complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go
+straight to the flat in St. John's Wood and begin her life anew
+with Adrian's beloved ghost, and she had issued orders to servants
+to have everything in readiness for her arrival, but Barbara had
+intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man of limited sympathies
+and brutal common sense. All of us, including Jaffery, who seemed
+to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only equalled by that of
+a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah as to the way
+to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of tragic
+memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had
+indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the
+home of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in
+peace with the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of
+Holies in which Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by
+vulgar tread? Our suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything
+that could arise from earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things.
+We could only prevail upon her to postpone her return to the flat
+until such time as she was physically strong enough to grapple with
+changed conditions.</p>
+<p>The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were
+bending over a book on Doria's knee&mdash;<i>Les Malheurs de
+Sophie</i>, which Susan, proud of her French scholarship, had
+proposed to read to Doria, who having just returned from France was
+supposed to be the latest authority on the language. I noticed that
+the severity of this intellectual communion was mitigated by
+Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little
+haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all
+of a sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the
+landscape (framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a
+huge and familiar figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this
+on the ground, rushed up to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung
+Susan in the air and kissed her, and was still laughing and making
+the welkin ring&mdash;that is to say, making a thundering
+noise&mdash;when I, having sped across the lawn, joined the
+group.</p>
+<p>"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"</p>
+<p>"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an
+earlier train. No good staying in town on such a morning.
+Besides&mdash;" He glanced at Doria in significant aposiopesis.</p>
+<p>"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked,
+pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why
+didn't you leave it to be called for?"</p>
+<p>"This? This little <i>sachet</i>?" He lifted it up by one finger
+and grinned.</p>
+<p>Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are
+strong!"</p>
+<p>Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift
+the thing an inch from the ground with both her hands.</p>
+<p>"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I
+felt as if I had been picked up by an iron crane."</p>
+<p>Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his
+physical strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen
+Jaffery in a nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from
+his saddle and wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one
+in each hand, and dash their heads together over his horse's neck.
+But that is the sort of story that Jaffery himself never told.</p>
+<p>Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had
+caught sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.</p>
+<p>"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great
+hand towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South.
+The sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh?
+Remember when we started for Nice?"</p>
+<p>He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with
+as much pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.</p>
+<p>"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near
+distance, I hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is
+the one disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise
+happy season, Barbara expects me to be something between a
+scene-shifter and a Furniture Removing Van.</p>
+<p>The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we
+settled down. Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very
+wistful look. He held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand
+very gently on hers.</p>
+<p>"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting
+tenderness in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much
+longer."</p>
+<p>"Is it at the printer's?"</p>
+<p>"It's printed."</p>
+<p>Barbara and I gave each a little start&mdash;we looked at
+Jaffery, who was taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at
+each other. What on earth did the man mean?</p>
+<p>"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be
+flooded with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it
+up with Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."</p>
+<p>"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it
+necessary? I mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"</p>
+<p>"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to
+pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't
+presume to do such a thing."</p>
+<p>"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open
+the hasps of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of
+galley-proofs fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which
+he deposited on Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids
+fluttered as she fingered the precious thing. For a moment we
+thought she was going to faint. There was breathless silence. Even
+Susan, who had been left out in the cold, let the black kitten leap
+from her knee, and aware that something out of the ordinary was
+happening, fixed her wondering eyes on Doria. Her mother and I
+wondered even more than Susan, for we had more reason. Of what
+manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed proofs? Was it
+possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in the
+assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of
+despair?</p>
+<p>Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened
+her eyes and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long
+proofs. At once she sat bolt upright.</p>
+<p>"'<i>The Greater Glory</i>.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His
+title was '<i>God</i>.' Who has dared to change it?"</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i190.jpg" id="i190.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/190.jpg"><img src="images/190.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs.</b></div>
+<p>Her eyes flashed; her little body quivered. She flamed an
+incarnate indignation. For some reason or other she turned
+accusingly on me.</p>
+<p>"I knew nothing of the change," said I, "but I'm very glad to
+hear of it now."</p>
+<p>Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of
+what Jaffery had been doing with the book.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind wouldn't have the old title," cried Jaffery eagerly.
+"The public are very narrow minded, and he felt that in certain
+quarters it might be misunderstood."</p>
+<p>"Wittekind told dear Adrian that he thought it a perfect
+title."</p>
+<p>"Our dear Adrian," said I, pacifically, "was a man of enormous
+will-power and perhaps Wittekind hadn't the strength to stand up
+against him."</p>
+<p>"Of course he hadn't," exclaimed Doria. "Of course he hadn't
+when Adrian was alive: now Adrian's dead, he thinks he is going to
+do just as he chooses. He isn't! Not while I live, he isn't!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at me from beneath bent brows and his eyes were
+turned to cold blue steel.</p>
+<p>"Hilary!" said he, "will you kindly tell Doria what we found on
+Adrian's blotting pad&mdash;the last words he ever wrote?"</p>
+<p>What he desired me to say was obvious.</p>
+<p>"Written three or four times," said I, "we found the words: 'The
+Greater Glory: A Novel by Adrian Boldero.'"</p>
+<p>"What has become of the blotting pad?"</p>
+<p>"The sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a
+lot of other unimportant papers."</p>
+<p>"And I came across further evidence," said Jaffery, "of his
+intention to rename the novel."</p>
+<p>Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "I
+should like to have had Adrian's last words," she whispered. Then
+bringing herself back to earth, she begged Jaffery's pardon very
+touchingly. Adrian's implied intention was a command. She too
+approved the change. "But I'm so jealous," she said, with a catch
+in her voice, "of my dear husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm
+sure you've done everything that was right and good, Jaffery." She
+held out the great bundle and smiled. "I pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>Jaffery took the bundle and laid it again on her lap. "It's
+awfully good of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But
+you can keep this set. I've got another, with the corrections in
+duplicate."</p>
+<p>She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips
+in a timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back.</p>
+<p>"I can't read it. I daren't read it. If Adrian had lived I
+shouldn't have seen it before it was published. He would have given
+me the finally bound book&mdash;an advance copy. These
+things&mdash;you know&mdash;it's the same to me as if he were
+living."</p>
+<p>The tears started. She rose; and we all did the same.</p>
+<p>"I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara dear. I'd
+rather be alone." She put her arm round my small daughter. "Perhaps
+Susan will see I don't break my neck across the lawn."</p>
+<p>Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and holding on to Susan,
+who was mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly
+towards the house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the
+bedroom door, she had lingered for a moment outside and had heard
+Auntie Doria crying like anything.</p>
+<p>Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous
+draught of proofs, advanced, a female David, up to Goliath
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a
+graven image and be mystified in my own house. Will you have the
+goodness to explain?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked down on her, his head on one side.</p>
+<p>"Explain what?"</p>
+<p>"That!"</p>
+<p>She pointed to the proofs of which I had possessed myself and
+was eagerly scanning. Unblenching he met her gaze.</p>
+<p>"That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Boldero, which I, as his
+literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough
+manuscript, but he had no time to read it."</p>
+<p>They looked at one another for quite a long time.</p>
+<p>"Is that all you're going to tell me?"</p>
+<p>"That's all."</p>
+<p>"And all you're going to tell Hilary?"</p>
+<p>"Telling Hilary is the same as telling you."</p>
+<p>"Naturally."</p>
+<p>"And telling you is the same as telling Hilary."</p>
+<p>"By no manner of means," said Barbara tartly. She took him by
+the sleeve. "Come and explain."</p>
+<p>"I've explained already," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Barbara eyed him like a syren of the cornfields. "I'm going to
+dress a crab for lunch. A very big crab."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile.
+Barbara could dress crab like no one else in the world. She herself
+disliked the taste of crab. I, a carefully trained gastronomist,
+adored it, but a Puckish digestion forbade my consuming one single
+shred of the ambrosial preparation. Doria would pass it by through
+sheer unhappiness. And it was not fit food for Susan's tender
+years. Old Jaff knew this. One gigantic crab-shell filled with
+Barbara's juicy witchery and flanked by cool pink, meaty claws
+would be there for his own individual delectation. Several times
+before had he taken the dish, with a "One man, one crab. Ho! ho!
+ho!" and had left nothing but clean shells.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to dress this crab," said Barbara, "for the sake of
+the servants. But if you find I've put poison in it, don't blame
+me."</p>
+<p>She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Jaffery
+laughed, sank into a chair and tugged at his pipe.</p>
+<p>"I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing," said
+he.</p>
+<p>"Why?" I asked looking up from the proofs.</p>
+<p>"It's not quite up to the standard of 'The Diamond Gate.'"</p>
+<p>"I shouldn't suppose it was," said I drily.</p>
+<p>"Wittekind's delighted anyhow. It's a different <i>genre</i>;
+but he says that's all the better."</p>
+<p>Susan emerged from my study door on to the terrace.</p>
+<p>"My good fellow," said I, "yonder is the daughter of the house,
+evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read
+this wonderful novel and don't want to be disturbed till
+lunch."</p>
+<p>The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan finding herself
+in undisputed possession took him off to remote recesses of the
+kitchen garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile I went on
+reading, very much puzzled. Naturally the style was not that of
+"The Diamond Gate," which was the style of Tom Castleton and not of
+Adrian Boldero. But was what I read the style of Adrian Boldero?
+This vivid, virile opening? This scene of the two derelicts who
+hated one another, fortuitously meeting on the old tramp steamer?
+This cunning, evocation of smells, jute, bilge water, the warm oils
+of the engine room? This expert knowledge so carelessly displayed
+of the various parts of a ship? How had Adrian, man of luxury, who
+had never been on a tramp steamer in his life, gained the
+knowledge? The people too were lustily drawn. They had a flavour of
+the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces; a deep-lunged folk. So
+that I should not be interrupted I wandered off to a secluded nook
+of the garden down the drive away from the house and gave myself up
+to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident
+following incident, every trait of character presented objectively
+in fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen pictures of grim
+scenes faultless in their definition and restraint. There was a
+girl in it, a wild, clean-limbed, woodland thing who especially
+moved my admiration. The more I read the more fascinated did I
+become, and the more did I doubt whether a single line in it had
+been written by Adrian Boldero.</p>
+<p>After a long spell, I took out my watch. It was twenty past one.
+We lunched at half-past. I rose, went towards the house and came
+upon Jaffery and Susan. The latter I despatched peremptorily to her
+ablutions. Alone with Jaffery, I challenged him.</p>
+<p>"You hulking baby," said I, "what's the good of pretending with
+me? Why didn't you tell me at once that you had written it
+yourself?"</p>
+<p>He looked at me anxiously. "What makes you think so?"</p>
+<p>"The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First,"
+I continued, as he made no reply but stood staring at me in
+ingenuous discomfort, "you couldn't have got this out of poor
+Adrian's mush; secondly, Adrian hadn't the experience of life to
+have written it; thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive
+articles in <i>The Daily Gazette</i> and have little difficulty in
+recognising the hand of Jaffery Chayne."</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" said he. "It isn't as obvious as all that?"</p>
+<p>I laughed. "Then you did write it?"</p>
+<p>"Of course," he growled. "But I didn't want you to know. I tried
+to get as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here"&mdash;he
+gripped my shoulder&mdash;"if it's such a transparent fraud, what
+the blazes is going to happen?"</p>
+<p>To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position,
+having peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world
+had the faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming
+book would be received without shadow of question as the work of
+the author of "<i>The Diamond Gate</i>." The difference of style
+and treatment would be attributed to the marvellous versatility of
+the dead genius. . . . Jaffery's brow began to clear.</p>
+<p>"What do you think of it&mdash;as far as you've gone?"</p>
+<p>My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my
+appreciation. He positively blushed and looked at me rather
+guiltily, like a schoolboy detected in the act of helping an old
+woman across the road.</p>
+<p>"It's awful cheek," said he, "but I was up against it. The only
+alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and
+take the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I had written
+about half of it all in bits and pieces about three or four years
+ago and put it aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one
+day and read it and it seemed rather good, so, having the story in
+my head, I set to work."</p>
+<p>"And that's why you didn't go to Persia?"</p>
+<p>"How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on
+the back of a beastly camel!"</p>
+<p>He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of
+a laugh.</p>
+<p>"I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up;
+couldn't get along. I must have spent a week, night after night,
+staring at a blank sheet of paper. I thought I had bitten off more
+than I could chew and was going the way of Adrian. By George, it
+taught me something of the Hades the poor fellow must have passed
+through. I've been in pretty tight corners in my day and I know
+what it is to have the cold fear creeping down my spine; but that
+week gave me the fright of my life."</p>
+<p>"I wish you had told me," said I, "I might have helped. Why
+didn't you?"</p>
+<p>"I didn't like to. You see, if this idea hadn't come off, I
+should have looked such a stupendous ass."</p>
+<p>"That's a reason," I admitted.</p>
+<p>"And I didn't tell you at first because you would have thought I
+was going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could
+write a novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the
+impossible, like Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to
+death and you would have put me off."</p>
+<p>Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We
+hurried to the dining-room. Jaffery sat down before a gigantic
+crab.</p>
+<p>"Is it all right?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Doria has interceded for you," said Barbara. "You owe her your
+life."</p>
+<p>Doria smiled. "It's the least I could do for you."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed
+himself in crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said:</p>
+<p>"Hilary has read half the book."</p>
+<p>"What do you think of it?" Barbara asked.</p>
+<p>I repeated my dithyrambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone.</p>
+<p>"I do wish you could see your way to read it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I would give my heart to," said Doria. "But I've told you why I
+can't."</p>
+<p>"Circumstances alter cases," said I, platitudinously. "In
+happier circumstances you would have been presented with the
+novelist's fine, finished product. As it happens, Jaffery has had
+to fill up little gaps, make bridges here and there. I'm sure if
+you had been well enough," I added, with a touch of malice, for I
+had not quite forgiven his leaving me in the dark, "Jaffery would
+have consulted you on many points."</p>
+<p>I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make
+upon her. Although I had reassured Jaffery, I could, scarcely
+conceive the possibility of the book being taken as the work of
+Adrian.</p>
+<p>"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it.
+You weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree
+with Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are
+so jolly clumsy."</p>
+<p>Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be
+justified?"</p>
+<p>"Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."</p>
+<p>So it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study
+and demanded the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom,
+where she remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It
+was right that she should know what was going to be published under
+Adrian's name.</p>
+<p>In Jaffery's presence, I disclosed to Barbara the identity of
+the author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me
+before lunch, with, perhaps, a little more shamefacedness. Were it
+not for reiteration upon reiteration of the same things in talk,
+life would be a stark silence broken only by staccato announcement
+of facts. At last Barbara's eyes grew uncomfortably moist.
+Impulsively she flew to Jaffery and put her arms round his vast
+shoulders&mdash;he was sitting, otherwise she could not have done
+it&mdash;and hugged him.</p>
+<p>"You're a blessed, blessed dear," she said; and ashamed of this
+exhibition of sentiment she bolted from the room.</p>
+<p>Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of
+billiards.</p>
+<p>To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room
+before dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen
+since lunch; an arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can
+imagine a Tanagra figure in black and white ivory. Her face,
+however, was a passion of excitement.</p>
+<p>"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't
+know till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things
+he describes&mdash;he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my
+God! If only he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands
+before her eyes and dashed them swiftly away&mdash;"Jaffery has
+done his best, poor fellow. But oh! the bridges he speaks
+of&mdash;they're so crude, so crude! I can see every one. The
+murder&mdash;you remember?"</p>
+<p>It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three
+or four splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing
+was done. Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.</p>
+<p>"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.</p>
+<p>"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's
+horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to
+the imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and
+spoiled it. And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San
+Francisco, where Fenton finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of
+London musical comedy. Adrian never wrote it. It's the sort of
+claptrap he hated. He has often told me so. Jaffery thought it was
+necessary to explain Ellina in the next chapter, and so in his dull
+way, he stuck it in."</p>
+<p>That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a
+low dive on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing
+seen, somewhat journalistic, I admit&mdash;but such as very few
+journalists could give.</p>
+<p>"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.</p>
+<p>"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man
+that had been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I
+don't know the difference between Adrian's work and that of a
+penny-a-liner like Jaffery?"</p>
+<p>The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and
+took him by the lapels of his dress coat.</p>
+<p>"I've read it. It's a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do
+want it to be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear&mdash;I know
+you've done all that mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But
+it isn't your fault if you're not a professional novelist or an
+imaginative writer. And you, yourself, said the bridges were
+clumsy. Couldn't you&mdash;oh!&mdash;I loathe hurting you, dear
+Jaffery&mdash;but it's all the world, all eternity to
+me&mdash;couldn't you get one of Adrian's colleagues&mdash;one of
+the famous people"&mdash;she rattled off a few names&mdash;"to look
+through the proofs and revise them&mdash;just in honour of Adrian's
+memory? Couldn't you, dear Jaffery?" She tugged convulsively at the
+poor old giant's coat. "You're one of the best and noblest men who
+ever lived or I couldn't say this to you. But you understand, don't
+you?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have
+slapped it physically and it would have worn the same dazed,
+paralysed lack of expression.</p>
+<p>"My life," said he, in a queer toned voice, that wasn't
+Jaffery's at all, "my life is only an expression of your wishes.
+I'll do as you say."</p>
+<p>"It's for Adrian's sake, dear Jaffery," said Doria.</p>
+<p>Jaffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face,
+from the roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to
+wipe therefrom all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the
+sunny Reubens-like features that we all loved.</p>
+<p>"But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the
+book's worthy of Adrian?"</p>
+<p>"Oh, I do," she cried passionately. "I do. It's a work of
+genius. It's Adrian in all his maturity, in all his greatness!"</p>
+<p>The door opened.</p>
+<p>"Dinner is served, madam," said Franklin.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+<p>When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's
+outburst, he fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After
+what he had done for her, said I, given up one of the great chances
+of his career, carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her
+a present of a brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from
+shame, she ought to go on her knees and pray God to shower
+blessings on his head. As it was, she deserved whipping.</p>
+<p>Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass&mdash;he
+has an Eastern habit of, facile vituperation&mdash;and roared about
+the drawing-room. The ladies, be it understood, had retired.</p>
+<p>"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You
+haven't the intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know
+I've written the rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she
+thinks I've spoiled it. She's perfectly justified. For the little
+footling services I rendered her on the journey, she's idiotically
+grateful&mdash;out of all proportion. As for Persia, she knows
+nothing about it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"She ought to," said I.</p>
+<p>"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as
+you're satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."</p>
+<p>It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and
+however understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined
+towards them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through
+all their bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would
+be dead in a week.</p>
+<p>"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor
+girl's mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying
+out of this ghastly farce."</p>
+<p>"I do, my dear chap."</p>
+<p>"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could&mdash;a labour of
+love. But it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work&mdash;which she
+thinks is Adrian's. To keep up the deception I had to crab it and
+say that the faults were mine. Naturally she believes me."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and
+Adrian's memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and
+moral balance&mdash;what then?"</p>
+<p>"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you
+suppose I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"</p>
+<p>I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross
+indelicacy of saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or
+words to that effect. Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition
+that a living second husband&mdash;stretching the imagination to
+the hypothesis of her taking one&mdash;is but an indifferent hero
+to the widow who spends her life in burning incense before the
+shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We can't say these
+things to our friends. We expect them to have common sense as we
+have ourselves. But we don't, and&mdash;for the curious reason,
+based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no
+man can appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a
+particular woman&mdash;we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of
+his heart. The man who pours into our ears a torrential tale of
+passion moves us not to sympathy, but rather to psychological
+speculation, if we are kindly disposed, or to murderous
+inclinations if we are not. On the other hand, he who is silent
+moves us not at all. In any and every case, however, we entirely
+fail to comprehend why, if Ne&aelig;ra is obdurate, our swain does
+not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
+Amaryllis.</p>
+<p>I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt
+somewhat impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was,
+casting the largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a
+woman blinded by the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it
+was his religion to intensify. There he was doing this, and he did
+not see the imbecility of it! In after time we can correlate
+incidents and circumstances, viewing them in a perspective more or
+less correct. We see that we might have said and done a hundred
+helpful things. Well, we know that we did not, and there's an end
+on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery, although&mdash;or
+was it because?&mdash;I recognised the bald fact that he was in
+love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.</p>
+<p>You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick
+you?" and he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned
+to touch my unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the
+world are you to do, save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your
+cigar? This I did. I also found amusement in comparing his meek
+wooing, like that of an early Italian amorist, with his rumbustious
+theories as to marriage by capture and other primitive methods of
+bringing woman to heel.</p>
+<p>Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick
+(when Barbara wasn't looking&mdash;for Barbara had read her a
+lecture on the polite treatment of trustees and executors) and made
+him more her slave than ever. He fetched and carried. He read
+poetry. He was Custodian of the Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was
+damp. He shielded her from over-rough incursions on the part of
+Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany of Saint Adrian. He
+sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her and hold
+figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch
+them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides,
+Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during
+which, touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of
+tender regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one
+could wish to meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one
+else, the smile into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt
+that, in her way and as far as her Adrian-bound emotional
+temperament permitted, she felt grateful to Jaffery. She also felt
+safe in his company. He was like a great St. Bernard dog, she
+declared to Barbara.</p>
+<p>These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until
+a letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's
+approval, Jaffery had sent the proofs.</p>
+<p>"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly
+different from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its
+largeness of conception and the perfection of its kind. The
+alteration of a single word would spoil it. If an alien hand is
+there, it is imperceptible."</p>
+<p>At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He
+tossed the letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.</p>
+<p>"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't
+it? I do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through.
+This ought to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"</p>
+<p>"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."</p>
+<p>But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain&mdash;and how
+could a work of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however
+imperceptible, had touched it?&mdash;was not satisfied. Towards
+noon, when she came downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace,
+with a familiar little knitting of the brow before which his
+welcoming smile faded.</p>
+<p>"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the
+letter. "Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to
+recognise the merits of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed
+of the critical faculty."</p>
+<p>"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me
+to send him the novel?"</p>
+<p>"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria,
+after the way of women.</p>
+<p>"And he hasn't any?"</p>
+<p>"Read the thing again."</p>
+<p>Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well,
+what's to be done now?"</p>
+<p>"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original
+manuscript. Where is it?"</p>
+<p>Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied
+convincingly.</p>
+<p>"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've
+destroyed it."</p>
+<p>"I thought everything was typed nowadays."</p>
+<p>"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an
+advocate of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I
+wanted to rush the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see
+why I should pamper them with type. Have you the original
+manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.</p>
+<p>For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought
+up his daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary
+life. To my great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.</p>
+<p>"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions
+for the manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's
+gone. I'm not unreasonable."</p>
+<p>"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers
+in the drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made
+Jaffery submit his careful editing to an expert, and you're
+honourably bound to accept the expert's verdict."</p>
+<p>"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a
+flash of her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty
+to keep to my own opinion."</p>
+<p>Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face
+as he did in moments of perplexity.</p>
+<p>"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."</p>
+<p>"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad
+tobacco&mdash;not tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's
+encomium had aroused the artist's pride in his first-born. An
+altered word would spoil the book. "My dear girl," said he,
+stretching out his great hand, from beneath which she wriggled an
+impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very gently, "the
+possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man of
+common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us
+do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue
+pencil as much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a
+thundering mess of it."</p>
+<p>Doria made a little gesture&mdash;a bit of a shrug&mdash;a bit
+of a resigned flicker of her hands.</p>
+<p>"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a
+woman with nobody to turn to"&mdash;she smiled with her lips, but
+there was no coordination of her eyes&mdash;"as I said before, I
+pass the proofs."</p>
+<p>She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house,
+leaving Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.</p>
+<p>"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"</p>
+<p>He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body
+on the threshold.</p>
+<p>"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to
+her morbid vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it
+birth. You know better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you
+send those proofs straight back to the publisher. If you let her
+persuade you to change one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll
+tell her the whole thing, and damn the consequences!"</p>
+<p>My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest
+sense. They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She
+would no more think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or
+a baby's neck.</p>
+<p>"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said
+Jaffery. "But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying
+brute."</p>
+<p>"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped
+Barbara. "The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree.
+It's only the exceptional woman that can take command."</p>
+<p>I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the
+tenderly sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic
+silence.</p>
+<p>"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery
+with cold politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her
+up in her garden chair and attend to her comforts, and then,
+settled down, she would open a volume of Tolstoi and courteously
+signify his dismissal. Jaffery with a hang-dog expression went with
+me to the golf-course, where he drove with prodigious muscular
+skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a question of good
+taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have reminded him
+that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a little white
+ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal to a dead
+friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor old
+Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
+of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
+masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
+direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian&mdash;for Jaffery is
+too splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of
+his once living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do
+not aspire to these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power
+of generalisation, deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of
+mundane phenomena, and Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates
+the core of spiritual things, could, with little difficulty, divine
+the passionate struggle between love and hatred, between loyalty
+and tenderness, between desire and duty that took place in the soul
+of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly appetited
+gentleman.</p>
+<p>You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of
+romance. I am not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my
+imperfect way, a barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty
+son of Pantagruel forced into the incongruous r&ocirc;le of Sir
+Galahad. . . . During the term of his punishment he behaved in a
+bearish and most unheroic manner. At last, however, Doria forgave
+him, and, smiling on him once more, permitted him to read Tolstoi
+aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his manners.</p>
+<p>The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had
+invited Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She
+usually arrived by an early train in the forenoon and returned by
+the late train at night. But on Saturday evening, she asked
+Barbara, over the telephone, for permission to bring a friend, a
+gentleman staying in the boarding house, the happy possessor of a
+car, who would motor her down. His name was Fendihook. Barbara
+replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's friend, and of
+course came back to us and speculated as to who and what this Mr.
+Fendihook might be.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.</p>
+<p>"It would scarcely have been polite."</p>
+<p>We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I
+don't like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a
+vast deal too much."</p>
+<p>"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus
+started an old argument.</p>
+<p>On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the
+car, a two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and
+perceived between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly
+buttoned Burberry coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the
+middle of which projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha
+out.</p>
+<p>"This is Mr. Fendihook."</p>
+<p>"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.</p>
+<p>I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my
+chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by
+Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings
+and revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily
+attired. I know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against
+a black and white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a
+gold ring.</p>
+<p>"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good
+one, on which he had retained the band.</p>
+<p>"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."</p>
+<p>"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of
+all right here."</p>
+<p>"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha.
+"Ah, Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We
+followed. Mr. Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little
+shock, that he had kept on his gloves.</p>
+<p>"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of
+a blow would do our fair friend good."</p>
+<p>Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath
+the motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he
+preceded me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure
+in the middle of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round
+appreciatively and again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open
+French window.</p>
+<p>"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our
+friends? The long and the short of it, aren't they?"</p>
+<p>He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn.
+I told him their names.</p>
+<p>"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always
+talking about, her guardian or something."</p>
+<p>"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late
+husband."</p>
+<p>"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear,
+signified "Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his
+cigar. "Introduce me." And as I accompanied him across the
+lawn&mdash;"There's nothing like knowing everybody&mdash;getting it
+over at once. Then one feels at home."</p>
+<p>"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said
+I.</p>
+<p>"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I
+did." And the amazing creature patted me on the back.</p>
+<p>I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself
+delighted to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as
+conversation did not start spontaneously, he once more looked
+around, nodded at the landscape approvingly, and once more said
+"Tiptop!"</p>
+<p>"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford
+to retire and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a
+desirable residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's
+country house."</p>
+<p>"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?"
+queried Doria.</p>
+<p>He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."</p>
+<p>I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.</p>
+<p>Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running
+up.</p>
+<p>"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and
+say how d'ye do, Gwendoline."</p>
+<p>Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under
+the chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the
+image of her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the
+bowl of his pipe in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on
+some puzzling insect.</p>
+<p>"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor
+asked.</p>
+<p>"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a
+garden bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to
+affect my nerves. He peeled them off.</p>
+<p>"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried.
+"Catch!"</p>
+<p>He made a feint of throwing them.</p>
+<p>"Haven't you caught 'em?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were
+empty.</p>
+<p>"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He
+flicked a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a
+ball and threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it
+gone to?"</p>
+<p>Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept
+forward fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards
+a flower bed.</p>
+<p>"Why, there it is!"</p>
+<p>He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the
+handkerchief hung limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.</p>
+<p>"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever
+talked to angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."</p>
+<p>He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into
+the central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not
+in the best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught
+the coins announced their intention of sticking to them. But
+threats of reporting to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the
+coins dropped and jingled in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded
+him as she would a god.</p>
+<p>"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.</p>
+<p>"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day
+long."</p>
+<p>He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap
+caught it in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed
+white strong teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"</p>
+<p>"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"Two hours a day solid year in and year out&mdash;not that trick
+alone, of course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you
+know who I am&mdash;I'm the One and Only Ras
+Fendihook&mdash;Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and General Variety
+Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"</p>
+<p>We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.</p>
+<p>"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically.
+"You've never heard of me&mdash;and perhaps you two gentlemen are
+big bugs in your own line&mdash;and I've never heard of you. But
+anyhow, I never asked you, Mr. Chayne, to catch my gloves."</p>
+<p>"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on
+Susan.</p>
+<p>"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."</p>
+<p>And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the
+wash-leather gloves.</p>
+<p>"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the
+matin&eacute;e performance."</p>
+<p>Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."</p>
+<p>"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the
+little one."</p>
+<p>He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour
+came the shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought
+Barbara flying out of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The
+yelping ceased. Mr. Ras Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria,
+Jaffery and I looked at one another in mutual and dismayed
+comprehension.</p>
+<p>"Old pal," quoted Doria.</p>
+<p>I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for
+his sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"</p>
+<p>"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a
+lot he called me."</p>
+<p>"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently.
+"He's&mdash;he's <i>marvelious</i>!"</p>
+<p>"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't
+express him."</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as
+mummy will let you."</p>
+<p>I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of
+that suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon
+until it was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved
+over and over again a tense situation. To the guest in her house
+Barbara was the perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of
+convention raged fury with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer
+social animal for what he is and suck the honey from his flowers of
+unconventionality. She had never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a
+butler when offered a second helping of pudding. She had never
+dreamed of the possibility of a strange table-neighbour laying his
+hand on hers and requesting her to "take it from me, my dear." It
+sent awful shivers down her spine to hear my august self alluded to
+as her "old man." She looked down her nose when, to the apoplectic
+joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest behaviour at meals),
+he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato into the air,
+caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her smile was
+that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic listener
+when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To her
+confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the
+personalities of the World of Variety.</p>
+<p>"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said
+confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off
+with that contortionist&mdash;you know who I mean&mdash;handsome
+chap&mdash;what's his name?&mdash;oh, of course you know him."</p>
+<p>My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a
+K.C.B., assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!</p>
+<p>"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied
+pathetically.</p>
+<p>"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo!
+You must have heard of Romeo."</p>
+<p>I sniggered&mdash;I couldn't help it&mdash;at Barbara's face. He
+went on with his reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I,
+though displeased with Liosha for introducing such an incongruous
+element into my family circle, took the rational course of deriving
+from the fellow considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done
+the same as myself, had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian
+weighed heavily upon him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly.
+Doria, like my wife, I could see was shocked. The only two who,
+beside myself, enjoyed our guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan
+was nine years old and a meal at which a guest broke her whole
+decalogue of table manners at once&mdash;to say nothing of the
+performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange into
+nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently
+extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother&mdash;was a feast
+of memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha,
+pupil of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud
+Albanian chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How
+could she admire this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line,
+peculiarly accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She
+sat by my side, grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she
+had bestowed on us. She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his
+anecdotes, she urged him on to further exhibition of prowess, and
+in a magnificent way appeared unconscious of the presence at the
+table of her trustee and would-be dragon, Jaffery Chayne.</p>
+<p>After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to
+Mr. Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery,
+having invited Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having
+declined, with a polite smile, on the ground that her best
+Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown was not suitable for country roads,
+went off by himself in dudgeon. Barbara took Liosha aside and
+cross-examined her on the subject of Mr. Fendihook and as far as
+hospitality allowed signified her non-appreciation of the guest.
+After a time I took him into the billiard room, Susan following. As
+he was a brilliant player, giving me one hundred and fifty in two
+hundred and running out easily before I had made thirty, he found
+less excitement in the game than in narrating his exploits and
+performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things with the
+billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and
+balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I
+think that day he must have gone through his whole
+r&eacute;pertoire.</p>
+<p>The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's
+first words to Liosha were:</p>
+<p>"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"</p>
+<p>"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.</p>
+<p>He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day.
+But sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."</p>
+<p>He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee
+was rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something
+unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who
+was established on the terrace.</p>
+<p>"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked
+cheerfully.</p>
+<p>Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused,
+explaining that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view
+of the excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank
+tea in the afternoon.</p>
+<p>"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"</p>
+<p>The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara&mdash;"And may I drink
+to the success of that promising little affair"&mdash;he jerked a
+backward thumb&mdash;"between our pippy friend and the charming
+widow?"</p>
+<p>Barbara had passed the gasping stage.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now,
+had made strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same
+relation of trustee to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs.
+Prescott."</p>
+<p>But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck!
+Here's to him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."</p>
+<p>He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not
+respond. A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her
+hand showed white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace,
+where she found Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet.
+And this is what happened.</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll
+excuse me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is
+yours. I have business to talk."</p>
+<p>Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my
+dear girl. I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha.
+As soon as they were out of earshot, she said:</p>
+<p>"Are you going to marry her?"</p>
+<p>"Who?"</p>
+<p>"Doria."</p>
+<p>Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic
+mood.</p>
+<p>"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your
+own business."</p>
+<p>"All right," she retorted, "I will."</p>
+<p>"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you.
+What do you mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"</p>
+<p>"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very
+clever and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."</p>
+<p>"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.</p>
+<p>They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast,
+they found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden.
+Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.</p>
+<p>"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery
+continued.</p>
+<p>"How dare you speak so of my friend?"</p>
+<p>"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend.
+And you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"</p>
+<p>"Shan't!" said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with
+him."</p>
+<p>There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said
+the same things over and over again. Both had worked themselves
+into a fury.</p>
+<p>"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."</p>
+<p>"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you
+mind yours."</p>
+<p>"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace
+yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."</p>
+<p>"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up
+magnificently. "Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man
+living? You insult me."</p>
+<p>"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed
+fool of herself&mdash;and you more than most."</p>
+<p>"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she
+taunted, and flung an arm in the direction of the house.</p>
+<p>Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."</p>
+<p>"And you leave me alone."</p>
+<p>They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned,
+marched superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through,
+slammed it in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive
+quarrel, free from all subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in
+Jaffery's veins. If he could have given her a good sound thrashing
+he would have been a happy man. This accursed civilisation
+paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing at whiskers and
+beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in the middle
+of the lawn.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never
+bring him here again."</p>
+<p>"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight
+before her.</p>
+<p>"Well, ask him."</p>
+<p>"I will. Hilary!"</p>
+<p>At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook
+had been discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of
+widowhood to a quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed
+and bright-eyed Juno.</p>
+<p>"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"</p>
+<p>"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been
+conscious of storms. I took her hand.</p>
+<p>"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated
+that it is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate
+ramifications&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"&mdash;I hesitated&mdash;"not quite
+the kind of person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."</p>
+<p>"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a
+pattern, like little tin soldiers."</p>
+<p>"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it
+goes."</p>
+<p>"Oh, go on&mdash;" Jaffery interrupted.</p>
+<p>"But&mdash;" I continued.</p>
+<p>"You'd rather not see him again?"</p>
+<p>"No," roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me.
+"You and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"</p>
+<p>I still held her hand, which was growing moist&mdash;and I
+suppose mine was too&mdash;and I didn't like to drop it, for fear
+of hurting her feelings. I gave it a great squeeze. It was very
+difficult for me. Personally, I enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and
+prodigiously accomplished scion of a vulgar race. As a mere
+bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should have taken him
+joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my microscope and
+studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that there was
+of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan who
+did not count, he was&mdash;I admit, deservedly&mdash;an object of
+loathing. So I squeezed Liosha's hand.</p>
+<p>"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that
+he's not quite a gentleman."</p>
+<p>"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."</p>
+<p>She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor
+advisedly. She had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before
+a breeze.</p>
+<p>"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."</p>
+<p>Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.</p>
+<p>"We must hook it!"</p>
+<p>Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"</p>
+<p>"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very
+kind. But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for
+the evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."</p>
+<p>"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.</p>
+<p>Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained
+with a learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the
+pink, fleshy face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered
+away down the drive.</p>
+<p>"Yes, indeed," said Doria.</p>
+<p>Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.</p>
+<p>"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"</p>
+<p>"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.</p>
+<p>"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to
+dine among all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"</p>
+<p>"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria.
+"I should think it was rather a rise in the social scale."</p>
+<p>And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save
+the puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his
+interest in Liosha.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+<p>"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the
+reviewers and made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a
+legitimate successor to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit
+of Tom Castleton. The contrast was so extraordinary, so
+inexplicable. It was generally concluded that no writer but Adrian
+Boldero, in the world's history, had ever revealed two such
+distinct literary personalities as those that informed the two
+novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused universal wonder.
+His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained by English
+letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the new
+book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals,
+knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the
+press. In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius;
+for, after all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can
+put your finger on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom
+Castleton's work possessed; Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater
+Glory" vibrated with life, it was wide and generous, it was a
+capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond Gate," it could not rank
+with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David Copperfield." I say this
+in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but merely to present
+his work in true proportion. Published under his own name it would
+doubtless have received recognition; probably it would have made
+money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic reception it
+enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name of Adrian
+Boldero.</p>
+<p>Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had
+succeeded beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs
+of the woman he loved. He had also astonished himself
+enormously.</p>
+<p>"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that
+I'm not a mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap
+with brains, and"&mdash;he turned over a bundle of
+press-cuttings&mdash;"and 'poetic fancy' and 'master of the human
+heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of things' and
+'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.' Ho! ho!
+ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
+years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
+complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling
+like blazes."</p>
+<p>It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
+ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
+spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His
+poorer human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now
+Adrian's restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria
+there would open a new life in which, with the past behind her, she
+could find a glory in the sun and an influence in the stars, and a
+spark in her own bosom responsive to his devotion. For the
+tumultuous moment, however, when Adrian's name was on all men's
+tongues, and before all men's eyes, the ghost walked in triumphant
+verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings of Jaffery and Doria,
+he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever he was evoked;
+and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or perhaps
+for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
+Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
+reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
+blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
+reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to
+write on Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it
+and that of Jaffery Chayne?</p>
+<p>One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.</p>
+<p>"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery
+sacrificed his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling
+together Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success
+of it, and you treat him as if he were a dog."</p>
+<p>Doria protested. "I don't. I <i>am</i> grateful. I don't know
+what I should do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness
+for Jaffery can't alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work;
+and when I hear those very faults in the book praised, I am fit to
+be tied."</p>
+<p>"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by
+yourself," said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be
+sane and civil."</p>
+<p>"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't
+the wife of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you
+again."</p>
+<p>"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and
+you know it."</p>
+<p>Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little
+eyrie in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever
+leaving it. Arbuthnot of <i>The Daily Gazette</i> satirically
+enquiring whether he wanted a job or still yearned for a season in
+Mayfair he consigned, in his grinning way, to perdition. Change was
+the essence of holiday-making, and this was his holiday. It was
+many years since he had one. When he wanted a job he would go round
+to the office.</p>
+<p>"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want
+to keep your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring
+us up."</p>
+<p>Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he
+liked.</p>
+<p>The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria
+Street may have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I
+dismissed the excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch,
+at the club, assuming my most sceptical manner.</p>
+<p>"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after
+her."</p>
+<p>"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound
+health, perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does
+want a man's advice, she can always turn to me."</p>
+<p>"And there's Liosha."</p>
+<p>"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable
+of looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very
+definitely to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any
+more interesting evenings out lately?"</p>
+<p>"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her
+off that low-down bounder."</p>
+<p>"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with
+him."</p>
+<p>He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of
+the argument.</p>
+<p>"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction,
+"she can't marry him."</p>
+<p>"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"</p>
+<p>"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar
+is married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four
+wives in fact&mdash;oh, a dreadful hound&mdash;but only one real
+one with a wedding ring, and she lives up in the north with a pack
+of children."</p>
+<p>"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a
+villain."</p>
+<p>He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was
+not Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I
+agreed with him.</p>
+<p>"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as
+to look after her."</p>
+<p>"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company.
+She'll get a bad name."</p>
+<p>"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you
+devoting his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of
+mischief is too preposterous. Try me with something else."</p>
+<p>Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was
+writing another book.</p>
+<p>He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to
+know. He was getting along famously. He had had the story in his
+head for a long time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline
+very picturesquely. Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the
+development of the man Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had
+happened. The born novelist had just discovered himself and
+clamoured for artistic self-expression. He was writing this book
+just because he could not help it, finding gladness in the mere
+work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and letting himself
+go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become of it when
+written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a matter.
+Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new
+novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as
+closely as "Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be
+the deuce to pay. If he published it under his own name, he would
+render himself liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from
+the dead author of "The Greater Glory," and so complicate this
+already complicated web of literary theft; and if he threw
+sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria to enable him to publish
+under Adrian's name, he would be performing the task of the
+altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.</p>
+<p>Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his
+novel, looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and
+enjoying the society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds
+of passage like himself, who happened to be passing through London.
+Being a man of modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food,
+he found his small patrimony and the savings from his professional
+earnings quite adequate for amenable existence. When he wanted
+healthy, fresh air he came down to us to see Susan; when he wanted
+anything else he went to see Doria, which was almost daily.</p>
+<p>Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and
+Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing
+and dusting, she entered the awful room&mdash;neither servants nor
+friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was
+always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the
+focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be
+a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy.
+In her blind perversity she counted on his co&ouml;peration. It was
+he who carried through negotiations with an eminent sculptor for a
+bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time, she
+bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion
+of Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National
+Biography. . . . And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign
+behests without a murmur and without a hint that he desired reward
+for his servitude. But, to those gifted with normal vision, signs
+were not wanting that he chafed, to put it mildly, under this
+forced worship of Adrian; and to those who knew Jaffery it was
+obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not last forever.
+Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one should
+kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find august
+recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was not
+devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted
+everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery
+for his meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct
+must have revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath
+the exterior of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For
+one thing, she considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity
+perhaps blinded her judgment. At all events she did not realise
+that a change was bound to come in their relations. It came,
+inevitably.</p>
+<p>One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St.
+John's Wood flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of
+queer isolation from the world below, and from the strange world
+masked behind the vast superficies of brick against which they were
+perched. Jaffery said something about a nest midway on a cliff side
+overlooking the sea. He also, in bass incoherence, formulated the
+opinion that in such a nest might he found true happiness. The
+pretty languor of early summer laughed in the air. Their situation,
+'twixt earth and heaven, had a little sensuous charm. Doria replied
+sentimentally:</p>
+<p>"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of
+cliff, with the sea-gulls wheeling about it&mdash;bringing messages
+from the sunset lands across the blue, blue sea&mdash;" Poor dear!
+She forgot that sea lit by a westering sun is of no colour at all
+and that the blue water lies to the east; but no matter; Jaffery,
+drinking in her words, forgot it likewise. "Away from everything,"
+she continued, "and two people who loved&mdash;with a great, great
+love&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down
+Maida Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted&mdash;the
+ripeness of youth and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained
+her ivory cheek&mdash;you will find the exact simile in Virgil. She
+was too desirable for Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in
+his chair&mdash;they were sitting face to face, so that he had his
+back to the motor omnibuses&mdash;and put his great hand on her
+knee.</p>
+<p>"Why not we two?"</p>
+<p>It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish&mdash;what you please;
+but every man's first declaration of love is bathos&mdash;the
+zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his
+intelligence. Anyhow the declaration was made, without shadow of
+mistake.</p>
+<p>Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset
+and gulls and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from
+before her eyes, and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff
+Chayne.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean?" she asked.</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean."</p>
+<p>He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The
+three-foot balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles.
+She put out a hand.</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so
+nervous."</p>
+<p>He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as
+if she had dealt him a slap in the face.</p>
+<p>"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I
+want you and I'll never be happy till I get you."</p>
+<p>She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.</p>
+<p>"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"</p>
+<p>"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward
+glance.</p>
+<p>"Not with an obstinate devil like me."</p>
+<p>He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.</p>
+<p>"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the
+drawing-room.</p>
+<p>He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a
+footling balcony. What do you take me for?"</p>
+<p>"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave
+elf facing horrible ogre&mdash;and, either by chance or design, her
+hand touched and held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph
+of her late husband.</p>
+<p>"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's
+memory when you say such things to me?"</p>
+<p>"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to
+the free woman he loves."</p>
+<p>"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."</p>
+<p>"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."</p>
+<p>"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of
+you,"&mdash;his blue eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his
+hands, but heedless she went on&mdash;"yes, mean and base and
+despicable of you to wish to betray him. Adrian&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and
+listen to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual
+disgusts and sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real
+live man who would walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail
+body in his great grasp, and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught
+up by a dynamo. "My love for you has nothing whatever to do with
+Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as one man can be to another,
+living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary and Barbara. But I want
+you. I've wanted you since the first moment I set eyes on you.
+You've got into my blood. You're going to love me. You're going to
+marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."</p>
+<p>He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely.
+She did not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were
+white and her face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And
+unconscious that his grip was giving her physical pain he
+continued:</p>
+<p>"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I
+heard you were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting.
+But, by God!"&mdash;and, not knowing what he did, he shook her
+backwards and forwards&mdash;"I'll not go on waiting for ever.
+You&mdash;you little bit of mystery&mdash;you little bit of
+eternity&mdash;you&mdash;you&mdash;ah!"</p>
+<p>With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not
+counted on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning,
+and she fell, knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp
+of horror and in an instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa,
+and on his knees beside her, with remorse oversurging his passion,
+behaved like a penitent fool, accusing himself of all the
+unforgivable savageries ever practised by barbaric male. Doria, who
+was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed to the door.</p>
+<p>"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."</p>
+<p>Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of
+reaction.</p>
+<p>"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."</p>
+<p>She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you
+out, but if Adrian was alive&mdash;Ha! ha! ha!&mdash;" she laughed
+with a touch of hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren
+rascal&mdash;how do you dare to think you can take the place of a
+man like Adrian?"</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i234.jpg" id="i234.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/234.jpg"><img src="images/234.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>"Go! You are nothing but a brute."</b></div>
+<p>The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her
+up bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I
+would hold a cat or a rabbit.</p>
+<p>"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference
+between a man and a&mdash;"</p>
+<p>Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might
+have struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.</p>
+<p>"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going
+to hurt you."</p>
+<p>He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the
+room.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+<p>If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the
+lover who woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have
+thrown away his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed.
+Doria proved to Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration
+and nervous collapse, that she would never set eyes again upon the
+unqualifiable savage by whom her holiest sentiments had been
+outraged and her person disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a
+blood-curdling story into semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short
+work of her contention that Jaffery ought to have respected her as
+he would have respected the wife of a living friend, characterising
+it as morbid and indecent nonsense; and with regard to the physical
+violence she declared that it would have served her right had he
+smacked her.</p>
+<p>"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband,
+be faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man
+comes along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an
+honourable way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months
+all a man has to give, and then, when he tells you what you've
+known perfectly well all along, treat him as if he were making
+shameful proposals to you&mdash;especially a man like Jaffery; I
+have no patience with you."</p>
+<p>Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No
+one understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was
+aware. But when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery
+Chayne, she really thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore
+Barbara, rather angry at being brought up to London on a needless
+errand, involving loss of dinner and upset of household
+arrangements, administered a sleeping-draught and bade her wake in
+the morning in a less idiotic frame of mind.</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me
+later&mdash;to "behave like a cat" is her way of signifying a
+display of the vilest phases of feminine nature&mdash;"but I
+couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal of sense. It isn't
+as if I had never warned her about the way she has been treating
+Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian&mdash;I'm sick
+of his name&mdash;and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"</p>
+<p>This she said during a private discussion that night on the
+whole situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she
+returned to Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the
+first time in his life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent
+dinner, imploring me to tell him whether he should enlist for a
+soldier, or commit suicide, or lie prone on Doria's doormat until
+it should please her to come out and trample on him. He seemed
+rather surprised&mdash;indeed a trifle hurt&mdash;that neither of
+us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not
+Doria's&mdash;especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside
+of the scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about
+the drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.</p>
+<p>"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both
+of you, she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You&mdash;'a
+barren rascal'&mdash;you? Good God!"</p>
+<p>He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must
+take this from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on
+her. He oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He
+was a savage unfit for the society of any woman outside a
+wigwam.</p>
+<p>"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to
+bed. Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."</p>
+<p>The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I
+could not exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless,
+and with a large disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent
+him a suit of my meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same
+purpose.</p>
+<p>He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria
+and was denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned
+unopened. He passed a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose
+end in London during the height of the season. In despair he went
+to <i>The Daily Gazette</i> office and proclaimed himself ready for
+a job. But for the moment the earth was fairly calm and the
+management could find no field for Jaffery's special activities.
+Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable
+weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of
+the proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the
+newspaper office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a
+disturber of traffic. Then he came down to Northlands for a while,
+where, for want of something to do, he hired himself out to my
+gardener and dug up most of the kitchen garden. His usual
+occupation of romping with Susan was gone, for she lay abed with
+some childish ailment which Barbara feared might turn into German
+measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or eating or
+sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless mood. At
+nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases wherein
+he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer the
+most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying
+with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when
+a merciful Providence gave him something definite to think
+about.</p>
+<p>It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my
+dressing-room when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding
+admittance, rushed in, clad in bath gown and slippers, flourishing
+a letter.</p>
+<p>"Read that."</p>
+<p>I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Dear Jaff Chayne,</p>
+<br />
+<p>"As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm
+going to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook&mdash;"</p>
+</div>
+<p>I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."</p>
+<p>"He is. Read on."</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married
+at Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an
+Albanian it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in
+England, and I would have to give up half my money to Government.
+But in France, owing to different laws, I can get married without
+any fuss at all. I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a
+lawyer, so it's all right. I suppose when I am married you won't be
+my trustee any more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and
+thank you for all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and
+Barbara and Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is
+Erasmus, but you will when you know him better.</p>
+<p>"Yours affectionately,</p>
+<p>"LIOSHA PRESCOTT."</p>
+</div>
+<p>The amazing epistle took my breath away.</p>
+<p>"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.</p>
+<p>"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look
+signified that it was he who intended to cause it.</p>
+<p>"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.</p>
+<p>"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He
+must have once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."</p>
+<p>I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of
+pity for our poor deluded Liosha.</p>
+<p>"We must get her out of this."</p>
+<p>"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."</p>
+<p>I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the
+room where she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in
+cap and peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with
+lather crinkling over one-half of my face, held first an
+indignation meeting, and then a council of war.</p>
+<p>"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He
+couldn't offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing
+bigamy, and I know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement;
+so he has invented this poisonous plot to get her out of
+England."</p>
+<p>"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?"
+asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but
+Barbara's eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws
+and formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the
+fact that, not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be
+sold to a young Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming
+to haggle over her price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in
+telling her wild fables of English life. Her ignorance in many ways
+was abysmal. Once having seen a photograph in the papers of the
+King in a bowler-hat she expressed her disappointment that he wore
+no insignia of royalty; and when I consoled her by saying that, by
+Act of Parliament, the King was obliged to wear his crown so many
+hours a day and therefore wore it always at breakfast, lunch and
+dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted my assurance with the
+credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara rebuked me for
+taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry indeed. How
+was she to know when and where not to believe me?</p>
+<p>"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any
+kind of plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a
+full account of it is a proof."</p>
+<p>"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled.
+"If Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."</p>
+<p>"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara.
+"She thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you
+know."</p>
+<p>"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said
+I.</p>
+<p>"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick
+knitting of the brow.</p>
+<p>"Precisely," said I.</p>
+<p>"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with
+the fellow already?"</p>
+<p>"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."</p>
+<p>He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while
+Barbara discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard
+to Liosha.</p>
+<p>Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.</p>
+<p>"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday.
+Fendihook left last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."</p>
+<p>We regarded each other in dismay.</p>
+<p>"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from
+moustache downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When
+he was puzzled he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why
+should he leave the boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you.
+Because his London engagement was over and he had to put in a
+week's engagement at some provincial music-hall. Theatrical folks
+always travel on Sunday. If he was still working in London and
+wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have chosen Sunday. We can
+easily see by the advertisements in the morning paper. His London
+engagement was at the Atrium."</p>
+<p>"I've got the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> here," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken
+condition to which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest
+search among the ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement
+page. The attractions at the Atrium were set out fully; but the
+name of Ras Fendihook did not appear.</p>
+<p>"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where
+did she write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown
+pocket. "Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday
+afternoon. So she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was
+written on her own note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address,
+and then held it up before us. "See anything queer about this?"</p>
+<p>We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."</p>
+<p>"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come
+along. I can tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I
+seem to be a bit of an ass. Besides&mdash;you'll come, won't
+you?"</p>
+<p>"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."</p>
+<p>"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be
+prepared to come to Havre&mdash;all over France, if necessary."</p>
+<p>"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast
+coolness of the proposal.</p>
+<p>"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."</p>
+<p>"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave
+Susan."</p>
+<p>"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you
+can't." He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."</p>
+<p>"Where?" I asked, stupidly.</p>
+<p>"Wherever I take you."</p>
+<p>"But, my dear fellow&mdash;" I remonstrated.</p>
+<p>He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack
+his bag, and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."</p>
+<p>He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.</p>
+<p>"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by
+yourself?"</p>
+<p>"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me
+and I met the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help
+me to save a woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find
+somebody else."</p>
+<p>"Of course I'll come," said I.</p>
+<p>"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a
+breakfast."</p>
+<p>He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman
+heroes rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy,
+bellowing fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the
+normal tones of the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.</p>
+<p>I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that
+we should be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other
+people's lives?"</p>
+<p>She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's
+just because we've done nothing&mdash;nothing otherwise to justify
+our existence. We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and
+Susan. If we didn't take a share of other people's troubles we
+should die of congestion of the soul."</p>
+<p>I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the
+steady vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at
+a moment's notice for anywhere&mdash;perhaps Havre, perhaps
+Marseilles, perhaps Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which
+wouldn't suit me&mdash;anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving
+Jaffery might choose to ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with
+my translation of Firdusi. . . .</p>
+<p>"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin
+to put in an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs.
+Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately
+done black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we
+were calling in question the moral character of her establishment.
+She did not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone.
+She was not in the habit of putting such enquiries to her
+guests.</p>
+<p>"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on
+Thursday. It was not my business to associate the two departures in
+any way."</p>
+<p>By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an
+old client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had
+been touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come
+without much ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms,
+paid her bill and departed with her trunks.</p>
+<p>"When did she give notice to leave you?"</p>
+<p>"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then
+she came with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things
+were packed and ready to be brought downstairs."</p>
+<p>"What address did she give to the cabman?"</p>
+<p>Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter.
+Jaffery repeated his question.</p>
+<p>"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.</p>
+<p>I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded
+it as the most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on
+me.</p>
+<p>"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying
+instructions&mdash;covering up her tracks. When she got to
+Westminster she told the driver to cross the bridge&mdash;and what
+railway station is the other end of the bridge?"</p>
+<p>"Waterloo," said I.</p>
+<p>"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from
+Southampton the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny,
+believe me."</p>
+<p>I said no more.</p>
+<p>The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his
+pocket.</p>
+<p>"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this
+district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."</p>
+<p>"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.</p>
+<p>"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was
+something fishy about it."</p>
+<p>"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne,
+and I'm surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my
+character. I had a short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday
+enclosing four other letters which she asked me to stamp and post,
+as I owed her fourpence change on her bill."</p>
+<p>"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.</p>
+<p>"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.</p>
+<p>"But the postmark on the envelope."</p>
+<p>She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been
+destroyed.</p>
+<p>"Then where is she?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at
+once."</p>
+<p>So after a visit to my bankers&mdash;for I am not the kind of
+person to set out for Santa F&eacute; de Bogot&agrave; with
+twopence halfpenny in my pocket&mdash;and after a hasty lunch at a
+restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient disgust&mdash;"Why the
+dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if we're to fool
+about wasting time over lunch?"&mdash;but as I explained, if I
+don't have regular meals, I get a headache&mdash;and after having
+made other sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase
+of a toothbrush, an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin,
+admirable fellow that he is, invariably forgets to put into my
+case, we started for Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth
+Road we went, through Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the
+Surrey Downs rolling warm in the sunshine, through Farnham, through
+grey, dreamy Winchester, past St. Cross, with its old-world
+almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill and down to
+Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a quarter.
+Jaffery drove.</p>
+<p>We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the
+various places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in
+Southampton. We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the
+Royal, the Star, the Dolphin, the Polygon&mdash;and found no trace
+of the runaways. Jaffery interviewed officials at the stations and
+docks, dapper gentlemen with the air of diplomatists, tremendous
+fellows in uniform, policemen, porters, with all of whom he seemed
+to be on terms of familiar acquaintance; but none of them could
+trace or remember such a couple having crossed by the midnight
+boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were their names down on the list
+of those who had secured berths in advance for this Saturday
+night.</p>
+<p>"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not
+displeased at my masterful friend's failure.</p>
+<p>"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly
+means that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on
+Monday. If it was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've
+only to wait and catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement,
+which is possible, he and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that
+case we'll cross ourselves and track them down."</p>
+<p>"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I
+murmured.</p>
+<p>"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement
+he must be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must
+be working in the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place
+besides this is Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only
+seventeen miles."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
+comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to
+dine at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the
+car drove off.</p>
+<p>"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."</p>
+<p>"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow
+night's boat."</p>
+<p>"There isn't one on Sundays."</p>
+<p>"Then Monday night's boat."</p>
+<p>"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet
+him on the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down
+on my leg above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I
+should like to take you on an expedition. It would do you a
+thundering lot of good."</p>
+<p>We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of
+enquiries as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining
+Southsea could we find a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook,
+and still less of the obscure Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel.
+We dined very well. On that I insisted&mdash;without much
+expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me for a Sybarite
+and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on account of
+succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
+excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we
+felt that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it
+so gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back
+to Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on
+the off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to
+catch the Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I
+cheerfully contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre.
+And as Jaffery (also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining
+me with juicy stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt
+equal to any dare-devil adventure.</p>
+<p>We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
+South-Western Hotel&mdash;the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our
+uncertainty as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed
+his dull brain. Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to
+stick to his side and obey him slavishly took the place of
+intellectual workings. It was nearly midnight. We walked through
+the docks, a background of darkness, a foreground of confusing
+lights amid which shone vivid illuminated placards before the
+brightly lit steamers&mdash;"St.
+Malo"&mdash;"Cherbourg"&mdash;"Jersey"&mdash;"Havre." At the quiet
+gangway of the Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags
+on the quay and stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a
+stick at its master's feet.</p>
+<p>One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad
+ants swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the
+fore, he the aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women,
+vague human forms encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of
+impedimenta. They all seemed alike&mdash;just a herd of Britons,
+impelled by irrational instinct, like the fate-driven lemmings of
+Norway, to cross the sea. And all around, weird in the conflicting
+lights, hurried gnome-like figures mountainously laden, and in the
+confusion of sounds could be heard the slither and thud of trunks
+being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail of the packed wedge
+disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I went to the aft
+gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had seen Fendihook
+or Liosha.</p>
+<p>A second train produced results equally barren.</p>
+<p>There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We
+went aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.</p>
+<p>My method of travel has always been to arrange everything
+beforehand with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains
+and boats I have thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear
+therefore that there were no berths free and that we should have to
+pass the night either on the windy deck or in the red-plush
+discomfort of the open saloon caused me not unreasonable dismay. I
+had to choose and I chose the saloon. Jaffery, of course, chose the
+raw winds of heaven. All night I did not get a wink of sleep. There
+was a gross fellow in the next section of red-plush whose snoring
+drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long after they had
+cleared away the remains of supper from the long central table
+chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
+world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the
+popping of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three
+a minute. I understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the
+human brain. I devised exquisite means of removing him from a
+nauseated world. Then there was a lamp which swung backwards and
+forwards and searched my eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I
+covered them.</p>
+<p>What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife
+and child and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got
+out to sea. There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and
+swift scurrying of stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly
+hate a ship to do. And I was fully dressed and it seemed as if all
+the tender parts of my body were tied up with twine. What was I
+doing in this galley?</p>
+<p>When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning
+over me and all was deathly still.</p>
+<p>"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is
+there a fog?"</p>
+<p>"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of
+Havre."</p>
+<p>"What time is it?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Half-past six."</p>
+<p>"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said
+I, lying down again.</p>
+<p>He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.</p>
+<p>The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck
+of Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.</p>
+<p>"What a ghastly night!"</p>
+<p>"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped
+over twenty miles."</p>
+<p>There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate
+numbers on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the
+companion onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the
+releasing gangway. I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans.
+The sky was overcast. It was very cold. The universe had an
+uncared-for, unswept appearance, like a house surprised at dawn,
+before the housemaids are up. The forced appearance of a well-to-do
+philosopher at such an hour was nothing less than an outrage. I
+glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and turned down
+its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool thoughtlessness I
+had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in charge of the
+blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I glanced
+over my shoulder.</p>
+<p>"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.</p>
+<p>At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep
+from us turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into
+each other's eyes.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER
+XVIII</h2>
+<p>Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm.
+Her eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then
+she turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just
+beyond the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even
+further away. The gangway was fixed and the movement of the
+conglomerate mass began. Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.</p>
+<p>"There's the brute waiting for her."</p>
+<p>And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a
+smile on his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the
+foot of the gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence,
+sought us anxiously with his gaze; then with an air of bravado
+waved his hat&mdash;a hard white felt&mdash;and cried out: "Cheer
+O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and linking his arm
+through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers hurrying across
+the stones to the custom-sheds.</p>
+<p>"Stop," Jaffery roared.</p>
+<p>They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook
+would have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the
+stream into a clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us.
+When we had struggled our slow way down and reached the quay she
+advanced a few steps looking very terrible in her wrath.</p>
+<p>"How dare you follow me?"</p>
+<p>"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an
+imperious gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the
+stern of the boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging,
+and a sergeant de ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.</p>
+<p>"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I
+didn't play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play
+dragon with a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."</p>
+<p>"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said
+jauntily.</p>
+<p>"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone.
+"You know very well why I'm here."</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne&mdash;" Liosha began.</p>
+<p>He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."</p>
+<p>"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."</p>
+<p>"He has got to tell me, not you."</p>
+<p>"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said
+Fendihook, with sudden nastiness.</p>
+<p>"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."</p>
+<p>"How are you going to do it?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?"
+snarled Fendihook.</p>
+<p>"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."</p>
+<p>"Sure," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>"And are you going to marry this lady?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly."</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you marry her in England?"</p>
+<p>"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here&mdash;we don't
+want any of your interference." And she planted herself by the side
+of her abductor, glaring defiance at Jaffery.</p>
+<p>Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and
+an Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and
+would forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little
+skunk!"</p>
+<p>The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked
+swiftly at Fendihook.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't it true what you told me?"</p>
+<p>"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in
+England as Mrs. Considine."</p>
+<p>She paid no attention to me.</p>
+<p>"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.</p>
+<p>Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that
+rot seriously, you silly cuckoo?"</p>
+<p>Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly.
+For the first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her
+candid mind.</p>
+<p>"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise
+to marry her in France."</p>
+<p>"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"</p>
+<p>"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."</p>
+<p>"Who says I can't?"</p>
+<p>"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."</p>
+<p>"I've divorced her."</p>
+<p>"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing.
+I've found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous
+character."</p>
+<p>Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her
+eyes burning.</p>
+<p>"He's married already&mdash;" she gasped.</p>
+<p>"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."</p>
+<p>Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been
+for Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been
+round Fendihook's throat.</p>
+<p>"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron
+strength. Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as
+white as a sheet. I tapped him on the arm.</p>
+<p>"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if
+you don't want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a
+scared look, "you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You
+had better stick to the sort you're accustomed to."</p>
+<p>"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."</p>
+<p>"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne.
+With my own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like
+and"&mdash;I made an expressive gesture&mdash;"throw him clean
+away."</p>
+<p>"Right O!" said he.</p>
+<p>He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck
+me. I overtook him.</p>
+<p>"Where are you staying in Havre?"</p>
+<p>He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know
+for?"</p>
+<p>"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be
+if we chanced upon the same hotel."</p>
+<p>"I'm staying at the Phares&mdash;the swagger one on the beach
+near the Casino."</p>
+<p>"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."</p>
+<p>"Good-bye, old pal," said he.</p>
+<p>He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.</p>
+<p>I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she
+stood unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking
+sidewise down. Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had
+mastered her fury, but now we had to deal with her shame and
+humiliation.</p>
+<p>"Let her go!" I whispered.</p>
+<p>Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without
+moving her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have
+known exactly what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat
+helplessly.</p>
+<p>"<i>Monsieur</i>," said a voice close by, and we saw our little
+blue-bloused porter. He explained that he had been seeking us
+everywhere. If we did not make haste we would lose the Paris
+train.</p>
+<p>I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not
+pressed for time; but this little outside happening broke the
+situation.</p>
+<p>"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground
+a leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
+extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.</p>
+<p>"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides,
+we'll have to stay the night."</p>
+<p>"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."</p>
+<p>"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."</p>
+<p>An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she
+wore cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly
+unconcerned with such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken
+face to all the world. I felt intensely sorry for her. She realised
+now from what a blatant scoundrel she had been saved; but she still
+bitterly resented our intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped
+naked walking between them"&mdash;that was her primitive account
+later of her state of mind.</p>
+<p>"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."</p>
+<p>She nodded, without looking at me.</p>
+<p>"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."</p>
+<p>She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but
+she remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
+mechanically to her declarations.</p>
+<p>On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the
+cheery sun had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a
+glorious day. The luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took
+an open cab and rattled through the narrow flag-paved streets of
+the harbour quarter of the town. As we emerged into a more spacious
+thoroughfare, suddenly from a gaudy column at the corner flared the
+name of Ras Fendihook. I caught the heading of the <i>affiche</i>:
+"Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery was solved. Jaffery had
+been right in his deduction that he had left London on a
+professional engagement; but we had not thought of an engagement
+out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question: "Why
+Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
+of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had
+eyes for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We
+passed another column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where
+already at that early hour, above its wide terrace, the striped
+awning of Tortoni's was flung. We alighted at the hotel and ordered
+our three rooms; coffee and roll to be taken up to madame; we men
+would eat our petit d&eacute;jeuner downstairs. Liosha left us
+without saying a word.</p>
+<p>Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good <i>caf&eacute; au
+lait</i>, gladdened by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our
+morning's work, quite a different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on
+the terrace from the sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours
+before. My urbane dismissal of Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my
+memory. The glow of conscious heroism warmed me, even like last
+night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind. After despatching, by the
+chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and sending up to Liosha's
+room a bunch of red roses we bought at a florist's hard by, I
+surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the matutinal
+Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his pipe and
+uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.</p>
+<p>I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is
+regarding of its <i>sous</i>, it is what you will. But it lives a
+spacious, out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury
+itself, like provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks
+abroad. It indulges in its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is
+intensely conscious of family, but it can take deep breaths of
+freedom. It is not Sundayfied into our vacuous boredom. It clings
+to the picturesque, in which it finds its dignified delight. The
+little soldier clad in blue tunic and red trousers struts along
+with his <i>fianc&eacute;e</i> or <i>ma&icirc;tresse</i> on his
+arm; the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair
+plume; the cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty
+wife, drinks syrup at a neighbouring table in your caf&eacute;. The
+work-girls, even on Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they
+were at home in the friendly street. The cur&eacute; in shovel hat
+and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday happens not to be the
+<i>jour de repos hebdomadaire</i> ordained by law, in their blue
+<i>sarreau</i>; the peasants from outlying villages&mdash;the men
+in queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
+dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent
+black, with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with
+fat and greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an
+exiguous cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a
+quarter of an inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair
+of gendarmes with their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords;
+the white-aproned waiters standing by caf&eacute; tables&mdash;all
+these types are distinct, picked out pleasurably by the eye; they
+give a cheery sense of variety; the stage is dressed.</p>
+<p>So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do
+all day, I replied:</p>
+<p>"Sit here."</p>
+<p>"Don't you want to see the place?"</p>
+<p>"The place," said I, "is parading before us."</p>
+<p>"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."</p>
+<p>"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and
+she's not in a mood for jaunts."</p>
+<p>"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful
+for her. Oh, that swine of a blighter!"</p>
+<p>His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the
+dozenth time we went over the story.</p>
+<p>"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She
+can't go back to the boarding-house."</p>
+<p>"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to
+Barbara."</p>
+<p>"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know,
+Hilary, there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if
+one only knew the right way to take her."</p>
+<p>The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal
+it. I assented to Jaffery's proposition.</p>
+<p>"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a
+Spanish gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of
+truth and honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been
+a nasty knock for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as
+she has pulled herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a
+big way."</p>
+<p>And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing
+towards us past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself.
+Another woman would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us
+would have had to soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her
+to eat and cajole her into revisiting the light of day. Not so
+Liosha. She arrayed herself in fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt,
+fitting close to her splendid figure, which she held erect, a smart
+hat with a feather, and new white gloves, and came to us the
+incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the morning, our roses pinned
+in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her lips were not quite
+under control, but she made a valiant show.</p>
+<p>We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our
+chairs.</p>
+<p>"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."</p>
+<p>We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she
+looked steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.</p>
+<p>"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."</p>
+<p>"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been
+rather indiscreet."</p>
+<p>"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.</p>
+<p>"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat
+your breakfast?"</p>
+<p>She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What
+would she have now? I sent a waiter for caf&eacute;-au-lait and a
+brioche and lectured her on the folly of going without proper
+sustenance. The ghost of a smile crept into her eyes, in
+recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism with which I am wrongly
+credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for the roses. They
+were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the little tray
+and the <i>verseur</i> poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
+her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.</p>
+<p>"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.</p>
+<p>"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the
+boat? We watched the London trains carefully."</p>
+<p>"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and
+went to bed at once."</p>
+<p>"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What
+were you doing at Southsea?"</p>
+<p>"Staying with Emma&mdash;Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I
+couldn't stick that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote
+to Emma to ask her to put me up."</p>
+<p>"So that's why you went on Thursday?"</p>
+<p>"That's why."</p>
+<p>"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
+Considine&mdash;I mean Mrs. Jupp&mdash;into your confidence?"</p>
+<p>"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going
+to Havre&mdash;to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that.
+But Jaff Chayne was the only person that had to know the
+truth."</p>
+<p>We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the
+intrigue that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left
+London on Sunday for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of
+Havre. As there was no Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to
+travel to Havre via Paris. Being a crafty villain, he would not run
+away with Liosha straight from London. She was to join him a week
+later, after he had had time to spy out the land and make his
+nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His fortnight up, he was
+sailing away again to America. Liosha was to accompany him. In all
+probability, for I delight in thinking the worst of Mr. Ras
+Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of his
+tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
+worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed
+voyage back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in
+the railway network of the United States. I have made it my
+business to enquire into the ways of this entertaining but unholy
+villain. This is what I am sure he would have done. One girl some
+half dozen years before he had left penniless in San Francisco and
+the door over which burns the Red Lamp swallowed her up
+forever.</p>
+<p>For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a
+soul must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As
+Jaffery had guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of
+Westminster Abbey. Although her open nature abhorred the deception,
+she obeyed his instructions in minor details and thought she was
+acting in the spirit of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters
+to Mrs. Jardine to be posted in London. By risking discovery of her
+secret during her visit to the admirable lady at Southsea and by
+ingenuously disclosing the plot to Jaffery she showed herself to be
+a very sorry conspirator.</p>
+<p>She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to
+touch upon the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not
+stay in Havre all day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who
+might swagger into the town from his swagger hotel on the
+<i>plage</i>, we carried out Jaffery's proposal, hired an
+automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight from inland into
+the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of fisher-folk and
+fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged needle gates
+jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
+grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
+sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew
+a deep breath.</p>
+<p>"Oh, let us all come and live here."</p>
+<p>We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats
+wherein the fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach
+where a few belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the
+curious steps to the terrace and listened to the last number of the
+orchestra. Then lunch at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet
+among the fishing boats; and afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the
+little shady courtyard. Jaffery was very gentle with Liosha,
+treating her tenderly like a bruised thing, and talked of his
+adventures and cracked little jokes and attended solicitously to
+her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy gratitude,
+and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled her to
+make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
+sipped <i>cr&ecirc;me de menthe</i> with frank gusto. To me she
+appeared like a naughty child who instead of meeting with expected
+punishment finds itself coddled in affectionate arms. All
+resentment had died away. Unreservedly she had laid herself as a
+"damn fool" at our feet&mdash;or rather at Jaffery's feet, for I
+did not count for much. Instead of blundering over her and tugging
+her up and otherwise exacerbating her wounds, he lifted her with
+tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the first time, save when
+Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a spiritual relation
+with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy&mdash;she was dealing with
+a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
+immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At
+the same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously
+throbbing and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those
+few hours.</p>
+<p>To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in
+Jaffery's category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have
+threatened on many restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a
+gigantic wheel for his benefit similar to that in which Susan's
+white mice take futile exercise. If there was such a wheel he must,
+I am sure, get in and whirl it round; just as if there is a boat he
+must row it, or tree to be felled he must fell it, or a hill to be
+climbed he must climb it. At Etretat, as it happens, there are two
+hills. He stretched forth his hand to one, of course the highest,
+crowned by the fishermen's chapel and ordained an ascent. Liosha
+was in the chastened mood in which she would have dived with him to
+the depths of the English Channel. I, with grudging meekness and a
+prayer for another five minutes devoted to the deglutition of
+another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.</p>
+<p>It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze
+tempered the fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and
+agreeable to the feet. The smell of wild thyme mingling with the
+salt of the low-tide seaweed conveyed stimulating fragrance. When
+we reached the top and Jaffery suggested that we should lie down, I
+protested. Why not walk along the edge of the inspiring cliffs?</p>
+<p>"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night,"
+said he throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I
+need rest."</p>
+<p>Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after
+the quick ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played
+charmingly in the wind which blew her skirts close around her in
+fine modelling. I thought of the Winged Victory.</p>
+<p>"I'm not a bit tired," she said.</p>
+<p>But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his
+fists, she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to
+go contrary to his desires?" and settled down beside him.</p>
+<p>So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the
+dancing sea and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long
+plume from a steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us
+and the tiny golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and
+were in fact giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when
+suddenly Liosha broke the spell.</p>
+<p>"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have
+killed him."</p>
+<p>Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.</p>
+<p>"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I did strike him once."</p>
+<p>"Oh?" said I.</p>
+<p>"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to
+hear the details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous
+elements. But she left them to my imagination. "After that," she
+continued, "he saw I was an honest woman and talked about
+marriage."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my
+dear," said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."</p>
+<p>She shrugged her shoulders&mdash;it was the full shrug of the
+un-English child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze
+still far away. "He was so funny."</p>
+<p>"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
+remonstrance.</p>
+<p>"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he
+was different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very
+much. You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't
+behave like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me
+out to dinner."</p>
+<p>Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go
+on."</p>
+<p>"What can I say?"&mdash;she shrugged her shoulders again. "With
+him I hadn't to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I
+liked. You all think it dreadful because I know, like everybody
+else, how children come into the world, and can make jokes about
+things like that. Emma used to say it was not ladylike&mdash;but
+he&mdash;he did not say so. He laughed. His friends used to laugh.
+With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off my
+stays"&mdash;she threw out her hands largely&mdash;"ouf!"</p>
+<p>"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.</p>
+<p>"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a
+crowd of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a
+big difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in
+a low voice.</p>
+<p>I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to
+Barbara for her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My
+attitude, as you can understand, was solely one of kindly
+curiosity. Liosha, for some moments, also said nothing. Rather
+feverishly she pulled off her new white gloves and cast them away;
+and I noticed an all but imperceptible something&mdash;something,
+for want of a better word, like a ripple&mdash;sweep through her,
+faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her neck and
+dying away in a flush on her cheek.</p>
+<p>"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the
+grass-blades.</p>
+<p>She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or
+two and clutched his shoulder.</p>
+<p>"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I
+thought you understood. I would have married anybody who would have
+taken me out of prison. He was going to take me out of prison to
+places where I could breathe." She fell back onto her heels and
+beat her breast with both hands. "I was dying for want of air. I
+was suffocating."</p>
+<p>Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.</p>
+<p>"What are you talking about?"</p>
+<p>She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
+spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my
+knees.</p>
+<p>"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my
+throat"&mdash;and forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's
+discipline she mimed her words startlingly&mdash;"I was
+sick&mdash;sick&mdash;sick to death. You forget, Jaff Chayne, the
+mountains of Albania."</p>
+<p>"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her.
+"But I remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"</p>
+<p>She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though
+to hide swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them
+away. "No. Not now. Not after&mdash;No. But mountains,
+freedom&mdash;anything unlike prison. Oh, I've gone mad sometimes.
+I've wanted to take up a fender and smash things."</p>
+<p>"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"And what have you done?"</p>
+<p>"I've broken out of prison and run away."</p>
+<p>"That's what I did," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and
+looked at her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And
+Liosha laughed, too.</p>
+<p>"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what
+it comes to."</p>
+<p>No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy
+good-humour had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her
+imagination of wider horizons; he promised her release from the
+conventions and restrictions of her artificial existence; she was
+ready to embark with him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was
+evident that she had not given him the tiniest little scrap of her
+heart.</p>
+<p>"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I tried to be good to please you&mdash;you and Barbara and
+Hilary, who've been so kind to me."</p>
+<p>"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear
+girl, I'm as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere
+and wear beads."</p>
+<p>"So do I," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
+chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my
+knees, consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a
+moment afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect
+agreement of babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff
+road. I jumped to my feet and pursued them.</p>
+<p>"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe
+the decencies of civilised life."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER XIX</h2>
+<p>"<i>Arr&ecirc;tez! 'Arr&ecirc;tez!</i>" roared Jaffery all of a
+sudden.</p>
+<p>We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from
+Etretat. The chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door,
+leaped out and disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice
+reverberating from side to side of the Boulevard Maritime.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"</p>
+<p>I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw
+Jaffery in characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the
+shoulders and laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad,
+powerful-looking fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a
+point, and wearing a curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a
+bowler-hat. I noticed that he carried neither stick nor gloves. The
+ecstasies of encounter having subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the
+car.</p>
+<p>"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted,
+opening the door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a
+drink at Tortoni's."</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling,
+took off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave,
+self-possessed manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes,
+the colour of a stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering
+him my seat next Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he
+quickly established himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto
+occupied by Jaffery. Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur
+and leaned over the partition. The car started.</p>
+<p>"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard
+him. "From Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and
+Mediterranean ports thrown in. In the depth of winter.
+Remember?"</p>
+<p>"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head
+round. "We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of
+December."</p>
+<p>"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and
+back."</p>
+<p>"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain
+Maturin.</p>
+<p>"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave
+smile. "He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."</p>
+<p>"Remember that night off Vigo?"</p>
+<p>"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch
+and go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think
+of the time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self
+was responsible for the saving of his ship.</p>
+<p>"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.</p>
+<p>"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since,
+myself included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with
+me."</p>
+<p>Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few
+planks, holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and
+from side to side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water
+and fronting a hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the
+time not knowing from one minute to the next whether you are going
+to Kingdom come&mdash;No. It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of
+fun. And even as duty&mdash;I thanked merciful Heaven that never
+since the age of nine, when I was violently sick crossing to the
+Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest desire to be a mariner,
+either professional or amateur. I looked at the two adventurers
+wonderingly; and so did Liosha.</p>
+<p>"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"</p>
+<p>"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner,
+and I grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend
+to on board ship."</p>
+<p>He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly
+for the entertainment of a pretty woman.</p>
+<p>"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed
+Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If
+a man doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's
+not saying that I love the sea."</p>
+<p>With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the
+Hotel, Restaurant and Caf&eacute; Tortoni in the Place Gambetta.
+The terrace was thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and
+wives and families enjoying the Sunday afternoon
+<i>ap&eacute;ritif</i>.</p>
+<p>"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through
+the crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine
+devices. But Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a
+pretty woman at our table as well as other people? She flushed at
+the compliment, the first, I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter
+conjured a vacant table and chairs from nowhere, in the midst of
+the sedentary throng. For Liosha was brought grenadine syrup and
+soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain Maturin, with the steady
+English sailor's suspicion of any other drink than Scotch whisky,
+glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an appetite for
+dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.</p>
+<p>"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing
+with yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"</p>
+<p>"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue
+Cross Line&mdash;Ellershaw &amp; Co.&mdash;trading between Havre
+and Mozambique."</p>
+<p>"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.</p>
+<p>I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information.
+"Portuguese East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to
+Madagascar."</p>
+<p>"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of
+soda into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to
+me, exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped
+his drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us&mdash;for he
+was not a spontaneously communicative man&mdash;that he now had a
+very good command: steamship <i>Vesta</i>, one thousand five
+hundred tons, somewhat old, but sea-worthy, warranted to take more
+cargo than any vessel of her size he had ever set eyes on.</p>
+<p>"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up
+now."</p>
+<p>Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered
+another.</p>
+<p>"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, worse luck."</p>
+<p>"Why worse luck?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of
+Madagascar before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and
+plot of garden at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.</p>
+<p>"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
+Chayne?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white
+teeth showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And
+bringing down his hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder&mdash;"Why
+not? You and I. Out of this rotten civilisation?"</p>
+<p>Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement.
+So did I. I thought he was going mad.</p>
+<p>"Would you like it?" he asked.</p>
+<p>"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang
+into her face.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin leaned forward.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and
+certainly there's no accommodation for ladies."</p>
+<p>Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady&mdash;in your
+silly old sailor sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me.
+When you had me aboard, did you think of having accommodation for a
+gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At any rate," said he, at the end of the
+peal, "you've a sort of spare cabin? There's always one."</p>
+<p>"A kind of dog-hole&mdash;for you, Mr. Chayne."</p>
+<p>Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He
+jumped to his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two
+adjoining and crowded tables, for which, dismayed and
+bareheaded&mdash;Jaffery could be a very courtly gentleman when he
+chose&mdash;he apologized in fluent French, and, turning, caught
+Captain Maturin beneath the arm.</p>
+<p>"Let us have a private palaver about this."</p>
+<p>They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness
+of the Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till
+they disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:</p>
+<p>"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"</p>
+<p>"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.</p>
+<p>"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I
+notice that her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had
+cast them on the hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my
+immortal soul to go."</p>
+<p>I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark,
+staring craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring
+craziness is.</p>
+<p>"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I,
+pretending to believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a
+tramp&mdash;without another woman on board, with all the inherited
+smells of all the animals in Noah's Ark, including the descendants
+of all the cockroaches that Noah forgot to land, with a crew of
+Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful food, without a bath, with a beast
+of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to sleep in&mdash;a wallowing,
+rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of a steamer, a
+little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping seas,
+always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
+always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the
+bridge to see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down&mdash;a
+floating&mdash;when she does float&mdash;a floating inferno of
+misery&mdash;here it is&mdash;I can tell you all about it&mdash;any
+child in a board school could tell you&mdash;an inferno of misery
+in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
+suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently
+ill and always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused
+by the wind&mdash;to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo
+of cotton goods catching fire, and the wheezing medi&aelig;val
+boilers bursting and sending you all to glory&mdash;"</p>
+<p>I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and
+chin on hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with
+absorbed interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a
+shaky voice:</p>
+<p>"I should love it! I should love it!"</p>
+<p>"But it's lunatic," said I.</p>
+<p>"So much the better."</p>
+<p>"But the proprieties."</p>
+<p>She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and
+flung out her hands towards me.</p>
+<p>"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What
+have Jaff Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I
+travel from Scutari to London?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different
+now?"</p>
+<p>It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from
+glow to defensive sombreness admitted its significance.</p>
+<p>"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the
+same." She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath
+lowering brows. "If you think just because he and I are good
+friends now there's any difference, you're making a great mistake.
+And just you tell Barbara that."</p>
+<p>"I will do so&mdash;" said I.</p>
+<p>"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha
+Prescott is not going to let herself be made a fool of by a man
+who's crazy mad over another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not
+me. And as for the proprieties"&mdash;she snapped her
+fingers&mdash;"they be&mdash;they be anything'd!"</p>
+<p>To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I
+drank the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back
+on the manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
+anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its
+discomfort.</p>
+<p>"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear,
+will always be in the way."</p>
+<p>"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery
+sun now about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables,
+followed by the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.</p>
+<p>"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en
+understands the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem
+and Madagascar and North and South Amerikee,' come."</p>
+<p>"But this is midsummer madness," said I.</p>
+<p>"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and
+fortuitously caught a waiter by the arm. "<i>M&ecirc;me chose pour
+tout le monde</i>." He flicked him away. "Now, this is business.
+Will you come and rough it? The <i>Vesta</i> isn't a Cunard Liner.
+Not even a passenger boat. No luxuries. I hope you understand."</p>
+<p>"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but
+you mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign
+on as one of the crew?"</p>
+<p>"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up
+to the binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in
+irons."</p>
+<p>"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
+incredulity.</p>
+<p>"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and
+portmanteaux aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"The <i>what</i>?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha
+and me have dunnage."</p>
+<p>"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together
+with a parrot in a cage."</p>
+<p>Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to
+light mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I
+asked, "is to become of the forty-odd <i>colis</i> that we passed
+through the customs this morning?"</p>
+<p>"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over
+his third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I
+brought him along? I told him he'd come in useful."</p>
+<p>"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a
+lone man, give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all
+this baggage? They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and
+I shall be arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are
+agencies of expedition. We can forward the luggage by <i>grande
+vitesse</i> or <i>petite vitesse</i>&mdash;how long are you likely
+to be away on this Theophile Gautier voyage&mdash;'<i>Cueillir la
+fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka</i>'?"</p>
+<p>"Four months," said Captain Maturin.</p>
+<p>"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just
+in time."</p>
+<p>I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
+difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
+nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing
+crates belonging to a woman who is not my wife.</p>
+<p>There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic,
+but to the others practical details, in which I had no share. A
+suit of oilskins and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of
+much complicated argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin
+undertook to procure them from marine stores this peaceful Sunday
+night. Liosha, aglow with excitement and looking exceedingly
+beautiful, also mentioned her need of thick jersey and woollen cap
+and stout boots not quite so tempest-defying as the others; and
+these, too, the foolish and apparently infatuated mariner promised
+to provide. We drifted mechanically, still talking, into the
+interior of the Caf&eacute;-Restaurant, where we sat down to a
+dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not one of the others
+took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a schoolboy son of
+Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth&mdash;it might have been
+tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or cared.
+His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
+clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
+plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the
+table, after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight&mdash;I
+whispered the information as (through force of training) I should
+have whispered it to Barbara, with no other result than an
+impatient push which rendered it more piquantly crooked than ever.
+Captain Maturin went through the performance with the grave face of
+another classical devotee to duty; but his heart&mdash;poor
+fellow!&mdash;was not in his food. It was partly in Pinner, partly
+in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of having as
+cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman of the
+stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
+finery, who was sitting next to him.</p>
+<p>Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do
+before turning in&mdash;including, I suppose, the purchase of his
+cook's mate's outfit&mdash;and he was to sail at five-thirty in the
+morning. If his new deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside
+at five or thereabouts, he would see to their adequate
+reception.</p>
+<p>"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said
+he, with a grip like&mdash;like any horrible thing that is hard and
+iron and clamping in a steamer's machinery&mdash;and athwart his
+green-grey eyes filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of
+humour&mdash;"There's still time."</p>
+<p>"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact
+that all my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a
+Persian poet."</p>
+<p>If I am not urbane, I am nothing.</p>
+<p>He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
+rearrangement of her luggage&mdash;"dunnage," I
+corrected&mdash;would be a lengthy process. She thanked me, in her
+best Considine manner, for all the trouble I had taken on her
+account, sent her love to Barbara and to Susan, whose sickness, she
+trusted, would be transitory, expressed the hope that the care of
+her belongings would not be too great a strain upon my
+household&mdash;and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
+middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities
+and respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around
+my neck in a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary,
+I do love you!" and marched away magnificently through the staring
+tables to the inner recesses of the hotel.</p>
+<p>Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are
+credited in France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it
+conforms with traditions of <i>le fl&egrave;gme britannique</i>;
+but there was not much <i>fl&egrave;gme</i> about Liosha's embrace,
+and so the good Havrais were mystified.</p>
+<p>There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have
+run after her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more
+instinctively artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might
+suppose. Besides, there was the bill to pay. We sat down again.</p>
+<p>"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery.
+"He's one of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a
+damnable way of getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command
+of a great liner instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred
+tons."</p>
+<p>I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described
+it in those terms to Liosha."</p>
+<p>"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
+cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."</p>
+<p>It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."</p>
+<p>"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when
+I contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of
+bewilderment. But in one respect my mind retains its serene
+equipoise. Nothing short of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed
+at half-past four in the morning."</p>
+<p>"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."</p>
+<p>"Give them to me now," said I.</p>
+<p>He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind
+tidying up, some day&mdash;I left my papers in a deuce of a
+mess."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything
+should crop up."</p>
+<p>He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the
+document, which I put into my letter case.</p>
+<p>"And what about letters?"</p>
+<p>"Don't want any. Unless"&mdash;said he, after a little pause,
+frowning in the plenitude of his content&mdash;"if you and Barbara
+can make things right again with Doria&mdash;then one of you might
+drop me a line. I'll send you a schedule of dates."</p>
+<p>"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.</p>
+<p>"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me
+there's only one woman in the world."</p>
+<p>"Let us have a final drink," said I.</p>
+<p>We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.</p>
+<p>When I awoke the next morning the <i>Vesta</i> was already four
+hours on her way to Madagascar.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER XX</h2>
+<p>I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the
+County of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely
+confess it. I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men
+are&mdash;which, thank Heaven, I am not&mdash;I might wear a pound
+or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my person. This I decline
+to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot keep a key. Of all
+the household stowaway places under my control (and Barbara limits
+their number) only one is locked; and that drawer containing I know
+not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so forever and
+ever&mdash;for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
+desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who
+are trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and
+strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to
+waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and
+have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it
+as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of
+Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at
+Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my arrival at
+Northlands.</p>
+<p>"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge
+of this thing."</p>
+<p>But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must
+accept the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a
+luggage label to the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend,
+"Key of Jaffery's flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into
+the wall of my library.</p>
+<p>"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I
+am not going to have anything to do with this crack-brained
+adventure."</p>
+<p>"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at
+considerable length on the subject, "one would think that I could
+have prevented it. If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to
+throw her cap over the topmasts, why in the world shouldn't
+they?"</p>
+<p>"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the
+description you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child
+will be utterly miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure
+and her skin."</p>
+<p>I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the
+steamship <i>Vesta</i>.</p>
+<p>As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St.
+Quentin's Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who,
+knowing me to be a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need
+not have burdened myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's
+chambers. I found the small sitting-room in very much the same
+state of litter as when Jaffery left it. He enjoyed litter and
+hated the devastating tidiness of housemaids. Give a young horse
+with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an hour's run in an ordinary
+bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal appearance of
+Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his books and
+pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos, of
+old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
+and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender
+care upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder,
+which reposed&mdash;most useful piece of furniture&mdash;in the
+middle of the hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric
+radiator that took the place of a grate, I let these things be, and
+concentrated my attention on his papers which lay loose on desk and
+table. This was obviously the tidying up to which he had referred.
+I swept his correspondence into one drawer. I gathered together the
+manuscript of his new novel and swept it into another. On the top
+of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the original manuscript of "The
+Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper and threaded through
+with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer of the desk,
+which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his bedroom,
+where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and looked
+around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed two
+photographs on his dressing-table&mdash;one of his mother, whom I
+remembered, and, one of Doria&mdash;these I laid face downwards so
+that the light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered
+portmanteau from beneath the lid of which protruded three or four
+corners of scribbling paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the
+offending beer-barrel in a dark alcove. The basin set below the
+tap, in order to catch the drip, was nearly full. In four months'
+time the room would be flooded with sour and horrible beer. Full of
+the thought, I deposited the letters in the drawer with the rest of
+the correspondence, and, leaving the flat, summoned the lift, and
+in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter with the contents of
+a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow that mantles from
+man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a friend for
+life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
+labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery
+and myself had, at least, one thing in common&mdash;videlicet, the
+keyless habit. I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked
+some hidden <i>trait-d'union</i>. Now I had found it.</p>
+<p>And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how
+congenial Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the
+<i>Vesta</i>. The weather had changed from summer calm to storm.
+The gentleman from the meteorological office who writes for the
+newspapers talked about cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales
+in the channel and on the west coasts of France. The same was
+likely to continue. The wind blew hard enough in Berkshire, what
+must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a matter of fact, as we
+learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a short letter
+from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips considerably
+later&mdash;for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to the
+bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe&mdash;they had
+made their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during
+which they apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas
+washed the deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food
+had not been procurable. It seemed that every horror I had
+prophesied had come to pass. I should have pitied them, but for the
+blatant joyousness of their communications. "I was not seasick a
+minute, and I have never been so happy in my life," wrote Liosha.
+"Hilary should have been with us," wrote Jaffery. "It would have
+made a man of him. Liosha in splendid fettle. She goes about in
+men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her hand to anything when
+she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just imagine them having
+cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing in wet and dirt.
+. . .</p>
+<p>About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in
+my all too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her
+first visit since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to
+make friends with us once more, and to prove it showed the
+pleasanter side of her character. She professed not to have
+forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the terrible episode in less
+vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that she missed him more
+than she would confess, even to herself. In her reconstituted
+existence he had stood for an essential element. Unconsciously she
+had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his constant
+service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now that
+she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
+neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble
+uncomfortably. After all, she had provoked the man (this with some
+reluctance she admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up
+and shaken her. He had had no intention of dashing out her brains
+or even of giving her a beating. In her heart she repented.
+Otherwise why should she take so ill Jaffery's flight with Liosha,
+which she characterised as abominable, and Liosha's flight with
+Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?</p>
+<p>"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
+morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
+disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat
+back in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the
+woman. One would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of
+stain."</p>
+<p>"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."</p>
+<p>"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot.
+"You, a man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off
+with that dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with
+Jaffery. What respectable woman&mdash;well, what honest woman,
+according to the term of the lower classes&mdash;would run away
+with two men within twenty-five hours?"</p>
+<p>"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going
+to marry her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because
+there's no question of marriage or anything else between them."</p>
+<p>"<i>Sancta simplicitas!</i>" She shook her head from side to
+side and looked at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a
+fool. But she isn't. The best one can say for her is that she has
+no moral sense. I know the type."</p>
+<p>"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.</p>
+<p>She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied
+with her ready sureness:</p>
+<p>"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own
+among literary people."</p>
+<p>"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional
+chair."</p>
+<p>"You're as bemused as Barbara."</p>
+<p>"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've
+studied an individual, which you haven't."</p>
+<p>She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own
+way&mdash;Paul and Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to
+me?"</p>
+<p>"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it&mdash;what the dickens
+does it matter to you?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.</p>
+<p>"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with
+malicious intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again.
+You've banished him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no
+concern of yours. If he chose to elope with the fat woman in a
+freak museum, why shouldn't he? What would it have to do with
+you?"</p>
+<p>"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not
+sitting on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the
+more insulting."</p>
+<p>"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.</p>
+<p>"Precisely."</p>
+<p>She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she
+had swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to
+myself. She was eaten up with jealousy.</p>
+<p>"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the
+absent being always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back
+and hear what they've got to say for themselves."</p>
+<p>She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little
+black and ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What
+they may say is a matter of perfect indifference to me."</p>
+<p>I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
+Jaffery's&mdash;practically&mdash;last words to me were: 'There's
+only one woman in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away
+with a laugh. "And to prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh,
+Hilary"&mdash;with the tips of her fingers she brushed my
+hair&mdash;"you really are a simple old dear!"</p>
+<p>"All the same&mdash;" I began.</p>
+<p>"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy
+conversation. I didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy
+of Baudelaire, if you have one."</p>
+<p>She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down <i>Les
+Fleurs du Mal</i>. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm,
+and went out.</p>
+<p>Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good
+discipline. It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever
+get Jaffery back again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I
+was certain that not only would she forgive past mishandling, but
+for the sake of keeping him would put up with a little more.
+Whether she would marry him was another story. I had every reason
+to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned her bosom's lord. In
+her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She regarded a second
+marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough, with her
+husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
+back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she
+would treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of
+course, were my conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara)
+from the patent fact that she found herself lost without Jaffery
+and that she was furiously jealous of Liosha.</p>
+<p>It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived.
+Barbara and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all
+my gods I would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I
+arrived with a mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid
+at a great hotel on the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed
+in the Adriatic. We revisited familiar churches and picture
+galleries in Venice. We mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd and
+developed the complexions (not only in our faces) of an Othello
+family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every August, Mr.
+Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and other
+feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
+marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
+nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.</p>
+<p>Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the
+sea having subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled
+down to the normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn
+with the hands, coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his
+watch. Liosha, we were given to understand, besides helping in the
+galley and the cabin and swabbing decks, found much delight in
+painting the ship's boats with paint which Jaffery had bought for
+the purpose at Bordeaux. She had struck up a friendship with the
+first mate, who, possessing a camera, had taken their photographs.
+They sent us one of the two standing side by side, and a more
+villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could not wish to
+see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
+Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's
+sake, had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without
+taking the trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung
+about her calves in disgraceful fringes.</p>
+<p>"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
+anything but utterly miserable."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she
+maintained.</p>
+<p>"Well, it's her own skin."</p>
+<p>"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.</p>
+<p>What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had
+the last word.</p>
+<p>The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly
+afterwards Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the
+Adrian-haunted flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining
+that no one but her father, of whose society she had wearied, was
+in town, and went off on a series of country-house visits. The
+flat, I suspected, for all its sacred memories, was dull without
+Jaffery. She still maintained her unrelenting attitude, and spoke
+scornfully of him; but once or twice she asked when this mad voyage
+would be over, thereby betraying curiosity rather than
+indifference.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing.
+Wittekind's list of new novels in its deep black framing border
+stared at you from the advertisement pages of every periodical you
+picked up, and so did the list of every other publisher. Day after
+day Doria's eyes fell on this announcement of Wittekind, and day
+after day her indignation swelled at the continued omission of "The
+Greater Glory." All these nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers,
+were being thrust flamboyantly on public notice and her Adrian, the
+great Sun of the firm, was allowed to remain in eclipse. For what
+purpose had he lived and died if his memory was treated with this
+dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her. Adrian's book had
+been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold enormously.
+It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any longer.
+Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do his
+duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
+"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he
+wasn't a tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of
+selling books, how could Adrian's novels have attained their wide
+circulation? It was to his interest to increase that circulation as
+much as possible. Why not let him run his very successful business
+his own way? Doria loftily assured me that she had no interest in
+his business, in the mere vulgar number of copies sold. Adrian's
+glory was above such sordid things. Of far higher importance was it
+that his name should be kept, like a beacon, before the public. Not
+to do so was callous ingratitude and tradesman's niggardliness on
+the part of Wittekind. Something ought to be done. I confessed my
+inability to do anything.</p>
+<p>"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
+executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking
+after his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."</p>
+<p>Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I
+might have asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been
+kind, he would have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued
+her from Fendihook, and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet.
+But what would have been the use? I was tired of these windy
+arguments with Doria, and worn out with the awful irony of
+upholding our poor Adrian's genius.</p>
+<p>"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he
+might have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."</p>
+<p>A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced
+an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> of the works of a brilliant
+novelist cut off like Adrian in the flower of his age. It was
+printed on special paper and illustrated by a famous artist, and
+limited to a certain number of copies. This set Doria aflare. From
+Scotland, where she was paying one of her restless visits, she sent
+me the newspaper cutting. If the commercial organism, she said,
+that passed with Wittekind for a soul would not permit him to
+advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn list, why couldn't he
+do like Mackenzie &amp; Co., and advertise an <i>&eacute;dition de
+luxe</i> of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie &amp; Co. thought
+it worth while to bring out such an edition of an entirely
+second-rate author, surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to
+treat Adrian equally sumptuously. I advised her to write to
+Wittekind. She did. Accompanied by a fury of ink, she sent me his
+most courteous and sensible answer. Both books were doing
+splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden aftermath of cheap
+editions. The time was not ripe for an <i>&eacute;dition de
+luxe</i>. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to,
+when other sales showed signs of exhaustion.</p>
+<p>"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when
+he sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or
+waste'&mdash;there's a foolish woman here who evidently has written
+a foolish book, and has shown me her silly contract with a
+publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what he's thinking of. It's
+intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to but you. Do
+advise me."</p>
+<p>I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of
+concocting a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to
+impress the recipient. It ran:</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite
+him."</p>
+<p>I was rather pleased at the humour&mdash;may I venture to
+qualify it as mordant?&mdash;of the suggestion. Even Barbara
+smiled. Of course, I was right. Let her fight it out herself with
+Wittekind.</p>
+<p>But I have regretted that telegram ever since.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER XXI</h2>
+<p>Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me
+from all quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the
+voyage of the <i>S.S. Vesta</i>, they were rare phenomena.
+Ordinarily, if I heard from him thrice a year I had to consider
+that he was indulging in an orgy of correspondence. But what with
+Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with Barbara and myself being
+so intimately mixed up in the matters which preoccupied his mind,
+the voyage of the <i>Vesta</i> covered a period of abnormal
+epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor found a
+post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the journalist's
+trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque hero, who
+could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a University
+Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand hang on
+to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
+scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
+writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances&mdash;that is to say in
+what, to Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances&mdash;he performed
+these literary gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the
+voyage of the <i>Vesta</i> was an exceptional affair. Save
+incidentally&mdash;for he did send descriptive articles to <i>The
+Daily Gazette</i>&mdash;he was not out on professional business.
+The gymnastics were performed for my benefit&mdash;yet with an
+ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to satisfy a
+certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
+Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the
+deeper he plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer
+did the poor ogre come to heartache and to desire. He wrote
+spaciously, in the foolish hope that I would reply narrowly,
+following a Doria scent laid down with the na&iuml;vet&eacute; of
+childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of dates and
+addresses&mdash;I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
+certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North
+Pole or horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather
+pathetic, for I could give him but little comfort.</p>
+<p>Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs
+taken chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible
+to reconstruct the <i>S.S. Vesta</i> in all her dismalness. You
+have seen scores of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the
+world. You have only to picture an old, two-masted, well-decked
+tramp with smokestack and foul clutter of bridge-house amidships,
+and fore and aft a miserable bit of a deck broken by hatches and
+capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions and chains and other
+unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual promenader. From
+the photographs and letters I learned that the dog-hole, intended
+by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha, was away aft,
+beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch of the
+propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy, bunked
+in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
+relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
+life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful
+Providence for having been spared so dreadful an experience.</p>
+<p>Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in
+everything; I have their letters to prove it. And Jaffery
+especially found perpetual enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For
+instance, here is an extract from one of his letters:</p>
+<p>"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the
+time. Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work
+till you sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just
+see Liosha. Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor
+like her, and that was the daughter of a trader sailing among the
+Islands, who had lived all her life since birth on his ship and had
+scarcely slept ashore. She's as much born to it as any shell-back
+on board. She has the amazing gift of looking part of the tub, like
+the stokers and the man at the wheel. Unlike another woman, she's
+never in the way, and the more work you can give her to do, the
+happier she is. She's in magnificent health and as strong as a
+horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of her; now
+she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep her
+from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on
+as cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and
+between the cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and
+tell her about their wives and their girls and what rotten food
+they've got&mdash;'Everybody has got rotten food on board ship, you
+silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What do you expect&mdash;sweetbreads and
+ices?'&mdash;and what soul-shattering blighters they've shipped
+with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly imaginary) they have
+performed in pursuit of their perilous calling. They're all
+children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them, these
+hell-tearing fellows&mdash;children afflicted with a perpetual
+thirst and a craving to punch heads&mdash;and Liosha's a child,
+too; so there's a kind of freemasonry between them.</p>
+<p>"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other
+evening. The first mate went to look into it and found Liosha
+standing enraptured at the hatch looking down upon a free fight.
+There were knives about. The mate, being a blasphemous and
+pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then he came up to
+Liosha&mdash;you and Barbara should have seen her&mdash;it was
+sultry, not a breath of air&mdash;and she just had on a thin bodice
+open at her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged
+skirt and was bareheaded.</p>
+<p>"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'</p>
+<p>"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except
+the skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an
+ox-eyed Juno; you know her way.</p>
+<p>"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'</p>
+<p>"'Enjoyment&mdash;!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his
+arms and came over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail.
+'There they was trying to cut one another's throats, and she calls
+it enjoyment.'</p>
+<p>"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A
+Dutchman&mdash;what you would call a Swede&mdash;a hulking beggar,
+came up from the fo'c'sle very much the worse for wear. Liosha
+says:</p>
+<p>"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'</p>
+<p>"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'</p>
+<p>"'What was it all about?'</p>
+<p>"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of
+that mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had
+called him a &mdash;&mdash;, he had retaliated, and the others had
+taken a hand, too."</p>
+<p>It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But,
+believe me, they were enough to annoy anybody.</p>
+<p>"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on
+deck for a minute.'</p>
+<p>"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London,
+emerged.</p>
+<p>"'what's the matter?'</p>
+<p>"Why did you call Petersen a &mdash;&mdash;?' she asked
+pleasantly and word-perfect.</p>
+<p>"'Cos he is one.'</p>
+<p>"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you.
+And you both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to
+see the end of it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see
+here, if you two don't shake hands, right now, and make friends and
+promise not to fight again, I'll not speak a word to either of you
+for the rest of the voyage.'</p>
+<p>"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they
+would have consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any
+other woman had attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would
+have told her in perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind
+her own business. In either case they would have resented to the
+depths of their simple souls the alien interference. But with
+Liosha it was different. Of course sex told. Naturally. But she was
+a child like themselves. She had looked on, placidly, and had
+caught the flash of knives without turning a hair. They felt that
+if she were drawn into a m&ecirc;l&eacute;e she would use a knife
+with the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems
+so deuced interesting and I should like to know what you and
+Barbara think. Do you remember Gulliver? For all the world it was
+like Glumdalclitch making the peace between two little
+nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men looked at each other
+sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at the fo'c'sle
+hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At last the
+lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
+without looking at him.</p>
+<p>"'All right, mate.'</p>
+<p>"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried
+'Bravo, missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just
+a bit abaft the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time,
+swung up the deck towards me, as pleased as Punch."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.</p>
+<p>Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed
+them in full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of
+the African continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round
+by the Cape of Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish
+way, duplicated these travel-pictures in articles to <i>The Daily
+Gazette</i>, which, supplemented by memory, he has already
+published in book form for all the world to read. Therefore, if I
+recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape Lopez, Boma, Matadi,
+Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other apocalyptic places, I
+should be merely plagiarising or infringing copyright, or what-not;
+and in any case I should be introducing matter entirely irrelevant
+to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty <i>Vesta</i>
+wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
+disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken
+port, and making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a
+European market. If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all
+about it; but you see, I remained in England. And if I subjected
+Jaffery's correspondence to microscopic examination, and read up
+blue books on the exports and imports of all the places on the
+South African coast line, and told you exactly what was taken out
+of the <i>S.S. Vesta</i> and what was put into her, I cannot
+conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To do so,
+would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
+transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a
+matter of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled,
+in so-called comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know
+all about it. Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a
+mile of the shore. On one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed
+lighters manned by glistening and excited negroes. On board is a
+donkey-engine working a derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast
+bales and packing cases are lifted from the holds. A dingily
+white-suited officer stands by with greasy invoice sheets, while
+another at the yawning abyss whence the cargo emerges makes the
+tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations. And the
+merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter, by
+black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
+unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me;
+and I cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or
+daughters of men who are not intimately concerned in a particular
+trade. . . . You must imagine, I say, the <i>S.S. Vesta</i>
+repeating this monotonous performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the
+little, black-bearded skipper, all clad in decent raiment, going
+ashore, and being entertained scraggily or copiously by German,
+French, Portuguese, English, fever-eyed commissioners, who took
+them on the <i>tour du propri&eacute;taire</i>, among the white
+wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of the natives,
+and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom Houses and
+the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger children,
+and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
+yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts
+to which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant
+to the story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I
+have to relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you.
+I should have chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as
+far as I can make out, the moment they put foot on shore, they
+behaved like the best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually
+in a semi-detached residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be
+furious when he reads this. But great is the Truth, and it shall
+prevail. It was on the sea, away from ports and mission stations
+and exiles hungering for the last word of civilisation, and
+shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by Jaffery swelled with
+juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of his letters are
+those humoristically concerned with the doings of Liosha.</p>
+<p>As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When
+Jaffery put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what
+he saw and letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy
+references to Doria were all the more poignant by reason of their
+rarity. But Liosha was the central figure in many a picture.</p>
+<p>Here, I say, is another extract:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing
+that worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with
+her after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going
+round and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go
+with her. I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't
+see her settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I
+think I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a
+snarling tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy
+has managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine.
+It shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting
+in another long stretch. . . .</p>
+<p>"She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
+the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
+wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
+his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
+I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
+strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
+and again, when it's my watch&mdash;I'm on the starboard watch, you
+know&mdash;I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She
+stands for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her
+lungs. And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her
+skirts, and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at
+her face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
+deck&mdash;and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of
+a woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell
+of bacon and eggs&mdash;my son, if you don't know the conglomerate
+smell of fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the
+pure early morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary.
+She and the Portugee between them, he contributing the science and
+she the good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn
+your nose up at it&mdash;but you've never been hungry in your life!
+and there hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered
+her the permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to
+our comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to.
+She's a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
+spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
+cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.</p>
+<p>"Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
+result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
+considered the matter gravely.</p>
+<p>"'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
+luck so far, have I?'</p>
+<p>"I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'</p>
+<p>"'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she
+said. 'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used
+to meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras
+Fendihooks!'</p>
+<p>"She rose&mdash;we had been sitting on the cabin
+sky-light&mdash;and leaned over the taffrail and looked wistfully
+out to sea. I joined her. She was silent for a bit. Then she
+said:</p>
+<p>"'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to
+marry a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't
+beat me&mdash;and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm
+built.'</p>
+<p>"She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
+talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
+who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
+would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
+Honest&mdash;I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean
+great Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he
+as decent a sort as you please."</p>
+</div>
+<p>It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's
+horizon gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as
+an invalid's interests become circumscribed by the walls of his
+sick-room. He tells us of childish things, a catch of fish, a
+quarrel between the first and second mate over Liosha, second
+having accused first of a disrespectful attitude towards the lady,
+the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind which Liosha had her
+morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's toe and her
+temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and Liosha's
+supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of the
+impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay
+more&mdash;with a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he
+himself had created Liosha.</p>
+<p>Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us
+both:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of
+Doria. If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've
+bought some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when
+I reach home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is
+rough only on the outside.</p>
+<p>"Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given
+her by the donkey-man. . . .</p>
+</div>
+<p>There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a
+long account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's
+company including the captain took part, to the subversion of
+discipline and navigation. But you see&mdash;he switches off at
+once to Liosha and the trivial records of the humdrum day.</p>
+<p>At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were
+in the Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I
+can scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
+dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
+rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
+ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
+a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
+shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
+colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
+straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
+packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
+mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
+had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
+straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
+port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
+turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
+other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
+inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
+didn't like it; no one liked it.</p>
+<p>"When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway
+and began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying,
+staggering crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of
+forty-five degrees one way and thirty degrees another and
+constantly shifting both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed
+athwart the ship to catch hold of, your mind is pretty well
+concentrated on yourself. I know mine was. I slipped and wallowed
+on my belly hanging on to the rope like grim death till my turn
+came for the ladder. I got my feet on the rungs. I was all right,
+when looking up into the livid daylight whom do you think I saw
+calmly preparing to follow me? Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She
+had sea-boots and a jersey and looked just like a man. I
+roared:</p>
+<p>"'Clear out. This is no place for you.'</p>
+<p>"'I'm coming. Go along down.'</p>
+<p>"She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as
+much of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.</p>
+<p>"'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'</p>
+<p>"Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What
+the this, that and the other were we waiting for?</p>
+<p>"'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'</p>
+<p>"'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn
+soon make you,' cried Andrews.</p>
+<p>"He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of
+the cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of
+devils. He was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of
+courtesy, but at the moment he didn't care who went down into the
+hold, or who was killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted
+and the crazy old tub didn't go down.</p>
+<p>"So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down
+we were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
+peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
+some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
+quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
+able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
+huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
+quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
+they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
+know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
+muscles about to snap&mdash;queer feeling that&mdash;and I think
+I'm about as tough as they make 'em.</p>
+<p>"Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught
+sight of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
+you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
+running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got jammed
+on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were knocked
+out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know what
+was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of the
+ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He looked
+ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the iron
+ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along, barging
+into everything&mdash;it was blowing half a gale&mdash;and once I
+fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
+and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
+cook, sick of fever&mdash;I think he's a blighted
+malingerer&mdash;was the only creature there. I routed him out, in
+the dim mephitic place reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in
+his charge. Then I went back through the drenching seas to the
+hatch. There was just enough room for a man's body to squeeze
+through down the ladder. I went down into the same hell-broth of
+sweat and confusion. The ground you stood upon might have been the
+back of a super-Titanic butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent
+term. It was a helpless scuttering surge of men and vast wooden
+cubes. Most of the men had torn off their upper garments and fought
+half naked, the sweat glistening on their skins in the feeble
+light. Soon the heat became unbearable and I too tore off jersey
+and shirt. Liosha joined me and we worked together without
+speaking. Her long thick hair had come down and she had hastily
+tied it in a knot, just as you might tie a knot in a towel, and she
+had thrown off things like everybody else and only a flimsy cotton,
+sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's called, drenched through and
+sticking to her, made a pretence of covering her from her
+waist.</p>
+<p>"You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
+your time&mdash;if you could&mdash;for the roll, and push and then
+scramble with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out
+of the way of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with
+fantastic murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring
+of the storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the
+propeller lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of
+every plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.</p>
+<p>"We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast,
+and were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
+anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
+twilight&mdash;just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down
+the ladder where the hatch was open,&mdash;hanging on to edges and
+corners of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave,
+vibrated in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus
+of cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand
+clear!' Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I
+stumbled and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding
+crate, two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung
+aside, to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was
+stopped by the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the
+men securing the crate and the other half grovelling around
+something on the deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless
+with blood streaming from her head.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i308.jpg" id="i308.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/308.jpg"><img src="images/308.jpg" width="60%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside.</b></div>
+<p>"In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of
+another fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before
+realised the appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her
+bunk aft; I sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances
+from the ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far
+she was injured. . . .</p>
+<p>"Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
+But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
+lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
+skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
+A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
+her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
+clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
+hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
+seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
+I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
+about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
+refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."</p>
+</div>
+<p>And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit
+of a scrawl from Liosha&mdash;her complete account of the
+incident:</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo
+go loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the
+head and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it
+gave me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to
+them. Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event
+in the amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved
+by a woman at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how
+heroic in action and how magnanimous in after modesty, does not
+forget it either. Although he had been credited (to his ingenuous
+delight) by reviewers of "The Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge
+of the complexities of a woman's nature, I have never met a more
+dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings with women. He perceived
+the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on Liosha's part, but seems to
+have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last <i>Vesta</i>
+letters, "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's
+splendid. I take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said
+about her. And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of
+intimacy, she has adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards
+me. In her great, spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression
+that she owns Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his
+good. Women's ways are wonderful but weird."</p>
+</div>
+<p>He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
+epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
+motherliness.</p>
+<p>"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly
+ass!</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER XXII</h2>
+<p>It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her
+round of country-house visits and returned to the flat in St.
+John's Wood. The morning after her arrival in town she took my
+satirical counsel and called at Wittekind's office, and, I am
+afraid, tried to bite that very pleasant, well-intentioned
+gentleman. She went out to do battle, arraying herself in subtle
+panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's account of the matter.
+She informs me that when a woman goes to see her solicitor, her
+banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man who really
+understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different kind
+of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
+at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered
+when tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true.
+Costumes also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with
+the hats. I recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it
+explained many puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations
+in my wee wife's personal appearance. And yet, the other morning
+when I was going up to town to see after some investments, and I
+asked her which was the more psychological tie, a green or a
+violet, in which to visit my stockbroker, she lost as much of her
+temper as she allows herself to lose and bade me not he silly. . .
+. But this has nothing to do with Doria.</p>
+<p>Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on
+striking terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in
+the outer office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian
+Boldero, doors flew open, and Doria marched straight away into
+Wittekind's comfortably furnished private room. Wittekind himself,
+tall, loose-limbed, courteous, the least tradesman-like person you
+can imagine, rose to receive her. For some reason or the other, or
+more likely against reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug
+little man hiding crafty eyes behind spectacles; but here he was,
+obviously a man of good breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly
+and gave her to understand that she was the one person in the world
+whom he had been longing to meet. And the office was not a sort of
+human <i>charcuterie</i> hung round with brains of authors for
+sale, but a quiet, restful place to which valuable prints on the
+walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an air of
+distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
+bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old
+armchair with a beautiful back&mdash;she was sensitive to such
+things&mdash;and spoke of Adrian as of his own blood brother. She
+had not anticipated such warmth of genuine feeling, or so fine an
+appreciation of her Adrian's work.</p>
+<p>"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only
+to you in my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't
+do to keep your husband's memory green. But it is green, thank
+goodness. How do I know? By two signs. One that people wherever the
+English language is spoken are eagerly reading his books&mdash;I
+say reading, because you deprecate the purely commercial side of
+things; but you must forgive me if I say that the only proof of all
+their reading is the record of all their buying. And when people
+buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they also discuss
+him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
+advertisement and an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i>. But it is only
+the little man that needs the big drum."</p>
+<p>"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an <i>&eacute;dition
+de luxe</i> would be such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care
+a bit about the money," she went on with a splendid disregard of
+her rights that would have sent a shiver down the incorporated back
+of the Incorporated Society of Authors, "I'm only too willing to
+contribute towards the expense. Please understand me. It's a
+tribute and a monument."</p>
+<p>"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said
+Wittekind.</p>
+<p>"But my husband&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"&mdash;isn't dead," said he.</p>
+<p>"Oh!" said Doria. "Then&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"The time for your <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> is not
+yet."</p>
+<p>"Yet? But&mdash;you don't think Adrian's work is going to
+die?"</p>
+<p>She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.</p>
+<p>"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that
+he is among the immortals. But an <i>&eacute;dition de luxe</i> now
+would be a wanton <i>Hic jacet</i>."</p>
+<p>All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound
+business from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through
+the medium of Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I
+listened to her account of it with a new moon of a smile across my
+soul&mdash;or across whatever part of oneself one smiles with when
+one's face is constrained to immobility.</p>
+<p>"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr.
+Wittekind," she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to
+leave Adrian's reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come
+to see you before." "I wish you had," said he.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's
+a splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."</p>
+<p>"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.</p>
+<p>"Well&mdash;so prompt."</p>
+<p>"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
+unconscionable time," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do.
+Your husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled
+together. He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time,
+although it was a labour of love."</p>
+<p>"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind,"
+she cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see
+exactly what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried!
+Why do your printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"</p>
+<p>"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays.
+They print from a typed copy."</p>
+<p>"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original
+manuscript."</p>
+<p>Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero.
+From two typed copies&mdash;one in England and one in America."</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you
+Adrian's original manuscript with his revisions."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I
+read the typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your
+husband's manuscript."</p>
+<p>"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's
+manuscript."</p>
+<p>"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."</p>
+<p>Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great
+dark eyes grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand
+on the writing desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was
+sitting. He rose, too.</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
+manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the
+printers."</p>
+<p>"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're
+making some extraordinary mistake."</p>
+<p>"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."</p>
+<p>Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow
+me."</p>
+<p>He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me
+at once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this.
+Mr. Forest is my literary adviser&mdash;everything goes through his
+hands."</p>
+<p>They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember
+the Boldero manuscripts?"</p>
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+<p>"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"</p>
+<p>"Typescript."</p>
+<p>"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original
+manuscript?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"</p>
+<p>"I'm sure it hasn't."</p>
+<p>"Thank you, Mr. Forest."</p>
+<p>The reader retired.</p>
+<p>"You see," said Wittekind.</p>
+<p>"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate'
+and 'The Greater Glory'?"</p>
+<p>"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of
+knowing."</p>
+<p>"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers
+and destroyed by the printers."</p>
+<p>"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling
+misunderstanding. Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a
+distinguished man&mdash;and a man of unblemished honour. A word or
+two will clear up everything."</p>
+<p>"He's in Madagascar."</p>
+<p>"Then wait till he comes back."</p>
+<p>Doria insisted&mdash;and who in the world can blame her for
+insisting?</p>
+<p>"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm
+not&mdash;not to the extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne
+has told me definitely that those two manuscripts came to your
+office, that the books were printed from them and that they were
+destroyed by the printers."</p>
+<p>"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour&mdash;and I
+have also given you independent testimony&mdash;that no manuscript
+of your husband's has ever entered this office."</p>
+<p>"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
+destroyed?"</p>
+<p>"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the
+proofs. Typed copy may or may not be returned."</p>
+<p>"But autograph copy is valuable?"</p>
+<p>"Naturally."</p>
+<p>"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of
+money?"</p>
+<p>"Quite a lot of money."</p>
+<p>"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"</p>
+<p>"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne
+would be incapable."</p>
+<p>"And you've never seen any of it?"</p>
+<p>"I've given you my word of honour."</p>
+<p>"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.</p>
+<p>She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.</p>
+<p>"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You
+have nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She
+looked up at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give
+explanations. In the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's
+memory in your hands&mdash;to keep green, as you say"&mdash;tears
+came into her eyes&mdash;"and you will, won't you?"</p>
+<p>The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent
+over her, still holding her hand.</p>
+<p>"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers
+have our ideals&mdash;and our purest is to distribute through the
+world the works of a man of genius."</p>
+<p>So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on
+urgent business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full
+of the virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a
+full account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations
+of Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for
+having counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have
+thrown every possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I
+ought to have foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one
+weak spot in our web of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven
+by necessity from the paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished
+liar. It is not my fault. Mere providence has guided my life
+through such gentle pastures that I have had no practice worth
+speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in mendacity. Both of us
+were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and suspicious
+cross-examination.</p>
+<p>"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," I lied.</p>
+<p>"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"</p>
+<p>"No," I lied again.</p>
+<p>"Was it among Adrian's papers?"</p>
+<p>"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the
+printers, he destroyed it."</p>
+<p>"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has
+also got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want
+them for?"</p>
+<p>"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer,
+because I don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know
+nothing whatever about them."</p>
+<p>"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done
+for me," said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know
+something."</p>
+<p>From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of
+view, she was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful.
+If she had brought an action against us for recovery of these
+wretched manuscripts and we managed to keep the essential secret,
+both counsel and judge would have flayed me alive. . . . Put
+yourself in her place for a minute&mdash;God knows I tried to do so
+hard enough&mdash;and you will see the logic of her position, all
+through. She was not a woman of broad human sympathies and generous
+outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole being had been
+concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life; it was
+concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
+flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to
+bear with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had
+happened to cloud her faith. She had come up against many
+incomprehensible things: the delay in publication of Adrian's book;
+the change of title; the burning of Adrian's last written words on
+the blotting pad; the vivid pictures that were obviously not
+Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo of the original
+manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of
+the executorship. She had accepted them&mdash;not without protest;
+but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of things
+more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her outrageously.
+I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.</p>
+<p>But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor
+Barbara do? We sat, both of us, racking our brains for some
+fantastic invention, while Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen,
+walked about my library, inveighing against Jaffery and crying for
+her manuscripts. And I dared not know anything at all about them.
+She had every reason to reproach me.</p>
+<p>Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame
+Hilary. When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a
+special department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's
+management of financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with
+the literary side of things. It has worked very well. This silly
+muddle about the manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."</p>
+<p>"But it does matter," cried Doria.</p>
+<p>And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts
+written by the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers,
+every fibre of her passionate self craved their possession. We
+argued futilely, as people must, who haven't the ghost of a
+case.</p>
+<p>"But why has Jaffery lied?"</p>
+<p>"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again
+perjuring myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me.
+As I've told you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went
+through together. We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.'
+Possibly," said I, with a despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it
+about so much and deface it with his own great scrawl, that he
+thought it might pain you to see it, and so he told you that it had
+disappeared at the printer's. Now that I remember, he did say
+something of the kind."</p>
+<p>"Yes, he did," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're
+merely saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see
+through you"&mdash;I have already apologised to you for our being
+the unconvincing liars that we were&mdash;"you know nothing more
+about it than I do. You ought to, as I've already said. But you
+don't. In fact, you know considerably less. Shall I tell you where
+the manuscripts are at the present moment?"</p>
+<p>"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who
+has come to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine
+how utterly wearied we were with the whole of the miserable
+business. "Let us wait till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very
+long."</p>
+<p>"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't
+condemn a man without a hearing?"</p>
+<p>Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend.
+And when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful
+than when she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then
+she gets really angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."</p>
+<p>I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem
+to detect anything particularly wrong about it.</p>
+<p>"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't
+do anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at
+that."</p>
+<p>"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I
+don't want to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can
+help. But that's where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of
+them"&mdash;and she pointed to the key of Jaffery's flat hanging
+with its staring label against my library wall.</p>
+<p>Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to
+Jaffery. But again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our
+heads and demanded Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every
+reason to believe in their existence. Wittekind had never seen
+them. Vandal and Goth and every kind of Barbarian that she
+considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable that he had
+deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable that he
+had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
+therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
+satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did
+we confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious
+dealings. If it were only to gain time in order to think and
+consult, we had to refer her to the absent Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a
+deuce of a mess."</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid we are."</p>
+<p>"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs,
+with no thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig
+and about anything outside our nice comfortable sty."</p>
+<p>"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm
+roused."</p>
+<p>We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the
+disastrous topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and
+discussed the modern tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on
+being in the forefront of progress, and found no dramatic salvation
+outside the most advanced productions of the Incorporated Stage
+Society. I pleaded for beauty, which she called wedding-cake. She
+pleaded for courage and truth in the presentation of actual life,
+which I called dull and stupid photography which any dismal fool
+could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely profitless
+argument.</p>
+<p>"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to
+your silly old early Victorian platitudes!"</p>
+<p>"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own
+home by one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."</p>
+<p>So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If
+only, I thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a
+fascinating little person she might be. And I understood how it had
+come to pass that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her
+so desperately.</p>
+<p>The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the
+planting of some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs,
+came through my library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried
+to her.</p>
+<p>"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying
+to lunch."</p>
+<p>No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara,
+was waiting to take her to the station.</p>
+<p>"I'll see you into the train," said I.</p>
+<p>"Oh, please don't trouble."</p>
+<p>"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the
+slope to the front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin
+with the luggage. Doria and I drove to the station. For the few
+minutes before the train came in we walked up and down the
+platform. She was in high spirits, full of jest and laughter. An
+unwonted flush in her cheeks and a brightness in her deep eyes
+rendered her perfectly captivating.</p>
+<p>"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such
+a long time," I said.</p>
+<p>The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good
+in the world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de
+Jouvence for weary people."</p>
+<p>That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with
+me a short while afterwards through the carriage window, she
+thanked me for our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality
+than she had ever before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling
+that, after all, we had done something to help the poor little lady
+on her way. If I had been a cat, I should have purred. After an
+hour or so, Barbara summoned me from my contemplative
+occupation.</p>
+<p>"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.</p>
+<p>"Have you written to Rogers?"</p>
+<p>Rogers was a plumber.</p>
+<p>"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a
+letter from a clean-minded man."</p>
+<p>"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to
+be unusable."</p>
+<p>"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this
+household in his awful hands?"</p>
+<p>"He does."</p>
+<p>"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."</p>
+<p>"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to
+have done it three days ago."</p>
+<p>So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
+conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I
+turned in my chair, holding it up in my hand.</p>
+<p>"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"</p>
+<p>I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice
+that the pipes&mdash;". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes
+on the wall, "what has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"</p>
+<p>There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it,
+impertinently and nakedly bright. The labelled key had
+vanished.</p>
+<p>"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the
+household from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in
+frantic search, and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses
+and wives and children to help, only to discover that I have had
+the wretched object in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is
+Barbara to this wolf-cry that if I came up to her without my head
+and informed her that I had lost it, she would be profoundly
+sceptical.</p>
+<p>But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I
+declared, "and I saw it this morning."</p>
+<p>"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant
+you it was there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our
+attention to it."</p>
+<p>"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met
+in a sudden stare.</p>
+<p>"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"</p>
+<p>"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to
+me in the garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally
+animated and demonstrative at the station&mdash;your sex's little
+guileful way ever since the world began. She had the stolen key
+about her. She's going straight to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those
+manuscripts."</p>
+<p>"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them,
+because they don't exist."</p>
+<p>"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
+everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up
+in the place!"</p>
+<p>"Do you mean&mdash;?" she cried aghast.</p>
+<p>"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."</p>
+<p>"I'll come with you," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to
+London. We alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter
+came out to receive us.</p>
+<p>"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"</p>
+<p>"No, sir, not to my knowledge."</p>
+<p>We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a
+strain.</p>
+<p>"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said
+I.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i325.jpg" id="i325.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/325.jpg"><img src="images/325.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and strewn<br />
+papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.</b></div>
+<p>"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the
+porter.</p>
+<p>"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her
+ready common-sense, took me aside and whispered:</p>
+<p>"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with
+us?"</p>
+<p>In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney
+that Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.</p>
+<p>"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."</p>
+<p>"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."</p>
+<p>We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We
+entered the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked
+drawers and strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on
+the hearthrug, lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER
+XXIII</h2>
+<p>If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many
+sorrows, it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the
+soul-stricken little creature owe her life and her reason. For a
+fortnight she scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours
+anywhere, and snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a
+swallow. For a whole fortnight she wrestled with the powers of
+darkness, which like Apollyon straddled quite over all the breadth
+of the way, and by sheer valiancy and beauty of heart, she made
+them spread forth their dragon's wings and speed them away so that
+Doria for a season saw them no more. How she fought and with what
+weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are written down; but
+in a Book which no human eye can see.</p>
+<p>We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
+revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to
+Northlands. It was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct
+foresaw madness if we took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her
+father's house, her natural refuge, was equally impossible. For
+what explanation could we have given to the worthy but
+uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors to minister to
+a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of diagnosis.
+Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy; which
+was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
+gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:</p>
+<p>"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to
+go. I can't ask father&mdash;and I can't go back home. It would
+drive me mad."</p>
+<p>Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
+flat&mdash;haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable
+Presence, the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented
+country bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To
+save her reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had
+bridged over the chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She
+knew all that we knew. Further attempts at deception would have
+been vain cruelty. Barbara could palliate the offence; she could
+show how irresistible had been the temptation; she could prove how
+our love for Adrian had been unshaken by disastrous knowledge and
+urge that Doria's love should be unshaken likewise; she could apply
+all the healing remedies of which she only has the secret&mdash;but
+she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
+uncertainty.</p>
+<p>Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I,
+when I went through the place in order to make arrangements for
+closing it altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the
+condemned cell where Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been
+sacrosanct; not a thing had been disturbed; there was the iron safe
+empty, but yet a grim receptacle of abominable secrets; the quill
+pen, its point stained with idle ink, lay on the office
+writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there under a clump
+of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in the corner
+stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a syphon
+of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
+even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had
+hated it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing
+transcendental had affected me; but now I shuddered, physically
+shuddered, as though the cubic space were informed with a spirit in
+the torture of an everlasting despair. Doria not knowing, he could
+have borne his punishment. But now Doria knew. He had lost her
+love, the rock on which he had built his hope of salvation. He was
+damned to eternity. It is the supreme and unspeakable horror of
+eternal life that you cannot dash your head against a wall and
+plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful Presence of Adrian
+was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly walls. . .
+.</p>
+<p>I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again.
+Of course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not
+have slept in that flat for anything in the world.</p>
+<p>I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's
+chambers, in order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had
+made. She had ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the
+contents of the old portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent
+manuscript, about the floor. I did what I ought to have done on my
+first visit; I brought the tragic lumber to Northlands, and having
+made a bonfire in a corner of the kitchen garden, burned the whole
+lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the evidence of Adrian's guilt,
+I could not at the time imagine. It was only later that I heard the
+trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn the papers in his
+flat, because he had no fire&mdash;only the electric radiator. You
+try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six thousand sheets
+of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his idea, when
+he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his next
+voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
+cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise,
+and throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his
+two voyages that year&mdash;if a channel crossing can be termed a
+voyage&mdash;at a moment's notice. In each case he had not had
+occasion to call at his chambers, and the destroying journey had
+yet to be made. As for discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked
+receptacles, who was there to discover them? Such friends as he had
+would never pry into his private concerns; and as for housemaids
+and waiters and porters, the whole matter to them was
+unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's Mansions, he
+considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that he
+would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That
+I bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken
+steps to destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long
+time I felt the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three
+kingdoms. If I had been a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it
+would not have mattered; but I have always prided myself on
+being&mdash;not the last word, for that would not be consonant with
+my natural modesty&mdash;but, say, the penultimate word of our
+modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
+ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
+brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each
+other's bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms
+for careless fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not
+a bit of good to anybody.</p>
+<p>The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his
+great fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men
+could ever set Humpty-Dumpty up again.</p>
+<p>Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
+interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. <i>Moi
+qui vous parle</i>, I have read all of them; and I like them. I
+have even seen some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the
+Agamemnon given by the boys of Bradfield College, in their model
+open-air Greek theatre, built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat
+gripped from beginning to end by the tremendous drama. I am not
+talking foolishly. I know as much as the ordinary man need know
+about Greek tragedy. But in spite of Aristotle (who ought to have
+been strangled at birth, like all other bland
+doctrinaires&mdash;and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has
+none been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago
+when the pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a
+bison was clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not
+draw for nuts)&mdash;in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the
+theorists, I assert that, as far as my experience goes, in the
+ordinary wary modern life to which we are accustomed, doom and
+inevitableness do not matter a hang. If we have any common-sense we
+can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course, if a woman marries a
+congenital idiot there are bound to be ructions&mdash;here we are
+entering the domain of pathology, which is as doomful as you
+please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent. of the
+tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The
+history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of
+coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian
+purist that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He
+only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That
+there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging
+human destinies is another question. I am neither a theologian nor
+a metaphysician, and I do not desire to discuss the subject. I only
+maintain that, had it not been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret
+would never have been discovered a second time. I cannot see any
+doom about it. A series of sheer, silly accidents on the part of
+Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to face with these
+incriminating papers. As for her having gained access to the flat
+without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation on her
+part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken
+some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable
+stairs.</p>
+<p>I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles;
+but in view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What
+useful purpose would have been served? He would have left the
+steamship <i>Vesta</i> and travelled post-haste overland, dragging
+with him a resentful Liosha, and rushed like a mad bull into an
+upheaval in which he could have no place. We had arranged by
+correspondence that, after he had parted from the good Captain
+Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to leave
+Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with
+her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be
+far better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their
+lunatic adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at
+Northlands to break the disastrous tidings. It would give us time
+to watch Doria and see what direction the resultant of the forces
+now tearing her soul would take.</p>
+<p>"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I
+can't be bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended
+for a year."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a
+great pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax,
+and she had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered
+the apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and
+hugged her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a
+few silly words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room
+fire, and rushed out into the garden and cut the last poor
+lingering autumn roses, and, returning, cast them into her lap. And
+we talked hard about the roses; and I told her which were Madame
+Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de Salisbury, and which Frau Karl
+Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady Hillingdon. We did not
+refer at all to unhappy things.</p>
+<p>It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the
+veil of her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any
+fool could have divined it. Together with far less shattering of
+idols has many a woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor
+Doria's case it was not only the shattering of idols.</p>
+<p>"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I
+can't go on living here for ever."</p>
+<p>"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and
+you're only just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets.
+Why do you want to go?"</p>
+<p>We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp
+morning and the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their
+leaves around us in a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen
+lay sodden on the grass borders. Here and there a surviving blossom
+of antirrhinum swaggered among its withered brethren as if to
+maintain the illusion of summer. A partridge or two whirred across
+the path from copse to meadow. The gentle sadness of the autumn day
+had moved her to discourse on the mutability of mundane things.
+Hence, by chain of association, I suppose, her sudden remark.</p>
+<p>"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the
+dreamy peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such
+a long time&mdash;for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad
+pet&mdash;biting the hand that fed me."</p>
+<p>I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.</p>
+<p>"It's true. While the three of you&mdash;you and Barbara and
+Jaffery&mdash;were doing for me what has never been done for
+another human being, I was all the time snarling and snapping. I
+can't make out how you can bear the sight of me." She clenched her
+hands and straightened her arms down tense. "The thought of it
+scorches me," she cried suddenly.</p>
+<p>"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we
+understood it all. How could we blame you?"</p>
+<p>We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods
+to whom human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion
+on which to tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the
+father of lies. I am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was
+a warm-hearted philanthropist, who has never received due credit,
+and that the devil having seized hold of his discovery perverted it
+to his own diabolical uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing
+that devils, whether they promote ancient Gehennas or modern
+companies, have been doing since the world began.</p>
+<p>"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The
+horrible things I said and did&mdash;the ghastliness of
+it&mdash;"</p>
+<p>"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let
+this mere fringe of tragedy worry you."</p>
+<p>She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most
+unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.</p>
+<p>"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening
+irritation? The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it
+doesn't kill. And for some reason"&mdash;she threw out her little
+gloved hands&mdash;"the big thing hasn't killed me&mdash;it has
+paralysed me. The springs of feeling"&mdash;she clutched her
+bosom&mdash;"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I can't
+explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone
+through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up
+altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you
+call it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for
+the torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an
+appealing touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean
+to go on in this wild way. I thought I had a better hold on
+myself."</p>
+<p>"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to
+one who has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of
+Adrian."</p>
+<p>She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the
+gravel path. I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a
+few paces, before either of us spoke.</p>
+<p>"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to
+unburden. There never was an Adrian."</p>
+<p>"There was indeed," said I, warmly.</p>
+<p>"Yours. Not mine."</p>
+<p>"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.</p>
+<p>She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great
+eyes gleamed black ice.</p>
+<p>"No," she said.</p>
+<p>I went straight to bed-rock.</p>
+<p>"He was the father of your dead child," said I.</p>
+<p>Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the
+drive. "I can only thank God that the child didn't live."</p>
+<p>Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to
+hold Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till
+now when I heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know
+that she had never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate
+directness.</p>
+<p>"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.</p>
+<p>"I am as God made me."</p>
+<p>"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake&mdash;in order to get
+you."</p>
+<p>She dismissed the argument with a gesture.</p>
+<p>"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable
+torment of those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at
+creation."</p>
+<p>She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we
+turned and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:</p>
+<p>"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain
+out,&mdash;his when he was alive&mdash;and mine now. The thought of
+it will freeze my soul for all eternity. I can't tell you what I
+feel." She cast out her hands imploringly to the autumn fields. "I
+pity him as I would pity some one remote from me&mdash;a criminal
+whom I might have seen done to death by awful tortures. It's a
+matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all the
+understanding. But I can't find the pardon."</p>
+<p>"That will come," said I.</p>
+<p>"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."</p>
+<p>Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to
+argue about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her
+point of view, she was mercilessly right.</p>
+<p>"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all
+this time I've been living, first on stolen property and now on
+charity&mdash;Jaffery's charity&mdash;and he hasn't even had a word
+of thanks. Quite the contrary." Again she laughed the shrill, dead
+laugh. "You see, I must go home&mdash;to my father's&mdash;I'm
+strong enough now&mdash;and start my life, such as it is, all over
+again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money.
+Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."</p>
+<p>"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's
+not the man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you
+don't like to keep the money&mdash;I appreciate your
+feelings&mdash;you can devote it to philanthropic purposes."</p>
+<p>"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this
+fraud&mdash;this false reputation&mdash;to go on forever?"</p>
+<p>"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by
+throwing such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody
+living were suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's
+no reason to blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."</p>
+<p>"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the
+secret?" she asked anxiously.</p>
+<p>"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else,"
+said I.</p>
+<p>"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things
+public, I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the
+disgrace."</p>
+<p>"To poor Adrian," said I.</p>
+<p>She flashed a quick, defiant glance.</p>
+<p>"To me."</p>
+<p>"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He
+sinned&mdash;the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it.
+He's expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not
+yours, that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so
+irrevocably wrapped up in him"&mdash;I pursued my
+advantage&mdash;"that you feel yourself a partner in his guilt.
+Which means that you love him still."</p>
+<p>She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her
+shoulder. Then, all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an
+agony of sobs and tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and
+put my arm round her and let her sob herself out.</p>
+<p>After that we did not speak of Adrian.</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XXIV</h2>
+<p>At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous
+voyage.</p>
+<div class="blockquot">
+<p>"Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us
+Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to
+all.</p>
+<p>"JAFFERY."</p>
+</div>
+<p>Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in
+his proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading
+than to make a d&eacute;tour through London. Rooms were got ready.
+In the one destined for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of
+trunks which the Great Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time.
+The next day I took the car to Reading and waited for the
+train.</p>
+<p>From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a
+moment afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.</p>
+<p>"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"</p>
+<p>Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier,
+redder than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook
+me in his lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and
+Liosha all rocked and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and,
+before I could recover, Liosha threw her arms round my neck and
+kissed me. A porter who picked up my hat restored me to mental
+equipoise. Then I looked at them, and anything more splendid in
+humanity than that simple, happy pair of gigantic children I have
+never seen in my life. I, too, felt the laughter of happiness swell
+in my heart, for their gladness at the sight of me was so true, so
+unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed aloud foolishly. It
+is good to be loved, especially when you've done nothing particular
+to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two loved me.</p>
+<p>"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"Magnificent," said I.</p>
+<p>She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a
+gipsy swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health.
+When I had parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of
+soft increase in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh
+had hardened down into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her
+splendour. And there seemed to be more authority in her radiant
+face and a new masterfulness and a quicker intelligence in her
+brown eyes. I noticed that it was she who first broke away from the
+clamour of greeting and gave directions as to the transport of
+their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail of his eye;
+then turned to me with a bass chuckle.</p>
+<p>"We're a sort of Jaff Chayne and Co., according to her, and she
+thinks she's managing director. Ho! ho! ho!" He put his arm round
+my shoulder and suddenly grew serious. "How's everybody?"</p>
+<p>"Flourishing," said I.</p>
+<p>"And Doria?"</p>
+<p>"At Northlands."</p>
+<p>"She knows I'm coming?"</p>
+<p>"Yes," said I.</p>
+<p>Liosha joined us, accompanied by a porter, carrying their
+exiguous baggage. We walked to the exit, without saying much, and
+settled ourselves in the limousine, my guests in the back seat, I
+on one of the little chairs facing them. We started.</p>
+<p>"My dear old chap," said I, leaning forward. "I've got something
+to tell you. I didn't like to write about it. But it has got to be
+told, and I may as well get it over now."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>It was a subdued and half-scared Jaffery who greeted Barbara and
+Susan at our front door. The jollity had gone out of him. He was
+nothing but a vast hulk filled with self-reproach. It was his
+fault, his very grievous and careless fault for having postponed
+the destruction of the papers, and for having left them loose and
+unsecured in his rooms. He all but beat his breast. If Doria had
+died of the shock his would be the blame. He saluted Barbara with
+the air of one entering a house of mourning.</p>
+<p>"You mustn't look so woe-begone," she said. "Something like this
+was bound to happen. I have dreaded it all along&mdash;and now it
+has happened and the earth hasn't come to an end."</p>
+<p>We stood in the hall, while Franklin divested the visitors of
+their outer wraps and trappings.</p>
+<p>"And, Liosha," Barbara continued, throwing her arms round as
+much of Liosha as they could grasp&mdash;she had already kissed her
+a warm welcome&mdash;"it's a shame, dear, to depress you the moment
+you come into the place. You'll wish you were at sea again."</p>
+<p>"I guess not," said Liosha. "I know now I'm among folks who love
+me. Isn't that true, Susan?"</p>
+<p>"Daddy loves you and mummy loves you and I adore you," cried
+Susan.</p>
+<p>Whereupon there was much hugging of a spoiled monkey.</p>
+<p>We went upstairs. At the drawing-room door Barbara gave me one
+of her queer glances, which meant, on interpretation, that I should
+leave her alone with Jaffery for a few minutes so that she could
+pour the balm of sense over his remorseful soul, and that in the
+meantime it would be advisable for me to explain the situation to
+Liosha. Aloud, she said, before disappearing:</p>
+<p>"Your old room, Liosha, dear&mdash;you'll find everything
+ready."</p>
+<p>In order to carry out my wife's orders, I had to disentangle
+Susan from Liosha's embrace and pack her off rueful to the nursery.
+But the promise to seat her at lunch between the two seafarers
+brought a measure of consolation.</p>
+<p>"Come into the library, Liosha," said I, throwing the door open.
+I followed her and settled her in an armchair before a big fire;
+and then stood on the hearthrug, looking at her and feeling rather
+a fool. I offered her refreshment. She declined. I commented again
+on her fine physical appearance and asked her how she was. I drew
+her attention to some beautiful narcissi and hyacinths that had
+come from the greenhouse. The more I talked and the longer she
+regarded me in her grave, direct fashion, the less I knew how to
+tell her, or how much to tell her, of Doria's story. The drive had
+been a short one, giving time only for a narration of the facts of
+the discovery. Liosha, although accepting my apology, had sat
+mystified; also profoundly disturbed by Jaffery's unconcealed
+agitation. Her life with him during the past four months had drawn
+her into the meshes of the little drama. For her own sake, for
+everybody's sake, we could not allow her to remain in complete
+ignorance. . . . I gave her a cigarette and took one myself. After
+the first puff, she smiled.</p>
+<p>"You want to tell me something."</p>
+<p>"I do. Something that is known only to four people in the
+world&mdash;and they're in this house."</p>
+<p>"If you tell me, I guess it'll be known only to five," said
+Liosha.</p>
+<p>To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to
+insult truth itself.</p>
+<p>"All right," said I. "You'll be the fifth and last." And then,
+as simply as I could, I told her all there was to know. She grasped
+the literary details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found
+afterwards that the long months of the voyage had not been entirely
+taken up with the cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there
+had been long stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things
+under heaven, and aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her
+mental horizon had broadened prodigiously through constant
+association with a cultivated man. . . . When I reached the point
+in my story where Jaffery gave up the Persian expedition, she
+gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips worked in their
+familiar quiver.</p>
+<p>"He must have loved her to do that," she said in a low
+voice.</p>
+<p>I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous
+affair, the more was I convinced that it would he better for her to
+understand clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria. You see, I
+knew all along, as all along I hope I have given you to
+understand&mdash;ever since the day when she asked him to beat her
+with a golf-stick&mdash;that the poor girl loved Jaffery, heart and
+soul. I knew also that she made for herself no illusions as to
+Jaffery's devotion to Doria. On that point her words to me at Havre
+had left me in no doubt whatever. But since Havre all sorts of
+extraordinary things had happened. There had been their intimate
+comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few
+months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards
+Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the
+emotional subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel
+to tell her of the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so
+grotesque, between the man she loved and the other woman. But her
+unflinching bravery and her great heart demanded it. And as I told
+her, walking nervously about the room, she followed me with her
+steadfast eyes.</p>
+<p>"So that's why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me."</p>
+<p>"I suppose so," said I.</p>
+<p>"If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her
+out of the window."</p>
+<p>"I dare say. But you wouldn't have been Jaff Chayne."</p>
+<p>"That's true," she assented. "No man like him ever walked the
+earth. And how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I
+can't imagine."</p>
+<p>"Her head was full of another man, you see."</p>
+<p>"Oh yes, I see," she said with a touch of contempt. "And such a
+man! You were fond of him I know. But he was a sham. He used to
+look on me, I remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the
+Zoological Gardens. It never occurred to him that I had sense. He
+was a fool."</p>
+<p>Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she
+had ever expressed an opinion regarding Adrian. We had assumed
+that, having touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy
+figure in her mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned
+us, she had viewed him with entire indifference. But her keen
+feminine brain had picked out the fatal flaw in poor Adrian's
+character, the shallow glitter that made us laugh and the want of
+vision from which he died.</p>
+<p>"Go on," said Liosha.</p>
+<p>I continued. In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for
+setting Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She
+understood. False gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped,
+had for a time the mystifying power of concealing their falsehood.
+And during that time they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus,
+flaming Joves to poor mortal Semeles. Liosha quite understood.</p>
+<p>I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard,
+uncomprehending, in the car.</p>
+<p>"And that's how it stands," said I.</p>
+<p>I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I
+turned aside and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for
+a while, resting her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her
+deep tones:</p>
+<p>"Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!"</p>
+<p>Tears flooded her eyes.</p>
+<p>"By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature."</p>
+<p>"I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose. "I guess I
+must have a clean up before lunch," and she made for the door.</p>
+<p>I looked at my watch. "You just have time," said I.</p>
+<p>I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in
+front of the fire. Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the
+serene young barbarian who had come to us two and a half years
+before blandly characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she
+would not let her buy a stocked chicken incubator and take it to
+the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie wolf from the noble Great Dane. Her
+nature had undergone remarkable developments. As Jaffery had
+prophesied at Havre, she treated things in a big way, and she had
+learned restraint, not the restraint of convention, for not a
+convention would have stopped her from doing what she chose, but
+the restraint of self-discipline. And she had learned pity. A year
+ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every woman's
+reason for hating. A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in her
+heart. If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family
+had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks
+before her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt
+whether she would have cut off one single head.</p>
+<p>A tap at the window aroused me. It was Jaffery in the rain,
+which had just begun to fail, seeking admittance. I let him in.</p>
+<p>"This is an awful business, old man," he said gloomily.</p>
+<p>From which I gather that for once Barbara's soothing had been of
+little avail.</p>
+<p>"Have you seen Doria yet?" I asked.</p>
+<p>He shook his head. "Barbara is with her. She's coming in to
+lunch."</p>
+<p>At the anti-climax, I smiled. "That shews she's not quite dead
+yet."</p>
+<p>But to Jaffery it was no smiling matter. "Look here, Hilary," he
+said hoarsely, "don't you think it would be better for me to cut
+the whole thing and go away right now?"</p>
+<p>"Go away&mdash;?" I stared at him. "What for?"</p>
+<p>"Why should I force myself on that poor, tortured child? Think
+of her feelings towards me. She must loathe the sound of my
+name."</p>
+<p>"Jaff Chayne," said I, "I believe you're afraid of mice."</p>
+<p>He frowned. "What the blazes do you mean?"</p>
+<p>"You're in a blue funk at the idea of meeting Doria."</p>
+<p>"Rot," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>But he was.</p>
+<p>Franklin summoned us to luncheon. We went into the drawing-room
+where the rest of our little party were assembled, Susan and her
+governess, Liosha, Barbara and Doria. Doria stepped forward
+valiantly with outstretched hand, looking him squarely in the
+face.</p>
+<p>"Welcome back, Jaffery. It's good to see you again."</p>
+<p>Jaffery grew very red and bending over her hand muttered
+something into his beard.</p>
+<p>"You'll have to tell me about your wonderful voyage."</p>
+<p>"There was nothing so wonderful about it," said Jaffery.</p>
+<p>That was all for the moment, for Barbara hustled us into the
+dining-room. But the terrible meeting that both had dreaded was
+over. Nobody had fainted or shed tears; it was over in a perfectly
+well-bred way. At lunch Susan, between Liosha and Jaffery, became
+the centre of attention and saved conversation from constraint.</p>
+<p>To Doria, who had lingered at Northlands, in order to lose no
+time in setting herself right with Jaffery,&mdash;her own
+phrase&mdash;the ordinary table small-talk would have been an
+ordeal. As it was, she sat on my left, opposite Liosha, lending a
+polite ear to the answers to Susan's eager questions. The child had
+not received such universal invitation to chatter at mealtime since
+she had learned to speak. But, in spite of her inspiring
+assistance, a depressing sense of destinies in the balance pervaded
+the room, and we were all glad when the meal came to an end. Susan,
+refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to
+the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship <i>Vesta</i>.
+Barbara and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I,
+after a perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for
+a while on different things, the child's robustious health, the
+garden, the weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal
+fashion as assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought
+downstairs. At last Barbara said:</p>
+<p>"I must go and write some letters."</p>
+<p>And I said: "I'm going to have my afternoon nap."</p>
+<p>Both the others cried out with simultaneous anxiety and scarlet
+faces:</p>
+<p>"Oh, don't go, Barbara, dear."</p>
+<p>"Can't you cut the sleep out for once?"</p>
+<p>"I must!" said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"No," said I.</p>
+<p>And we left our nervous ogre and our poor little elf to fight
+out between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps
+it was cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come
+to mutual understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had
+the afternoon before them. It was pouring with rain. They had
+nothing else to do. In order that they should be undisturbed,
+Barbara had given orders that we were not at home to visitors.
+Besides, we were actuated by motives not entirely altruistic. If I
+seem to have posed before you as a noble-minded philanthropist, I
+have been guilty of careless misrepresentation. At the best I am
+but a not unkindly, easy-going man who loathes being worried. And I
+(and Barbara even more than myself) had been greatly worried over
+our friends' affairs for a considerable period. We therefore
+thought that the sooner we were freed from these worries the better
+for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts against their
+joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.</p>
+<p>"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going
+to happen?"</p>
+<p>"She'll marry him, of course."</p>
+<p>"She won't," said I.</p>
+<p>"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."</p>
+<p>"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that
+young woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against
+Jaffery."</p>
+<p>"If," she said. "But you haven't."</p>
+<p>"All right," said I.</p>
+<p>"All right," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to
+become of Liosha?"</p>
+<p>Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."</p>
+<p>"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall
+be."</p>
+<p>"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.</p>
+<p>"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XXV</h2>
+<p>So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
+drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity
+and realised failure; the woman&mdash;as it seemed to me, smoking
+reflectively in my library armchair, for sleep was
+impossible&mdash;the woman in the calm of desperation. The man who
+had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to shield her from harm,
+who lavished on her all the devotion and tenderness of his simple
+heart; the woman who owed him her life, and, but for fool accident
+and her own lack of faith in him, would still be owing him the
+twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not met, or
+exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
+John's Wood flat, when he had told her that he loved her, and by
+the sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the
+ground; since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and
+contempt, when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed
+him into fury; when, white with realisation that the secret was
+about to escape from his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had
+gone blindly into the street. Now facing each other for the first
+time after many months, they remembered all too poignantly that
+parting. The barren rascal who stood before her was the man who had
+written every word of Adrian's triumphant second novel, and had
+given it to her out of the largesse of his love. And he had borne
+with patience all her imperious strictures and had obeyed all her
+crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her&mdash;quixotically
+fooled her, it is true&mdash;but fooled her as never woman had been
+fooled in the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren
+rascal, all the time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never
+had he uttered one disparaging word. And he had secured the
+insertion of a life of Adrian in the next supplement to the
+Dictionary of National Biography; and he had helped her to set up
+that staring white marble monument in Highgate Cemetery, with its
+lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested in such a
+Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through Hell-fire.
+No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No wonder
+the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
+And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she
+was alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she
+stood face to face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose
+loving hand had unwittingly kindled that burning torment?</p>
+<p>The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had
+plucked out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she
+regard the man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt,
+the contempt of pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I
+could not take my mind off those two closeted together. What was
+happening? Again and again I went over the whole disastrous story.
+What would be the end? I wearied myself for a long, long time with
+futile speculation.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering
+lip and tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by
+my side and buried her head on the arm of the chair and began to
+cry wretchedly.</p>
+<p>"My dear, my dear," said I, bewildered by this tornado of
+misery. "My dear," said I, putting an arm round her shoulders,
+"what is the matter?"</p>
+<p>"I'm a fool," she wailed. "I know I'm a fool, but I can't help
+it. I went in there just now. I didn't know they were there.
+Susan's music mistress came and I had to go out of the
+nursery&mdash;and I went into the drawing-room. Oh, it's hard,
+Hilary, dear&mdash;it's damned hard."</p>
+<p>"My poor Liosha," said I.</p>
+<p>"There doesn't seem to be a place in the world for me."</p>
+<p>"There's lots of places in our hearts," I said as soothingly as
+I could. But the assurance gave her little comfort. Her body
+shook.</p>
+<p>"I wish the cargo had killed me," she said.</p>
+<p>I waited for a little, then rose and made her sit in my chair. I
+drew another near her.</p>
+<p>"Now," said I. "Tell me all about it."</p>
+<p>And she told me in her broken way.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>She walked into the drawing-room thinking to find Barbara.
+Instead, she sailed into a surging sea of passion. Doria crouched
+on a sofa hiding her face&mdash;the flame, poor little elf in the
+Nessus shirt, had been lapping her round, and with both hands
+outstretched she motioned away Jaffery who stood over her.</p>
+<p>"Don't touch me, don't touch me! I couldn't bear it!" she cried;
+and then, aware of Liosha's sudden presence, she started to her
+feet. Liosha did not move. The two women glared at each other.</p>
+<p>"What do you mean by coming in here?" cried Doria.</p>
+<p>"You had better leave us, Liosha," said Jaffery sombrely.</p>
+<p>But Liosha stood firm. The spurning of Jaffery by Doria struck a
+chord of the heroic that ran through her strange, wild nature. If
+this man she loved was not for her, at least no other woman should
+scorn him. She drew herself up in her full-bosomed
+magnificence.</p>
+<p>"Instead of telling him not to touch you, you little fool, you
+ought to fall at his feet. For what he has done for you, you ought
+to steal the wide world and give it to him. And you refuse your
+footling little insignificant self. If you had a thousand selves,
+they wouldn't be enough for him."</p>
+<p>"Stop!" shouted Jaffery.</p>
+<p>She wheeled round on him. "Hold your tongue, Jaff Chayne. I
+guess I've the right, if anybody has, to fix up your concerns."</p>
+<p>"What right?" Doria demanded.</p>
+<p>"Never mind." She took a step forward. "Oh, no; not that right!
+Don't you dare to think it. Jaff Chayne doesn't care a tinker's
+curse for me that way. But I have a right to speak, Jaff Chayne.
+Haven't I?"</p>
+<p>Jaffery's mind went back to the Bedlam of the slithering cargo.
+He turned to Doria.</p>
+<p>"Let her say what she wants."</p>
+<p>"I want nothing!" cried Liosha. "Nothing for myself. Not a
+thing! But I want Jaff Chayne to be happy. You think you know all
+he has done for you, but you don't. You don't know a bit. They
+offered him thousands of pounds to go to Persia, and he would have
+come back a great man, and he didn't go because of you."</p>
+<p>"Persia? I never heard of that," said Doria.</p>
+<p>"The job didn't suit me," Jaffery growled.</p>
+<p>"And you told her all about it?"</p>
+<p>"No, he didn't," said Liosha. "Hilary told me to-day."</p>
+<p>"I take your word for it," said Doria coldly. "It only shows
+that I'm under one more obligation than I thought to Mr.
+Chayne."</p>
+<p>From what I could gather, the word "obligation" infuriated
+Liosha. She uttered an avalanche of foolish things. And Jaffery
+(for what is man in a woman's battle but an impotent spectator?)
+looked in silence from one: to the other; from the little ivory,
+black and white Tanagra figure to the great full creature whom he
+had seen, but a few days ago, with the salt spray in her hair and
+the wind in her vestments. And at last she said:</p>
+<p>"If I were a woman like you and wouldn't marry a man who loved
+me like Jaff Chayne, and who had done for me all that Jaff Chayne
+had done for you, I'd pray to God to blast me and fill my body with
+worms."</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>And then she burst out of the room, and, like a child seeking
+protection, came and threw herself down by my side.</p>
+<p>What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me
+up till three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he
+poured into his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in
+embarrassing silence, until Doria spoke:</p>
+<p>"She misunderstood&mdash;when she came in. Quite natural. It was
+your touch of pity that I couldn't bear. I wasn't repelling you, as
+she seemed to think."</p>
+<p>"It cut me to the heart to see you in such grief," said Jaffery.
+"I only thought of comforting you."</p>
+<p>"I know." She sat on a chair by the window and looked out at the
+pouring rain.</p>
+<p>"Tell me," she said, without turning round, "what did she mean
+by saying she had the right to interfere in your affairs?"</p>
+<p>"She saved my life at the risk of her own," replied Jaffery.</p>
+<p>"I see. And you saved my life once; so perhaps you have rights
+over me."</p>
+<p>"That would be damnable!" he cried. "Such a thought has never
+entered my head."</p>
+<p>"It is firmly fixed in mine," said Doria.</p>
+<p>She sat for a while, with knitted brows deep in thought. Jaffery
+stood dejectedly by the fire, his hands in his pockets. Presently
+she rose.</p>
+<p>"Besides saving my life and doing for me the things I know,
+there must be many things you've done for me that I never heard
+of&mdash;like this sacrifice of the Persian expedition. Liosha was
+right. I ought to go on my knees to you. But I can't very well do
+that, can I?"</p>
+<p>"No," replied Jaffery, scrabbling at whiskers and beard. "That
+would be stupid. You mustn't worry about me at all. Whatever I did
+for you, my dear, I'd do a thousand times over again!"</p>
+<p>"You must have your reward, such as it is. God knows you have
+earned it."</p>
+<p>"Don't talk about rights or rewards," said he. "As I've said
+repeatedly this afternoon, I've forfeited even your thanks."</p>
+<p>"And I've said I forgive you&mdash;if there's anything to
+forgive," she smiled, just a little wearily. "So that is wiped out.
+All the rest remains. Let us bury all past unhappiness between us
+two."</p>
+<p>"I wish we could. But how?"</p>
+<p>"There is a way."</p>
+<p>"What is that?"</p>
+<p>"You make things somewhat hard for me. You might guess. But I'll
+tell you. Liosha again was right. . . . If you want me still, I
+will marry you. Not quite yet; but, say, in six months' time. You
+are a great-hearted, loyal man"&mdash;she continued bravely,
+faltering under his gaze&mdash;"and I will learn to love you and
+will devote my life to making you happy."</p>
+<p>She glanced downwards with averted head, awaiting some outcry of
+gladness, surrendering herself to the quick clasp of strong arms.
+But no outcry came, and no arms clasped. She glanced up, and met a
+stricken look in the man's eyes.</p>
+<p>For Jaffery could not find a word to utter. A chill crept about
+his heart and his blood became as water. He could not move; a
+nightmare horror of dismay held him in its grip. The inconceivable
+had happened. He no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted
+his thoughts for over two years, for whom he had made quixotic
+sacrifices, for whom he had made a mat of his great body so that
+she should tread stony paths without hurt to her delicate feet, was
+his now for the taking&mdash;nobly self-offered&mdash;and with all
+the world as an apanage he could not have taken her. The phenomenon
+of sex he could not explain. Once he had desired her passionately.
+The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired his blood. He had
+fought with beasts. He had wrestled with his soul in the night
+watches. He had loved her purely and sweetly, too. But now, as she
+stood before him, recoiling a little from his fixed stare of pain,
+though she had suffered but little loss in beauty and in that of
+her which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that
+he desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the
+idealised love he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams.
+Not that he would not still do her infinite service. The pathos of
+her broken life moved him to an anguish of pity. For her soothing
+he would give all that life held for him, save one
+thing&mdash;which was no longer his to give. Another man glib of
+tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an
+abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He
+could not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life. His
+nature was too primitive. He could only stare in spellbound
+affright at the icy barrier that separated him from Doria.</p>
+<p>"I see," she said tonelessly, moving slowly away from him. "Your
+feelings have changed. I am sorry."</p>
+<p>Then he found power of motion and speech. He threw out his arms.
+"My God, dear, forgive me he groaned, and sat down and clutched his
+head in his hands. She returned to the window and looked out at the
+rain. And there she fought with her woman's indignant humiliation.
+And there was a long, dead silence, broken only by the faintly
+heard notes of Susan's piano in the nursery and the splash of water
+on the terrace.</p>
+<p>Presently all that was good in Doria conquered. She crossed the
+room and laid a light hand on Jaffery's head. It was the finest
+moment in her life.</p>
+<p>"One can't help these things. I know it too well. And no hearts
+are broken. So it's all for the best."</p>
+<p>He groaned again. "I didn't know. I'd like to shoot myself."</p>
+<p>She smiled, conscious of feminine superiority. "If you did, I
+should die, too. I tell you, it's all for the best. I love you as I
+never loved you before. I usen't to love you a little bit. But I
+should have had to learn to love you as a wife&mdash;and it might
+have been difficult."</p>
+<p>A moment afterwards she appeared in the library, serenely
+matter-of-fact. Liosha started round in her chair and looked
+defiantly at her rival.</p>
+<p>"Would both of you mind coming into the drawing-room for a
+minute?"</p>
+<p>We followed her. She held the door, which I was about to shut,
+and left it open. Before Jaffery had time to rise at our entrance,
+I caught sight of him sitting as she had left him, great clumps of
+his red hair sticking through his fingers. His face was a picture
+of woe. I can imagine nothing more like it than that of a
+conscience smitten lion. Doria ran her arm through mine and kept me
+near the doorway.</p>
+<p>"I've asked Jaffery to marry me," she said, in a steady voice,
+"and he doesn't want to. It's because he loves a much better woman
+and wants to marry her."</p>
+<p>Then while Jaffery and Liosha gasped in blank astonishment, she
+swung me abruptly out of the room and slammed the door behind
+her.</p>
+<p>"There," she said, and flung up her little bead, "what do you
+think of that?"</p>
+<p>"Magnificent," said I, "but bewildering. Did Jaffery
+really&mdash;?"</p>
+<p>In a few words, she put me into possession of the bare
+facts.</p>
+<p>"I'm not sorry," she added. "Sometimes I love
+Jaffery&mdash;because he's so lovable. Sometimes I hate
+him&mdash;because&mdash;oh, well&mdash;because of Adrian. You can't
+understand."</p>
+<p>"I'm not altogether a fool," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, that's how it is. I would have worn myself to death to
+try to make him happy. You believe me?"</p>
+<p>"I do indeed, my dear," I replied. And I replied with unshakable
+conviction. She was a woman who once having come under the
+domination of an idea would obey it blindly, ruthlessly, marching
+straight onwards, looking neither to right nor left. The very
+virtue that had made her overcruel to him in the past would have
+made her overkind to him in the future. Unwittingly she had used a
+phrase startlingly true. She would have worn herself to death in
+her determination to please. Incidentally she would have driven him
+mad with conscientious dutifulness.</p>
+<p>"He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she
+said. "But we needn't speak of it any more. I'm not the woman for
+him. Liosha is. It's all over. I'm glad. At any rate, I've made
+atonement&mdash;at least, I've tried&mdash;as far as things lay in
+my power."</p>
+<p>I took both her hands, greatly moved by her courage.</p>
+<p>"And what's going to happen to you, my dear?"</p>
+<p>"Now that all this is straight," she replied, with a faint
+smile, "I can turn round and remake my life. You and Barbara will
+help."</p>
+<p>"With all our hearts," said I.</p>
+<p>"It won't be so hard for you, ever again, I promise. I shall be
+more reasonable. And the first favour I'll ask you, dear Hilary, is
+to let me go this afternoon. It would be a bit of a strain on me to
+stay."</p>
+<p>"I know, my dear," I said. "The car is at your service."</p>
+<p>"Oh, no! I'll go by train."</p>
+<p>"You'll do as you're told, young woman, and go by car."</p>
+<p>At this rubbishy speech, the tears, for the first time, came
+into her eyes. She pulled down my shoulders&mdash;I am rather lank
+and tall&mdash;and kissed me.</p>
+<p>"You're a dear," she said, and went off in search of
+Barbara.</p>
+<p>I returned to my library, rang the bell, and gave orders for the
+chauffeur to stand at Mrs. Boldero's disposal. Then I sat down at a
+loose end, very much like a young professional man, doctor or
+estate-agent, waiting for the next client. And like the young
+professional man at a loose end, I made a pretence of looking
+through papers. Presently I became aware that I only had to open a
+window in order to summon a couple of clients at once. For there in
+the gathering November dusk and in the rain&mdash;it had ceased
+pouring, but it was drizzling, and therefore it was rain&mdash;I
+saw our pair of delectable savages strolling across the wet, sodden
+lawn, in loverlike proximity, for all the world as though it were a
+flowery mead in May. I might have summoned them, but it would have
+been an unprofessional thing to do. Instead, I drew my curtains and
+turned on the light, and continued to wait. I waited a long time.
+At last Barbara rushed in.</p>
+<p>"Doria's ready."</p>
+<p>"You've heard all about it?" She nodded. "I said there would be
+no marriage," I remarked blandly.</p>
+<p>"You said she wouldn't marry him. I said she would. And so she
+would, if he had let her. I know you're prepared to argue," she
+said, rather excitedly, "but it's no use. I was right all the
+time."</p>
+<p>I yielded.</p>
+<p>"You're always right, my dear," said I.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell
+you about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the
+drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still
+sore, and childishly anxious that I should not account him a
+traitor and a scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human
+touch, told me, as I have already stated, over and over again,
+until I yawned for weariness in the small hours of the morning,
+what had taken place in his staggering interview with Doria; but as
+regards Liosha, he was shyly evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a
+very simple affair. She had told me bluntly that when the two men,
+Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the scene of Balkan desolation in
+which she was the central figure, Jaffery was the one who caused
+her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way she had loved him
+ever since that extraordinary moment. And though Jaffery has never
+confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as Monsieur
+Jourdain spoke prose, <i>sans le savoir</i>, so, without knowing
+it, was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from
+Northlands in Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. <i>Quien
+sabe?</i> But he imagined himself to be in love with a moonbeam.
+And the moonbeam shot like a glamorous, enchanted sword between him
+and Liosha, and kept them apart until the moment of dazed
+revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam was merely a pale,
+earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien to his every
+instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from the
+goddess of his idolatry.</p>
+<div class="figcenter"><br />
+<a name="i361.jpg" id="i361.jpg"></a> <a href=
+"images/361.jpg"><img src="images/361.jpg" width="45%" alt=""
+title="" /></a><br />
+<b>There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as<br />
+war correspondent. Liosha is there, too.</b></div>
+<p>That is how I explain&mdash;and I have puzzled my head into
+aching over any other possible explanation&mdash;the attitude of
+Jaffery towards Liosha on the <i>Vesta</i> voyage. Well, my
+conjectures are of not much value. I have done my best to put the
+facts, as I know them, before you; and if you are interested in the
+matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's content. "Look
+here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my mind to new
+conditions, "what about your new novel?"</p>
+<p>He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you
+going to finish it?"</p>
+<p>"No."</p>
+<p>"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born
+novelist?"</p>
+<p>"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"</p>
+<p>"I don't," said I.</p>
+<p>He walked about the library in his space&mdash;occupying
+way.</p>
+<p>"I'm going to tear the damned thing up! I'm never going to write
+a novel again. I cut it out altogether. It's the least I can do for
+her."</p>
+<p>"Isn't that rather quixotic?" I asked.</p>
+<p>"Suppose it is. What have you to say against it?"</p>
+<p>"Nothing," said I.</p>
+<p>"Well, keep on saying it," replied Jaffery, with the steel flash
+in his eyes.</p>
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+<p>They were married. Our vicar performed the ceremony. I gave the
+bride away. Liosha revealed the feminine kink in her otherwise
+splendid character by insisting on the bridal panoply of white
+satin, veil and orange blossoms. I confess she looked superb. She
+looked like a Valkyr. A leather-visaged war correspondent, named
+Burchester, whom I had never seen before, and have not seen since,
+acted as best man. Susan, tense with the responsibilities of
+office, was the only bridesmaid. Mrs. Jupp (late Considine) and her
+General were our only guests. Doria excused herself from
+attendance, but sent the bride a travelling-case fitted with a
+myriad dazzling gold-stoppered bottles and a phantasmagoria of
+gold-mounted toilette implements.</p>
+<p>And then they went on their honeymoon. And where do you think
+they went? They signed again on the steamship <i>Vesta</i>. And
+Captain Maturin gave them his cabin, which is more than I would
+have done, and slept, I presume, in the dog-hole. And they were as
+happy as the ship was abominable.</p>
+<p>Now, as I write, there is a war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery
+is there as the correspondent of <i>The Daily Gazette</i>. Liosha
+is there, too, as the inseparable and peculiarly invaluable
+companion of Jaffery Chayne. They live impossible lives. But what
+has that got to do with you or me? They like it. They adore it. A
+more radiantly mated pair the earth cannot produce. Their
+two-year-old son is learning the practice of the heroic virtues at
+Cettinje, while his parents loaf about battlefields in full
+eruption.</p>
+<p>"Poor little mite!" says Barbara.</p>
+<p>But I say:</p>
+<p>"Lucky little Pantagruel!"</p>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Jaffery
+
+Author: William J. Locke
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2005 [EBook #14669]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JAFFERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Rick Niles, Charlie Kirschner and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (_See page 165_)]
+
+
+
+
+JAFFERY
+
+BY
+
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+F. MATANIA
+
+NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
+
+1915
+
+Press of
+J.J. Little & Ives Company
+New York, U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+TO MY WIFE
+
+
+This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial affection
+I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and
+many dreams that we have shared.
+
+You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with
+the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote.
+You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913;
+so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on
+our Egyptian journey.
+
+_C'est bien loin, tout cela_! War overtook it in its serial course; and
+now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the
+moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.
+
+These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our
+home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted
+as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to
+live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to
+modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date;
+but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we
+from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last
+words.
+
+Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there,
+across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's
+work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel
+that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice
+thundering across the lawn. . . ?
+
+W.J.L.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                         FACING
+                                                          PAGE
+
+It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with
+extraordinary sureness and gentleness             _Frontispiece_
+
+Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding      64
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek        78
+
+He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs            186
+
+"Go! You're nothing but a brute"                            228
+
+Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside        300
+
+And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning
+heap of a woman                                             316
+
+There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there
+as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too                  350
+
+
+
+
+THE
+WILLIAM J. LOCKE
+YEAR-BOOK
+
+A _bon-mot_ for each day in
+every year, selected from
+this popular author's works.
+
+_Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net_
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend, Jaffery
+Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following account of that
+dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say that I have been
+egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A man of my somewhat
+urbane and dilettante temperament does not do these things without being
+worried into them. I had the inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my
+wife), and she agreed, at the time, dutifully, that I ought to record
+our friend Jaffery's doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the
+first suggestion, the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the
+"egging on" is merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene
+insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge, all
+the facts of the story--although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian Boldero and
+poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the imbroglio, counted
+themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor wretch (a man must get
+home somewhere), was in the nursery; and that, finally, if she had been
+taught English grammar and spelling at school, she would have dispensed
+entirely with my pedantic assistance and written the story herself.
+Anyhow, man-like, I am broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't
+very much matter. Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I
+know they are one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so
+futile a thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally
+self-appointed and fantastic task.
+
+But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that if it
+had not been for Barbara I should write of these things with
+half-knowledge. Sex is a queer and incalculable solvent of human
+confidence. There are certain revelations that men will make only to a
+man, certain revelations likewise that women will make only to a man. On
+the other hand, a woman is told things by her sister women and her
+brother men which, but for her, would never reach a man's ears. So by
+combining the information obtained from our family encyclopaedia under
+the feminine heading of China with that obtained under the masculine
+heading of Philosophy, I can, figuratively speaking, like the famous
+student, issue my treatise on Chinese Philosophy.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One miraculous morning in late May, not so very many years ago, when the
+parrot-tulips in my garden were expanding themselves wantonly to the
+sun, and the lilac and laburnum which I caught, as I sat at my table,
+with the tail of one eye, and the pink may which I caught with the tail
+of the other, bloomed in splendid arrogance, my quiet outlook on
+greenery and colour was obscured by a human form. I may mention that my
+study-table is placed in the bay of a window, on the ground floor. It is
+a French window, opening on a terrace. Beyond the parapet of the
+terrace, the garden, with its apple and walnut trees, its beeches, its
+lawn, its beds of tulips, its lilac and laburnum and may and all sorts
+of other pleasant things, slopes lazily upwards to a horizon of iron
+railings separating the garden from a meadow where now and then a cow,
+when she desires to be peculiarly agreeable to the sight, poses herself
+in silhouette against the sky. I like to gaze on that adventitious cow.
+Her ruminatory attitude falls in with mine. . . . But I digress. . . .
+
+I glanced up at the obscuring human form and recognized my wife. She
+looked, I must confess, remarkably pretty, with her fair hair _blond
+comme les bles_, and her mocking cornflower blue eyes, and her mutinous
+mouth, which has never yet (after all these years) assumed a responsible
+parent's austerity. She wore a fresh white dress with coquettish bits of
+blue about the bodice. In her hand she grasped a dilapidated newspaper,
+the _Daily Telegraph_, which looked as if she had been to bed in it.
+
+"Am I disturbing you, Hilary?"
+
+She was. She knew she was. But she looked so charming, a petal of
+spring, a quick incarnation of pink may and forget-me-not and laburnum,
+that I put down my pen and I smiled.
+
+"You are, my dear," said I, "but it doesn't matter."
+
+"What are you doing?" She remained on the threshold.
+
+"I am writing my presidential address," said I, "for the Grand Meeting,
+next month, of the Hafiz Society."
+
+"I wonder," said Barbara, "why Hafiz always makes me think of sherbet."
+
+I remonstrated, waving a dismissing hand.
+
+"If that's all you've got to say--"
+
+"But it isn't."
+
+She crossed the threshold, stepped in, swished round the end of my long
+oak table and took possession of my library. I wheeled round politely in
+my chair.
+
+"Then, what is it?" I asked.
+
+"Have you read the paper this morning?"
+
+"I've glanced through the _Times_," said I.
+
+She patted her handful of bedclothing and let fall a blanket and a
+bed-spread or two--("Look at my beautifully, orderly folded _Times_,"
+said I, with an indicatory gesture) She looked and sniffed--and shed
+Vallombrosa leaves of the _Daily Telegraph_ about the library until she
+had discovered the page for which she was searching. Then she held a
+mangled sheet before my eyes.
+
+"There!" she cried, "what do you think of that?"
+
+"What do I think of what?" I asked, regarding the acre of print.
+
+"Adrian Boldero has written a novel!"
+
+"Adrian?" said I. "Well, my dear, what of it? Poor old Adrian is capable
+of anything. Nothing he did would ever surprise me. He might write a
+sonnet to a Royal Princess's first set of false teeth or steal the tin
+cup from a blind beggar's dog, and he would be still the same beautiful,
+charming, futile Adrian."
+
+Barbara pished and insisted. "But this is apparently a wonderful novel.
+There's a whole column about it. They say it's the most astounding book
+published in our generation. Look! A work of genius."
+
+"Rubbish, darling," said I, knowing my Adrian.
+
+"Take the trouble to read the notice," said Barbara, thrusting the paper
+at me in a superior manner.
+
+I took it from her and read. She was right. Somebody calling himself
+Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond Gate," which a
+usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to be a work of genius.
+He sketched the outline of the story, indicated its peculiar wonder. The
+review impressed me.
+
+"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else--not our Adrian."
+
+"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"
+
+"Thousands," said I.
+
+She pished again and tossed her pretty head.
+
+"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all about
+it."
+
+She departed through the library door into the recesses of the house
+where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of my
+presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied my
+thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the more I
+read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of "The Diamond
+Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same person.
+
+You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton
+and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of
+youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's
+shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were
+gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual
+capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of
+reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged one another pretty
+accurately and remained devoted friends. There were other men, of
+course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and each of us had our little
+separate circle; we did not form a mutual admiration society and
+advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and
+d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a quiet way, we recognised our
+quadruple union of hearts, and talked amazing rubbish and committed
+unspeakable acts of lunacy and dreamed impossible dreams in a very
+delightful, and perhaps unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our middle
+and late thirties--all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an alien
+grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He was the
+son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to talk to us
+of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they were
+haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he was forever
+writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember, were always
+on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in him firmly. He
+alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.
+
+Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would
+certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and,
+because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at
+the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.
+Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review,
+and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy
+waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of
+Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I am a happy nonentity. I
+have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
+accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few founder's
+shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to
+gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the other three
+mattered. They were definite--Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian
+Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton,
+romantically definite. And poor old Tom was dead. Dear, impossible,
+feckless fellow. He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we
+thought his brilliant career was assured--but somehow circumstances
+baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking
+pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the
+meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He
+secured a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
+us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton. He never
+reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!
+
+So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my
+Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and
+then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a
+comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something
+idiotically desperate somewhere or the other--he was a war-correspondent
+by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of hot-cross
+buns), and a desperado by predilection--I had not heard from him for a
+year; and now Adrian--if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
+he--had written an epoch-making novel.
+
+But Adrian--the precious, finnikin Adrian--how on earth could he have
+written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond doubt he was a clever
+fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the Law Tripos and had done
+well in his Bar examination. But after fourteen years or so he was
+making twopence halfpenny per annum at his profession. He made another
+three-farthings, say, by selling elegant verses to magazines. He dined
+out a great deal and spent much of his time at country houses, being a
+very popular and agreeable person. His other means of livelihood
+consisted of an allowance of four hundred a year made him by his mother.
+Beyond the social graces he had not distinguished himself. And now--
+
+"It _is_ Adrian," cried my wife, bursting into the library. "I knew it
+was. He has had several other glorious reviews which we haven't seen.
+Isn't it splendid?"
+
+Her eyes danced with loyalty and gladness. Now that I too knew it was
+our Adrian I caught her enthusiasm.
+
+"Splendid," I echoed. "To think of old Adrian making good at last! I'm
+more than glad. Telephone at once, dear, for a copy of the book."
+
+"Adrian is bringing one with him. He's coming down to dine and stay the
+night. He said he had an engagement, but I told him it was rubbish, and
+he's coming."
+
+Barbara had a despotic way with her men friends, especially with Adrian
+and Jaffery, who, each after his kind, paid her very pretty homage.
+
+"And now, I've got a hundred things to do, so you must excuse me," said
+Barbara--for all the world as if I had invited her into my library and
+was detaining her against her will.
+
+My reply was smilingly ironical. She disappeared. I returned to Hafiz.
+Soon a bumble-bee, a great fellow splendid in gold and black and
+crimson, blundered into the room and immediately made furious racket
+against a window pane. Now I can't concentrate my mind on serious
+things, if there's a bumble-bee buzzing about. So I had to get up and
+devote ten minutes to persuading the dunderhead to leave the glass and
+establish himself firmly on the piece of paper that would waft him into
+the open air and sunlight. When I lost sight of him in the glad greenery
+I again came back to my work. But two minutes afterwards my little seven
+year old daughter, rather the worse for amateur gardening, and holding a
+cage of white mice in her hand, appeared on the threshold, smiled at me
+with refreshing absence of apology, darted in, dumped the white mice on
+an open volume of my precious Turner Macan's edition of Firdusi, and
+clambering into my lap and seizing pencil and paper, instantly ordained
+my participation in her favourite game of "head, body and legs."
+
+An hour afterwards a radiant angel of a nurse claimed her for purposes
+of ablution. I once more returned to Hafiz. Then Barbara put her head in
+at the door.
+
+"Haven't you thought how delighted Doria will be?"
+
+"I haven't," said I. "I've more important things to think about."
+
+"But," said Barbara, entering and closing the door with soft
+deliberation behind her and coming to my side--"if Adrian makes a big
+success, they'll be able to marry."
+
+"Well?" said I.
+
+"Well," said she, with a different intonation. "Don't you see?"
+
+"See what?"
+
+It is wise to irritate your wife on occasion, so as to manifest your
+superiority. She shook me by the collar and stamped her foot.
+
+"Don't you care a bit whether your friends get married or not?"
+
+"Not a bit," said I.
+
+Barbara lifted the Macan's Firdusi, still suffering the desecration of
+the forgotten cage of white mice, onto my manuscript and hoisted herself
+on the cleared corner of the table.
+
+"Doria is my dearest friend. She did my sums for me at school, although
+I was three years older. If it hadn't been for us, she and Adrian would
+never have met."
+
+"That I admit," I interrupted. "But having started on the path of crime
+we're not bound to pursue it to the end."
+
+"You're simply horrid!" she cried. "We've talked for years of the sad
+story of these two poor young things, and now, when there's a chance of
+their marrying, you say you don't care a bit!"
+
+"My dear," said I, rising, "what with you and Adrian and a bumble-bee
+and the child and two white mice, and now Doria, my morning's work is
+ruined. Let us go out into the garden and watch the starlings resting in
+the walnut trees. Incidentally we might discuss Doria and Adrian."
+
+"Now you're talking sense," said Barbara.
+
+So we went into the garden--and discussed the formation next autumn of a
+new rose-bed.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the afternoon train came Adrian, impeccably vestured and feverish
+with excitement. Two evening papers which he brandished nervously,
+proclaimed "The Diamond Gate" a masterpiece. The book had been only out
+a week--(we country mice knew nothing of it)--and already, so his
+publisher informed him, repeat orders were coming in from the libraries
+and distributing agents.
+
+"Wittekind, my publisher, declares it's going to be the biggest thing in
+first novels ever known. And though I say it as shouldn't, dear old
+Hilary,"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"it's a damned fine book."
+
+I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his
+manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a
+smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had
+conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured me
+in the shade. At one leap he had mounted to planes beyond our dreams.
+All this his attitude betokened. He removed the hand from my shoulder
+and flourished it in a happy gesture.
+
+"My fortune's made," he cried.
+
+"But, my dear fellow," I asked, "why have you sprung this surprise on
+us? I had no idea you were writing a novel."
+
+He laughed. "No one had. Not even Doria. It was on her account I kept it
+secret. I didn't want to arouse possible false hopes. It's very simple.
+Besides, I like being a dark horse. It's exciting. Don't you remember
+how paralysed you all were when I got my First at Cambridge? Everybody
+thought I hadn't done a stroke of work--but I had sweated like mad all
+the time."
+
+This was quite true, the sudden brilliance of the end of Adrian's
+University career had dazzled the whole of his acquaintance. Barbara,
+impatient of retrospect, came to the all-important point.
+
+"How does Doria take it?"
+
+He turned on her and beamed. He was one of those dapper, slim-built men
+who can turn with quick grace.
+
+"She's as pleased as Punch. Gave it to old man Jornicroft to read and
+insisted on his reading it. He's impressed. Never thought I had it in
+me. Can't see, however, where the commercial value of it comes in."
+
+"Wait till you show him your first thumping cheque," sympathised my
+wife.
+
+"I'm going to," he exclaimed boyishly. "I might have done it this
+afternoon. Wittekind was off his head with delight and if I had asked
+him to give me a bogus cheque for ten thousand to show to old man
+Jornicroft, he would have written it without a murmur."
+
+"How much did he really write a cheque for this afternoon?" I asked,
+knowing (as I have said before) my Adrian.
+
+Barbara looked shocked. "Hilary!" she remonstrated.
+
+But Adrian laughed in high good humour. "He gave me a hundred pounds on
+account."
+
+"That won't impress Mr. Jornicroft at all," said I.
+
+"It impressed my tailor, who cashed it, deducting a quarter of his
+bill."
+
+"Do you mean to say, my dear Adrian," I questioned, "that you went to
+your tailor with a cheque for a hundred pounds and said, 'I want to pay
+you a quarter of what I owe you, will you give me change?'"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"But why didn't you pass the cheque through your banking account and
+post him your own cheque?"
+
+"Did you ever hear such an innocent?" he cried gaily. "I wanted to
+impress him, I did. One must do these things with an air. He stuffed my
+pockets with notes and gold--there has never been any one so all over
+money as I am at this particular minute--and then I gave him an order
+for half-a-dozen suits straight away."
+
+"Good God!" I cried aghast. "I've never had six suits of clothes at a
+time since I was born."
+
+"And more shame for you. Look!" said he, drawing my wife's attention to
+my comfortable but old and deliberately unfashionable raiment. "I love
+you, my dear Barbara, but you are to blame."
+
+"Hilary," said my wife, "the next time you go to town you'll order
+half-a-dozen suits and I'll come with you to see you do it. Who is your
+tailor, Adrian?"
+
+He gave the address. "The best in London. And if you go to him on my
+introduction--Good Lord!"--it seemed to amuse him vastly--"I can order
+half-a-dozen more!"
+
+All this seemed to me, who am not devoid of a sense of humour and an
+appreciation of the pleasant flippancies of life, somewhat futile and
+frothy talk, unworthy of the author of "The Diamond Gate" and the lover
+of Doria Jornicroft. I expressed this opinion and Barbara, for once,
+agreed with me.
+
+"Yes. Let us be serious. In the first place you oughtn't to allude to
+Doria's father as 'old man Jornicroft.' It isn't respectful."
+
+"But I don't respect him. Who could? He is bursting with money, but
+won't give Doria a farthing, won't hear of our marriage, and practically
+forbids me the house. What possible feeling can one have for an old
+insect like that?"
+
+"I've never seen any reason," said Barbara, who is a brave little woman,
+"why Doria shouldn't run away and marry you."
+
+"She would like a shot," cried Adrian; "but I won't let her. How can I
+allow her to rush to the martyrdom of married misery on four hundred a
+year, which I don't even earn?"
+
+I looked at my watch. "It's time, my friends," said I, "to dress for
+dinner. Afterwards we can continue the discussion. In the meanwhile I'll
+order up some of the '89 Pol Roger so that we can drink to the success
+of the book."
+
+"The '89 Pol Roger?" cried Adrian. "A man with '89 Pol Roger in his
+cellar is the noblest work of God!"
+
+"I was thinking," Barbara remarked drily, "of asking Doria to spend a
+few days here next week."
+
+"All I can say is," he retorted, with his quick turn and smile, "that
+you are the Divinity Itself."
+
+So, a short time afterwards, a very happy Adrian sat down to dinner and
+brought a cultivated taste to the appreciation of a now, alas!
+historical wine, under whose influence he expanded and told us of the
+genesis and the making of "The Diamond Gate."
+
+Now it is a very odd coincidence, one however which had little, if
+anything, to do with the curious entanglement of my friend's affairs
+into which I was afterwards drawn, but an odd coincidence all the same,
+that on passing from the dining room with Adrian to join Barbara in the
+drawing room, I found among the last post letters lying on the hall
+table one which, with a thrill of pleasure, I held up before Adrian's
+eyes.
+
+"Do you recognise the handwriting?"
+
+"Good Lord!" cried he. "It's from Jaffery Chayne. And"--he scanned the
+stamp and postmark--"from Cettinje. What the deuce is he doing there?"
+
+"Let us see!" said I.
+
+I opened the letter and scanned it through; then I read it aloud.
+
+     "Dear Hilary,
+
+     "A line to let you know that I'm coming back soon. I haven't quite
+     finished my job--"
+
+     "What was his job?"
+
+     "Heaven knows," I replied. "The last time I heard from him he was
+     cruising about the Sargasso Sea."
+
+     I resumed my reading.
+
+     "--for the usual reason, a woman. If it wasn't for women what a
+     thundering amount of work a man could get through. Anyhow--I'm
+     coming back, with an encumbrance. A wife. Not my wife, thank
+     Olympus, but another man's wife--"
+
+     "Poor old devil!" cried Adrian. "I knew he would come a mucker one
+     of these days!"
+
+     "Wait," said I, and I read--
+
+     "--poor Prescott's wife. I don't think you ever knew Prescott, but
+     he was a good sort. He died of typhoid. Only quaggas and yaks and
+     other iron-gutted creatures like myself can stand Albania. I'm
+     escorting her to England, so look out for us. How's everybody? Do
+     you ever hear of Adrian? If so, collar him. I want to work the
+     widow off on him. She has a goodish deal of money and is a kind of
+     human dynamo. The best thing in the world for Adrian."
+
+     Adrian confounded the fellow. I continued--
+
+     "Prepare then for the Dynamic Widow. Love to Barbara, the fairy
+     grasshopper--"
+
+     "Who's that?"
+
+     "My daughter, Susan Freeth. The last time he saw her, she was
+     hopping about in a green jumper--Barbara would give you the
+     elementary costume's commercial name."
+
+     "--and yourself," I read. "By the way, do you know of a
+     granite-built, iron-gated, portcullised, barbicaned, really
+     comfortable home for widows?
+
+     Yours, Jaffery."
+
+Without waiting for comment from Adrian, I went with the letter into the
+drawing room, he following. I handed it to Barbara, who ran it through.
+
+"That's just like Jaffery. He tells us nothing."
+
+"I think he has told us everything," said I.
+
+"But who and what and whence is this lady?"
+
+"Goodness knows!" said I.
+
+"Therefore, he has told us nothing," retorted Barbara. "My own belief is
+that she's a Brazilian."
+
+"But what," asked Adrian, "would a lone Brazilian female be doing in the
+Balkans?"
+
+"Looking for a husband, of course," said Barbara.
+
+And like all wise men when staggered by serene feminine asseveration we
+bowed our heads and agreed that nothing could be more obvious.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Some weeks passed; but we heard no more of Jaffery Chayne. If he had
+planted his widow there, in Cettinje, and gone off to Central Africa we
+should not have been surprised. On the other hand, he might have walked
+in at any minute, just as though he lived round the corner and had
+dropped in casually to see us.
+
+In the meantime events had moved rapidly for Adrian. Everybody was
+talking about his book; everybody was buying it. The rare phenomenon of
+the instantaneous success of a first book by an unknown author was
+occurring also in America. Golden opinions were being backed by golden
+cash. Adrian continued to draw on his publishers, who, fortunately for
+them, had an American house. Anticipating possible alluring proposals
+from other publishers, they offered what to him were dazzling and
+fantastic terms for his next two novels. He accepted. He went about the
+world wearing Fortune like a halo. He achieved sudden fame; fame so
+widespread that Mr. Jornicroft heard of it in the city, where he
+promoted (and still promotes) companies with monotonous success. The
+result was an interview to which Adrian came wisely armed with a note
+from his publisher as to sales up to date, and the amazing contract
+which he had just signed. He left the house with a father's blessing in
+his ears and an affianced bride's kisses on his lips. The wedding was
+fixed for September. Adrian declared himself to be the happiest of God's
+creatures and spent his days in joy-sodden idleness. His mother, with
+tears in her eyes, increased his allowance.
+
+The book that created all this commotion, I frankly admit, held me
+spellbound. It deserved the highest encomiums by the most enthusiastic
+reviewers. It was one of the most irresistible books I had ever read. It
+was a modern high romance of love and pity, of tears iridescent with
+laughter, of strong and beautiful though erring souls; it was at once
+poignant and tender; it vibrated with drama; it was instinct with calm
+and kindly wisdom. In my humility, I found I had not known my Adrian one
+little bit. As the shepherd of old who had a sort of patronizing
+affection for the irresponsible, dancing, flute-playing, goat-footed
+creature of the woodland was stricken with panic when he recognised the
+god, so was I convulsed when I recognised the genius of my friend
+Adrian. And the fellow still went on dancing and flute-playing and I
+stared at him open-mouthed.
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, who was a widower, gave a great dinner party at his
+house in Park Crescent, in honour of the engagement. My wife and I
+attended, fishes somewhat out of water amid this brilliant but solid
+assembly of what it pleased Barbara to call "merchantates." She
+expressed a desire to shrink out of the glare of the diamonds; but she
+wore her grandmother's pearls, and, being by far the youngest and
+prettiest matron present, held her own with the best of them. There were
+stout women, thin women, white-haired women, women who ought to have
+been white-haired, but were not; sprightly and fashionable women; but
+besides Barbara, the only other young woman was Doria herself.
+
+She took us aside, as soon as we were released from the formal welcome
+of Mr. Jornicroft, a thickset man with a very bald head and heavy black
+moustache.
+
+"The sight of you two is like a breath of fresh air. Did you ever meet
+with anything so stuffy?"
+
+Now, considering that all these prosperous folks had come to do her
+homage I thought the remark rather ungracious.
+
+"It's apt to be stuffy in July in London," I said.
+
+She laid her hand on Barbara's wrist and pointed at me with her fan.
+
+"He thinks he's rebuking me. But I don't care. I'm glad to see him all
+the same. These people mean nothing but money and music-halls and bridge
+and restaurants--I'm so sick of it. You two mean something else."
+
+"Don't speak sacrilegiously of restaurants, even though you are going to
+marry a genius," said I. "There is one in Paris to which Adrian will
+take you straight--like a homing bird."
+
+"Wherever Adrian takes me, it will be beautiful," she said defiantly.
+
+My little critical humour vanished, for she looked so valiantly adorable
+in her love for the man. She was very small and slenderly made, with
+dark hair, luminous eyes, and ivory-white complexion, a sensitive nose
+and mouth, a wisp of nerves and passion. She carried her head high and,
+for so diminutive a person, appeared vastly important.
+
+Adrian, released from an ex-Lady Mayoress, came up all smiles, to greet
+us. Doria gave him a glance which in spite of my devotion to Barbara and
+my abhorrence of hair's breadth deviation from strict monogamy dealt me
+a pang of unregenerate jealousy. There is only one man in the universe
+worthy of being so regarded by a woman; and he is oneself. Every
+true-minded man will agree with me. She was inordinately proud of him;
+proud too of herself in that she had believed in him and given him her
+love long before he became famous. Adrian's eyes softened as they met
+the glance. He turned to Barbara.
+
+"It's in a crowd like this that she looks so mysterious--an Elemental;
+but whether of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, I shall spend my life trying
+to discover."
+
+The faintest flush possible mounted to that pure ivory-white cheek of
+hers. She laughed and caught me by the arm.
+
+"I must carry you to Lady Bagshawe--you're taking her in to dinner. Her
+husband is Master of the Organ-Grinders' Company--"
+
+"No, no, Doria," said I.
+
+"--Well, it's some city company--I don't know--and she is a museum of
+diseases and a gazetteer of cure places. Now you know where you are."
+
+She led me to Lady Bagshawe. Soon afterwards we trooped down to dinner,
+during which I learned more of my inside than I knew before, and more of
+that of Lady Bagshawe than any of her most fervent adorers in their
+wildest dreams could have ever hoped to ascertain; during which, also, I
+endeavoured to convince an unknown, but agreeable lady on my left that I
+did not play polo, whereat, it seemed, her eight brothers were experts;
+and that Omar Khayyam was a contemporary not of the Prophet Isaiah, but
+of William the Conqueror. As for the setting--I am not an observant
+man--but I had an impression of much gold and silver and rare flora on
+the table, great gold frames enclosing (I doubt not) costly pictures on
+the walls, many desirable jewels on undesirable bosoms, strong though
+unsympathetic masculine faces, and such food and drink as Lucullus, poor
+fellow, did not live long enough to discover.
+
+When the ladies retired, and we moved up towards our host, I found
+myself between two groups; one discussing the mercantile depravity of a
+gentleman called Wilmot, of whom I had never heard, the other arguing
+on dark dilemmas connected with an Abyssinian loan. A vacant chair
+happening to be by my side, Adrian, glass in hand, came round the table
+and sat down.
+
+"How are you getting on?"
+
+"Well," said I. "Very well." I sipped my port. I recognised Cockburn
+1870.
+
+"You seemed rather at a loose end."
+
+"When one has 1870 port to drink," said I, "why fritter away its flavour
+in vain words?"
+
+"It is damned good port," Adrian admitted.
+
+"Earth holds nothing better," said I.
+
+We lapsed into silence amid the talk on each side of us. I confess that
+I rather surrendered myself to the wine. A little taper for cigarettes
+happened to be in front of me; I held my glass in its light and lost
+myself in the wine's pure depths of mystery and colour; and my mind
+wandered to the lusty sunshine of "Lusitanian summers" that was there
+imprisoned. I inhaled its fragrance, I accepted its exquisite and
+spacious generosity. Wine, like bread and oil--"God's three chief
+words"--is a thing of itself--a thing of earth and air and sun--one of
+the great natural things, such as the stars and the flowers and the eyes
+of a dog. Even the most mouth-twisting new wine of Northern Italy has
+its fascination for me, in that it is essentially something apart from
+the dust and empty racket of the world; how much more then this radiant
+vintage suddenly awakened from its slumber in the darkness of forty
+years. So I mused, as I think an honest man is justified in musing,
+soberly, over a great wine, when suddenly my left eye caught Adrian's
+face. He too was musing; but musing on unhappy things, for a hand seemed
+to have swept his face and wiped the joy from it. He was gazing at his
+half-emptied glass, with the short stem of which his fingers were
+nervously toying. There was a quick snap. The stem broke and the wine
+flowed over the cloth. He started, and with a flash the old Adrian came
+back, manifesting itself in his smiling dismay, his boyish apology to
+Mr. Jornicroft for smashing a rare glass, spoiling the tablecloth and
+wasting precious wine. The incident served to disequilibrate, as one
+might say, the two discussions on Wilmot and Abyssinia. Coffee came and
+liqueurs. I bade farewell to Lusitanian dreams and found myself in heart
+to heart conversation with my neighbour on the right, a florid,
+simple-minded sugar-broker, a certain next-year's Sheriff of the City of
+London, whose consuming ambition was to become a member of the Athenaeum
+Club. When I informed him that I was privileged to enter that Valley of
+Dry Bones--my late father, an eminent Assyriologist and a disastrous
+Master of Fox hounds, had put me up for all sorts of weird institutions,
+I think, before I was born--my sugar broker almost fell at my feet and
+worshipped me. Although I told him that the premises were overrun with
+Bishops and that we had laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail,
+he refused to be disillusioned. I told him that on the occasion of my
+last visit to the Megatherium--Thackeray, I explained--a Royal
+Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate
+"The Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the
+austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room story
+which was current at my preparatory school--and that in the library I
+ran into an equally desolate, though even less familiar Archdeacon, who
+seized me, like the Ancient Mariner, and never let me go until he had
+impressed upon my mind the name and address of the only man in London
+who could cut clerical gaiters. But the simple child of sugar would have
+his way. There was but one Valhalla in London, and it was built by
+Decimus Burton.
+
+After that we joined the ladies for an unimportant half hour or so, and
+then Barbara and I took our leave. As we were motoring home--we live
+some thirty miles out of London--we discussed the dinner party,
+according to the way of married folks, home-bound after a feast, and I
+mentioned the trivial incident of Adrian and the broken glass. Why
+should his face have been so haggard when he had everything to make him
+happy?
+
+"He was thinking of Mr. Jornicroft's previous insulting behaviour."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"He told me," said Barbara.
+
+"I never knew Adrian to be seriously vindictive," said I.
+
+"It strikes me, my dear," replied Barbara, taking my hand, "that you are
+an old ignoramus."
+
+And this from a woman who actively glories in not knowing how many "r's"
+there are in "harassed."
+
+She nestled up to me. "We're not going abroad in August, are we?"
+
+"What?" I cried, "leave the English country during the only part of the
+year that is not 'deformed with dripping rains or withered by a frost'?
+Certainly not."
+
+"But we did last year, and the year before."
+
+"Pure accident. The year before, Susan was recovering from the measles
+and you had some pretty frocks which you thought would look lovely at
+Dinard. And last year you also had some frocks and insisted that
+Houlgate was the only place where Susan could avoid being stricken down
+by scarlet-fever."
+
+"Anyhow," said my wife, "we're not going away this year, for I've fixed
+up with Doria and Adrian to spend August at Northlands."
+
+"Why didn't you tell me so at once? Why did you ask me whether we were
+going away?"
+
+"Because I knew we weren't," she answered.
+
+In putting two questions at the same time, I blundered. The first was a
+poser and might have elicited some interesting revelation of feminine
+mental process. In forlorn hope I repeated it.
+
+"Why, I've told you, stupid," said Barbara. "You've no objection to
+their coming, have you?"
+
+"Good Lord, no. I'm delighted."
+
+"From the way you've argued, any one would have thought you didn't want
+them."
+
+Outraged by the illogic, I gasped; but she broke into a laugh.
+
+"You silly old Hilary," she said. "Don't you see that Doria must get her
+trousseau together and Adrian must find a house or a flat, that has to
+be decorated and furnished, and the poor child hasn't a mother or any
+sensible woman in the world to look after her but me?"
+
+"I see," said I, "that you intend having the time of your life."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My prevision proved correct. In August came the engaged couple and every
+day Barbara took them up to town and whirled them about from house-agent
+to house-agent until she found a flat to suit them, and then from
+emporium to emporium until she found furniture to suit the flat, and
+from raiment-vendor to raiment-vendor until she equipped Doria to suit
+the furniture. She used to return almost speechless with exhaustion; but
+pantingly and with the glaze of victory in her eyes, she fought all her
+battles o'er again and told of bargains won. In the meantime had it not
+been for Susan, I should have lived in the solitude of an anchorite. We
+spent much time in the garden which we (she less conscious of irony than
+I) called our desert island. I was Robinson Crusoe and she was Man
+Friday, and on the whole we were quite happy; perhaps I should have been
+happier in a temperature of 80 deg. in the shade if I had not been forced to
+wear the Polar bear rug from the drawing-room in representation of
+Crusoe's goatskins. I did suggest that I should be Robinson Crusoe's
+brother, who wore ordinary flannels, and that she should be Woman
+Wednesday. But Susan saw through the subterfuge and that game didn't
+work. One afternoon, however, Barbara, returning earlier than usual,
+caught us at it and expressing horror and indignation at the uses to
+which the bearskin was put, metaphorically whipped me and sent me to bed
+as being the elder of the naughty ones. After that we played at fairies
+in a glade, which was much cooler.
+
+It was in the evenings that I was loneliest; for then Barbara went early
+to bed, and the lovers strolled about together in the moonlight. With
+the intention, half-malicious, half-pitiful, of filling up my time,
+Doria taught me a new and complicated Patience. Then finally, when
+Doria, having spent a couple of polite minutes in the drawing-room, had
+retired, and when I was tired out from the strain of the day and
+half-asleep through weariness, Adrian would mix himself the longest
+possible brandy and soda, light the longest possible cigar and try to
+keep me up all night listening to his conversation.
+
+At last, one Friday evening, while I was engaged in my forlorn and
+unprofitable game, the butler entered the drawing-room with unperturbed
+announcement:
+
+"Mr. Chayne on the telephone, sir."
+
+I sent the card table flying amid the wreckage of my lay-out and rushed
+to the telephone.
+
+"Hullo! That you, Jaff?"
+
+"Yes, old man. Very much me. A devil of a lot of me. How are you?"
+
+His strong bass boomed through the receiver. I have always found a
+queer comfort in Jaffery's voice. It wraps you round about in thundering
+waves. We exchanged the commonplaces of delighted greeting. I asked:
+
+"When did you arrive?"
+
+"A couple of days ago."
+
+"Why on earth didn't you let me know at once?"
+
+I heard him laugh. "I'll tell you when I see you. By the way, can
+Barbara have me for the week-end?"
+
+This was like Jaffery. Most men would have asked me, taking Barbara for
+granted.
+
+"Barbara would have you for the rest of time," said I. "And so would
+Susan. I'll expect you by the 11 o'clock train."
+
+"Right," said he.
+
+"And, I say!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Talking of fair ladies--what about--?"
+
+"Oh, Hell!" came Jaffery's great voice. "She's here right enough."
+
+"Where?" I asked.
+
+"The Savoy. So is Euphemia--"
+
+Euphemia was Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a
+little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting muscat grape.
+
+"Euphemia has taken her on. Wants to convert her."
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Is she a Turk?"
+
+"She's a problem." And his great laugh vibrated in my ears.
+
+"Why not bring her down with Euphemia?"
+
+"I want a couple of days off. I want a good quiet time, with no female
+women about save Barbara and my fairy grasshopper whom, as you know, I
+love to distraction."
+
+"But will Euphemia be all right with her?"
+
+I had not the faintest notion what kind of a creature the "problem" was.
+
+"Right as rain. Euphemia has fixed up to take her to-morrow night to a
+lecture on Tolstoi at the Lyceum Club, and to the City Temple on Sunday.
+Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+His Homeric laughter must have shattered the Trunk Telephone system of
+Great Britain, for after that there was silence cold and merciless.
+Well, perhaps it was just as well, for if we had been allowed to
+converse further I might have told him that another female woman, Doria
+Jornicroft, was staying at Northlands, and he might not have come.
+Jaffery was always a queer fish where women were concerned. Not a
+chilly, fishy fish, but a sort of Laodicean fish, now hot, now cold. I
+have seen him shrink like a sensitive plant in the presence of an
+ingenue of nineteen and royster in Pantagruelian fashion with a mature
+member of the chorus of the Paris Opera; I ham e also known him to fly,
+a scared Joseph, from the allurements of the charming wife of a Right
+Honourable Sir Cornifer Potiphar, G.C.M.G., and sigh like a furnace in
+front of an obdurate little milliner's place of business in Bond Street.
+I do not, for the world, wish it to be supposed that I am insinuating
+that my dear old Jaffery had no morals. He had--lots of them. He was
+stuffed with them. But what they were, neither he nor I nor any one else
+was ever able to define. As a general rule, however, he was shy of
+strange women, and to that category did Doria belong.
+
+When the lovers came in I told them my news. Adrian expressed
+extravagant delight. A little tiny cloud flitted over Doria's brow.
+
+"Shall I like him?" she asked.
+
+"You'll adore him," cried Adrian.
+
+"I'll try to, dear, because he seems to mean so much to you. Are you
+going up to town with us to-morrow?"
+
+"There's only a morning's fitting at a dressmaker--no place for me," he
+laughed. "I'll stay and welcome old Jaffery."
+
+Again the most transient of tiny little clouds. But I could not help
+thinking that if Jaffery had been a woman instead of a mere man, there
+would have been a thunderstorm.
+
+When we were alone Adrian threw himself into a chair.
+
+"Women are funny beings," he said. "I do believe Doria is jealous of old
+Jaffery."
+
+"You have every reason to be proud," said I, "of your psychological
+acumen."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+A fair-bearded, red-faced, blue-eyed, grinning giant got out of the
+train and catching sight of us ran up and laid a couple of great
+sun-glazed hands on my shoulders.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!" he shouted, and gripping Adrian in his turn,
+shouted it again. He made such an uproar that people stuck wondering
+heads out of the carriage windows. Then he thrust himself between us,
+linked our arms in his and made us charge with him down the quiet
+country platform. A porter followed with his suit-case.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me that the Man of Fame was with you?"
+
+"I thought I'd give you a pleasant surprise," said I.
+
+"I met Robson of the Embassy in Constantinople--you remember Robson of
+Pembroke--fussy little cock-sparrow--he'd just come from England and was
+full of it. You seem to have got 'em in the neck. Bully! Bully!"
+
+Adrian took advantage of the narrow width of the exit to release himself
+and I, who went on with Jaffery, looking back, saw him rub himself
+ruefully, as though he had been mauled by a bear.
+
+"And how's everybody?" Jaffery's voice reverberated through the subway.
+"Barbara and the fairy grasshopper? I'm longing to see 'em. That's the
+pull of being free. You can adopt other fellows' wives and families. I'm
+coming home now to my adopted wife and daughter. How are they?"
+
+I answered explicitly. He boomed on till we reached the station yard,
+where his eye fell upon a familiar object.
+
+"What?" cried he. "Have you still got the Chinese Puffhard?"
+
+The vehicle thus disrespectfully alluded to was an ancient, ancient car,
+the pride of many a year ago, which sentiment (together with the
+impossibility of finding a purchaser) would not allow me to sell. It had
+been a splendid thing in those far-off days. It kept me in health. It
+made me walk miles and miles along unknown and unfrequented roads. In
+the aggregate I must have spent months of my life doing physical culture
+exercises underneath it. You got into it at the back; it was about ten
+feet high, and you started it at the side by a handle in its midriff.
+But I loved it. It still went, if treated kindly. Barbara loathed it and
+insulted it, so that with her as passenger, it sulked and refused to go.
+But Susan's adoration surpassed even mine. Its demoniac groans and
+rattles and convulsive quakings appealed to her unspoiled sense of
+adventure.
+
+"Barbara has gone away with the Daimler," said I, "and as I don't keep a
+fleet of cars, I had to choose between this and the donkey-cart. Get in
+and don't be so fastidious--unless you're afraid--"
+
+He took no account of my sarcasm. His face fell. He made no attempt to
+enter the car.
+
+"Barbara gone away?"
+
+I burst out laughing. His disappointment at not being welcomed by
+Barbara at Northlands was so genuine and so childishly unconcealed.
+
+"She'll be back in time for lunch. She had to run up to town on
+business. She sent you her love and Susie will do the honours."
+
+His face brightened. "That's all right. But you gave me a shock.
+Northlands without Barbara--" He shook his head.
+
+We drove off. The Chinese Puffhard excelled herself, and though she
+choked asthmatically did not really stop once until we were half way up
+the drive, when I abandoned her to the gardeners, who later on harnessed
+the donkey to her and pulled her into the motor-house. We dismounted,
+however, in the drive. A tiny figure in a blue smock came scuttling over
+the sloping lawn. The next thing I saw was the small blue patch
+somewhere in the upland region of Jaffery's beard. Then boomed forth
+from him idiotic exclamations which are not worth chronicling,
+accompanied by a duet of bass and treble laughter. Then he set her
+astride of his bull neck and pitched his soft felt hat to Adrian to
+hold.
+
+"Hang on to my hair. It won't hurt," he commanded.
+
+She obeyed literally, clawing two handfuls of his thick reddish shock in
+her tiny grasp, and Jaffery lumbered along like an elephant with a robin
+on his head, unconscious of her weight. We mounted to the terrace in
+front of the house and having established my guests in easy chairs, I
+went indoors to order such drink as would be refreshing on a sultry
+August noon. When I returned I found Jaffery, with Susan on his knee,
+questioning Adrian, after the manner of a primitive savage, on the
+subject of "The Diamond Gate," and Adrian, delighted at the opportunity,
+dazzling our simple-minded friend with publisher's statistics.
+
+"And you're writing another? Deep down in another?" asked Jaffery. "Do
+you know, Susie, Uncle Adrian has just got to take a pen and jab it into
+a piece of paper, and--tchick!--up comes a golden sovereign every time
+he does it."
+
+Susan turned her serene gaze on Adrian. "Do it now," she commanded.
+
+"I haven't got a pen," said he.
+
+"I'll fetch you one from Daddy's study," she said, sliding from
+Jaffery's knee.
+
+Both Jaffery and Adrian looked scared. I, who was not the father of a
+feminine thing of seven years old for nothing, interposed, I think,
+rather tactfully.
+
+"Uncle Adrian can only do it with a great gold pen, and poor old daddy
+hasn't got one."
+
+"I call that silly," replied my daughter. "Uncle Jaffery, have you got
+one?"
+
+"No," said he, "You have to be born, like Uncle Adrian, with a golden
+pen in your mouth."
+
+The lucky advent of the Archangel Gabriel, with a grin on his face and a
+doll in his mouth--the Archangel Gabriel, commonly known as Gabs, and so
+termed on account of his archi-angelic disposition, a hideous mongrel
+with a white patch over one eye and a brown patch over the other, with
+the nose of a collie and the legs of a Great Dane and the tail of a
+fox-terrier, whose mongreldom, however, Adrian repudiated by the bold
+assertion that he was a Zanzibar bloodhound--the lucky advent of this
+pampered and over-affectionate quadruped directed Susan's mind from the
+somewhat difficult conversation. She ran off, forthwith, to the rescue
+or her doll; but later (I heard) her nurse was sore put to it to explain
+the mystery of the golden pen.
+
+"So much for Adrian. I'm tired of the auriferous person," said I, waving
+a hand. "What about yourself? What about the dynamic widow?"
+
+"Oh, damn the dynamic widow," he replied, corrugating his serene and
+sunburnt forehead. "I've come down here to forget her. I'll tell you
+about her later." Then he grinned, in his silly, familiar way, showing
+two rows of astonishingly white, strong teeth, between the hair on lip
+and chin.
+
+"Well," said I, "at any rate give some account of yourself. What were
+you doing in Albania, for instance?"
+
+"Prospecting," said he.
+
+"In what--gold, coal, iron?"
+
+"War," said he. "There's going to be a hell of a bust-up one of these
+days--and one of these days very soon--in the Balkans. From Scutari to
+Salonica to Rodosto, the whole blooming triangle--it's going to be a
+battlefield. The war correspondent who goes out there not knowing his
+ground will be a silly ass. The slim statesman like me won't. See? So
+poor old Prescott--you must know Prescott of Reuter's?--anyhow that was
+the chap--poor old Prescott and I went out exploring. When he pegged out
+with enteric I hadn't finished, so I dumped his widow down at Cettinje
+where I have some pals, and started out again on my own. That's all."
+
+He filled another pint tumbler with the iced liquid (one always had to
+provide largely for Jaffery's needs) and poured it down his throat.
+
+"I don't call that a very picturesque account of your adventures," said
+Adrian.
+
+Jaffery grinned. "I'll tell you all sorts of funny things, if you'll
+give me time," said he, wiping his lips with a vast red and white
+handkerchief about the size of a ship's Union Jack.
+
+But we did not give him time; we plied him with questions and for the
+next hour he entertained us pleasantly with stories of his wanderings.
+He had a Rabelaisian way of laughing over must of his experiences, even
+those which had a touch of the gruesome, and the laughter got into his
+speech, so that many amusing episodes were told in the roars of a
+hilarious lion.
+
+Presently the familiar sound of the horn announced the return of
+Barbara. We sprang to our feet and descended to meet the car at the
+front porch. Jaffery, grinning with delight, opened the door, appeared
+to lift a radiant Barbara out of the car like a parcel and almost hugged
+her. And there they stood holding on to each other's hands and smiling
+into each other's faces and saying how well they looked, regardless of
+the fact that they were blocking the way for Doria, who remained in the
+car, I had to move them on with the reminder that they had the whole
+week-end for their effusions. Adrian helped Doria to alight, and to
+Doria then, for the first time, was presented Jaffery Chayne. Jaffery
+blinked at her oddly as he held her little gloved fingers in his
+enormous hand. And, indeed, I could excuse him; for she was a very
+striking object to come suddenly into the immediate range of a man's
+vision, with her chiffon and her slenderness, and her black hat beneath
+which her great eyes shone from the startling, nervous, ivory-white
+face.
+
+She smiled on him graciously. "I'm so glad to meet you." Then after a
+fraction of a second came the explanation. "I've heard so much of you."
+
+He murmured something into his beard. Meeting his childlike gaze of
+admiration, she turned away and put her arm round Barbara's waist. The
+ladies went indoors to take off their things, accompanied by Adrian, who
+wanted a lover's word with Doria on the way. Jaffery followed her with
+his eyes until she had disappeared at the corner of the hall-stairs.
+Then he took me by the arm and led me up towards the terrace.
+
+"Who is that singularly beautiful girl?" he asked.
+
+"Doria Jornicroft," said I.
+
+"She's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in my life."
+
+"I wouldn't find her too astonishing, if I were you," said I with a
+laugh, "because there might be complications. She's engaged to Adrian."
+
+He dropped my arm. "Do you mean--she's going to marry him?"
+
+"Next month," said I.
+
+"Well, I'm damned," said Jaffery. I asked him why. He did not enlighten
+me. "Isn't he a lucky devil?" he asked, instead. "The most
+pestilentially lucky devil under the sun. But why the deuce didn't you
+tell me before?"
+
+"You expressed such a distaste for female women that we thought we would
+give you as long a respite as possible."
+
+"That's all very well," he grumbled. "But if I had known that Adrian's
+fiancee was knocking around I'd have lumped her in my heart with Barbara
+and Susie."
+
+"You're not prevented from doing that now," said I.
+
+His brow cleared. "True, sonny." He broke into a guffaw. "Fancy old
+Adrian getting married!"
+
+"I see nothing funny in it," said I. "Lots of people get married. I'm
+married."
+
+"Oh, you--you were born to be married," he said crushingly.
+
+"And so are you," I retorted.
+
+"I? I tie myself to the stay-strings of a flip of a thing in petticoats,
+whom I should have to swear to love, honour and obey--?"
+
+"My good fellow," I interrupted, "it is the woman who swears obedience."
+
+"And the man practises it. Ho! Ho! Ho!"
+
+His laughter (at this very poor repartee) so resounded that the
+adventitious cow, in the field some hundred yards away, lifted her tail
+in the air and scampered away, in terror.
+
+"And as to the stay-strings, to continue your delicate metaphor, you can
+always cut them when you like."
+
+"Yes. And then there's the devil to pay. She shows you the ends and
+makes you believe they're dripping blood and tears. Don't I know 'em?
+They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."
+
+He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
+institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
+provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
+multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
+But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
+untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
+conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
+scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
+them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
+spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
+colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.
+
+"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
+you were a devil of a fellow."
+
+"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory, or
+rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of those men
+who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs with air, who
+must get out into the wilds if they're to live--God! I'd sooner be
+snowed up on a battlefield than smirk at a damned afternoon tea-party
+any day in the week! If I want a woman, I like to take her by her hair
+and swing her up behind me on the saddle and ride away with her--"
+
+"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"
+
+"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But that's my
+attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would be for me to
+tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of a thing in
+petticoats."
+
+"You're a blessed innocent," said I.
+
+Adrian sauntering through the French window of my library joined us on
+the terrace. Jaffery, forgetful of his attitude, his philosophy, caught
+him by the shoulders and shook him in pain-dealing exuberance. Old
+Adrian was going to be married. He wished him joy. Yet it was no use his
+wishing him joy because he already had it--it was assured. That
+exquisite wonder of a girl. Adrian was a lucky devil, a pestilentially
+lucky devil. He, Jaffery, had fallen in love with her on sight. . . .
+
+"And if I hadn't told him that Miss Jornicroft was engaged to you," said
+I, "he would have taken her by the hair of her head and swung her up
+behind him on the saddle and ridden away with her. It's a little way
+Jaffery has."
+
+In spite of sunburn, freckles and pervading hairiness of face, Jaffery
+grew red.
+
+"Shut up, you silly fool!" said he, like the overgrown schoolboy that he
+was.
+
+And I shut up--not because he commanded, but because Barbara, like
+spring in deep summer, and Doria, like night at noontide, appeared on
+the terrace.
+
+Soon afterwards lunch was announced. By common conspiracy Jaffery and
+Susan upset the table arrangements, insisting that they should sit next
+each other. He helped the child to impossible viands, much to my wife's
+dismay, and told her apocalyptic stories of Bulgaria, somewhat to her
+puzzledom, but wholly to her delight. But when he proposed to fill her
+silver mug (which he, as godfather, had given her on her baptism) with
+the liquefied dream of Paradise that Barbara, _sola mortalium_, can
+prepare, consisting of hock and champagne and fruits and cucumber and
+borage and a blend of liqueurs whose subtlety transcends human thought,
+Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the crystal
+jug of joy poised in his hand.
+
+"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"
+
+"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your mother's
+hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child and fill up your
+own glass."
+
+"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
+Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer holiday!"
+
+At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a
+handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold
+beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian
+butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he
+returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded
+it wide-eyed.
+
+"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible
+whisper.
+
+"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if
+I don't get enough to eat!"
+
+"And Aunt Doria?"
+
+Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.
+
+"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.
+
+It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
+inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
+with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
+out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
+appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
+lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
+We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
+devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
+interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
+new kind of hippopotamus.
+
+The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
+east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
+swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
+three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
+earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
+responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
+discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
+the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
+that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
+matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied
+attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its
+merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the
+pleasurable and elusive point of critical formulation, when Jaffery's
+voice, booming down the terrace, knocked the discriminating nicety out
+of my head. I lazily shifted my position and watched the pair.
+
+"You're subtle and psychological and introspective and analytic and all
+that," Jaffery was saying--his light word about an ogre at lunch was not
+a bad one; sitting side by side on the low parapet they looked like a
+vast red-bearded ogre and a feminine black-haired elf--she had taken off
+her hat--engaged in a conversation in which the elf looked very much on
+the defensive--"and you're always tracking down motives to their roots,
+and you're not contented, like me, with the jolly face of things--"
+
+"For an accurate diagnosis," I reflected, "of an individual woman's
+nature, the blatant universalist has his points."
+
+"Whereas, I, you see," he continued, "just buzz about life like a
+dunderheaded old bumble-bee. I'm always busting myself up against glass
+panes, not seeing, as you would, the open window a few inches off. Do
+you see what I'm driving at?"
+
+Apparently she didn't; for while she was speaking, he threw away his
+corona corona--a dream of a cigar for nine hundred and ninety-nine men
+out of a thousand (I glanced at Adrian who had religiously preserved two
+inches of ash on his)--and hauled out pipe and tobacco-pouch. I could
+not hear what she said. When she had finished, he edged a span nearer.
+
+"What I want you to understand," said he, "is that I'm a simple sort of
+savage. I can't follow all these intricate henry Jamesian complications
+of feeling. I've had in my life"--he stuck pouch and pipe on the stone
+beside him--"I've had in my life just a few men I've loved--I don't
+count women--men--men I've cared for, God knows why. Do you know why one
+cares for people?"
+
+She smiled, shrugged her shoulders and shook her head.
+
+"The latest was poor Prescott--he has just pegged out--you'll hear soon
+enough about Prescott. There was Tom Castleton--has Adrian told you
+about Castleton--?"
+
+Again she shook her head.
+
+"He will--of course--a wonder of a fellow--up with us at Cambridge. He's
+dead. There only remains Hilary, our host, and Adrian."
+
+As far as I could gather--for she spoke in the ordinary tones of
+civilised womanhood, whereas Jaffery, under the impression that he was
+whispering confidentially, bellowed like an honest bull--as far as I
+could gather, she said:
+
+"You must have met hundreds of men more sympathetic to you than Mr.
+Freeth and Adrian."
+
+"I haven't," he cried. "That's the funny devil of it. I haven't. If I
+was struck a helpless paralytic with not a cent and no prospect of
+earning a cent, I know I could come to those two and say, 'Keep me for
+the rest of my life'--and they would do it"
+
+"And would you do the same for either of them?"
+
+Jaffery rose and stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and towered
+over her.
+
+"I'd do it for them and their wives and their children and their
+children's children."
+
+He sat down again in confusion at having been led into hyperbole. But he
+took her shoulders in his huge but kindly hands, somewhat to her
+alarm--for, in her world, she was not accustomed to gigantic males
+laying unceremonious hold of her--
+
+"All I wanted to convey to you, my dear girl, is this--that if Adrian's
+wife won't look on me as a true friend, I'm ready to go away and cut my
+throat"
+
+Doria smiled at him with pretty civility and assured him of her
+willingness to admit him into her inner circle of friends; whereupon he
+caught up his pouch and pipe and lumbered down the terrace towards us,
+shouting out his news.
+
+"I've fixed it up with Doria"--he turned his head--"I can call you
+Doria, can't I?" She nodded permission--what else could she do? "We're
+going to be friends. And I say, Barbara, they'll want a wedding-present.
+What shall I give 'em? What would you like?"
+
+The latter question was levelled direct at Doria, who had followed
+demurely in his footsteps. But it was not answered; for from the
+drawing-room there emerged Franklin, the butler, who marched up straight
+to Jaffery.
+
+"A lady to see you, sir"
+
+"A lady? Good God! What kind of a lady?"
+
+He stared at Franklin, in dismay.
+
+"She came in a taxi, sir. The driver mistook the way, and put her down
+at the back entrance. She would not give her name."
+
+"Tall, rather handsome, dressed in black?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Lord Almighty!" cried Jaffery, including us all in the sweep of a
+desperate gaze. "It's Liosha! I thought I had given her the slip."
+
+Barbara rose, and confronted him. "And pray who is Liosha?"
+
+Adrian hugged his knee and laughed:
+
+"The dynamic widow," said he.
+
+"I'll go and see what in thunder she wants," said Jaffery.
+
+But Barbara's eyes twinkled. "You'll do nothing of the sort. She has no
+business to come running after you like this. She must be taught
+manners. Franklin, will you show the lady out here?"
+
+She drew herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, thereby
+demonstrating the obvious fact that she was mistress in her own house.
+
+Presently Franklin reappeared.
+
+"Mrs. Prescott," said he.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+That there should have been in the uncommon-tall young woman of buxom
+stateliness and prepossessing features, attired (to the mere masculine
+eye) in quite elegant black raiment--a thing called, I think, a picture
+hat, broad-brimmed with a sweeping ostrich feather, tickled my especial
+fancy, but was afterwards reviled by my wife as being entirely unsuited
+to fresh widowhood--what there should have been in this remarkable
+Junoesque young person who followed on the heels of Franklin to strike
+terror into Jaffery's soul, I could not, for the life of me, imagine. In
+the light of her personality I thought Barbara's _coup de theatre_
+rather cruel. . . . Of course Barbara received her courteously. She,
+too, was surprised at her outward aspect, having expected to behold a
+fantastic personage of comic opera.
+
+"I am very pleased to see you, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+Liosha--I must call her that from the start, for she exists to me as
+Liosha and as nothing else--shook hands with Barbara, making a queer
+deep formal bow, and turned her calm, brown eyes on Jaffery. There was
+just a little quarter-second of silence, during which we all wondered in
+what kind of outlandish tongue she would address him. To our gasping
+astonishment she said with an unmistakable American intonation: "Mr.
+Chayne, will you have the kindness to introduce me to your friends?"
+
+I broke into a nervous laugh and grasped her hand "Pray allow me. I am
+Mr. Freeth, your much honoured host, and this is my wife, and . . .
+Miss Jornicroft . . . and Mr. Boldero. Mr. Chayne has been deceiving us.
+We thought you were an Albanian."
+
+"I guess I am," said the lady, after having made four ceremonious bows,
+"I am the daughter of Albanian patriots. They were murdered. One day I'm
+going back to do a little murdering on my own account."
+
+Barbara drew an audible short breath and Doria instinctively moved
+within the protective area of Adrian's arm. Jaffery, with knitted brow,
+leaned against one of the posts supporting the old wistaria arbour and
+said nothing, leaving me to exploit the lady.
+
+"But you speak perfect English," said I.
+
+"I was raised in Chicago. My parents were employed in the stockyards of
+Armour. My father was the man who slit the throats of the pigs. He was a
+dandy," she said in unemotional tones--and I noticed a little shiver of
+repulsion ripple through Barbara and Doria. "When I was twelve, my
+father kind of inherited lands in Albania, and we went back. Is there
+anything more you'd like to know?"
+
+She looked us all up and down, rather down than up, for she towered
+above us, perfectly unconcerned mistress of the situation. Naturally we
+made mute appeal to Jaffery. He stirred his huge bulk from the post and
+plunged his hands into his pockets.
+
+"I should like to know, Liosha," said he, in a rumble like thunder, "why
+you have left my sister Euphemia and what you are doing here?"
+
+"Euphemia is a damn fool," she said serenely. "She's a freak. She ought
+to go round in a show."
+
+"What have you been quarrelling about?" he asked.
+
+"I never quarrel," she replied, regarding him with her calm brown eyes.
+"It is not dignified."
+
+"Then I repeat, most politely, Liosha--what are you doing here?"
+
+She looked at Barbara. "I guess it isn't right to talk of money before
+strangers."
+
+Barbara smiled--glanced at me rebukingly. I pulled forward a chair and
+invited the lady to sit--for she had been standing and her astonishing
+entrance had flabbergasted ceremonious observance out of me. Whilst she
+was accepting my belated courtesy, Barbara continued to smile and said:
+
+"You mustn't look on us as strangers, Mrs. Prescott. We are all Mr.
+Chayne's oldest and most intimate friends."
+
+"Do tell us what the row was?" said Jaffery.
+
+Liosha took calm stock of us, and seeing that we were a pleasant-faced
+and by no means an antagonistic assembly--even Doria's curiosity lent
+her a semblance of a sense of humour--she relaxed her Olympian serenity
+and laughed a little, shewing teeth young and strong and exquisitely
+white.
+
+"I am here, Jaff Chayne," she said, "because Euphemia is a damn fool.
+She took me this morning to your big street--the one where all the shops
+are--"
+
+"My dear lady," said Adrian, "there are about a hundred miles of such
+streets in London."
+
+"There's only one--" she snapped her fingers, recalling the name--"only
+one Regent Street, I ever heard of," she replied crushingly. "It was
+Regent Street. Euphemia took me there to shew me the shops. She made me
+mad. For when I wanted to go in and buy things she dragged me away. If
+she didn't want me to buy things why did she shew me the shops?" She
+bent forward and laid her hand on Barbara's knee. "She must he a damn
+fool, don't you think so?"
+
+Said Barbara, somewhat embarrassed:
+
+"It's an amusement here to look at shops without any idea of buying."
+
+"But if one wants to buy? If one has the money to buy?--I did not want
+anything foolish. I saw jewels that would buy up the whole of Albania.
+But I didn't want to buy up Albania. Not yet. But I saw a glass cage in
+a shop window full of little chickens, and I said to Euphemia: 'I want
+that. I must have those chickens.' I said, 'Give me money to go in and
+buy them.' Do you know, Jaff Chayne, she refused. I said, 'Give me my
+money, my husband's money, this minute, to buy those chickens in the
+glass cage.' She said she couldn't give me my husband's money to spend
+on chickens."
+
+"That was very foolish of her," said Adrian solemnly, "for if there's
+one thing the management of the Savoy Hotel love, it's chicken
+incubators. They keep a specially heated suite of apartments for them."
+
+"I was aware of it," said Liosha seriously. "Euphemia was not. She knows
+less than nothing. I asked her for the money. She refused. I saw an
+automobile close by. I entered. I said, 'Drive me to Mr. Jaff Chayne, he
+will give me the money.' He asked where Mr. Jaff Chayne was. I said he
+was staying with Mr. Freeth, at Northlands, Harston, Berkshire. I am not
+a fool like Euphemia. I remember. I left Euphemia standing on the
+sidewalk with her mouth open like that"--she made the funniest grimace
+in the world--"and the automobile brought me here to get some money to
+buy the chickens." She held out her hand to Jaffery.
+
+"Confound the chickens," he cried. "It's the taxi I'm thinking
+of--ticking out tuppences, to say nothing of the mileage. Liosha," said
+he, in a milder roar, "it's no use thinking of buying chickens this
+afternoon. It's Saturday and the shops are shut. You go home before that
+automobile has ticked out bankruptcy and ruin. Go back to the Savoy and
+make your peace with Euphemia, like a good girl, and on Monday I'll talk
+to you about the chickens."
+
+She sat up straight in her chair.
+
+"You must take me somewhere else. I've got no use for Euphemia."
+
+"But where else can I take you?" cried Jaffery aghast.
+
+"I don't know. You know best where people go to in England. Doesn't he?"
+She included us all in a smile.
+
+"But you must go back to Euphemia till Monday, at any rate."
+
+"And she has arranged such a nice little programme for you," said
+Adrian. "A lecture on Tolstoi to-night and the City Temple to-morrow.
+Pity to miss 'em."
+
+"If I saw any more of Euphemia, I might hurt her," said Liosha.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said Jaffery. "But you must go somewhere." He turned to me
+with a groan. "Look here, old chap. It's awfully rough luck, but I must
+take her back to the Savoy and mount guard over her so that she doesn't
+break my poor sister's neck."
+
+"I wouldn't go so far as that," said Liosha.
+
+"How far would you go?" Adrian asked politely, with the air of one
+seeking information.
+
+"Oh, shut up, you idiot," Jaffery turned on him savagely. "Can't you see
+the position I'm in?"
+
+"I'm very sorry you're angry, Jaff Chayne," said Liosha with a certain
+kind dignity. "But these are your friends. Their house is yours. Why
+should I not stay here with you?"
+
+"Here? Good God!" cried Jaffery.
+
+"Yes, why not?" said Barbara, who had set out to teach this lady
+manners.
+
+"The very thing," said I.
+
+Jaffery declared the idea to be nonsense. Barbara and I protested,
+growing warmer in our protestations as the argument continued. Nothing
+would give us such unimaginable pleasure as to entertain Mrs. Prescott.
+Liosha laid her hand on Jaffery's arm.
+
+"But why shouldn't they have me? When a stranger asks for hospitality in
+Albania he is invited to walk right in and own the place. Is it refused
+in England?"
+
+"Strangers don't ask," growled Jaffery.
+
+"It would make life much more pleasant if they did," said Barbara,
+smiling. "Mrs. Prescott, this bear of a guardian or trustee or whatever
+he is of yours, makes a terrible noise--but he's quite harmless."
+
+"I know that," said Liosha.
+
+"He does what I tell him," the little lady continued, drawing herself up
+majestically beside Jaffery's great bulk. "He's going to stay here, and
+so will you, if you will so far honour us."
+
+Liosha rose and bowed. "The honour is mine."
+
+"Then will you come this way--I will shew you your room."
+
+She motioned to Liosha to precede her through the French window of the
+drawing-room. Before disappearing Liosha bowed again. I caught up
+Barbara.
+
+"My dear, what about clothes and things?"
+
+"My dear," she said, "there's a telephone, there's a taxi, there's a
+maid, there's the Savoy hotel, and there's a train to bring back maid
+and clothes."
+
+When Barbara takes command like this, the wise man effaces himself. She
+would run an Empire with far less fuss than most people devote to the
+running of a small sweet-stuff shop. I smiled and returned to the
+others. Jaffery was again filling his huge pipe.
+
+"I'm awfully sorry, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+Adrian burst out laughing "But she's immense, your widow! The most
+refreshing thing I've seen for many a day. The way she clears the place
+of the cobwebs of convention! She's great. Isn't she, Doria?"
+
+"I can quite understand Mr. Chayne finding her an uncomfortable charge."
+
+"Thank you," said Jaffery, with rather unnecessary vehemence. "I knew
+you would be sympathetic." He dropped into a chair by her side. "You
+can't tell what an awful thing it is to be responsible for another human
+being."
+
+"Heaps of people manage to get through with it--every husband and
+wife--every mother and father."
+
+"Yes; but not many poor chaps who are neither father nor husband are
+responsible for another fellow's grown-up widow."
+
+Doria smiled. "You must find her another husband."
+
+"That's a great idea. Will you help me? Before I knew of Adrian's great
+good fortune, I wrote to Hilary--ho! ho! ho! But we must find somebody
+else."
+
+"Has she any money?" asked Doria, who smiled but faintly at the jocular
+notion of a Liosha-bound Adrian.
+
+"Prescott left her about a thousand a year. He was pretty well off, for
+a war-correspondent."
+
+"I don't think she'll have much difficulty. Do you know," she added,
+after a moment or two of reflection, "if I were you, I would establish
+her in a really first-class boarding-house."
+
+"Would that be a good way?" Jaffery asked simply.
+
+She nodded. "The best. She seems to have fallen foul of your sister."
+
+"The dearest old soul that ever lived," said Jaffery.
+
+"That's why. I'm sure I know your sister perfectly. The daughter of an
+Albanian patriot who used to kill pigs in Chicago--why, what can your
+poor sister do with her? Your sister is much older than you, isn't she?"
+
+"Ten years. How did you guess?"
+
+Doria smiled with feminine wisdom. "She's the gentlest maiden lady that
+ever was. It's only a man that could have thought of saddling her with
+our friend. Well--that's impossible. She would be the death of your
+sister in a week. You can't look after her yourself--that wouldn't be
+proper."
+
+"And it would be the death of me too!" said Jaffery.
+
+"You can't leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the poor
+woman would die of boredom. The only thing that remains is the
+boarding-house."
+
+Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen Goth
+receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.
+
+"By Jove!" he murmured. "You're wonderful."
+
+"Let us stretch our legs, Hilary," said Adrian, who had not displayed
+enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.
+
+So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on the
+mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the
+exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts.
+Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry
+convert to their sympathetic intercourse. The saint could hold her own;
+she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to the type for whom
+vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had made no vows, save of
+loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided they are kept, are
+perfectly consistent with a man's falling hopelessly, despairingly in
+love with his friend's affianced bride. And, as far as Barbara and
+myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that
+Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call _le
+coup de foudre_, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had
+first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise
+the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at
+her little feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.
+
+The fairy tales are very true. The rumbustious ogre has a hitherto
+undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of
+a wife. Why he married her has never been told. Why the mortal male whom
+we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing
+mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an
+insoluble mystery, and if we can't tell even why men mate, what can we
+expect to know about ogres? At all events, as far as the humdrum of
+matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life. The
+ogre marries his ogress. It is like to like. But when it comes to
+love--and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum,
+there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the
+world worth the hearing--we have quite a different condition of affairs.
+Did you ever hear of an ogre sighing himself to a shadow for love of a
+gap-toothed ogress? No. He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending
+his ogress-wife to Jericho, becomes desperately enamoured of the elfin
+princess. There he is, great, ruddy, hairy wretch: there she is, a
+wraith of a creature made up of thistledown and fountain-bubbles and
+stars. He stares at her, stretches out his huge paw to grab a fairy,
+feathery tress of her dark hair. Defensive, she puts up her little hand.
+Its touch is an electric shock to the marauder. He blinks, and rubs his
+arm. He has a mighty respect for her. He could take her up in his
+fingers and eat her like a quail--the one satisfactory method of eating
+a quail is unfortunately practised only by ogres--but he does not want
+to eat her. He goes on his knees, and invites her to chew any portion of
+him that may please her dainty taste. In short he makes the very
+silliest ass of himself, and the elfin princess, who of course has come
+into contact with the Real Beautiful Young Man of the Story Books, won't
+have anything to do with the Ogre; and if he is more rumbustious than he
+ought to be, generally finds a way to send him packing. And so the poor
+Ogre remains, planted there. The Fairy Tales, I remark again, are very
+true in demonstrating that the Ogre loves the elf and not the Ogress.
+But all the same they are deucedly unsympathetic towards the poor Ogre.
+The only sympathetic one I know is Beauty and the Beast; and even that
+is a mere begging of the question, for the Beast was a handsome young
+nincompoop of a Prince all the time!
+
+Barbara says that this figurative, allusive adumbration of Jaffery's
+love affair is pure nonsense. Anything less like an ogre than our
+overgrown baby of a friend it would he impossible to imagine. But I hold
+to my theory; all the more because when Adrian and I returned from our
+stroll round the garden, we found Jaffery standing over her, legs apart,
+like a Colossus of Rhodes, and roaring at her like a sucking dove. I
+noticed a scared, please-don't-eat-me look in her eyes. It was the ogre
+(trying to make himself agreeable) and the princess to the life.
+
+Presently tea was brought out, and with it came Barbara, a quiet laugh
+about her lips, and Liosha, stately and smiling. My wife to put her at
+her ease (though she had displayed singularly little shyness), after
+dealing with maid and taxi, had taken her over the house, exhibited
+Susan at tea in the nursery, and as much of Doria's trousseau as was
+visible in the sewing-room. The approaching marriage aroused her keen
+interest. She said very little during the meal, but smiled
+embarrassingly on the engaged pair. Jaffery stood glumly devouring
+cucumber sandwiches, till Barbara took him aside.
+
+"She's rather a dear, in spite of everything, and I think you're
+treating her abominably."
+
+Jaffery grew scarlet beneath the brick-coloured glaze.
+
+"I wouldn't treat any woman abominably, if I could help it."
+
+"Well, you can help it--" and taking pity on him, she laughed in his
+face. "Can't you take her as a joke?"
+
+He glanced quietly at the lady. "Rather a heavy one," he said.
+
+"Anyhow come and talk to us and be civil to her. Imagine she's the
+Vicar's wife come to call."
+
+Jaffery's elementary sense of humour was tickled and he broke out into a
+loud guffaw that sent the house cat, a delicate mendicant for food,
+scuttling across the lawn. The sight of the terror-stricken animal
+aroused the rest of the party to harmless mirth.
+
+"Tell me, Mrs. Prescott," said Adrian, "was he allowed to do that in
+Albania?"
+
+"I guess there aren't many things Jaff Chayne can't do in Albania,"
+replied Liosha. "He has the _bessas_ that carry him through and he's as
+brave as a lion."
+
+"I suppose you like brave men?" said Doria.
+
+"A woman who married a coward would be a damn fool--especially in
+Albania. I guess there aren't many in my mountains."
+
+"I wish you would tell us about your mountains," said Barbara
+pleasantly.
+
+"And at the same time," said I, "Jaff might let us hear his story. That
+is to say if you have no objection, Mrs. Prescott."
+
+"With us," said Liosha, "the guest is expected to talk about himself;
+for if he's a guest he's one of the family."
+
+"Shall I go ahead then?" asked Jaffery, "and you chip in whenever you
+feel like it?"
+
+"That would be best," replied Liosha.
+
+And having lit a cigarette and settled herself in her deck-chair, she
+motioned to Jaffery to proceed. And there in the shade of the old
+wistaria arbour, surrounded by such dainty products of civilisation as
+Adrian (in speckless white flannels and violet socks) and the tea-table
+(in silver and egg-shell china) this pair of barbarians told their tale.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+It is some years now since that golden August afternoon, and my memory
+of the details of the story of Liosha as told by Jaffery and illustrated
+picturesquely by the lady herself is none of the most precise.
+Incidentally I gathered, then and later in the smoking-room from Jaffery
+alone, a prodigious amount of information about Albania which, if I had
+imprisoned it in writing that same evening as the perfect diarist is
+supposed to do, would have been vastly useful to me at the present
+moment. But I am as a diarist hopelessly imperfect. I stare, now, as I
+write, at the bald, uninspiring page. This is my entry for Aug. 4th,
+19--.
+
+"Weighed Susan. 4 st. 3.
+
+"Met Jaffery at station.
+
+"Albanian widow turned up unexpectedly after lunch. Fine woman. Going to
+be a handful. Staying week-end. Story of meeting and Prescott marriage.
+
+"Promised Susan a donkey ride. Where the deuce does one get donkeys
+warranted quiet and guaranteed to carry a lady? _Mem:_ Ask Torn
+Fletcher.
+
+"_Mem:_ Write to Launebeck about cigars."
+
+Why I didn't write straight off to Launebeck about the cigars, instead
+of "mem-ing" it, may seem a mystery. It isn't. It is a comfortable habit
+of mine. Once having "mem-ed" an unpleasant thing in my diary, the
+matter is over. I dismiss it from my mind. But to return to Liosha--I
+find in my entry of sixty-two words thirty-five devoted to Susan, her
+donkey and the cigars, and only twenty-seven to the really astonishing
+events of the day. Of course I am angry. Of course I consult Barbara. Of
+course she pats the little bald patch on the top of my head and laughs
+in a superior way and invents, with a paralysing air of verity, an
+impossible amplification of the "story of meeting and Prescott
+marriage." And of course, the frivolous Jaffery, now that one really
+wants him, is sitting astride of a cannon, and smoking a pipe and,
+notebook and pencil in hand, is writing a picturesque description of the
+bungling decapitation by shrapnel of the general who has just been
+unfolding to him the whole plan of the campaign, and consequently is
+provokingly un-getatable by serious persons like myself[A].
+
+[Footnote A: Hilary is writing at the end of the late Balkan
+war.--W.J.L.]
+
+So for what I learned that day I must trust to the elusive witch,
+Memory. I have never been to Albania. I have never wanted to go to
+Albania. Even now, I haven't the remotest desire to go to Albania. I
+should loathe it. Wherever I go nowadays, I claim as my right bedroom
+and bath and viands succulent to the palate and tender to the teeth. My
+demands are modest. But could I get them in Albania? No. Could one
+travel from Scutari to Monastir in the same comfort as one travels from
+London to Paris or from New York to Chicago? No. Does any sensible man
+of domestic instincts and scholarly tastes like to find himself halfway
+up an inaccessible mountain, surrounded by a band of moustachioed
+desperadoes in fustanella petticoats engirdled with an armoury of
+pistols, daggers and yataghans, who if they are unkind make a surgical
+demonstration with these lethal implements, and if they are smitten with
+a mania of amiability, hand you over, for superintendence of your
+repose, to an army of satellites of whom you are only too glad to call
+the flea brother? I trow not. Personally, I dislike mountains. They were
+made for goats and cascades and lunatics and other irresponsible
+phenomena of nature. They have their uses, I admit, as windscreens and
+water-sheds; and beheld from the valley they can assume very pretty
+colours, owing to varying atmospheric conditions; and the more jagged
+and unenticing they are, the greater is their specious air of
+stupendousness. . . . At any rate they are hindrances to convenient
+travel and so I go among them as little as possible.
+
+To judge from the fervid descriptions given us by Jaffery and Liosha,
+Albania must be a pestilentially uncomfortable place to live in. It is
+divided into three religious sects, then re-divided into heaven knows
+how many tribes. What it will be when it gets autonomy and a government
+and a parliament and picture-palaces no one yet knows. But at the time
+when my two friends met it was in about as chaotic a condition as a
+jungle. Some tribes acknowledged the rule of the Turk. Others did not.
+Every mountainside had a pretty little anarchical system of its own.
+Every family had a pretty little blood feud with some other family.
+Accordingly every man was handy with knife and gun and it was every
+maiden's dream to be sold as a wife to the most bloodthirsty scoundrel
+in the neighbourhood. At least that was the impression given me by
+Liosha.
+
+When the tragedy occurred she herself was about to be sold to a
+prosperous young cutthroat of whom she had seen but little, as he lived,
+I gathered, a couple of mountains off. They had been betrothed years
+before. The price her father demanded was high. Not only did he hold a
+notable position on his mountain, but he had travelled to the fabulous
+land of America and could read and write and could speak English and
+could handle a knife with peculiar dexterity. Again, Liosha was no
+ordinary Albanian maiden. She too had seen the world and could read and
+write and speak English. She had a will of her own and had imbibed
+during her Chicago childhood curiously un-Albanian notions of feminine
+independence. Being beautiful as well, she ranked as a sort of prize
+bride worth (in her father's eyes) her weight in gold.
+
+It was to try to reduce this excessive valuation that the young
+cutthroat visited his father's house. During the night two families, one
+of whom had a feud with the host and another with the guest, each
+attended by an army of merry brigands, fell upon the sleeping homestead,
+murdered everybody except Liosha, who managed to escape, plundered
+everything plunderable, money, valuables, household goods and live
+stock, and then set fire to the house and everything within sight that
+could burn. After which they marched away singing patriotic hymns. When
+they had gone Liosha crept out of the cave wherein she had hidden, and
+surveyed the scene of desolation.
+
+"I tell you, I felt just mad," said Liosha at this stage of the story.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I remember Barbara and Doria staring at her open-mouthed. Instead of
+fainting or going into hysterics or losing her wits at the sight of the
+annihilation of her entire kith and kin--including her bridegroom to
+be--and of her whole worldly possessions, Liosha "felt just mad," which
+as all the world knows is the American vernacular for feeling very
+angry.
+
+"It was enough to turn any woman into a raving lunatic," gasped Barbara.
+
+"Guess it didn't turn me," replied Liosha contemptuously.
+
+"But what did you do?" asked Dora.
+
+"I sat down on a stone and thought how I could get even with that
+crowd." She bit her lip and her soft brown eyes hardened.
+
+[Illustration: Where the lonely figure in black and white sat
+brooding.]
+
+"And that's where we came in, don't you see?" interposed Jaffery
+hastily.
+
+You can imagine the scene. The two Englishmen, one gigantic, red and
+hairy, the other wiry and hawk-like, jogging up the mountain path on
+ragged ponies and suddenly emerging onto that plateau of despair where
+the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding.
+
+Under such unusual conditions, it was not difficult to form
+acquaintance. She told her story to the two horror-stricken men. British
+instinct cried out for justice. They would take her straight to the Vali
+or whatever authority ruled in the wild land, so that punishment should
+be inflicted on the murderers. But she laughed at them. It would take an
+army to dislodge her enemies from their mountain fastnesses. And who
+could send an army but the Sultan, a most unlikely person to trouble his
+head over the massacre of a few Christians? As for a local government,
+the _mallisori_, the mountain tribes, did not acknowledge any. The
+Englishmen swore softly. Liosha nodded her head and agreed with them.
+What was to be done? The Englishmen, alter giving her food and drink
+which she seemed to need, offered their escort to a place where she
+could find relations or friends. Again she laughed scornfully.
+
+"All my relations lie there"--she pointed to the smoking ruins. "And I
+have no friends. And as for your escorting me--why I guess it would be
+much more use my escorting you."
+
+"And where would you escort us?"
+
+"God knows," she said.
+
+Whereupon they realised that she was alone in the wide world, homeless
+and penniless, and that for a time, at least, they were responsible to
+God and man for this picturesque Albanian damsel who spoke the English
+of the stockyards of Chicago. Again what was to be done? They could take
+her back to Scutari, whence they had come, in the hope of finding a
+Roman Catholic sisterhood. The proposal evoked but lukewarm enthusiasm.
+Liosha being convinced that they would turn her into a nun--the last
+avocation in the world she desired to adopt. Her simple idea was to go
+out to America, like her father, return with many bags of gold and
+devote her life to the linked sweetness of a gradual extermination of
+her enemies. When asked how she would manage to amass the gold she
+replied that she would work in the packing-houses like her mother. But
+how, they asked, would she get the money to take her to Chicago? "It
+must come from you!" she said. And the men looked at each other, feeling
+mean dogs in not having offered to settle her there themselves. Then,
+being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she asked them what
+they were doing in Albania. They explained. They were travellers from
+England, wandering for pleasure through the Balkans. They had come from
+Scutari, as far as they could, in a motor-car. Liosha had never heard of
+a motor-car. They described it as a kind of little railway-engine that
+didn't need rails to run upon. At the foot of the mountains they had
+left it at a village inn and bought the ragged ponies. They were just
+going ahead exploring.
+
+"Do you know the way?" she asked with a touch of contempt.
+
+They didn't.
+
+"Then I guess I'll guide you. You pay me wages every day until you're
+tired and I'll use the money to go out to Chicago." And seeing them
+hesitate, she added: "No one's going to hurt me. A woman is safe in
+Albania. And if I'm with you, no one will hurt you. But if you go on by
+yourselves you'll very likely get murdered."
+
+Fantastic as was her intention, they knew that, as far as they
+themselves were concerned, she spoke common-sense. So it came to pass
+that Liosha, having left them for a few moments to take grim farewell of
+the charred remains of her family lying hidden beneath the smouldering
+wreckage, returned to them with a calm face, mounted one of the ponies
+and pointing before her, led the way into the mountains.
+
+Now, if old Jaff would only sit down and write this absurd Odyssey in
+the vivid manner in which he has related bits of it to me, he would
+produce the queerest book of travel ever written. But he never will. As
+a matter of fact, although he saw Albania as few Westerners have done
+and learned useful bits of language and made invaluable friends, and
+although he appreciated the journey's adventurous and humorous side, it
+did not afford him complete satisfaction. A day or two after their
+start, Prescott began to shew signs of peculiar interest in their guide.
+In spite of her unquestioning readiness to shoulder burdens, Prescott
+would run to relieve her. Liosha has assured me that Jaffery did the
+same--and indeed I cannot conceive Jaffery allowing a female companion
+to stagger along under a load which he could swing onto his huge back
+and carry like a walnut. To go further--she maintains that the two
+quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation of her labours, so much so,
+that often before they had ended their quarrel, she had performed the
+task in dispute. This of course Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was
+there, paid to do certain things, and she had to do them. The way
+Prescott spoiled her and indulged her, as though she were a little
+dressed-up cat in a London drawing-room, instead of a great hefty woman
+accustomed to throw steers and balance a sack of potatoes on her head,
+was simply sickening. And it became more sickening still as Prescott's
+infatuation clouded more and more the poor fellow's brain. Jaffery
+talked (not before Liosha, but to Adrian and myself, that night, after
+the ladies had gone to bed) as if the girl had woven a Vivien spell
+around his poor friend. We smiled, knowing it was Jaffery's way. . . .
+
+At all events, whether Jaffery was jealous or not, it is certain that
+Prescott fell wildly, blindly, overwhelmingly in love with Liosha.
+Considering the close intimacy of their lives; considering that they
+were in ceaseless contact with this splendid creature, untrammelled by
+any convention, daughter of the earth, yet chaste as her own mountain
+winds; and considering that both of them were hot-blooded men, the only
+wonder is that they did not fly at each other's throats, or dash in each
+other's heads with stones, after the fashion of prehistoric males. It is
+my well-supported conviction, however, that Jaffery, honest old bear,
+seeing his comrade's very soul set upon the honey, trotted off and left
+him to it, and made pretence (to satisfy his ursine conscience) of
+growling his sarcastic disapproval.
+
+"The devil of it was," he declared that night, with a sweep of his arm
+that sent a full glass of whiskey and soda hurtling across space to my
+bookshelves and ruining some choice bindings--"the devil of it was,"
+said he, after expressing rueful contrition, "that she treated him like
+a dog, whereas I could do anything I liked with her. But she married
+him."
+
+Of course she married him. Most Albanian young women in her position
+would have married a brave and handsome Englishman of incalculable
+wealth--even if they had not Liosha's ulterior motives. And beyond
+question Liosha had ulterior motives. Prescott espoused her cause hotly.
+He convinced her that he was a power in Europe. As a Reuter
+correspondent he did indeed possess power. He would make the civilised
+world ring with this tale of bloodshed and horror. He would beard
+Sultans in their lairs and Emperors in their dens. He would bring down
+awful vengeance on the heads of her enemies. How Sultans and Emperors
+were to do it was as obscure as at the horror-filled hour of their first
+meeting. But a man vehemently in love is notoriously blind to practical
+considerations. Prescott put his life into her hands. She accepted it
+calmly; and I think it was this calmness of acceptance that infuriated
+Jaffery. If she had been likewise caught in the whirlpool of a mad
+passion, Jaffery would have had nothing to say. But she did not (so he
+maintained) care a button for Prescott, and Prescott would not believe
+it. She had promised to marry him. That ideal of magnificent womanhood
+had promised to marry him. They were to be married--think of that, my
+boy!--as soon as they got back to Scutari and found a British Consul and
+a priest or two to marry them. "Then for God's sake," roared Jaffery,
+"let us trek to Scutari. I'm fed up with playing gooseberry. The Giant
+Gooseberry. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+So they shortened their projected journey and, making a circuit, picked
+up the motor-car--a joy and wonder to Liosha. She wanted to drive
+it--over the rutted wagon-tracks that pass for roads in Albania--and
+such was Prescott's infatuation that he would have allowed her to do so.
+But Jaffery sat an immovable mountain of flesh at the wheel and brought
+them safely to Scutari. There arrangements were made for the marriage
+before the British Vice-Consul. On the morning of the ceremony Prescott
+fell ill. The ceremony was, however, performed. Towards evening he was
+in high fever. The next morning typhoid declared itself. In two or three
+days he was dead. He had made a will leaving everything to his wife,
+with Jaffery as sole executor and trustee.
+
+This sorry ending of poor Prescott's romance--I never knew him, but
+shall always think of him as a swift and vehement spirit--was told very
+huskily by Jaffery beneath the wistaria arbour. Tears rolled down
+Barbara's and Doria's cheeks. My wife's sympathetic little hand slid
+into Liosha's. With her other hand Liosha fondled it. I am sure it was
+rather gratitude for this little feminine act than poignant emotion that
+moistened Liosha's beautiful eyes.
+
+"I haven't had much luck, have I?"
+
+"No, my poor dear, you haven't," cried Barbara in a gush of kindness.
+
+In the course of a few weeks to have one's affianced husband murdered
+and one's legal though nominal husband spirited away by disease, seemed
+in the eyes of my gentle wife to transcend all records of human tragedy.
+Very soon afterwards she made a pretext for taking Liosha away from us,
+and I had the extraordinary experience of seeing my proud little
+Barbara, who loathes the caressive insincerities prevalent among women,
+cross the lawn with her arm around Liosha's waist.
+
+The rest of the bare bones of the story I have already told you.
+Jaffery, after burying his poor comrade, took ship with Liosha and went
+to Cettinje, where he entrusted her to the care of old friends of his,
+the Austrian Consul and his wife, and made her known as the widow of
+Prescott of Reuter's to the British diplomatic authorities. Then having
+his work to do, he started forth again, a heavy-hearted adventurer, and,
+when it was over, he picked up Liosha, for whom Frau von Hagen had
+managed to procure a stock of more or less civilised raiment, and
+brought her to London to make good her claim, under Prescott's will, to
+her dead husband's fortune.
+
+Now this is Jaffery all over. Put him on a battlefield with guns going
+off in all directions, or in a shipwreck, or in the midst of a herd of
+crocodiles, and he will be cool master of the situation, and will
+telegraph to his newspaper the graphic, nervous stuff of the born
+journalist; but set him a simple problem in social life, which a child
+of fifteen would solve in a walk across the room, and he is scared to
+death. Instead of sending for Barbara, for instance, when he arrived in
+London, or any other sensible woman, say, like Frau von Hagen of
+Cettinje, he drags poor Euphemia, a timid maiden lady of forty-five,
+from her tea-parties and Bible-classes and Dorcas-meetings at Tunbridge
+Wells, and plants her down as guide, philosopher and friend to this
+disconcerting product of Chicago and Albania. Of course the poor lady
+was at her wits' ends, not knowing whether to treat her as a new-born
+baby or a buffalo. With equal inevitability, Liosha, unaccustomed to
+this type of Western woman, summed her up in a drastic epithet. And in
+the meanwhile Jaffery went about tearing hair and beard and cursing the
+fate that put him in charge of a volcano in petticoats.
+
+"I have a great regard for Euphemia," said Barbara, later in the
+day--they were walking up and down the terrace in, the dusk before
+dinner--"but I have some sympathy with Liosha. Tolstoi! My dear Jaffery!
+And the City Temple! If she wanted to take the girl to church, why not
+her own church, the Brompton Oratory or Farm Street?"
+
+"Euphemia wouldn't attend a Popish place of worship--she still calls it
+Popish, poor dear--to save her soul alive, or anybody else's soul,"
+replied Jaffery.
+
+"Then pack her off at once to Tunbridge Wells," said Barbara. "She's
+even more helpless than you, which is saying a great deal. I'll see to
+Liosha."
+
+Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet of her, miraculous of her,
+but he couldn't dream of it.
+
+"Then don't," she retorted. "Put it out of your mind. And there's
+Franklin. Come to dinner."
+
+"I'm not a bit hungry," he said gloomily.
+
+We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly. Liosha, who sat on
+my right, refreshingly free in her table manners (embarrassingly so to
+my most correct butler), was equally free in her speech. She provided me
+with excellent entertainment. I learned many frank truths about Albanian
+women, for whom, on account of their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed
+the most scathing contempt. Her details, in architectural phrase, were
+full size. Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
+disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
+grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
+great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth Century
+product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue Laundry,
+merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha, for all her
+yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise annoy her enemies,
+did not greatly regret the loss of the distinguished young Albanian
+cutthroat who was her affianced. Had he lived she would have spent the
+rest of her days in saying, like Melisande, "I am not happy." She would
+have been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving
+drudge, while he went triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among
+the scattered Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a
+whole-hearted detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that
+the death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that it
+might have done.
+
+You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian, wanted to
+run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds of civilisation.
+His daughter (woman the world over) was all for hunting. He had spent
+twenty years in America. By a law of gravitation, natural only in that
+Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago, he had come across an Albanian
+wife. . . .
+
+Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me tell you
+a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery Chayne or
+Liosha--except perhaps to shew that there is no reason why a Tierra del
+Fuegan foundling should not run across his long-lost brother on Michigan
+Avenue, and still less reason why Albanian male should not meet Albanian
+female in Armour's stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged
+on, as I said on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't
+see why I should not put into them anything I choose.
+
+An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received a
+representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to interview him.
+The interviewer was a typical American reporter, blue-eyed, high
+cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung, courteous, intensely alive,
+desirous to get to the heart of my friend's mystery, and charmingly
+responsive to his frank welcome. They talked. My friend, to give the
+young man his story, discoursed on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of
+the conglomeration of all the races under Heaven. To point his remarks
+and mark his contrasts he used the words "we English" and "you
+Americans." After a time the young man smiled and said: "But am not an
+American--at least I'm an American citizen, but I'm not a born
+American."
+
+"But," cried my friend, "you're the essence of America."
+
+"No," said the young man, "I'm an Icelander."
+
+Thus it was natural for Liosha's father to find an Albanian wife in
+Chicago. She too was superficially Americanised. When they returned to
+Albania with their purely American daughter, they at first found it
+difficult to appear superficial Albanians. Liosha had to learn Albanian
+as a foreign language, her parents and herself always speaking English
+among themselves. But the call of the blood rang strong in the veins of
+the elders. Robbery and assassination on the heroic scale held for the
+man an irresistible attraction, and he acquired great skill at the
+business; and the woman, who seems to have been of a lymphatic
+temperament, sank without murmuring into the domestic subjection into
+which she had been born. It was only Liosha who rebelled. Hence her
+complicated attitude towards life, and hence her entertaining talk at
+the dinner table.
+
+I enjoyed myself. So, I think, did everybody. When the ladies rose,
+Jaffery, who was nearest the door, opened it for them to pass out,
+Barbara, the last, lingered for a second or two and laid her hand on
+Jaffery's arm and looked up at him out of her teasing blue eyes.
+
+"My dear Jaff," she said, "what kind of a dinner do you eat when you
+_are_ hungry?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Barbara having freed Jaffery from immediate anxieties with regard to
+Liosha, easily persuaded him to pay a longer visit than he had proposed.
+A telephonic conversation with a first distracted, then
+conscience-smitten and then much relieved Euphemia had for effect the
+payment of bills at the Savoy and the retreat of the gentle lady to
+Tunbridge Wells. Liosha remained with us, pending certain negotiations
+darkly carried on by my wife and Doria in concert. During this time I
+had some opportunity of observing her from a more philosophic standpoint
+and my judgment was--I will not say formed--but aided by Barbara's
+confidential revelations. When not directly thwarted, she seemed to be
+good-natured. She took to Susan--a good sign; and Susan took to her--a
+better. Finding that her idea of happiness was to sprawl about the
+garden and let the child run over her and inveigle her into childish
+games and call her "Loshie" (a disrespectful mode of address which I had
+all the pains in the world in persuading Barbara to permit) and
+generally treat her as an animate instrument of entertainment, we
+smoothed down every obstacle that might lie in this particular path to
+beatitude. So many difficulties were solved. Not only were we spared the
+problem of what the deuce to do with Liosha during the daytime, but also
+Barbara was able to send the nurse away for a short and much needed
+holiday. Of course Barbara herself undertook all practical duties; but
+when she discovered that Liosha experienced primitive delight in
+bathing Susan--Susan's bath being a heathen rite in which ducks and fish
+and swimming women and horrible spiders played orgiac parts, and in
+getting up at seven in the morning--("Good God! Is there such an hour?"
+asked Adrian, when he heard about it)--in order to breakfast with Susan,
+and in dressing and undressing her and brushing her hair, and in
+tramping for miles by her side while with Basset, her vassal, in
+attendance, Susan rode out on her pony; when Barbara, in short, became
+aware of this useful infatuation, she pandered to it, somewhat
+shamelessly, all the time, however, keeping an acute eye on the zealous
+amateur. If, for instance, Liosha had picked a bushel of nectarines and
+had established herself with Susan, in the corner of the fruit garden,
+for a debauch, which would have had, for consequence, a child's funeral,
+Barbara, by some magic of motherhood, sprang from the earth in front of
+them with her funny little smile and her "Only one--and a very ripe
+one--for Susan, dear Liosha." And in these matters Liosha was as much
+overawed by Barbara as was Susan.
+
+This, I repeat, was a good sign in Liosha. I don't say that she would
+have fallen captive to any ordinary child, but Susan being my child was
+naturally different from the vulgar run of children. She was _rarissinia
+avis_ in the lands of small girls--one of the few points on which
+Barbara and I are in unclouded agreement. No one could have helped
+falling captive to Susan. But, I admit, in the case of Liosha, who was
+an out-of-the-way, incalculable sort of creature--it was a good sign.
+Perhaps, considering the short period during which I had her under close
+observation, it was the best sign. She had grievous faults.
+
+One evening, while I was dressing for dinner, Barbara burst into my
+dressing-room.
+
+"Reynolds has given me notice."
+
+"Oh," said I, not desisting (as is the callous way of husbands the world
+over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of my tie. "What
+for?"
+
+"Liosha has just gone for her with a pair of scissors."
+
+"Horrible!" said I, getting the ends even. "I can imagine nothing more
+finnikin in ghastliness than to cut anybody's throat with nail scissors,
+especially when the subject is unwilling."
+
+Barbara pished and pshawed. It was no occasion for levity.
+
+"I agree," said I. The dressing hour is the calmest and most philosophic
+period of the day.
+
+Barbara came up to me blue eyed and innocent, and with a traitorous
+jerk, undid my beautiful white bow.
+
+"There, now listen."
+
+And I, dilapidated wretch, had to listen to the tale of crime. It
+appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a
+ready-made gown--a model gown I believe is the correct term--insisted on
+her being properly corseted. Liosha, agonisingly constricted, rebelled.
+The maid was obdurate. Liosha flew at her with a pair of scissors. I
+think I should have done the same. Reynolds bolted from the room. So
+should I have done. I sympathised with both of them. Reynolds fled to
+her mistress, and, declaring it to be no part of her duty to wait on
+tigers, gave notice.
+
+"We can't lose Reynolds," said I.
+
+"Of course we can't."
+
+"And we can't pack Liosha off at a moment's notice, so as to please
+Reynolds."
+
+"Oh, you're too wise altogether," said my wife, and left me to the
+tranquil completion of my dressing.
+
+Liosha came down to dinner very subdued, after a short, sharp interview
+with Barbara, who, for so small a person, can put on a prodigious air of
+authority. As a punishment for bloodthirsty behaviour she had made her
+wear the gown in the manner prescribed by Reynolds; and she had
+apologised to Reynolds, who thereupon withdrew her notice. So serenity
+again prevailed.
+
+In some respects Liosha was very childish. The receipt of letters, no
+matter from whom--even bills, receipts and circulars--gave her
+overwhelming joy and sense of importance. This harmless craze, however,
+led to another outburst of ferocity. Meeting the postman outside the
+gate she demanded a letter. The man looked through his bundle.
+
+"Nothing for you this morning, ma'am."
+
+"I wrote to the dressmaker yesterday," said Liosha, "and you've got the
+reply right there."
+
+"I assure you I haven't," said the postman.
+
+"You're a liar," cried Liosha, "and I guess I'm going to see."
+
+Whereupon Liosha, who was as strong as a young horse, sprang to
+death-grapple with the postman, a puny little man, pitched him onto the
+side of the road and calmly entered into felonious possession of His
+Majesty's mails. Then finding no letter she cast the whole delivery over
+the supine and gasping postman and marched contemptuously into the
+house.
+
+The most astonishing part of the business was that in these outbreaks of
+barbarity she did not seem to be impelled by blind rage. Most people who
+heave a postman about a peaceful county would do so in a fit of passion,
+through loss of nerve-control. Not so Liosha. She did these things with
+the bland and deadly air of an inexorable Fate.
+
+The perspiration still beads on my brow when I think of the cajoling and
+bribing and blustering and lying I had to practise in order to hush up
+the matter. As for Liosha, both Jaffery and I rated her soundly. I
+explained loftily that not so many years ago, transportation, lifelong
+imprisonment, death were the penalties for the felony which she had
+committed.
+
+[Illustration: Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.]
+
+"You ought to have a jolly good thrashing," roared Jaffery.
+
+At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes of
+angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall table and
+handed it to the red-bearded giant.
+
+"I guess I do," she said. "Beat me."
+
+And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her at her
+word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing without a
+murmur. What was one to do with such a woman?
+
+Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek. Gradually she
+raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was startled to see the
+most extraordinary doglike submission. He frowned portentously and shook
+his head. Her lips worked, and after a convulsive sob or two, she threw
+herself on the ground, clasped his knees, and to our dismay burst into a
+passion of weeping. Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture,
+like a fairy tornado, released us from our embarrassing position. She
+annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.
+
+"Oh, go away, both of you, go away!"
+
+So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.
+
+Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very
+pleasantly. Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight (it
+was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course. Adrian and
+Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to justify my
+position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard at a Persian
+Grammar. Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime arranging for
+Liosha's future. Her organising genius had brought Doria's suggestion as
+to the First Class London Boarding House into the sphere of practical
+things. The Boarding House idea alone would not work; but, combine it
+with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran on wheels.
+
+"Even you," said Barbara, as though I were a sort of Schopenhauer, a
+professional disparager of her sex--"even you have a high opinion of
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+I had. Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine. She was not very
+beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very angelic or very
+anything--but she was one of those women of whom everybody has a high
+opinion. The impoverished widow of an Indian soldierman, with a son
+soldiering somewhere in India, she managed to do a great deal on very
+small means. She was a woman of the world, a woman of character. She
+knew how to deal with people of queer races. Heaven indicated her for
+appointment by Barbara as Liosha's duenna in the Boarding House. Mrs.
+Considine, herself compelled to live in these homes for the homeless,
+gladly accepted the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who
+happened then to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away,
+so to speak, with her contract in her pocket. It was part of the
+programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha's
+education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil into her
+a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and gradually root
+out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to death. It was a
+capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of a smile, in which,
+seeing Barbara's shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I suppressed the irony.
+
+When this was all settled Jaffery proclaimed himself the most care-free
+fellow alive. His hitherto grumpy and resentful attitude towards Liosha
+changed. He established himself as fellow slave with her under the whip
+of Susan's tyranny. It did one good to see these two magnificent
+creatures sporting together for the child's, and incidentally their own,
+amusement. For the first time during their intercourse they met on the
+same plane.
+
+"She's really quite a good sort," said Jaffery.
+
+But if it was pleasant to see him with Liosha, it was still more
+touching to watch his protective attitude towards Doria. He seemed so
+anxious to do her service, so deferential to her views, so
+puzzle-headedly eager to reconcile them with his own. She took upon
+herself to read him little lectures.
+
+"Don't you think you're rather wasting your life?" she asked him one
+day.
+
+"Do you think I am?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! But I work hard at my job, you know," he said apologetically--"when
+there's one for me to do. And when there isn't I kind of prepare myself
+for the next. For instance I've got to keep myself always fit."
+
+"But that's all physical and outside." She smiled, in her little
+superior way. "It's the inside, the personal, the essential self that
+matters. Life, properly understood, is a process of self-development. If
+a human being is the same at the end of a year as he was at the
+beginning he has made no spiritual progress."
+
+Jaffery pulled his red beard. "In other words, he hasn't lived," said
+he.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+"And you think that I'm just the same sort of old animal from one year's
+end to another and that I don't progress worth a cent, and so, that I
+don't live."
+
+"I don't want to say quite that," she replied graciously. "Every one
+must advance a little bit unless they deteriorate. But the conscious
+striving after spiritual progress is so necessary--and you seem to put
+it aside. It is such waste of life."
+
+"I suppose it is, in a way," Jaffery admitted.
+
+She pursued the theme, a flattered Egeria. "You see--well, what do you
+do? You travel about in out-of-the-way places and make notes about them
+in case the knowledge may be useful to you in the future. When you come
+across anything to kill, you kill it. It also pleases you to come across
+anything that calls for an exercise of strength. When there is a war or
+a revolution or anything that takes you to your real work, as you call
+it, you've only got to go through it and report what you see."
+
+"But that's just the difficulty," cried Jaffery. "It isn't every chap
+that's tough enough to come out rosy at the end of a campaign. And it
+isn't every chap that can _see_ the things he ought to write about.
+That's when the training comes in."
+
+Again she smiled. "I've no idea of belittling your profession, my dear
+Jaffery. I think it's a noble one. But should it be the Alpha and Omega
+of things? Don't you see? The real life is intellectual, spiritual,
+emotional. What are your ideals?"
+
+Jaffery looked at her ruefully. Beneath those dark pools of eyes lay the
+spirituality that made her a mystery so sacred. He, great hulking
+fellow, was a gross lump of clay. Ideals?
+
+"I don't suppose I have any," said he.
+
+"But you must. Everybody has, to a certain extent."
+
+"Well, to ride straight and tell the truth--like the ancient Persians, I
+suppose it was the Persians--anyway it's a sort of rough code I've got."
+
+"Have you read Nietzsche?" she asked suddenly.
+
+He frowned perplexedly. "Nietzsche--that's the mad superman chap, isn't
+it? No. I've not read a word."
+
+"I do wish you would. You'll find him so exhilarating. You might
+possibly agree with a lot of what he says. I don't. But he sets you
+thinking."
+
+She sketched her somewhat prim conception of the Nietzschean philosophy,
+and after listening to it in dumb wonder, he promised to carry out her
+wishes. So, when I came down to my library that evening dressed for
+dinner, I found him, still in morning clothes, with "Thus Spake
+Zarathustra" on his knees, and a bewildered expression on his face.
+
+"Have you read this, Hilary?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"Understand it?"
+
+"More or less."
+
+"Gosh!" said he, shutting the book, "and I suppose Doria understands it
+too, or she wouldn't have recommended it. But," he rose ponderously and
+looked down on me with serious eyes--"what the Hell is it all about?"
+
+I drew out my watch. "The five seconds that you have before rushing
+up-stairs to dress," said I, "don't give me adequate time to expound a
+philosophic system."
+
+Now if Adrian or I had talked to Jaffery about soul-progression and the
+Will to Power and suggested that he was missing the essentials of life,
+we should have been met with bellows of rude and profane derision. I
+don't believe he had even roughly considered what kind of an
+individuality he had, still less enquired into the state of his
+spiritual being. But the flip of a girl he professed so much to despise
+came along and reduced him to a condition of helpless introspection. I
+cannot say that it lasted very long. Psychology and metaphysics and
+aesthetics lay outside Jaffery's sphere. But while seeing no harm in his
+own simple creed of straight-riding and truth-speaking, he added to it
+an unshakable faith in Doria's intellectual and spiritual superiority.
+On his first meeting with her he had disclaimed the subtler mental
+qualities, videlicet his similitude of the bumble-bee; now, however, he
+went further, declaring himself, to a subrident host, to be a
+chuckle-headed ass, only fit to herd with savages. He would listen, with
+childlike envy, to Adrian, glib of tongue, exchanging with Doria the
+shibboleths of the Higher Life. He had been considerably impressed by
+Adrian as the author of a successful novel; but Adrian as a co-treader
+of the stars with Doria, appeared to him in the light of an immortal.
+
+Adrian and I, when alone, laughed over old Jaff, as we had laughed over
+him for goodness knows how many years. I, who had guessed (with
+Barbara's aid) the incidence of the thunderbolt, found in his humility
+something pathetic which was lost to Adrian. The latter only saw the
+blustering, woman-scorning hulk of thews and sinews, at the mercy of
+anything in petticoats, from Susan upward. I disagreed. He was not at
+the mercy of Liosha.
+
+"You burrowing mole," cried Adrian one morning in the library, Jaffery
+having gone off to golf, "can't you see that he goes about in mortal
+terror of her?"
+
+"No such thing!" I retorted hotly. "He has regarded her as an abominable
+nuisance--a millstone round his neck--a responsibility--"
+
+"A huntress of men," he interrupted. "Especially an all too probable
+huntress of Jaffery Chayne. With Susan and Barbara and Doria he knows
+he's safe--spared the worst--so he yields and they pick him up--look at
+him and stand him on his head and do whatever they darn well like to
+him; but with Liosha he knows he isn't safe. You see," Adrian continued,
+after having lit a cigarette, "Jaffery's an honourable old chap, in his
+way. With Liosha, his friend Prescott's widow, it would be a question of
+marriage or nothing."
+
+"You're talking rubbish," said I. "Jaffery would just as soon think of
+marrying the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour."
+
+"That's what I'm telling you," said Adrian. "He's in a mortal funk lest
+his animated Statue of Liberty should descend from her pedestal and with
+resistless hands take him away and marry him."
+
+"For one who has been hailed as the acutest psychologist of the day,"
+said I, "you seem to have very limited powers of observation."
+
+For some unaccountable reason Adrian's pale face flushed scarlet. He
+broke out vexedly:
+
+"I don't see what my imaginative work has got to do with the
+trivialities of ordinary life. As a matter of fact," he added, after a
+pause, "the psychology in a novel is all imagination, and it's the same
+imaginative faculty that has been amusing itself with Jaffery and this
+unqualifiable lady."
+
+"All right, my dear man," said I, pacifically. "Probably you're right
+and I'm wrong. I was only talking lightly. And speaking of
+imagination--what about your next book?"
+
+"Oh, damn the next book," said he, flicking the ash off his cigarette.
+"I've got an idea, of course. A jolly good idea. But I'm not worrying
+about it yet."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+He threw his cigarette into the grate. How, in the name of common sense,
+could he settle down to work? Wasn't his head full of his approaching
+marriage? Could he see at present anything beyond the thing of dream and
+wonder that was to be his wife? I was a cold-blooded fish to talk of
+novel-writing.
+
+"But you'll have to get into it sometime or other," said I.
+
+"Of course. As soon as we come back from Venice, and settle down to a
+normal life in the flat."
+
+"What does Doria think of the new idea?"
+
+Thousands who knew him not were looking forward to Adrian Boldero's new
+book. We, who loved him, were peculiarly interested. Somehow or other we
+had not touched before so intimately on the subject. To my surprise he
+frowned and snapped impatient fingers.
+
+"I haven't told Doria anything about it. It isn't my way. My work's too
+personal a thing, even for Doria. She understands. I know some fellows
+tell their plots to any and everybody--and others, if they don't do
+that, lay bare their artistic souls to those near and dear to them.
+Well, I can't. A word, no matter how loving, of adverse criticism, a
+glance even that was not sympathetic would paralyse me, it would shatter
+my faith in the whole structure I had built up. I can't help it. It's my
+nature. As I told you two or three months ago, it has always been my
+instinct to work in the dark. I instanced my First at Cambridge. How
+much more powerful is the instinct when it's a question of a vital
+created thing like a novel? My dear Hilary, you're the man I'm fondest
+of in the world. You know that. But don't worry me about my work. I
+can't stand it. It upsets me. Doria, heart of my heart and soul of my
+soul, has promised not to worry me. She sees I must be free from outside
+influences--no matter how closely near--but still outside. And you must
+promise too."
+
+"My dear old boy," said I, somewhat confused by this impassioned
+exposition of the artistic temperament, "you've only got to express the
+wish--"
+
+"I know," said he. "Forgive me." He laughed and lit another cigarette.
+"But Wittekind and the editor of _Fowler's_ in America--I've sold him
+the serial rights--are shrieking out for a synopsis. I'm damned if I'm
+going to give 'em a synopsis. They get on my nerves. And--we're intimate
+enough friends, you and I, for me to confess it--so do our dearest
+Barbara and old Jaff, and you yourself, when you want to know how I'm
+getting on. Look, dear old Hilary"--he laughed again and threw himself
+into an armchair--"giving birth to a book isn't very much unlike giving
+birth to a baby. It's analogical in all sorts of ways. Well, some women,
+as soon as the thing is started, can talk quite freely--sweetly and
+delicately--I haven't a word to say against them--to all their women
+friends about it. Others shrink. There's something about it too near
+their innermost souls for them to give their confidence to anyone. Well,
+dear old Hilary--that's how I feel about the novel."
+
+He spoke from his heart. I understood--like Doria.
+
+"Elizabeth Barrett Browning calls it 'the sorrowful, great gift,'" said
+I. "We who haven't got it can only bow to those who have."
+
+Adrian rose and took a few strides about the library.
+
+"I'm afraid I've been talking a lot of inflated nonsense. It must sound
+awfully like swelled head. But you know it isn't, don't you?"
+
+"Don't he an idiot," said I. "Let us talk of something else."
+
+We did not return to the subject.
+
+In the course of time came Mrs. Considine to carry off Liosha to the
+First Class Boarding House which she had found in Queen's Gate. Liosha
+left us full of love for Barbara and Susan and I think of kindly feeling
+for myself. A few days afterwards Jaffery went off to sail a small boat
+with another lunatic in the Hebrides. A little later Doria and Adrian
+went to pay a round of short family visits beginning with Mrs. Boldero.
+So before August was out, Barbara and Susan and I found ourselves alone.
+
+"Now," said I, "I can get through some work."
+
+"Now," said Barbara, "we can run over to Dinard."
+
+"What?" I shouted.
+
+"Dinard," she said, softly. "We always go. We only put it off this year
+on account of visitors."
+
+"We definitely made up our minds," I retorted, "that we weren't going to
+leave this beautiful garden. You know I never change my mind. I'm not
+going away."
+
+Barbara left the room, whistling a musical comedy air.
+
+We went to Dinard.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+There is a race of gifted people who make their livelihood by writing
+descriptions of weddings. I envy them. They can crowd so many pebbly
+facts into such a small compass. They know the names of everybody who
+attended from the officiating clergy to the shyest of poor relations.
+With the cold accuracy of an encyclopaedia, and with expert technical
+discrimination, they mention the various fabrics of which the costumes
+of bride and bridesmaids were composed. They catalogue the wedding
+presents with the correct names of the donors. They remember what hymns
+were sung and who signed the register. They know the spot chosen for the
+honeymoon. They know the exact hour of the train by which the happy pair
+departed. Their knowledge is astonishing in its detail. Their accounts
+naturally lack imagination. Otherwise they would not be faithful records
+of fact. But they do lack colour, the magic word that brings a scene
+before the eye. Perhaps that is why they are never collected and
+published in book form.
+
+Now I have been wondering how to describe the wedding of Doria and
+Adrian. I have recourse to Barbara.
+
+"Why, I have the very thing for you," she says, and runs away and
+presently reappears with a long thing like a paper snake. "This is a
+full report of the wedding. I kept it. I felt it might come in useful
+some day," she cried in triumph. "You can stick it in bodily."
+
+I began to read in hope the column of precise information. I end it in
+despair. It leaves me admiring but cold. It fails to conjure up to my
+mind the picture of a single mortal thing. Sadly I hand it back to
+Barbara.
+
+"I shan't describe the wedding at all," I say.
+
+And indeed why should I? Our young friends were married as legally and
+irrevocably as half a dozen parsons in the presence of a distinguished
+congregation assembled in a fashionable London church could marry them.
+Of what actually took place I have the confused memory of the mere man.
+I know that it was magnificent. All the dinner parties of Mr. Jornicroft
+were splendidly united. Adrian's troops of friends supported him. Doria,
+dark eyed, without a tinge of colour in the strange ivory of her cheek,
+looked more elfin than ever beneath the white veil. Jaffery, who was
+best man, vast in a loose frock coat, loomed like a monstrous effigy by
+the altar-rails. Susan, at the head of the bridesmaids, kept the stern
+set face of one at grapple with awful responsibility. She told her
+mother afterwards that a pin was running into her all the time. . . .
+Well, I, for one, signed the register and I kissed the bride and shook
+hands with Adrian, who adopted the poor nonchalant attitude of one
+accustomed to get married every day of his life. Driving from church to
+reception with Barbara, I railed, in the orthodox manner of the superior
+husband, at the modern wedding.
+
+"A survival of barbarism," said I. "What is the veil but a relic of
+marriage by barter, when the man bought a pig in a poke and never knew
+his luck till he unveiled his bride? What is the ring but the symbol of
+the fetters of slavery? The rice, but the expression of a hope for a
+prolific union? The satin slipper tied on to the carriage or thrown
+after it? Good luck? No such thing. It was once part of the marriage
+ceremony for the bridegroom to tap the wife with a shoe to symbolise
+his assertion of and her acquiescence in her entire subjection."
+
+"Where did Lady Bagshawe get that awful hat?" said Barbara sweetly. "Did
+you notice it? It isn't a hat; it's a crime."
+
+I turned on her severely. "What has Lady Bagshawe's hat to do with the
+subject under discussion? Haven't you been listening?"
+
+She squeezed my hand and laughed. "No, you dear silly, of course not."
+
+Another instance of the essential inconvincibility of woman.
+
+It was Jaffery Chayne, who, on the pavement before the house in Park
+Crescent, threw the satin slipper at the departing carriage. He had been
+very hearty and booming all the time, the human presentment of a
+devil-may-care lion out for a jaunt, and his great laugh thundering
+cheerily above the clatter of talk had infected the heterogeneous
+gathering. Unconsciously dull eyes sparkled and pursy lips vibrated into
+smiles. So gay a wedding reception I have never attended, and I am sure
+it was nothing but Jaffery's pervasive influence that infused vitality
+into the deadly and decorous mob. It was a miracle wrought by a rich
+Silenic personality. I had never guessed before the magnetic power of
+Jaffery Chayne. Indeed I had often wondered how the overgrown and
+apparently irresponsible schoolboy who couldn't make head or tail of
+Nietzsche and from whom the music of Shelley was hid, had managed to
+make a journalistic reputation as a great war and foreign correspondent.
+Now the veil of the mystery was drawn an inch or two aside. I saw him
+mingle with an alien crowd, and, by what On the surface appeared to be
+sheer brute full-bloodedness, compel them to his will. The wedding was
+not to be a hollow clang of bells but a glad fanfare of trumpets in all
+hearts. In order that this wedding of Adrian and Doria should be
+memorable he had instinctively put out the forces that had carried him
+unscathed through the wildest and fiercest of the congregations of men.
+He could subdue and he could create. In the most pithless he had started
+the working of the sap of life.
+
+As for his own definite part of best man, he played it with an
+Elizabethan spaciousness. . . . There was no hugger-mugger escape of
+travel-clad bride and bridegroom. He contrived a triumphal progress
+through lines of guests led by a ruddy giant, Master of the Ceremonies,
+exuding Pantagruelian life. Joyously he conducted them to their
+glittering carriage and pair--and, unconscious of anthropological truth,
+threw the slipper of woman's humiliation. The carriage drove off amid
+the cheers of the multitude. Jaffery stood and watched it until it
+disappeared round the curve. In my eagerness to throw the unnecessarily
+symbolic rice I had followed and stayed a foot or two away from him; and
+then I saw his face change--just for a few seconds. All the joyousness
+was stricken from it; his features puckered up into the familiar twists
+of a child about to cry. His huge glazed hands clenched and unclenched
+themselves. It was astonishing and very pitiful. Quickly he gulped
+something down and turned on me with a grin and shook me by the
+shoulders.
+
+"Now I'm the only free man of the bunch. The only one. Don't you wish
+you were a bachelor and could go to Hell or Honolulu--wherever you chose
+without a care? Ho! ho! ho!" He linked his arm in mine, and said in what
+he thought was a whisper: "For Heaven's sake let us go in and try to
+find a real drink."
+
+We went into a deserted smoking-room where decanters and siphons were
+set out. Jaffery helped himself to a mighty whisky and soda and poured
+it down his throat.
+
+"You seemed to want that," said I, drily.
+
+"It's this infernal kit," said he, with a gesture including his frock
+coat and patent leather boots. "For gossamer comfort give me a suit of
+armour. At any rate that's a man's kit."
+
+I made some jesting answer; but it had been given to me to see that
+transient shadow of pain and despair, and I knew that the discomfort of
+the garments of civilisation had nothing to do with the swallowing of
+the huge jorum of alcohol.
+
+Of course I told Barbara all about it--it is best to establish your wife
+in the habit of thinking you tell her everything--and she was more than
+usually gentle to Jaffery. We carried him down with us to Northlands
+that afternoon, calling at his club for a suit-case. In the car he
+tucked a very tired and comfort-desiring Susan in the shelter of his
+great arm. There was something pathetically tender in the gathering of
+the child to him. Barbara with her delicate woman's sense felt the
+harmonics of chords swept within him. And when we reached home and were
+alone together, she said with tears very near her eyes:
+
+"Poor old Jaff. What a waste of a life!"
+
+"My dear," I replied, "so said Doria. But you speak with the tongue of
+an angel, whereas Doria, I'm afraid, is still earth-bound."
+
+The tear fell with a laugh. She touched my cheek with her hand.
+
+"When you're intelligent like that," she said, "I really love you."
+
+For a mere man to be certified by Barbara as intelligent is praise
+indeed.
+
+"I wonder," she said, a little later, "whether those two are going to be
+happy?"
+
+"As happy," said I, "as a mutual admiration society of two people can
+possibly be."
+
+She rebuked me for a tinge of cynicism in my estimate. They were both of
+them dears and the marriage was genuine Heaven-made goods. I avowed
+absolute agreement.
+
+"But what would have happened," she said reflectively, "if Jaffery had
+come along first and there had been no question of Adrian. Would they
+have been happy?"
+
+Then I found my opportunity. "Woman," said I, "aren't you satisfied? You
+have made one match--you, and you'll pardon me for saying so, not
+Heaven--and now you want to unmake it and make a brand-new hypothetical
+one."
+
+"All your talk," she said, "doesn't help poor Jaffery."
+
+I put my hand to my head to still the flickering in my brain, kissed her
+and retired to my dressing-room. Barbara smiled, conscious of triumph
+over me.
+
+During dinner and afterwards in the drawing-room, she played the part of
+Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness--she had an eerie
+way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn.
+That was his home. He had no possessions.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "I should think I have. I've got about three
+hundred stuffed head of game stored in the London Repository, to say
+nothing of skins and as fine a collection of modern weapons as you ever
+saw. I could furnish a place in slap-up style to-morrow."
+
+"But have you a chest of drawers or a pillow slip or a book or a dinner
+plate or a fork?"
+
+"Thousands, my dear," said Jaffery. "They're waiting to be called for in
+all the shops of London."
+
+He laughed his great laugh at Barbara's momentary discomfiture. I
+laughed too, for he had scored a point. When a man has, say, a thousand
+pounds wherewith to buy that much money's worth of household clutter, he
+certainly is that household clutter's potential owner. Between us we
+developed this incontrovertible proposition.
+
+"Then why," said Barbara, "don't you go at once to Harrod's Stores and
+purchase a comfortable home?"
+
+"Because, my dear Barbara," said Jaffery, "I'm starting off for the
+interior of China the day after to-morrow."
+
+"China?" echoed Barbara vaguely.
+
+"The interior of China?" I reechoed, with masculine definiteness.
+
+"Why not? It isn't in Neptune or Uranus. You wouldn't go into hysterics
+if I said I was going to Boulogne. Let him come with me, Barbara. It
+would do him a thundering lot of good."
+
+At this very faintly humorous proposal he laughed immoderately. I need
+not say that I declined it. I should be as happy in the interior of
+China as on an Albanian mountain. I asked him how long he would be away.
+
+"A year or two," he replied casually.
+
+"It must be a queer thing," said I, "to be born with no conception of
+time and space."
+
+"A couple of years pass pretty quick," said Jaffery.
+
+"So does a lifetime," said I.
+
+Well, this was just like Jaffery. No sooner home amid the amenities of
+civilisation than the wander-fever seizes him again. In vain he pleaded
+his job, the valuable copy he would send to his paper. I proved to him
+it was but the mere lust of savagery. And he could not understand why we
+should be startled by the announcement that within forty-eight hours he
+would be on his way to lose himself for a couple of years in Crim
+Tartary.
+
+"Suppose I sprang a thing like that on you," said I. "Suppose I told you
+I was starting to-morrow morning for the South Pole. What would you
+say?"
+
+"I should say you were a liar. Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+In his mirth he rubbed his hands and feet together like a colossal fly.
+The joke lasted him for the rest of the evening.
+
+So, the next morning Jaffery left us with a "See you as soon as ever I
+get back," and the day after that he sailed for China. We felt sad; not
+only because Jaffery's vitality counted for something in the quiet
+backwater of our life, but also because we knew that he went away a less
+happy man than he had come. This time it was not sheer _Wanderlust_ that
+had driven him into the wilderness. He had fled in the blind hope of
+escaping from the unescapable. The ogre to whatsoever No Man's Land he
+betook himself would forever be haunted by the phantom of the elf. . . .
+It was just as well he had gone, said Barbara.
+
+A man of intense appetites and primitive passions, like Jaffery, for all
+his loyalty and lovable childishness, was better away from the
+neighbour's wife who had happened to engage his affections. If he lost
+his head. . . .
+
+I had once seen Jaffery lose his head and the spectacle did not make for
+edification. It was before I was married, when Jaffery, during his
+London sojourn, had the spare bedroom in a set of rooms I rented in
+Tavistock Square. At a florist's hard by, a young flower seller--a hussy
+if ever there was one--but bewitchingly pretty--carried on her poetical
+avocation; and of her did my hulking and then susceptible friend become
+ragingly enamoured. I repeat, she was a hussy. She had no intention of
+giving him more than the tip of her pretty little shoe to kiss; but
+Jaffery, reading the promise of secular paradise in her eyes, had no
+notion of her little hard intention. He squandered himself upon her and
+she led him a dog's life. Of course I remonstrated, argued, implored. It
+was like asking a hurricane politely not to blow. Her name I remember
+was Gwenny. One summer evening she had promised to meet him outside the
+house in Tavistock Square--he had arranged to take her to some Earl's
+Court Exhibition, where she could satiate a depraved passion for
+switch-backs, water-chutes and scenic railways. At the appointed hour
+Jaffery stood in waiting on the pavement. I sat on the first floor
+balcony, alternately reading a novel and watching him with a sardonic
+eye. Presently Gwenny turned the corner of the square--our house was a
+few doors up--and she appeared, on the opposite side of the road, by the
+square railings. But Gwenny was not alone. Gwenny, rigged out in the
+height of Bloomsbury florists' fashion, was ostentatiously accompanied
+by a young man, a very scrubby, pallid, ignoble young man; his arm was
+round her waist, and her arm was around his, in the approved enlinkment
+of couples in her class who are keeping company, or, in other words,
+are, or are about to be, engaged to be married. A curious shock vibrated
+through Jaffery's frame. He flamed red. He saw red. Gwenny shot a
+supercilious glance and tossed her chin. Jaffery crossed the road and
+barred their path. He fished in his pocket for some coins and addressed
+the scrubby man, who, poor wretch, had never heard of Jaffery's
+existence.
+
+"Here's twopence to go away. Take the twopence and go away. Damn
+you--take the twopence."
+
+The man retreated in a scare.
+
+"Won't you take the twopence? I should advise you to."
+
+Anybody but a born fool or a hero would have taken the twopence. I think
+the scrubby man had the makings of a hero. He looked up at the blazing
+giant.
+
+"You be damned!" said he, retreating a pace.
+
+Then, suddenly, with the swiftness of a panther, Jaffery sprang on him,
+grasped him in the back by a clump of clothes--it seemed, with one hand,
+so quickly was it done--and hurled him yards away over the railings. I
+can still see the flight of the poor devil's body in mid air until it
+fell into a holly-bush. With another spring he turned on the paralysed
+Gwenny, caught her up like a doll and charged with her now screaming
+violently against the shut solid oak front door. A flash of instinct
+suggested a latchkey. Holding the girl anyhow, he fumbled in his pocket.
+It was an August London evening. The Square was deserted; but at
+Gwenny's shrieks, neighbouring windows were thrown up and eager heads
+appeared. It was very funny. There was Jaffery holding a squalling girl
+in one arm and with the other exploring available pockets for his
+latchkey. I had one of the inspirations of my life. I rushed into my
+bedroom, caught up the ewer from my washstand, went out onto the extreme
+edge of the balcony and cast the gallon or so of water over the heads of
+the struggling pair. The effect was amazing. Jaffery dropped the girl.
+The girl, once on her feet, fled like a cat. Jaffery looked up
+idiotically. I flourished the empty jug. I think I threatened to brain
+him with it if he stirred. Then people began to pour out of the houses
+and a policeman sprang up from nowhere. I went down and joined the
+excited throng. There was a dreadful to-do. It cost Jaffery five hundred
+pounds to mitigate the righteous wrath of the young man in the
+holly-bush, and save himself from a dungeon-cell. The scrubby young man,
+who, it appeared, had been brought up in the fishmongering trade, used
+the five hundred pounds to set up for himself in Ealing, where very
+shortly afterwards Gwenny joined him, and that, save an enduring
+ashamedness on the part of Jaffery, was the end of the matter.
+
+So, if Jaffery did lose his head over Doria, there might be the devil to
+pay. We sighed and reconciled ourselves to his exile in Crim Tartary.
+After all, it was his business in life to visit the dark places of the
+earth and keep the world informed of history in the making. And it was a
+business which could not possibly be carried on in the most cunningly
+devised home that could be purchased at Harrod's Stores.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+In the course of time Adrian and Doria returned from Venice, their heads
+full of pictures and lagoons and palaces, and took proud possession of
+their spacious flat in St. John's Wood. They were radiantly happy, very
+much in love with each other. Having brought a common vision to bear
+upon the glories of nature and art which they had beheld, they were
+spared the little squabbles over matters of aesthetic taste which often
+are so disastrous to the serenity of a honeymoon. Touchingly they
+expounded their views in the first person plural. Even Adrian, whom I
+must confess to have regarded as an unblushing egotist, seldom delivered
+himself of an egotistical opinion. "We don't despise the Eclectics,"
+said he. And--"We prefer the Lombardic architecture to the purely
+Venetian," said Doria. And "we" found good in Italian wines and "we"
+found nothing but hideousness in Murano glass. They were, therefore, in
+perfect accord over decoration and furnishing. The only difference I
+could see between them was that Adrian loved to wallow in the comfort of
+a club or another person's house, but insisted on elegant austerity in
+his own home, whereas Doria loved elegant austerity everywhere. So they
+had a pure Jacobean entrance hall, a Louis XV drawing-room, an Empire
+bedroom, and as far as I could judge by the barrenness of the apartment,
+a Spartan study for Adrian.
+
+On our first visit, they triumphantly showed us round the establishment.
+We came last to the study.
+
+"No really fine imaginative work," said Adrian, with a wave of the hand
+indicating the ascetic table and chair, the iron safe, the bookcase and
+the bare walls--"no really fine imaginative work can be done among
+luxurious surroundings. Pictures distract one's attention, arm-chairs
+and sofas invite to sloth. This is my ideal of a novelist's workshop."
+
+"It's more like a workhouse," said Barbara, with a shiver. "Or a
+condemned cell. But even a condemned cell would have a plank bed in it."
+
+"You don't understand a bit," said Doria, with a touch of resentment at
+adverse criticism of her paragon's idiosyncrasies, "although Adrian has
+tried to explain it to you. It's specially arranged for concentration of
+mind. If it weren't for the necessity of having something to sit upon
+and something to write at and a few necessary reference books and a
+lock-up place, we should have had nothing in the room at all. When
+Adrian wants to relax and live his ordinary human life, he only has to
+walk out of the door and there he is in the midst of beautiful things."
+
+"Oh, I quite see, dear," said Barbara, with a familiar little flash in
+her blue eyes. "But do you think a leather seat for that hard wooden
+chair--what the French call a _rond-de-cuir_--would very greatly impair
+the poor fellow's imagination?"
+
+"It might be economical, too," said I, "in the way of saving
+shininess!--"
+
+Adrian laughed. "It does look a bit hard, darling," said he.
+
+"We'll get a leather seat to-day," replied Doria.
+
+But she did not smile. Evidently to her the spot on which Adrian sat was
+sacrosanct. The room was the Holy of Holies where mortal man put on
+immortality. Flippant comment sounded like blasphemy in her ears. She
+even grew somewhat impatient at our lingering in the august precincts,
+although they had not yet been consecrated by inspired labour. Their
+unblessed condition was obvious. On the large library table were a
+couple of brass candlesticks with fresh candles (Adrian could not work
+by electric light), a couple of reams of scribbling paper, an inkpot, an
+immaculate blotting pad, three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's
+whimsies to write always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an
+office stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this
+last monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination
+and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road, but
+not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of challenge
+from Doria, I forebore to make ignorant criticism.
+
+In the bedroom while Barbara was putting on her veil and powdering her
+nose (this may be what grammarians call a _hysteron proteron_--but with
+women one never can tell)--Doria broke into confidences not meet for
+masculine ears.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, darling," she cried, looking at Barbara with great awe-stricken
+eyes, "you can't tell what it means to be married to a genius like
+Adrian. I feel like one of the Daughters of Men that has been looked
+upon by one of the Sons of God. It's so strange. In ordinary life he's
+so dear and human--responsive, you know, to everything I feel and
+think--and sometimes I quite forget he's different from me. But at
+others, I'm overwhelmed by the thought of the life going on inside his
+soul that I can never, never share--I can only see the spirit that
+conceived 'The Diamond Gate'--don't you understand, darling?--and that
+is even now creating some new thing of wonder and beauty. I feel so
+little beside him. What more can I give him beyond what I have given?"
+
+Barbara took the girl's tense face between her two hands and smiled and
+kissed her.
+
+"Give him," said she, "ammoniated quinine whenever he sneezes."
+
+Then she laughed and embraced the Heavenly One's wife, who, for the
+moment, had not quite decided whether to feel outraged or not, and
+discoursed sweet reasonableness.
+
+"I should treat your genius, dear, just as I treat my stupid old
+Hilary."
+
+She proceeded to describe the treatment. What it was, I do not know,
+because Barbara refused to tell me. But I can make a shrewd guess. It's
+a subtle scheme which she thinks is hidden from me; but really it is so
+transparent that a babe could see through it. I, like any wise husband,
+make, however, a fine assumption of blindness, and consequently lead a
+life of unruffled comfort.
+
+Whether Doria followed the advice I am not certain. I have my doubts.
+Barbara has never knelt by the side of her stupid old Hilary's chair and
+worshipped him as a god. She is an excellent wife and I've no fault to
+find with her; but she has never done that, and she is the last woman in
+the world to counsel any wife to do it. Personally, I should hate to be
+worshipped. In worship hours I should be smoking a cigar, and who with a
+sense of congruity can imagine a god smoking a cigar? Besides, worship
+would bore me to paralysis. But Adrian loved it. He lived on it, just as
+the new hand in a chocolate factory lives on chocolate creams. The more
+he was worshipped the happier he became. And while consuming adoration
+he had a young Dionysian way of inhaling a cigarette--a way which
+Dionysus, poor god, might have exhibited, had tobacco grown with the
+grape on Mount Cithaeron--and a way of exhaling a cloud of smoke, holier
+than the fumes of incense in the nostrils of the adorer, which moved me
+at once to envy and exasperation.
+
+Yes, there he would sprawl, whenever I saw them together, either in
+their own flat or at our house (more luxuriously at Northlands than in
+St. John's Wood, owing to the greater prevalence of upholstered
+furniture), cigarette between delicate fingers, paradox on his tongue
+and a Christopher Sly beatitude on his face, while Doria, chin on palm,
+and her great eyes set on him, drank in all the wonder of this
+miraculous being.
+
+I said to Barbara: "She's making a besotted idiot of the man."
+
+Barbara professed rare agreement. But . . . the woman's point of
+view. . . .
+
+"I don't worry about him," she said. "It's of her I'm thinking. When she
+has turned him into the idiot--"
+
+"She'll adore him all the more," I interrupted.
+
+"But when she finds out the idiot she has made?"
+
+"No woman has ever done that since the world began," said I. "The
+unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole
+consistency."
+
+Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none,
+the proposition being incontrovertible. She mused for a while and then,
+quickly, a smile replaced the frown.
+
+"I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear," she said
+sweetly.
+
+I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates of a
+torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she vanished
+from the apartment. She did. The old-fashioned high-falutin' phrase is
+the best description I can give of the elusive uncapturable nature of
+this wife of mine. It is a pity that she has so little to do with the
+story of Jaffery which I am trying to relate, for I should like to make
+her the heroine. You see, I know her so well, or imagine I do, which
+comes to the same thing, and I should love to present you with a
+solution, of this perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled
+conundrum that is Barbara Freeth. But she, like myself, is but a
+_raisonneur_ in the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the
+background. _Paullo majora canamus_. Let us come to the horses.
+
+All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha. As deputies for the
+absent trustee we received periodical reports from the admirable Mrs.
+Considine, and entertained both ladies for an occasional week-end. On
+the whole, her demeanour in the Queen's Gate boarding-house was
+satisfactory. At first trouble arose over a young curly haired Swiss
+waiter who had won her sympathy in the matter of a broken heart. She had
+entered the dining-room when he was laying the table and discovered him
+watering the knives and forks with tears. Unaccustomed to see men weep,
+she enquired the cause. He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a
+woeful tale of a faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and
+well-to-do. He had looked forward to marry her at the end of the year,
+and to pass an unruffled life in the snugness of the _delicatessen_ shop
+which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had announced her
+engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among the chitterlings and
+liver-sausages was shattered. Herr Gott! what was he to do? Liosha
+counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and assassination of his rival.
+To kill another man for her was the surest way to a woman's heart. The
+waiter approved the scheme, but lacked the courage--also the money to go
+to Neuchatel. Liosha, espousing his cause warmly, gave him the latter at
+once. The former she set to work to instil into him. She waylaid him at
+odd corners in odd moments, much to the scandal of the guests, and
+sought to inspire him with the true Balkan spirit. She even supplied him
+with an Albanian knife, dangerously sharp. At last, the poor craven,
+finding himself unwillingly driven into crime, sought from the mistress
+of the boarding-house protection against his champion. Mrs. Considine,
+called into consultation, was informed that Mrs. Prescott must either
+cease from instigating the waiters to commit murder or find other
+quarters. Liosha curled a contemptuous lip.
+
+"If you think I'm going to have anything more to do with the little
+skunk, you're mistaken."
+
+And that evening when Josef, serving coffee in the drawing-room,
+approached her with the tray, she waved him off.
+
+"See here," she said calmly, "just you keep out of my way or I might
+tread on you."
+
+Whereupon the terrified Josef, amid the tittering hush of the genteel
+assembly, bolted from the room, and then solved the whole difficulty by
+bolting from the house, never to return.
+
+When taken to task by Barbara over the ethics of this matter, Liosha
+shrugged her shoulders and laughed.
+
+"I guess," she said, "if a man loves a woman strongly enough to cry for
+her, he ought to know what to do with the guy that butted in, without
+being told."
+
+"But you don't seem to understand what a terrible thing it is to take
+the life of a human being," said Barbara.
+
+"I can understand how you feel," Liosha admitted. "But I don't feel
+about it the same as you. I've been brought up different."
+
+"You see, my dear Barbara," I interposed judicially, "her father made
+his living by slaughter before she was born. When he finished with the
+pigs he took on humans who displeased him."
+
+"And they were worse than the pigs," said Liosha.
+
+Barbara sighed, for Liosha remained unconvinced; but she extracted a
+promise from our fair barbarian never to shoot or jab a knife into
+anyone before consulting her as to the propriety of so doing.
+
+But for this and for one or two other trivial lapses from grace, Liosha
+led a pretty equable existence at the boarding-house. If she now and
+then scandalised the inmates by her unconventional habits and free
+expressions of opinion, she compensated by affording them a chronic
+topic of conversation. A large though somewhat scornful generosity also
+established her in their esteem. She would lend or give anything she
+possessed. When one of the forlorn and woollen-shawled old maids fell
+ill, she sat up of nights with her, and in spite of her ignorance of
+nursing, which was as vast as that of a rhinoceros, magnetised the
+fragile lady into well-being. I think she was fairly happy. If London
+had been situated amid gorges and crags and ravines and granite cliffs
+she would have been completely so. She yearned for mountains. Mrs.
+Considine to satisfy this nostalgia took her for a week's trip to the
+English Lakes. She returned railing at Scawfell and Skiddaw for
+unimportant undulations, and declaring her preference for London. So in
+London she remained.
+
+In these early stages of our acquaintance with Liosha, she counted in
+our lives for little more than a freakish interest. Even in the crises
+of her naughtiness anxiety as to her welfare did not rob us of our
+night's sleep. She existed for us rather as a toy personality whose
+quaint vagaries afforded us constant amusement than as an intense human
+soul. The working out of her destiny did not come within the sphere of
+our emotional sympathies like that of Adrian and Doria. The latter were
+of our own kind and class, bound to us not only by the common traditions
+of centuries, but by ties of many years' affection. It is only natural
+that we should have watched them more closely and involved ourselves
+more intimately in their scheme of things.
+
+The first fine rapture of house-pride having grown calm, the Bolderos
+settled down to the serene beatitude of the Higher Life tempered by the
+amenities of commonplace existence. When Adrian worked, Doria read Dante
+and attended performances of the Intellectual Drama; when Adrian
+relaxed, she cooked dainties in a chafing dish and accompanied him to
+Musical Comedy. They entertained in a gracious modest way, and went out
+into cultivated society. The Art of Life, they declared, was to catch
+atmosphere, whatever that might mean. Adrian explained, with the gentle
+pity of one addressing himself to the childish intelligence.
+
+"It's merely the perfect freedom of mental adaptation. To discuss
+pragmatism while eating oysters would be destructive to the enjoyment
+afforded by the delicate sense of taste, whereas, to let one's mind
+wander from the plane of philosophic thought when preparing for a
+Hauptmann or a Strindberg play would lead to nothing less than the
+disaster of disequilibrium."
+
+Saying this he caught my cold, unsympathetic gaze, but I think I noticed
+the flicker of an eyelid. Doria, however, nodded, in wide-eyed approval.
+So I suppose they really did practise between themselves these modal
+gymnastics. They were all of a piece with the "atmospheres" evoked in
+the various rooms of the flat. To Barbara and myself, comfortable
+Philistines, all this appeared exceeding lunatic. But every married
+couple has a right to lay out its plan of happiness in its own way. If
+we had made taboo of irrelevant gossip between the acts of a serious
+play our evening would have been a failure. Theirs would have been, and,
+in fact, was a success. Connubial felicity they certainly achieved: and
+what else but an impertinence is a criticism of the means?
+
+Easter came. They had been married six months. "The Diamond Gate" had
+been published for nearly a year and was still selling in England and
+America. Adrian flourishing his first half-yearly cheque in January had
+vowed he had no idea there was so much money in the world. He basked in
+Fortune's sunshine. But for all the basking and all the syllabus of the
+perfect existence, and all his unquestionable love for Doria, and all
+her worship for him together with its manifestation in her admirable
+care for his material well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began
+to strike me as a man lacking some essential of happiness. They spent a
+week or so with us at Northlands. Adrian confessed dog-weariness. His
+looks confirmed his words. A vertical furrow between the brows and a
+little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair
+moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face. In moments
+of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a squint, appeared
+in his blue eyes. He was no longer debonair, no longer the lightly
+laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox seeing flippancy in the
+Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in Little Tich. He was morose and
+irritable. He had acquired a nervous habit of secretly rubbing his
+thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips when Doria, in her pride, spoke of
+his work, which amounted almost to ill-breeding. It was only late at
+night during our last smoke that he assumed a semblance of the old
+Adrian; and by that time he had consumed as much champagne and brandy as
+would have rendered jocose the prophet Jeremiah.
+
+He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From Doria we
+learned the cause. For the last three months he had been working at
+insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he
+breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and
+remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he began a three-hour
+spell of work. At night a four hours' spell--from nine to one, if they
+had no evening engagement, from midnight to four o'clock in the morning
+if they had been out.
+
+"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of this
+maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't let him
+do it. He is killing himself."
+
+"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting out
+creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous novelists
+whom I meet at the Athenaeum have told me so themselves. Even prodigious
+people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola--"
+
+"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist must be
+a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why--those two that you've
+mentioned--they slung out stuff by the bucketful. It didn't matter to
+them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the rhythm and the balance
+and the beauty of every sentence he writes--to say nothing of the
+subtlety of his analysis and the perfect drawing of his pictures. My
+dear, good people"--she threw out her hands in an impatient
+gesture--"you don't know what you're talking about. How can you? It's
+impossible for you to conceive--it's almost impossible even for me to
+conceive--the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four
+hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is
+stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine
+that work like Adrian's is to be done in this dead mechanical way."
+
+"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My admiration for
+Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I repeat that no human
+brain since the beginning of time has been capable of spinning cobwebs
+of fancy for twelve hours a day, day in and day out for months at a
+time. Look at your husband. He has tried it. Does he sleep well?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has he a hearty appetite?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Is he a light-hearted, cheery sort of chap to have about the place?"
+
+"He's naturally tired, after his winter's work," said Doria.
+
+"He's played out," said I, "and if you are a wise woman, you'll take him
+away for a couple of months' rest, and when he gets back, see that he
+works at lower pressure."
+
+Doria promised to do her best; but she sighed.
+
+"You don't realise Adrian's iron will."
+
+Once more I recognised with a shock that I did not know my Adrian. I
+used to think one could blow the thistledown fellow about whithersoever
+one pleased. Of the two, Doria seemed to have unquestionably the
+stronger will-power.
+
+"Surely," said I, "you can twist him round your little finger."
+
+Doria sighed again--and a wanly indulgent smile played about her lips.
+
+"You two dear people are so sensible, that it makes me almost angry to
+see how you can't begin to understand Adrian. As a man, of course I have
+a certain influence over him. But as an artist--how can I? He's a thing
+apart from me altogether. I know perfectly well that thousands of
+artists' wives wreck their happiness through sheer, stupid jealousy of
+their husbands' art. I'm not such a narrow-minded, contemptible woman."
+She threw her little head up proudly. "I should loathe myself if I
+grudged one hour that Adrian gave to his work instead of to me."
+
+This time Barbara and I sighed, for we realised how vain had been our
+arguments. Our considerably greater knowledge of life, our stark
+common-sense, our deep affection for Adrian counted as naught beside the
+fact that we had no experience whatever in the rearing of a genius.
+
+That word "genius" came too often from Doria's lips. At first it
+irritated me; then I heard it with morbid detestation. In the course of
+a more or less intimate conversation with Adrian, I let slip a mild
+expression of my feelings. He groaned sympathetically.
+
+"I wish to heaven she wouldn't do it," said he. "It puts a man into such
+a horrible false position towards himself. It's beautiful of her, of
+course--it's her love for me. But it gets on my nerves. Instead of
+sitting down at my desk with nothing in my mind but my day's work to
+slog through, I hear her voice and I have to say to myself, 'Go to. I am
+a genius. I mustn't write like any common fellow. I must produce the
+work of a genius.' It really plays the devil with me."
+
+He walked excitedly about the library, flourishing a cigar and
+scattering the ash about the carpet. I am pernicketty in a few ways and
+hate tobacco ash on my carpet; every room in the house is an arsenal of
+ash trays. In normal mood Adrian punctiliously observed the little laws
+of the establishment. This scattering of cigar ash was a sign of
+spiritual convulsion.
+
+"Have you explained the matter to Doria?" I asked.
+
+He halted before me performing his new uncomfortable trick of slithering
+thumb over finger tips.
+
+"No," he snapped. "How can I?"
+
+I replied, mildly, that it seemed to be the simplest thing in the world.
+He broke away impatiently, saying that I couldn't understand.
+
+"All right," said I, though what there was to understand in so
+elementary a proposition goodness only knows. I was beginning to resent
+this perpetual charge of non-intelligence.
+
+"I think we had better clear out," he said. "I'm only a damned nuisance.
+I've got this book of mine on the brain"--he held up his head with both
+hands--"and I'm not a fit companion for anybody."
+
+I adjured him in familiar terms not to talk rubbish. He was here for the
+repose of country things and freedom from day-infesting cares. Already
+he was looking better for the change. But I could not refrain from
+adding:
+
+"You wrote 'The Diamond Gate' without turning a hair. Why should you
+worry yourself to death about this new book?"
+
+When he answered I had the shivering impression of a wizened old man
+speaking to me. The slight cast I had noticed in his blue eyes became
+oddly accentuated.
+
+"'The Diamond Gate,'" he said, peering at me uncannily, "was just a
+pretty amateur story. The new book is going to stagger the soul of
+humanity."
+
+"I wish you weren't such a secretive devil," said I. "What's the book
+about? Tell an old friend. Get it off your mind. It will do you good."
+
+I put my arm round his shoulders and my hand gave him an affectionate
+grip. My heart ached for the dear fellow, and I longed, in the plain
+man's way, to break down the walls of reserve, which like those of the
+Inquisition Chamber, I felt were closing tragically upon him.
+
+"Come, come," I continued. "Get it out. It's obvious that the thing is
+suffocating you. I'll tell nobody--not even that you've told me--neither
+Doria nor Barbara--it will be the confidence of the confessional. You'll
+be all the better for it. Believe me."
+
+He shrugged himself free from my grasp and turned away; his nervous
+fingers plucked unconsciously at his evening tie until it was loosened
+and the ends hung dissolutely over his shirt front.
+
+"You're very good, Hilary," said he, looking at every spot in the room
+except my eyes. "If I could tell you, I would. But it's an enormous
+canvas. I could give you no idea--" The furrow deepened between his
+brows--"If I told you the scheme you would get about the same dramatic
+impression as if you read, say, the letter R, in a dictionary. I'm
+putting into this novel," he flickered his fingers in front of
+me--"everything that ever happened in human life."
+
+I regarded him in some wonder.
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, "you can't compress a Liebig's Extract of
+Existence between the covers of a six-shilling novel."
+
+"I can," said he, "I can!" He thumped my writing table, so that all the
+loose brass and glass on it rattled. "And by God! I'm going to do it."
+
+"But, my dearest friend," I expostulated, "this is absurd. It's
+megalomania--_la folie des grandeurs_."
+
+"It's the divinest folly in the world," said he.
+
+He threw a cigar stump into the fireplace and poured himself out and
+drank a stiff whisky and soda. Then he laughed in imitation of his
+familiar self.
+
+"You dear prim old prig of a Hilary, don't worry. It's all going to come
+straight. When the novel of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth
+centuries is published I guess you'll be proud of me. And now,
+good-night."
+
+He laughed, waved his arm in a cavalier gesture and went from the room,
+slamming the door masterfully behind him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+We kept the unreasonable pair at Northlands as long as we could, doing
+all that lay in our power to restore Adrian's idiotically impaired
+health. I motored him about the county; I took him to golf, a pastime at
+which I do not excel; and I initiated him into the invigorating
+mysteries of playing at robbers with Susan. We gave a carefully selected
+dinner-party or two, and accepted on his behalf a few discreet
+invitations. At these entertainments--whether at Northlands or
+elsewhere--we caused it to be understood that the lion, being sick,
+should not be asked to roar.
+
+"It's so trying for him," said Doria, "when people he doesn't know come
+up and gush over 'The Diamond Gate'--especially now when his nerves are
+on edge."
+
+On the occasion of our second dinner-party, the guests having been
+forewarned of the famous man's idiosyncrasies, no reference whatever was
+made to his achievements. We sat him between two pretty and charming
+women who chattered amusingly to him with what I, who kept an eye open
+and an ear cocked, considered to be a very subtly flattering deference.
+Adrian responded with adequate animation. As an ordinary clever,
+well-bred man of the world he might have done this almost mechanically;
+but I fancied that he found real enjoyment in the light and picturesque
+talk of his two neighbours. When the ladies left us, he discussed easy
+politics with the Member for our own division of the County. In the
+drawing-room, afterwards, he played a rubber at bridge, happened to
+hold good cards and smiled an hour away. When the last guest departed,
+he yawned, excused himself on the ground of healthy fatigue and went
+straight off to bed. Barbara and I congratulated ourselves on the
+success of our dinner-party. The next day Adrian went about as glum as a
+dinosaur in a museum, and conveyed, even to Susan's childish mind, his
+desire for solitude. His hang-dog dismalness so affected my wife, that
+she challenged Doria.
+
+"What in the world is the matter with him, to-day?"
+
+Doria drew herself up and flashed a glance at Barbara--they were both
+little bantams of women, one dark as wine, the other fair as corn. If
+ever these two should come to a fight, thought I who looked on, it would
+be to the death.
+
+"Your friends are very charming, my dear, and of course I've nothing to
+say against them; but I was under the impression that every educated
+person in the English-speaking world knew my husband's name, and I
+consider the way he was ignored last night by those people was
+disgraceful."
+
+"But, my dear Doria," cried Barbara, aghast, "we thought that Adrian was
+having quite a good time."
+
+"You may think so, but he wasn't. Adrian's a gentleman and plays the
+game; but you must see it was very galling to him--and to me--to be
+treated like any stockbroker--or architect--or idle man about town."
+
+"You are unfortunate in your examples," said I, intervening judicially.
+"Pray reflect that there are architects alive whose artistic genius is
+not far inferior to Adrian's."
+
+"You know very well what I mean," she snapped.
+
+"No, we don't, dear," said Barbara dangerously. "We think you're a
+little idiot and ought to be ashamed of yourself. We took the trouble to
+tell every one of those people that Adrian hated any reference to his
+work, and like decent folk they didn't refer to it. There--now round
+upon us."
+
+The pallor deepened a shade in Doria's ivory cheek.
+
+"You have put me in the wrong, I admit it. But I think it would have
+been better to let us know."
+
+What could one do with such people? I was inclined to let them work out
+their salvation in their own eccentric fashion; but Barbara decided
+otherwise. When one's friends reached such a degree of lunacy as
+warranted confinement in an asylum, it was one's plain duty to look
+after them. So we continued to look after our genius and his worshipper,
+and we did it so successfully that before he left us he recovered his
+sleep in some measure, and lost the squinting look of strain in his
+eyes.
+
+On the morning of their departure I mildly counselled him to temper his
+fine frenzy with common-sense.
+
+"Knock off the night work," said I.
+
+He frowned, fidgeted with his feet.
+
+"I wish to God I hadn't to work at all," said he. "I hate it! I'd sooner
+be a coal-heaver."
+
+"Bosh!" said I. "I know that you're an essentially idle beggar; but
+you're as proud as Punch of your fame and success and all that it means
+to you."
+
+"What does it mean after all?"
+
+"If you talk in that pessimistic way," I said, "you'll make me cry.
+Don't. It means every blessed thing in the world to you. At any rate it
+has meant Doria."
+
+"I suppose that's true," he grunted. "And I suppose I am essentially
+idle. But I wish the damned thing would get written of its own accord.
+It's having to sit down at that infernal desk that gets on my nerves. I
+have the same horrible apprehension of it--always have--as one has
+before a visit to the dentist, when you know he's going to drill hell
+into you."
+
+"Why do you work in such a depressing room?" I asked. "If I were shut up
+alone in it, I would stick my nose in the air and howl like a dog."
+
+"Oh, the room's all right," said he. Then he looked away absently and
+murmured as if to himself, "It isn't the room."
+
+"Then what is it?" I persisted.
+
+He turned with a dreary sort of smile. "It's the born butterfly being
+condemned to do the work of the busy bee."
+
+A short while afterwards we saw them drive off and watched the car
+disappear round the bend of the drive.
+
+"Well, my dear," said I, "thank goodness I'm not a man of genius."
+
+"Amen!" said Barbara, fervently.
+
+As soon as they had settled down in their flat, Adrian began to work
+again, in the same unremitting fashion. The only concession he made to
+consideration of health was to go to bed immediately on his return from
+dinner-parties and theatres instead of spending three or four hours in
+his study. Otherwise the routine of toil went on as before. One
+afternoon, happening to be in town and in the neighbourhood of St.
+John's Wood, I called at the flat with the idea of asking Doria for a
+cup of tea. I also had in my pocket a letter from Jaffery which I
+thought might interest Adrian. The maid who opened the door informed me
+that her mistress was out. Was Mr. Boldero in? Yes; but he was working.
+
+"That doesn't matter," said I. "Tell him I'm here."
+
+The maid did not dare disturb him. Her orders were absolute. She could
+not refuse to admit me, seeing that I was already in the hall; but she
+stoutly refused to announce me. I argued with the damsel.
+
+"I may have business of the utmost importance with your master."
+
+She couldn't help it. She had her orders.
+
+"But, my good Ellen," said I--the minx had actually been in our service
+a couple of years before!--"suppose the place were on fire, what would
+you do?"
+
+She looked at me demurely. "I think I should call a policeman, sir."
+
+"You can call one now," said I, "for I'm going to announce myself. Don't
+tell me I'll have to walk over your dead body first, for it won't do."
+
+I know it is not looked upon as a friendly act to interrupt a man in his
+work and to disregard the orders given to his servants, but I was
+irritated by all this Grand Llama atmosphere of mysterious seclusion.
+Besides, I had been walking and felt just a little hot and dusty and
+thirsty, and I felt all the hotter, dustier and thirstier for my
+argument with Ellen.
+
+"I'll announce myself," I said, and marched to the door of Adrian's
+study. It was locked. I rapped at the door.
+
+"Who's there?" came Adrian's voice.
+
+"Me. Hilary."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"I happen to be a guest under your roof," said I, with a touch of
+temper.
+
+"Wait a minute," said he.
+
+I waited about two. Then the door was unlocked and opened and I strode
+in upon Adrian who looked rather pale and dishevelled.
+
+"Why the deuce," said I, "did you keep me hanging about like that?"
+
+"I'm sorry," he replied. "But I make it a fixed rule to put away my
+work"--he waved a hand towards the safe--"whenever anybody, even Doria,
+wants to come into the room."
+
+I glanced around the cheerless place. There were no traces of work
+visible. Save that the quill pens and blotting pad were inky, his
+library table seemed as immaculate, as unstained by toil, as it did on
+the occasion of my first visit.
+
+"You needn't have made all that fuss," said I. "I only dropped in for a
+second or two. I wanted to ask for a drink and to show you a letter from
+Jaffery."
+
+"Oh, Jaffery!" He smiled. "How's the old barbarian getting on?"
+
+"Tremendously. He's the guest of a Viceroy and living in sumptuousness.
+Read for yourself."
+
+I took from my pocket letter and envelope. Now I am a man who keeps few
+letters and no envelopes. The second post bringing Jaffery's epistle had
+just arrived when I was leaving Northlands that morning, and it was but
+an accident of haste that the envelope had not been destroyed. I took
+the opportunity of tearing it up while Adrian was reading. With the
+pieces in my hand, I peered about the room.
+
+"What are you looking for?" he asked.
+
+"Your waste-paper basket."
+
+"Haven't got such a thing."
+
+I threw my litter into the grate.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I'm not going to pander to the curiosity of housemaids," he replied
+rather irritably.
+
+"What do you do with your waste paper, then?"
+
+"Never have any," he said, with his eyes on Jaffery's letter.
+
+"Good Lord!" I cried. "Do you pigeon-hole bills and money-lenders'
+circulars and second-hand booksellers' catalogues and all their
+wrappers?"
+
+He folded up the letter, took me by the arm and regarded me with a smile
+of forced patience.
+
+"My dear Hilary, can't you ever understand that this room is just a
+workshop and nothing else? Here I think of nothing but my novel. I would
+as soon think of conducting my social correspondence in the bathroom. If
+you want to see the waste-paper basket where I throw my bills and
+unanswered letters from duchesses, and the desk--I share it with
+Doria--where I dash off my brilliant replies to money-lenders, come into
+the drawing-room. There, also, I shall be able to give you a drink."
+
+My eyes, following an unconscious glance from his, fell upon a new and
+hitherto unnoticed object--a little table, now startlingly obvious, in a
+corner of the all but unfurnished room, bearing a tray with half full
+decanter, syphon and glass.
+
+"You've got all I want here," said I.
+
+"No. That's mere stimulant. _Sapit lucernam_. It has a horrible flavour
+of midnight oil. There's not what you understand by a drink in it. Let's
+get out of the accursed hole."
+
+He dragged me almost by force into the drawing-room, where he
+entertained me courteously. It was curious to observe how his manner
+changed in--I have to use the Boldero jargon--in the different
+atmosphere. He expounded the qualities of his whisky--a present from old
+man Jornicroft, a rare blend which just a few "merchantates" (Barbara's
+word, he declared, was delicious) in Glasgow and Dundee and here and
+there a one in the City of London were able to procure. In its flavour,
+said he, lurked the mystery of strange and barbaric names. He showed me
+a Bonington water colour which he had picked up for a song. On enquiry
+as to the signification of a song as a unit of value, I learned that
+since eminent tenors and divas had sung into gramophones, the standard
+had appreciated.
+
+"My dear man," he laughed, in answer to my protest. "I can afford it."
+
+For the quarter of an hour that I spent with him in his own
+drawing-room, he was quite the old Adrian. I drove to Paddington Station
+under the influence of his urbanity. But in the train, and afterwards at
+home, I was teased by vague apprehensions. Hitherto I had loosely and
+playfully qualified his methods of work as lunatic, without a thought as
+to the exact significance of the term. Now a horrible thought harassed
+me. Had I been precise without knowing it?
+
+Novelists may have their little idiosyncrasies, and the privacy of their
+working hours deserves respect; but none I have ever heard of are such
+fearful wildfowl as to need the precautions with which Adrian surrounded
+himself. Why should he put himself under lock and key? Why should he not
+allow human eye to fall, even from the distance prescribed by good
+manners, upon his precious manuscript? Why need he use care so
+scrupulous as not to expose even torn up bits of rough draft to the
+ancillary publicity of a waste-paper basket? Soundness of mind did not
+lie that way. The terms in which he alluded to his book were not those
+of a sane man filled with the joy of his creation. None of us, not even
+Doria, knew how the story was progressing. He had signed a contract with
+an American editor for serialisation to begin in July. Here we were in
+the middle of May, and not a page of manuscript had been delivered.
+Doria told Barbara that the editor had been cabling frenziedly. How much
+of the story was written? I recalled his wild talk at Easter about
+putting into the novel the whole of human life. I had jested with him,
+calling it a megalomaniac notion. But suppose, unwittingly, I had been
+right? I thought of the ghastly name physicians give to the malady and
+shivered.
+
+Suddenly, a day or two afterwards, came news that, to some extent,
+relieved my mind.
+
+While the Bolderos were at breakfast, a cable arrived from the Editor.
+It ran: "Unless half of manuscript is delivered to-day at London Office
+will cancel contract." Adrian read it, frowned and handed it to Doria.
+It seems that in all business matters she had his confidence.
+
+"Well, dear?" she said, looking up at him.
+
+He broke out angrily. "Did you ever hear such amazing insolence? I give
+this pettifogging tradesman the privilege of publishing my novel in his
+rubbishy periodical and he dares to dictate terms to me! Half a novel,
+indeed! As if it were half a bale of calico. The besotted fool! As well
+ask a clock-maker to deliver half a clock."
+
+"Argument by analogy is rather dangerous," she said gently, seeking to
+turn aside his wrath with a smile. "It's not quite the same thing. Can't
+you give him something to go on with?"
+
+"I can, but I won't. I'll see him damned first." He turned to the maid
+and demanded a telegraph form.
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to teach him a lesson. He thinks I'm going to be taken in by
+his bluff and run round with a brown paper parcel to Fleet Street or
+wherever his beastly office is. He's mistaken. There," he wrote the
+cable hurriedly and read it aloud, "'Shall not deliver anything. Only
+too glad to cancel contract.' He'll he the most surprised and disgusted
+man in America!"
+
+"Need you put it quite like that?" said Doria.
+
+"It's the only way to make him understand. He has been buzzing round me
+like a wasp for the past month. Now he's squashed. And now," said he,
+getting up and lighting a cigarette, "I'm not going to do another stroke
+of work for three months."
+
+It was the news of this last announcement that relieved my mind: not the
+story of Adrian's intolerable treatment of the editor, which was of a
+piece with his ordinary attitude towards his own genius. The
+capriciousness of the resolution startled me; but I approved
+whole-heartedly. I would have counselled immediate change of scene, had
+not Adrian anticipated my advice by rushing off then and there to Cook's
+and taken tickets to Switzerland. Having some business in town, I
+motored up with Barbara earlier than I need have done, and we saw them
+off at Victoria Station. Adrian, in holiday spirits, talked rather
+loudly. Now that he was free from the horror of that bestial vampire
+sucking his blood--that was his way of referring to the long suffering
+and hardly used editor--life emerged from gloom into sunshine. Now his
+spirit could soar untrammelled. It had taken its leap into the Empyrean.
+He beheld his book beneath him dazzlingly clear. Three months communing
+with nature, three months solitude on the pure mountain heights, three
+months calm discipline of the soul--that was what he needed. Then to
+work, and in another three months, _currente calamo_, the book would be
+written.
+
+"And what is Doria going to do on top of the Matterhorn?" asked my wife.
+
+Doria cried out, "Oh, don't tease. We're not going near the Matterhorn.
+We're going to read beautiful books, and see beautiful things and think
+beautiful thoughts." She dragged Barbara a step or two aside. "Don't you
+think this is the best thing that could have happened?" she asked, with
+her anxious, earnest gaze.
+
+"The very, very best, dear," replied Barbara gently.
+
+And indeed it was. If ever a man realised himself to be on the verge of
+the abyss, I am sure it was Adrian Boldero. Some haunting fear was set
+at the back of his laughing eyes--the expression of an animal instinct
+for self-preservation which discounted the balderdash about the soaring
+yet disciplined soul.
+
+I whispered to Doria: "Don't go too far into the wilds out of reach of
+medical advice."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"You're taking away a sick man."
+
+"Do you really think so?"
+
+"I do," said I.
+
+She looked to right and left and then at me full in the face, and she
+gripped my hand.
+
+"You're a good friend, Hilary. God knows I thank you."
+
+From which I clearly understood that her passionately loyal heart was
+grievously sore for Adrian.
+
+During their absence abroad, which lasted much longer than three months,
+we heard fairly regularly from Doria; twice or thrice from Adrian. After
+a time he grew tired of mountaintops and solitude and declared that his
+inspiration required steeping in the past, communion with the hallowed
+monuments of mankind. So they wandered about the old Italian cities,
+until he discovered that the one thing essential to his work was the
+gaiety of cosmopolitan society; whereupon they went the round of French
+watering-places, where Adrian played recklessly at baccarat and spent
+inordinate sums on food. And all the time Doria wrote glowingly of their
+doings. Adrian had put the book out of his head, was always in the best
+of spirits. He had completely recovered from the strain of work and was
+looking forward joyously to the final spurt in London and the
+achievement of the masterpiece.
+
+Meanwhile we played the annual comedy of our August migration; the only
+change being that instead of Dinard we went to the West Coast of
+Scotland to stay with some of Barbara's relatives. One gleam of joy
+irradiated that grey and dismal sojourn--the news that Jaffery, his
+mission in Crim Tartary being accomplished, would be home for Christmas.
+Our host and hostess were sporting folk with red, weatherbeaten faces
+and a mania (which they expected us to share) for salmon-fishing in the
+pouring rain. As neither Barbara nor I were experts--I always trembled
+lest a strong young fish getting hold of the end of Barbara's line
+should whisk her over like a feather into the boiling current--and as
+for myself, I prefer the more contemplative art of bottom fishing from a
+punt in dry weather--our friends caught all the salmon, while we merely
+caught colds in the head. Many an hour of sodden misery was cheered by
+the whispered word of comfort: Jaffery would be home for Christmas. And
+when, at ten o'clock in the evening, just as we were beginning to awake
+from the nightmare of the day, and to desire sprightly conversation, our
+host and hostess fell into a lethargy, and staggered off to slumber, we
+beguiled the hour before bedtime with talk of Jaffery's homecoming.
+
+At last we escaped and took the good train south. The Bolderos had
+already returned to London. They came to spend our first week-end at
+Northlands. Adrian professed to be in the robustest of health and to
+have not a care in the world. The holiday, said he, had done him
+incalculable good. Already he had begun to work in the full glow of
+inspiration. We thought him looking old and hag-ridden, but Doria seemed
+happy. She had her own reason for happiness, which she confided to
+Barbara. It would be early in the New Year. . . . Her eyes, I noticed,
+were filled with a new and wonderful love for Adrian. On the Sunday
+afternoon as we were sauntering about the garden, Adrian touched upon
+the subject in a man's shy way when speaking to his fellow man.
+
+"Why," said I with a laugh, "that's just about the time you expect the
+book to be out."
+
+He gave me a queer, slanting look. "Yes," said he, "they'll both be born
+together."
+
+That night, to my consternation and sorrow, he went to bed quite fuddled
+with whisky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Never shall I forget that Christmastide. Its shadow has fallen on every
+Christmas since then. And, in the innocent insolence of our hearts, we
+had planned such a merry one. It was the first since our marriage that
+we were spending at Northlands, for like dutiful folk we had hitherto
+spent the two or three festival days in the solid London house of
+Barbara's parents. Her father, Sir Edward Kennion, retired Permanent
+Secretary of a Government Office, was a courtly gentleman with a
+faultless taste in old china and wine, and Lady Kennion a charming old
+lady almost worthy of being the mother of Barbara. To speak truly, I had
+always enjoyed my visits. But when the news came that, for the sake of
+the dear lady's health, the Kennions were starting for Bermuda, in the
+middle of December, it did not strike us desolate. On the contrary
+Barbara clapped her hands in undisguised glee.
+
+"It will do mother no end of good, and we can give Susan a real
+Christmas of her own."
+
+So we laid deep schemes to fill the house to overflowing and to have a
+roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a widowed cousin of
+mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children; and we sent out
+invitations to the _ban_ and _arriere ban_ of the county's juvenility,
+to say nothing of that of London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having
+accounted satisfactorily for Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope
+in a Christian spirit, of our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be
+with us. Why not ask his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion
+affection for each other. Then there was Liosha. Both she and Jaffery
+met in Susan's heart, and it was Susan's Christmas. With Liosha would
+come Mrs. Considine, admirable and lonely woman. We trusted to luck and
+to Mrs. Considine's urbane influence for amenable relations between
+Liosha and Euphemia Chayne. With Jaffery in the house, Adrian and Doria
+must come. Last Christmas they had spent in the country with old Mrs.
+Boldero; old Mrs. Boldero was, therefore, summoned to Northlands. In the
+lightness of our hearts we invited Mr. Jornicroft. After the letter was
+posted my spirits sank. What in the world would we do with ponderous old
+man Jornicroft? But in the course of a few posts my gloom was lightened
+by a refusal. Mr. Jornicroft had been in the habit for many years of
+spending Christmas at the King's Hotel, Hastings, and had already made
+his arrangements.
+
+"Who else is there?" asked Barbara.
+
+"My dear," said I. "This is a modest country house, not an International
+Palace Hotel. Including Eileen's children and their governess and nurse
+and Doria's maid, we shall have to find accommodation for fifteen
+people."
+
+"Nonsense!" she said. "We can't do it."
+
+"Count up," said I.
+
+I lit a cigar and went out into the winter-stricken garden, and left her
+reckoning on her fingers, with knitted brow. When I returned she greeted
+me with a radiantly superior smile.
+
+"Who said it couldn't be done? I do wish men had some kind of practical
+sense. It's as easy as anything."
+
+She unfolded her scheme. As far as my dazed wits could grasp it, I
+understood that I should give up my dressing-room, that the maids should
+sleep eight in a bed, that Franklin, our excellent butler, should perch
+in a walnut-tree and that planks should be put up in the bath-rooms for
+as many more guests as we cared to invite.
+
+"That is excellent," said I, "but do you realise that in this house
+party there are only three grown men--three ha'porth of grown men" (I
+couldn't forbear allusiveness) "to this intolerable quantity of women
+and children?"
+
+"But who is preventing you from asking men, dear? Who are they?"
+
+I mentioned my old friend Vansittart; also poor John Costello's son, who
+would most likely be at a loose end at Christmas, and one or two others.
+
+"Well have them, dear," said Barbara.
+
+So four unattached men were added to the party. That made nineteen. When
+I thought of their accommodation my brain reeled. In order to retain my
+wits I gave up thinking of it, and left the matter to Barbara.
+
+We were going to have a mighty Christmas. The house was filled with
+preparations. Susan and I went to the village draper's and bought
+beautifully coloured cotton stockings to hang up at her little cousins'
+bedposts. We stirred the plum pudding. We planned out everything that we
+should like to do, while Barbara, without much reference to us, settled
+what was to be done. In that way we divided the labour. Old Jaffery,
+back from China, came to us on the twentieth of December, and threw
+himself heart and soul into our side of the work. He took up our life
+just as though he had left it the day before yesterday--just the same
+sun-glazed hairy red giant, noisy, laughter-loving and voracious. Susan
+went about clapping her hands the day he arrived and shouting that
+Christmas had already begun.
+
+The first thing he did was to clamour for Adrian, the man of fame. But
+the three Bolderos were not coming till the twenty-fourth. Adrian was
+making one last glorious spurt, so Doria said, in order to finish the
+great book before Christmas. We had not seen much of them during the
+autumn. Trivial circumstances had prevented it. Susan had had measles. I
+had been laid up with a wrenched knee. One side happened to be engaged
+when the other suggested a meeting. A trumpery series of accidents.
+Besides, Adrian, with his new lease of health and inspiration, had
+plunged deeper than ever into his work, so that it was almost impossible
+to get hold of him. On the few occasions when he did emerge from his
+work-room into the light of friendly smiles, he gave glowing accounts of
+progress. He was satisfying his poet's dreams. He was writing like an
+inspired prophet. I saw him at the beginning of December. His face was
+white and ghastly, the furrow had deepened between his brows, and the
+strained squint had become permanent in his eyes. He laughed when I
+repeated my warnings of the spring. Small wonder, said he, that he did
+not look robust; virtue was going from him into every drop of ink. He
+could easily get through another month.
+
+"And then"--he clapped me on the shoulder--"my boy--you shall see! It
+will be worth all the _enfantement prodigieux_. You thought I was going
+off my chump, you dear old fuss-box. But you were wrong. So did
+Doria--for a week or two. Bless her! she's an artist's wife in ten
+million."
+
+"Have you thought of a title?" I asked.
+
+"'God'," said he. "Yes--'God'--short like that. Isn't it good?"
+
+I cried out that it was in the worst possible taste. It would offend. He
+would lose his public. The Non-conformists and Evangelicals would be
+frightened by the very name. He lost his temper and scoffed at my Early
+Victorianism. "Little Lily and her Pet Rabbit" was the kind of title I
+admired. He was going to call it "God."
+
+"My dear fellow, call it what you please," said I, anxious to avoid a
+duel of plates and glasses, for we were lunching on opposite sides of a
+table at his club.
+
+"I please to call it," said he, "by the only conceivable title that is
+adequate to such a work." Then he laughed, with a gleam of his old
+charm, and filled up my wine glass. "Anyhow, Wittekind, who has the
+commercial end of things in view, thinks it's ripping." He lifted his
+glass. "Here's to 'God.'"
+
+"Here's to the new book under a different name," said I.
+
+When I told Barbara about this, she rather agreed with Wittekind. It all
+depended on the matter and quality of the book itself.
+
+"Well, anyhow," said I, abhorrent of dissension, "thank Heaven the
+wretched composition's nearly finished."
+
+On the morning of the twenty-third came my cousin Eileen and her
+offspring, and in the afternoon came Liosha and Mrs. Considine. Jaffery
+met his dynamic widow with frank heartiness, and for the hour before
+bedtime, there were wild doings in the nursery, in which neither my
+wife, nor my cousin, nor Mrs. Considine, nor myself were allowed to
+participate. When nurses sounded the retreat, our two Brobdingnagians
+appeared in the drawing-room, radiant, and dishevelled, with children
+sticking to them like flies. It was only when I saw Liosha, by the side
+of Jaffery, unconsciously challenging him, as it were, physical woman
+against physical man, with three children--two in her generous arms and
+one on her back--to his mere pair--that I realised, with the shock that
+always attends one's discovery of the obvious, the superb Olympian
+greatness of the creature. She stood nearly six feet to his six feet
+two. He stooped ever so little, as is the way of burly men. She held
+herself as erect as a redwood pine. The depth of her bosom, in its calm
+munificence, defied the vast, thick heave of his shoulders. Her lips
+were parted in laughter shewing magnificent teeth. In her brown eyes one
+could read all the mysteries and tenderness of infinite motherhood. Her
+hair was anyhow: a debauched wreckage of combs and wisps and hairpins.
+Her barbaric beauty seemed to hold sleekness in contempt. I wanted, just
+for the picture, half her bodice torn away. For there they stood, male
+and female of an heroic age, in a travesty of modern garb. Clap a
+pepperpot helmet on Jaffery, give him a skin-tight suit of chain mail,
+moulding all his swelling muscles, consider his red sweeping moustache,
+his red beard, his intense blue eyes staring out of a red face; dress
+Liosha in flaming maize and purple, leaving a breast free, and twist a
+gold torque through her hair, dark like the bronze-black shadows under
+autumn bracken; strip naked-fair the five nesting bits of humanity--it
+was an unpresented scene from Lohengrin or the Goetterdaemmerung.
+
+I can only speak according to the impression produced by their entrance
+on an idle, dilettante mind. My cousin Eileen, a smiling lady of plump
+unimportance, to whom I afterwards told my fancy, could not understand
+it. Speaking entirely of physical attributes, she saw nothing more in
+Jaffery than an uncouth red bear, and considered Liosha far too big for
+a drawing-room.
+
+When the children departed after an orgy of osculation, Jaffery surveyed
+with a twinkling eye the decorous quartette sitting by the fire. Then in
+his familiar fashion, he took his companion by the arm.
+
+"They're too grown up for us, Liosha. Let's leave 'em. Come and I'll
+teach you how to play billiards."
+
+So off they went, to the satisfaction of Barbara and myself. Nothing
+could be better for our Christmas merriment than such relations of
+comradeship. We had the cheeriest of dinners that evening. If only, said
+Jaffery, old Adrian and Doria were with us. Well, they were coming the
+next day, together with Euphemia and the four unattached men. As I said
+before, I had given up enquiring into the lodging of this host, but
+Barbara, doubtless, as is her magic way, had caused bedrooms and beds to
+smile where all had been blank before. She herself was free from any
+care, being in her brightest mood; and when Barbara gave herself up to
+gaiety she was the most delicious thing in the wide world.
+
+In the morning the shadow fell. About eleven o'clock Franklin brought me
+a telegram into the library where Jaffery and I were sitting. I opened
+it.
+
+"_Terrible calamity. Come at once. Boldero_."
+
+I passed it to Jaffery. "My God!" said he, and we stared at each other.
+Franklin said:
+
+"Any answer, sir?"
+
+"Yes. 'Boldero. Coming at once.' And order the car round
+immediately--for London. Also ask Mrs. Freeth kindly to come here. Say
+the matter's important." Franklin withdrew. "It's Adrian," said I, my
+mind rushing back to my horrible apprehensions of the summer.
+
+"Or Doria. I understood--" He waved a hand.
+
+"Then Barbara must come."
+
+"She would in any case. It may be Adrian, so I'll come too, if you'll
+let me."
+
+Let the great, capable fellow come? I should think I would. "For
+Heaven's sake, do," said I.
+
+Barbara entered swinging housewifely keys.
+
+"I'm dreadfully busy, dear. What is it?"
+
+Then she saw our two set faces and stopped short. Her quick eyes fell on
+the telegram which Jaffery had put down in the arm of a couch, and
+before we could do or say anything, she had snatched it up and read it.
+She turned pale and held her little body very erect.
+
+"Have you ordered the car?"
+
+"Yes. Jaffery's coming with us."
+
+"Good, I'll get on my coat. Send Eileen to me. I must tell her about
+house things."
+
+She went out. Jaffery laid his heavy hand on my shoulder.
+
+"What a wonder of a wife you've got!"
+
+"I don't need you to tell me that," said I.
+
+We went downstairs to put on our coats and then round to the garage to
+hurry up the car.
+
+"There's some dreadful trouble at Mr. Boldero's," I said to the
+chauffeur. "You must drive like the devil."
+
+Barbara, veiled and coated, met us at the front door. She has a trick of
+doing things by lightning. We started; Barbara and Jaffery at the back,
+I sideways to them on one of the little chair seats. We had the car
+open, as it was a muggy day. . . . It is astonishing how such trivial
+matters stick in one's mind. . . . We went, as I had ordained, like the
+devil.
+
+"Who sent that telegram?" asked Barbara.
+
+"Doria," said I.
+
+"I think it's Adrian," said Jaffery.
+
+"I think," said Barbara, "it's that silly old woman, Adrian's mother.
+Either of the others would have said something definite. Ah!" she smote
+her knee with her small hand, "I hate people with spinal marrow and no
+backbone to hold it!"
+
+We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas traffic in
+the town clearing magically before us. Sometimes a car on an errand of
+life or death is recognised, given way to, like a fire engine.
+
+"What makes you so dead sure something's happened to Adrian?" Jaffery
+asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.
+
+Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears. Ever
+since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his
+novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I had given
+of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein. I had mentioned his
+pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office, his bombastic
+rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of the Snows, and, all
+that being part and parcel of our old Adrian, we had laughed. Six months
+before I would have told Jaffery quite a different story. But now that
+Adrian had practically won through, what was the good of reviving the
+memory of ghastly apprehensions?
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "There's something behind all this."
+
+I told him. It took some time. We sped through Slough and Hounslow, and
+past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as heavy as our
+hearts.
+
+"In plain words," said Jaffery, "it's G.P.--General Paralysis of the
+Insane."
+
+"That's what I fear," said I.
+
+"And you?" He turned to Barbara.
+
+"I too. Hilary has told you the truth."
+
+"But Doria! Good God! Doria! It will kill her!"
+
+Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery's great raw hand. Only
+at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear gloves.
+
+"We know nothing about it as yet. The more we tear ourselves to pieces
+now, the less able we'll be to deal with things."
+
+Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance
+in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double
+line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially
+organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean,
+narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able. Then
+through Chiswick, over Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London.
+All London to cross. Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was
+smitten by a blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a
+hundred yards ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer
+yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in
+startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.
+Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with
+light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the
+roadway. The interiors were sharply clear. We could see swarms of black
+things, seething with ant-like activity amid a phantasmagoria of
+colours, draperies, curtains, flashes of white linen, streaks of red and
+yellow meat gallant with rosettes and garlands, instantaneous,
+glistening vistas of gold, silver and crystal, warm reflections of
+mahogany and walnut; on the pavements an agglutinated yet moving mass by
+the shop fronts, the inner stream a garish pink ribbon of faces, the
+outer a herd of subfuse brown. And in the roadway, through the
+translucent olive, the swirling traffic seemed like armies of ghosts
+mightily and dashingly charioted.
+
+The darkness had deepened when we, at last, drew up at the mansions in
+St. John's Wood. No lights were lit in the vestibule, and the
+hall-porter emerged as from a cavern of despair. He opened the car-door
+and touched his peaked cap. I could see from the man's face that he had
+been expecting us. He knew us, of course, as constant visitors of the
+Bolderos.
+
+"What's the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Don't you know, sir?"
+
+"No."
+
+He glanced at Barbara, as if afraid to give her the shock of his news,
+and bent forward and whispered to me:
+
+"Mr. Boldero's dead, sir."
+
+I don't remember clearly what happened then. I have a vague memory of
+the man accompanying us in the lift and giving some unintelligible
+account of things. I was stunned. We had interpreted the ambiguous
+telegram in all other ways than this. Adrian was dead. That was all I
+could think of. The only coherent remark I heard the man make was that
+it was a dreadful thing to happen at Christmas. Barbara gripped my hand
+tight and did not say a word. The next phase I remember only too
+vividly. When the flat door opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was
+like a curtain being lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as
+we entered we were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of
+anaesthetics, disinfectants--I know not what--greeted us.
+
+The maid Ellen who had admitted us, red-eyed and scared, flew down the
+corridor into the kitchen, whence immediately afterwards emerged a
+professional nurse, who, carrying something, flitted into Doria's room.
+From the spare room came for a moment an elderly woman whom we did not
+know. The study door was flung wide open--I noticed that the jamb was
+splintered. From the drawing-room came sounds of awful moaning. We
+entered and found Adrian's mother alone, helpless with grief. Barbara
+sat by her and took her in her arms and spoke to her. But she could tell
+us nothing. I heard a man's step in the hall and Jaffery and I went out.
+He was a young man, very much agitated; he looked relieved at seeing us.
+
+"I am a doctor," said he, "I was called in. The usual medical man is
+apparently away for Christmas. I'm so glad you've come. Is there a Mrs.
+Freeth here?"
+
+"Yes. My wife," said I.
+
+"Thank goodness--" He drew a breath. "There's no one here capable of
+doing anything. I had to get in the nurse and the other woman."
+
+Jaffery had summoned Barbara from her vain task.
+
+"Mrs. Boldero is very ill--as ill as she can be. Of course you were
+aware of her condition--well--the shock has had its not very uncommon
+effect."
+
+"Life in danger?" Jaffery asked bluntly.
+
+"Life, reason, everything. Tell me. I'm a stranger. I know nothing--I
+was summoned and found a man lying dead on the floor in that room"--he
+pointed to the study--"and a woman in a dreadful state. I've only had
+time to make sure that the poor fellow was dead. Could you tell me
+something about them?"
+
+So we told him, the three of us together, as people will, who Adrian
+Boldero was, and how he and his genius were all this world and a bit of
+the next to his wife. How I managed to talk sensibly I don't know, for
+beating against the walls of my head was the thought that Adrian lay
+there in the room where I had seen the strange woman, lifeless and
+stiff, with the laughing eyes forever closed and the last mockery gone
+from his lips. Just then the woman appeared again. The young doctor
+beckoned to her and said a few words. Jaffery and I followed her into
+the death-chamber, leaving the doctor with Barbara. And then we stood
+and looked at all that was left of Adrian.
+
+But how did it happen? It was not till long afterwards that I really
+knew more than the scared maid-servant and the porter of the mansions
+then told us. But that little more I will set down here.
+
+For the past few days he had been working early and late, scarcely
+sleeping at all. The night before he had gone to bed at five, had risen
+sleepless at seven, and having dressed and breakfasted had locked
+himself in his study. The very last page, he told Doria, was to be
+written. He was to come down to us for Christmas, with his novel a
+finished thing. At ten o'clock, in accordance with custom, when he began
+to work early, the maid came to his door with a cup of chicken-broth.
+She knocked. There was no reply. She knocked louder. She called her
+mistress. Doria hammered . . . she shrieked. You know how swiftly terror
+grips a woman. She sent for the porter. Between them they raised a din
+to awaken--well--all but the dead. The man forced the door--hence the
+splinters on the jamb--and there they found Adrian, in the great bare
+room, hanging horribly over his writing chair, with not a scrap of paper
+save his blotting-pad in front of him. He must have died almost as soon
+as he had reached his study, before he had time to take out his
+manuscript from the jealous safe. That this was so the harassed doctor
+afterwards affirmed, when he could leave the living to make examination
+of the dead. Still later than that we heard the cause of death--a clot
+of blood on the brain. . . .
+
+To go back . . . They found him dead. And then arose an unpicturable
+scene of horror. It seems that the cook, a stolid woman, on the point of
+starting for a Christmas visit, took charge of the situation, sent for
+the doctor, despatched the telegram to us, and with the help of the
+porter's wife, saw to Adrian. The elder Mrs. Boldero collapsed, a futile
+mass of sodden hysteria. Much that was fascinating and feminine in
+Adrian came from this amiable and incapable lady.
+
+We went into the dining-room and helped ourselves to whisky and soda--we
+needed it--and talked of the catastrophe. As yet, of course, we knew
+nothing of the clot of blood. Presently Barbara came in and put her
+hands on my shoulders.
+
+"I must stay here, Hilary, dear. You must get a bed at your club.
+Jaffery will take the car and bring us what we want from Northlands, and
+will look after things with Eileen. And put off Euphemia and the others,
+if you can."
+
+And that was the Christmas to which we had looked forward with such
+joyous anticipation. Adrian dead; his child stillborn: Doria hovering on
+the brink of life and death. I did what was possible on a Christmas eve
+in the way of last arrangements. But to-morrow was Christmas Day. The
+day after, Boxing Day. The day after that, Sunday. The whole world was
+dead. And all those awful days the thin yellow fog that was not fog but
+mere blight of darkness hung over the vast city.
+
+God spare me such another Christmastide.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried
+Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother
+had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country
+cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. Doria still lay
+in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the
+stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds that strike a note of agony
+through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to
+knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her.
+
+We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and appointing
+Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the
+child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis XV cabinet
+in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a
+solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We
+found his own personal bills and receipts filed, his old letters tied up
+in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his
+lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk
+of a careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
+Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
+intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry alone,
+because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from
+impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.
+
+All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been
+found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we had placed
+the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The
+Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing
+that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered
+the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it
+locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his
+unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women,
+who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion,
+hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed,
+professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an
+inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and
+household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
+strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living,
+the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand
+it over to the publisher.
+
+So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered
+the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the
+blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating
+yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the
+morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The
+stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the
+electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its
+scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went
+to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in
+the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three
+different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter
+the quill had scrawled "God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass
+ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an
+eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to
+hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its
+heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed
+from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
+of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.
+
+"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed
+look. "We'll have our work cut out."
+
+"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as
+you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."
+
+Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose, ragged
+piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets
+unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite
+manuscript; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes,
+fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible
+memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.
+"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah
+steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude
+drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking
+over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.
+
+"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his
+beard.
+
+"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great
+relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were
+turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained
+Adrian's whimsy.
+
+"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh
+at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an
+incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish
+away, and we'll look at the second shelf."
+
+The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were
+more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a
+couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent
+scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen
+stories.
+
+"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery,
+standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous
+wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had
+pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting
+in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.
+
+"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
+found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."
+
+We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
+could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.
+
+"It will take weeks to fix it up."
+
+"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
+old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."
+
+In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
+going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
+beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or
+four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a
+dozen headed "Chapter I."
+
+"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.
+
+I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I
+examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a
+coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.
+
+"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"
+
+He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in
+brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.
+
+"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.
+
+"Thank God!" said I.
+
+He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet
+with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a
+white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written
+inscription:
+
+"The Diamond Gate. A Novel--by Thomas Castleton."
+
+"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two
+we both stood stock-still.
+
+The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily
+flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's--Tom Castleton, the one genius
+of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.
+There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too
+familiar--as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom
+Castleton from Adrian.
+
+Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.
+
+There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond
+Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian
+had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man,
+but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.
+
+We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands
+and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we
+ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are
+times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We
+found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The
+apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we
+examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into
+an awful certainty.
+
+The great epoch-making novel did not exist.
+
+It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no
+possibility of existing.
+
+"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in his
+great, hoarse bass.
+
+"God knows," said I.
+
+But even as I spoke, I knew.
+
+I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned
+Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to
+shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I
+was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and
+hugged me kindly.
+
+"Go and get warm," said he.
+
+"But this?" I pointed to the litter.
+
+"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."
+
+He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I
+crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet
+and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that
+morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just
+as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose
+some story in mitigation of the tragedy.
+
+Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down
+on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
+hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the
+shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse
+and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the
+yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of
+turning on the lights.
+
+"What have you done?" I asked.
+
+"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll bring a
+portmanteau and take it away."
+
+"What are you going to do with it?"
+
+"Leave that to me," said he.
+
+What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was very
+glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with the
+reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as
+he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself
+like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he was a professional
+demigod. He reassured me further.
+
+"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he
+broke the silence.
+
+"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in God's
+name?"
+
+And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the cold grip
+of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was none too
+consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks,
+which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in
+terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his
+offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he
+had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture.
+
+Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not. Least of
+all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the revelation of
+his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in
+perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian. With all his faults,
+his poses, his superficialities, his secrecies, his egotisms, I never
+dreamed of him as aught but a loyal and honourable gentleman. When I
+think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul.
+What does one man know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was
+right: "We mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable
+faith in Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast
+with conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
+them part of our very selves.
+
+Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place
+made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral
+sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the
+manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his hands. Undoubtedly he was to
+arrange for its publication. Castleton's appointment to the
+professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I well remember,
+necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he
+sailed. Why did not Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the
+manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a
+question of despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were
+not parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
+characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From
+that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years,
+in his easy way, he struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for
+Doria, he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent
+to Wittekind, the publisher of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till
+later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript?
+That was what Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with
+morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
+queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
+relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence--that is the
+only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
+explain the sustained act of folly.
+
+And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
+gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
+remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
+Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
+the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
+looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
+merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
+ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
+what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
+woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
+novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
+casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
+himself to do heretofore, he had done.
+
+As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
+stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
+examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
+of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
+"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
+capacity.
+
+When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
+He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
+beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
+was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
+must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
+mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
+practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
+room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
+intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
+wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
+the condemned cell.
+
+As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
+of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
+spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
+mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
+few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a
+novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
+never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
+insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
+but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
+genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
+critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
+All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
+little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
+by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
+which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
+a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
+human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
+have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
+were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
+poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
+matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
+the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
+like, but the essential quality of the artist.
+
+And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
+months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
+never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
+such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
+life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
+and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
+became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
+told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
+wondrous book. The pity of it!
+
+How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
+to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
+would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
+the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
+he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
+sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
+impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
+out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
+should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No
+wonder he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
+accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills for
+whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for
+the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate God was
+merciful at last. He killed him.
+
+Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire--the ship-logs that Adrian
+loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and what-not, gave green and
+crimson and lavender flames.
+
+"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he said. "A
+war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of
+hell. But this sample I haven't struck before and it's the worst of the
+lot. My God! and only the day before yesterday I took him to be
+married."
+
+"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked hairs
+out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy of China,
+which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you had no idea of
+time or space."
+
+He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.
+
+"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the child
+stillborn--"
+
+I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me;
+that of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his
+eyes: "They'll both be born together."
+
+I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I said. "Both
+stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter, the more
+shudderingly awful it is."
+
+Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.
+
+"And she at the point of death--to complete the tragedy," he said below
+his breath.
+
+Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.
+
+"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried with a
+startling quaver in his deep voice.
+
+"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the best
+thing you can wish for her?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Isn't it obvious? She recovers--she will, most probably, recover;
+Jephson said so this morning--she comes back to life to find what? The
+shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's
+better that she should die now."
+
+Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his
+eyes blazed.
+
+"What do you mean--shattering of idols?"
+
+"She is bound to learn the truth."
+
+He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp,
+so that I winced with pain.
+
+"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim
+suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told
+her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of
+passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched
+fists,--the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and
+ceiling of the fog-darkened room--I shrank into my chair, for he seemed
+not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same
+deep, shaken voice.
+
+"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand."
+His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."
+
+"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."
+
+"You swear you've seen it?"
+
+"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.
+
+He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair,
+and walked for a little about the room.
+
+"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself. It's a
+matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you understand clearly
+what I mean?"
+
+"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself
+to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it can't last
+forever."
+
+Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the steel of
+his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's enemy.
+
+"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
+something out of nothing."
+
+"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've seen it,
+and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it
+matter to you what becomes of it?"
+
+"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole
+matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and
+trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you?"
+
+"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
+responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
+choose. But you've seen the outside of it."
+
+He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled a
+memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy.
+Then he turned on me.
+
+"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul
+of what you have seen this day?"
+
+I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for? But
+you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must know."
+
+He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile:
+
+"You and Barbara are one," said he.
+
+Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from
+his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheet of the
+blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God: A Novel: By
+Adrian Boldero."
+
+"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a touch of
+frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that Doria emerged
+from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they allowed me to visit
+her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost in search of a human
+occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she looked such a pitiful scrap,
+all hair and eyes. She smiled and held droopingly out to me the most
+fragile thing in hands I have ever seen.
+
+"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."
+
+"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for things to
+find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have already made
+the discovery."
+
+She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I love it
+in the spring. The dancing daffodils--"
+
+"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.
+
+"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause. "At
+first I longed to die--that was why my recovery was so slow. But
+now--odd, isn't it?"
+
+"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how great
+it is," I replied gently.
+
+"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."
+
+I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much the same.
+In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious aspiration. If it gives
+them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't they have it?
+But in Doria's case, its utterance gave me a kind of stab in the heart.
+By way of reply I patted her poor little wrist sympathetically.
+
+"When will the book be out?" she asked.
+
+"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.
+
+"I suppose they're busy printing it."
+
+"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.
+
+"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time. It won't
+do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"
+
+"I will," said I.
+
+I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded
+ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor
+child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the
+subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could
+not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know
+the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave
+him Doria's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing.
+He had become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the
+disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands.
+
+I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the
+best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town;
+yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished
+chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as
+I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor-omnibuses without an
+overcoat.
+
+After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his pipe
+thoughtfully--we were in the smoking-room of a club (not the Athenaeum)
+to which we both belonged--and then he roared out:
+
+"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"Well"--he grinned a little--"I'm not exactly a kind of sick-room
+flower."
+
+"I think you ought to see her--you're as much trustee and executor as I
+am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-racking
+questions."
+
+"All right, I'll go," he said.
+
+The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book
+would be published as soon as possible.
+
+"When will that be?" she asked.
+
+Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.
+
+"Is it in the printer's hands?"
+
+"Not yet."
+
+"Why?"
+
+He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but here
+and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together, which
+Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript. He himself
+was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical task of revision.
+
+"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could not be
+given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so
+why are you taking all this time over it?"
+
+"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.
+
+Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please
+Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she
+complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up
+Adrian's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting
+the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara
+did her best to soothe her; but we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad
+start.
+
+A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came
+across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known
+for some years--originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer
+of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss
+our common friend.
+
+"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while.
+
+"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.
+
+"Yes. Can't make him out."
+
+"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."
+
+"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a shock,
+is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a wilderness and
+roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be persuaded to leave it."
+
+"What do you mean?" I asked.
+
+"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to
+send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as well."
+
+"All this is news to me," said I.
+
+"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans, wild
+tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways,
+finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal
+conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is butter and honey to
+Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up
+with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!"
+
+At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I could
+not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate
+vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till
+three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot
+seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it
+was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the
+meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.
+The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission,
+the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model
+special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
+ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task
+after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest
+political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and
+honourable position on the paper.
+
+"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,"
+said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't
+tell him that we wouldn't."
+
+It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a
+man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred
+to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's
+Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a
+solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I
+did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in
+the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker's to give an order
+concerning Susan's riding-boots (_vide_ diary) and drove home to dinner,
+to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account
+of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the
+contented and inoffensive man.
+
+A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in
+Westminster in the forenoon--I had come up to town on business--I
+mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A
+dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I
+found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe
+in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere
+former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once
+comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did not seem to mind. The remains of
+breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear.
+Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth.
+
+"Hullo, hullo, hullo!"
+
+His usual greeting. We shook hands and commended the weather. When the
+alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London. It was a hole
+for sick dogs, not for sound men. He loathed its abominable suffocation.
+
+"Then why the deuce do you stay in it?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "I can't do anything else."
+
+This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+"I understood you could have gone to Persia."
+
+He frowned and tugged his red beard. "How did you know that?"
+
+"Arbuthnot--" I began.
+
+"Arbuthnot?" he boomed angrily. "What the blazes does he mean by telling
+you about my affairs? I'll punch his damned head!"
+
+"Don't," said I. "Your hands are so big and he's so small. You might
+hurt him."
+
+"I'd like to hurt him. Why can't he keep his infernal tongue quiet?"
+
+He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful anathema.
+Then in his infantile way he shouted: "I didn't want any of you to know
+anything about it."
+
+"Why?" I asked.
+
+"Because I didn't."
+
+"But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?"
+
+He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and collecting a
+litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a legging from a sofa,
+pitched it into a corner.
+
+"Here. Sit down."
+
+I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying the
+half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room. It was by no means the
+comfortable home from Harrod's Stores that Barbara had prescribed; and
+he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the heads of
+game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London Repository. It
+was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage.
+
+"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink."
+
+I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country
+gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half past
+eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar
+circumstances.
+
+"I'm going to have one anyway!"
+
+He disappeared and presently reentered with a battered two-handled
+silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy
+of Cambridge days, which he always carried about with him on no matter
+what lightly equipped expedition--it is always a matter of regret to me
+that Jaffery, as I have mentioned before, missed his seat in the
+Cambridge boat; but when one despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it
+is found the central feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such
+as used to protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from
+the priggish judgment of university authority?--he reentered, with this
+vessel full of beer. He nodded, drank a huge draught and wiped his
+moustache with his hand.
+
+"Better have some. I've got a cask in the bedroom."
+
+"Good God!" said I, aghast. "What else do you keep there? A side of
+bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?"
+
+Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his
+bedroom.
+
+Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long, lean,
+puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the
+deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.
+
+"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a
+cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of
+your life in not going out to Persia."
+
+He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard; and,
+turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife, and Susan
+my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed
+towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate me.
+
+"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian proposition," said
+he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window at the
+infinitely reaching landscape of the chimney pots of south London, their
+grey smoke making London's unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of
+the March sky. "Just hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning
+round my neck I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which
+was very wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of
+the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert. Away
+and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with
+white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band of
+topaz and amethystine vapours. And in his nostrils was the immemorable
+smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle of the harness
+and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of the drivers, and in
+his heart the certainty of plucking out the secret from the soul of this
+strange land. . . .
+
+At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair enquired
+politely after the health of Barbara and Susan. As far as the Persian
+journey was concerned the palaver was ended. He did not intend to give
+me his reasons for staying in England and I could not demand them more
+insistently. At any rate I had discovered the cause of his grumpiness.
+What creature of Jaffery's temperament could be contented with a soft
+bed in the centre of civilisation, when he had the chance of sleeping in
+verminous caravanserais with a saddle for pillow? In spite of his
+amazing predilections, Jaffery was very human. He would make a great
+sacrifice without hesitation; but the consequences of the sacrifice
+would cause him to go about like a bear with a sore head.
+
+And the cause of the sacrifice? Obviously Doria. Once having been
+admitted to her bedside, he went there every day. Flowers and fruit he
+had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a grape for Doria
+failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a pumpkin. Now he brought
+the offerings personally in embarrassing bulk. One offering was a
+gramophone which nearly drove her mad. Even in its present stage of
+development it offends the sensitive ear; but in its early days it was
+an instrument of torturing cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen
+strains music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he
+came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence
+of ravished senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and
+recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don't think the
+gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow's unspoken
+message. But gently criticising the banality of the tunes the thing
+played and sending him forth in quest of records of recondite and
+"unrecorded" music, she succeeded in mitigating the terror. To the
+present moment, however, I don't think Jaffery has realised that she had
+a higher aesthetic equipment than the hypnotised fox-terrier in the
+advertisement. . . . Jaffery also bought her puzzles and funny penny
+pavement toys and gallons of eau-de-cologne (which came in useful), and
+expensive scent (which she abominated), and stacks of new novels, and a
+fearsome machine of wood and brass and universal joints, by means of
+which an invalid could read and breakfast and write and shave all at the
+same time. The only thing he did not give her--the thing she craved more
+than all--was a fresh-bound copy of Adrian's book.
+
+Obviously, as I have remarked, it was Doria that kept him out of Persia.
+But I could not help thinking that this same Persian journey might have
+afforded a solution of the whole difficulty. Despatched suddenly to that
+vaguely known country, he could have taken the mythical manuscript to
+revise on the journey: the convoy could have been attacked by a horde of
+Kurds or such-like desperadoes, all could have been slain save a
+fortunate handful, and the manuscript could have been looted as an
+important political document and carried off into Eternity. Doria would
+have hated Jaffery forever after; but his chivalrous aim would have been
+accomplished. Adrian's honour would have been safe. But this simple way
+out never occurred to him. Apparently he thought it wiser to sacrifice
+his career and remain in London so as to buoy Doria up with false hope,
+all the time praying God to burn down St. Quentin's Mansions (where he
+lived) and Adrian's portmanteau of rubbish and himself all together.
+
+Suddenly, as soon as Doria could be moved, Mr. Jornicroft stepped in and
+carried her to the south of France. Barbara and Jaffery and myself saw
+her off by the afternoon train at Charing Cross. She was to rest in
+Paris for the night and the next day, and proceed the following night to
+Nice. She looked the frailest thing under the sun. Her face was
+startling ivory beneath her widow's headgear. She had scarcely strength
+to lift her head. Mr. Jornicroft had made luxurious arrangements for her
+comfort--an ambulance carriage from St. John's Wood, a special invalid
+compartment in the train; but at the station, as at Doria's wedding,
+Jaffery took command. It was his great arms that lifted her
+feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness from the
+carriage, carried her across the platform and deposited her tenderly on
+her couch in the compartment. Touched by his solicitude she thanked him
+with much graciousness. He bent over her--we were standing at the door
+and could not choose but hear:
+
+"Don't you remember what I said the first day I met you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It stands, my dear; and more than that." He paused for a second and
+took her thin hand. "And don't you worry about that book. You get well
+and strong."
+
+He kissed her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her
+shoulder--half her little body it seemed to be--and emerging from the
+compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm
+of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached Jornicroft.
+
+"I think I'll come with you as far as Paris," said he. "I'll get into a
+smoker somewhere or the other."
+
+"But, my dear sir"--exclaimed Mr. Jornicroft in some amazement--"it's
+awfully kind, but why should you?"
+
+"Mrs. Boldero has got to be carried. I didn't realise it. She can't put
+her feet to the ground. Some one has got to lift her at every stage of
+the journey. And I'm not going to let any damned clumsy fellow handle
+her. I'll see her into the Nice train to-morrow night--perhaps I'll go
+on to Nice with you and fix her up in the hotel. As a matter of fact, I
+will. I shan't worry you. You won't see me, except at the right time.
+Don't be afraid."
+
+Mr. Jornicroft, most methodical of Britons, gasped. So, I must confess,
+did Barbara and I. When Jaffery met us at the station he had no more
+intention of escorting Doria to Nice than we had ourselves.
+
+"I can't permit it--it's too kind--there's no necessity--we'll get on
+all right!" spluttered Mr. Jornicroft.
+
+"You won't. She has got to be carried. You're not going to take any
+risks."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--it's absurd--you haven't any luggage."
+
+"Luggage?" He looked at Mr. Jornicroft as if he had suggested the
+impossibility of going abroad without a motor veil or the Encyclopaedia
+Britannica. "What the blazes has luggage got to do with it?" His roar
+could be heard above the din of the hurrying station. "I don't want
+_luggage_." The humour of the proposition appealed to him so mightily
+that he went off into one of his reverberating explosions of mirth.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Then recovering--"Don't you worry about that."
+
+"But have you enough on you--it's an expensive journey--of course I
+should be most happy--"
+
+Jaffery stepped back and scanned the length of the platform and beckoned
+to an official, who came hurrying towards him. It was the station
+master.
+
+"Have you ever seen me before, Mr. Winter?"
+
+The official laughed. "Pretty often, Mr. Chayne."
+
+"Do you think I could get from here to Nice without buying a ticket
+now?"
+
+"Why, of course, our agent at Boulogne will arrange it if I send him a
+wire."
+
+"Right," said Jaffery. "Please do so, Mr. Winter. I'm crossing now and
+going to Nice by the Cote d'Azur Express to-morrow night. And see after
+a seat for me, will you?"
+
+"I'll reserve a compartment if possible, Mr. Chayne."
+
+The station master raised his hat and departed. Jaffery, his hands
+stuffed deep in his pockets, beamed upon us like a mountainous child. We
+were all impressed by his lordly command of the railway systems of
+Europe. It was a question of credit, of course, but neither Mr.
+Jornicroft, solid man that he was, nor myself could have undertaken that
+journey with a few loose shillings in his possession. For the first time
+since Adrian's death I saw Jaffery really enjoying himself.
+
+And that is how Jaffery without money or luggage or even an overcoat
+travelled from London to Nice, for no other purpose than to save Doria's
+sacred little body from being profaned by the touch of ruder hands.
+
+Having carried her at every stage beginning with the transfer from train
+to steamer at Folkestone and ending with a triumphant march up the
+stairs to the third floor of the Cimiez hotel, he took the first train
+back straight through to London.
+
+He returned the same old grinning giant, without a shadow of grumpiness
+on his jolly face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+About this time a bolt came from the blue or a bomb fell at our
+feet--the metaphor doesn't matter so long as it conveys a sense of an
+unlooked-for phenomenon. True, in relation to cosmic forces, it was but
+a trumpery bolt or a squib-like bomb; but it startled us all the same.
+The admirable Mrs. Considine got married. A retired warrior, a recent
+widower, but a celibate of twenty years standing owing to the fact that
+his late wife and himself had occupied separate continents (_on avait
+fait continent a part_, as the French might say) during that period, a
+Major-General fresh from India, an old flame and constant correspondent,
+had suddenly swooped down upon the boarding-house in Queen's Gate and,
+in swashbuckling fashion, had abducted the admirable and unresisting
+lady. It was a matter of special license, and off went the tardily happy
+pair to Margate, before we had finished rubbing our eyes.
+
+It was grossly selfish on the part of Mrs. Considine, said Barbara. She
+thought her--no; perhaps she didn't think her--God alone knows the
+convolutions of feminine mental processes--but she proclaimed her
+anyhow--an unscrupulous woman.
+
+"There's Liosha," she said, "left alone in that boarding-house."
+
+"My dear," said I, "Mrs. Jupp--I admit it's deplorable taste to change a
+name of such gentility as Considine for that of Jupp, but it isn't
+unscrupulous--Mrs. Jupp did not happen to be charged with a mission
+from on High to dry nurse Liosha for the rest of her life."
+
+"That's where you're wrong," Barbara retorted. "She was. She was the one
+person in the world who could look after Liosha. See what she's done for
+her. It was her duty to stick to Liosha. As for those two old faggots
+marrying, they ought to be ashamed of themselves."
+
+Whether they were ashamed of themselves or not didn't matter. Liosha
+remained alone in the boarding-house. Not all Barbara's indignation
+could turn Mrs. Jupp into the admirable Mrs. Considine and bring her
+back to Queen's Gate. What was to be done? We consulted Jaffery, who as
+Liosha's trustee ought to have consulted us. Jaffery pulled a long face
+and smiled ruefully. For the first time he realised--in spite of tragic
+happenings--the comedy aspect of his position as the legal guardian of
+two young, well-to-do and attractive widows. He was the last man in the
+world to whom one would have expected such a fate to befall. He too
+swore lustily at the defaulting duenna.
+
+"I thought it was all fixed up nicely forever," he growled.
+
+"Everything is transitory in this life, my dear fellow," said I.
+"Everything except a trusteeship. That goes on forever."
+
+"That's the devil of it," he growled.
+
+"You must get used to it," said I. "You'll have lots more to look after
+before you've done with this existence!"
+
+His look hardened and seemed to say: "If you go and die and saddle me
+with Barbara, I'll punch your head."
+
+He turned his back on me and, jerking a thumb, addressed Barbara.
+
+"Why do you take him out without a muzzle? Now you've got sense. What
+shall I do?"
+
+Then Liosha superb and smiling sailed into the room.
+
+I ought to have mentioned that Barbara had convened this meeting at the
+boarding-house. The room into which Liosha sailed was the elegant
+"_bonbonniere_" of a chamber known as the "boudoir." There was a great
+deal of ribbon and frill and photograph frame and artful feminine touch
+about it, which Liosha and, doubtless, many other inmates thought
+mightily refined.
+
+Liosha kissed Barbara and shook hands with Jaffery and me, bade us be
+seated and put us at our ease with a social grace which could not have
+been excelled by the admirable Mrs. Considine (now Jupp) herself. That
+maligned lady had performed her duties during the past two years with
+characteristic ability. Parenthetically I may remark that Liosha's
+table-manners and formal demeanour were now irreproachable. Mrs.
+Considine had also taken up the Western education of the child of twelve
+at the point at which it had been arrested, and had brought Liosha's
+information as to history, geography, politics and the world in general
+to the standard of that of the average schoolgirl of fifteen. Again, she
+had developed in our fair barbarian a natural taste in dress, curbing,
+on her emergence from mourning, a fierce desire for apparel in primary
+colours, and leading her onwards to an appreciation of suaver harmonies.
+Again she had run her tactful hand over Liosha's stockyard vocabulary,
+erasing words and expressions that might offend Queen's Gate and
+substituting others that might charm; and she had done it with a touch
+of humour not lost on Liosha, who had retained the sense of values in
+which no child born and bred in Chicago can be deficient.
+
+"I suppose you're all fussed to death about this marriage," she said
+pleasantly. "Well, I couldn't help it."
+
+"Of course not, dear," said Barbara.
+
+"You might have given us a hint as to what was going on," said Jaffery.
+
+"What good could you have done? In Albania if the General had interfered
+with your plans, you might have shot him from behind a stone and
+everyone except Mrs. Considine would have been happy; but I've been
+taught you don't do things like that in South Kensington."
+
+"Whoever wanted to shoot the chap?"
+
+"I, for one," said Barbara. "What are we to do now?"
+
+"Find another dragon," said Jaffery.
+
+"But supposing I don't want another dragon?"
+
+"That doesn't matter in the least. You've got to have one."
+
+"Say, Jaff Chayne," cried Liosha, "do you think I can't look after
+myself by this time? What do you take me for?"
+
+I interposed. "Rather a lonely young woman, that's all. Jaffery, in his
+tactless way, by using the absurd term 'dragon,' has missed the point
+altogether. You want a companion, if only to go about with, say to
+restaurants and theatres."
+
+"I guess I can get heaps of those," said Liosha, a smile in her eyes.
+"Don't you worry!"
+
+"All the more reason for a dragon."
+
+"If you mean somebody who's going to sit on my back every time I talk to
+a man, I decidedly object. Mrs. Considine was different and you're not
+going to find another like her in a hurry. Besides--I had sense enough
+to see that she was going to teach me things. But I don't want to be
+taught any more. I've learned enough."
+
+"But it's just a woman companion that we want to give you, dear," said
+Barbara. "Her mere presence about you is a protection against--well, any
+pretty young woman living alone is liable to chance impertinence and
+annoyance."
+
+Liosha's dark eyes flashed. "I'd like to see any man try to annoy me. He
+wouldn't try twice. You ask Mrs. Jardine"--Mrs. Jardine was the keeper
+of the boarding-house--"she'll tell you a thing or two about my being
+able to keep men from annoying me."
+
+Barbara did, afterwards, ask Mrs. Jardine, and obtained a few sidelights
+on Liosha's defensive methods. What they lacked in subtlety they made up
+in physical effectiveness. There were not many spruce young gentlemen
+who, after a week's residence in that establishment, did not adopt a
+peculiarly deferential attitude towards Liosha.
+
+"Still," said Jaffery, "I think you ought to have somebody, you know."
+
+"If you're so keen on a dragon," replied Liosha defiantly, "why not take
+on the job yourself?"
+
+"I? Good Lord! Ho! ho! ho!"
+
+Jaffery rose to his feet and roared with laughter. It was a fine joke.
+
+"There's a lot in Liosha's suggestion," said Barbara, with an air of
+seriousness.
+
+"You don't expect me to come and live here?" he cried, waving a hand to
+the frills and ribbons.
+
+"It wouldn't be a bad idea," said I. "You would get all the advantages
+and refining influences of a first-class English home."
+
+He pivoted round. "Oh, you be--"
+
+"Hush," said Barbara. "Either you ought to stay here and look after
+Liosha more than you do--"
+
+He protested. Wasn't he always looking after her? Didn't he write?
+Didn't he drop in now and then to see how she was getting on?
+
+"Have you ever taken the poor child out to dinner?" Barbara asked
+sternly.
+
+He stood before her in the confusion of a schoolboy detected in a lapse
+from grace, stammering explanations. Then Liosha rose, and I noticed
+just the faintest little twitching of her lip.
+
+"I don't want Jaff Chayne to be made to take me out to dinner against
+his will."
+
+"But--God bless my soul! I should love to take you out. I never thought
+of it because I never take anybody out. I'm a barbarian, my dear girl,
+just like yourself. If you wanted to be taken out, why on earth didn't
+you say so?"
+
+Liosha regarded him steadily. "I would rather cut my tongue out."
+
+Jaffery returned her gaze for a few seconds, then turned away puzzled.
+There seemed to be an unnecessary vehemence in Liosha's tone. He turned
+again and approached her with a smiling face.
+
+"I only meant that I didn't know you cared for that sort of thing,
+Liosha. You must forgive me. Come and dine with me at the Carlton this
+evening and do a theatre afterwards."
+
+"No, I wont!" cried Liosha. "You insult me."
+
+Her cheeks paled and she shook in sudden wrath. She looked magnificent.
+Jaffery frowned.
+
+"I think I'll have to be a bit of a dragon after all."
+
+I recalled a scene of nearly two years before when he had frowned and
+spoken thus roughly and she had invited him to chastise her with a
+cleek. She did not repeat the invitation, but a sob rose in her throat
+and she marched to the door, and at the door, turned splendidly,
+quivering.
+
+"I'm not going to have you or any one else for a dragon. And"--alas for
+the superficiality of Mrs. Considine's training--"I'm going to do as I
+damn well like."
+
+Her voice broke on the last word, as she dashed from the room. I
+exchanged a glance with Barbara, who followed her. Barbara could convey
+a complicated set of instructions by her glance. Jaffery pulled out
+pouch and pipe and shook his head.
+
+"Woman is a remarkable phenomenon," said he.
+
+"A more remarkable phenomenon still," said I, "is the dunderheaded
+male."
+
+"I did nothing to cause these heroics."
+
+"You asked her to ask you to ask her out to dinner."
+
+"I didn't," he protested.
+
+I proved to him by all the rules of feminine logic that he had done so.
+Holding the match over the bowl of his pipe, he puffed savagely.
+
+"I wish I were a cannibal in Central Africa, where women are in proper
+subjection. There's no worry about 'em there."
+
+"Isn't there?" said I. "You just ask the next cannibal you meet. He is
+confronted with the Great Conundrum, even as we are."
+
+"He can solve it by clubbing his wife on the head."
+
+"Quite so," said I. "But do you think the poor fellow does it for
+pleasure? No. It worries him dreadfully to have to do it."
+
+"That's specious rot, and platitudinous rubbish such as any soft idiot
+who's been glued all his life to an armchair can reel off by the mile. I
+know better. A couple of years ago Liosha would have eaten out of my
+hand, to say nothing of dining with me at the Canton. It's all this
+infernal civilisation. It has spoiled her."
+
+"You began this argument," said I, "with the proposition that woman was
+a remarkable phenomenon--a generalisation which includes woman in
+fig-leaves and woman in diamonds."
+
+"Oh, dry up," said Jaffery, "and tell me what I ought to do. I didn't
+want to hurt the girl's feelings. Why should I? In fact I'm rather fond
+of her. She appeals to me as something big and primitive. Long ago, if
+it hadn't been that poor old Prescott--you know what I mean--I gave up
+thinking of her in that way at once--and now I just want to be
+friends--we have been friends. She's a jolly good sort, and, if I had
+thought of it, I would have taken her about a bit. . . . But what I
+can't stand is these modern neurotics--"
+
+"You called them heroics--"
+
+"All the same thing. It's purely artificial. It's cultivated by every
+modern woman. Instead of thinking in a straight line they're taught it's
+correct to think in a corkscrew. You never know where to have 'em."
+
+"That's their artfulness," said I. "Who can blame them?"
+
+Meanwhile Liosha, pursued by Barbara, had rushed to her bedroom, where
+she burst into a passion of tears. Jaff Chayne, she wailed, had always
+treated her like dirt. It was true that her father had stuck pigs in the
+stockyards; but he was of an old Albanian family, quite as good a family
+as Jaff Chayne's. It had numbered princes and great chieftains, the
+majority of whom had been most gloriously slain in warfare. She would
+like to know which of Jaff Chayne's ancestors had died out of their
+feather beds.
+
+"His grandfather," said Barbara, "was killed in the Indian Mutiny, and
+his father in the Zulu War."
+
+Liosha didn't care. That only proved an equality. Jaff Chayne had no
+right to treat her like dirt. He had no right to put a female policeman
+over her. She was a free woman--she wouldn't go out to dinner with Jaff
+Chayne for a thousand pounds. Oh, she hated him; at which renewed
+declaration she burst into fresh weeping and wished she were dead. As a
+guardian of young and beautiful widows Jaffery did not seem to be a
+success.
+
+Barbara, in her wise way, said very little, and searched the
+paraphernalia on the dressing table for eau-de-cologne and such other
+lotions as would remove the stain of tears. Holding these in front of
+Liosha, like a stern nurse administering medicine, she waited till the
+fit had subsided. Then she spoke.
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Liosha, going on like a silly
+schoolgirl instead of a grown-up woman of the world. I wonder you didn't
+announce your intention of assassinating Jaffery."
+
+"I've a good mind to," replied Liosha, nursing her grievance.
+
+"Well, why don't you do it?" Barbara whipped up a murderous-looking
+knife that lay on a little table--it was the same weapon that she had
+lent the Swiss waiter. "Here's a dagger." She threw it on the girl's
+lap. "I'll ring the bell and send a message for Mr. Chayne to come up.
+As soon as he enters you can stick it into him. Then you can stick it
+into me. Then if you like you can go downstairs and stick it into
+Hilary. And having destroyed everybody who cares for you and is good to
+you, you'll feel a silly ass--such a silly ass that you'll forget to
+stick it into yourself."
+
+Liosha threw the knife into a corner. On its way it snicked a neat
+little chip out of a chair-back.
+
+"What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Clean your face," said Barbara, and presented the materials.
+
+Sitting on the bed and regarding herself in a hand-mirror Liosha obeyed
+meekly. Barbara brought the powder puff.
+
+"Now your nose. There!" For the first time Barbara smiled. "Now you look
+better. Oh, my dear girl!" she cried, seating herself beside Liosha and
+putting an arm round her waist. "That's not the way to deal with men.
+You must learn. They're only overgrown babies. Listen."
+
+And she poured into unsophisticated but sympathetic ears all the
+duplicity, all the treachery, all the insidious cunning and all the
+serpent-like wisdom of her unscrupulous sex. What she said neither I nor
+any of the sons of men are ever likely to know! but so proud of
+belonging to that nefarious sisterhood, so overweening in her
+sex-conceit did she render Liosha, that when they entered the little
+private sitting-room next door whither, according to the instructions
+conveyed by Barbara's parting glance downstairs, I had dragged a softly
+swearing Jaffery, she marched up to him and said serenely:
+
+"If you really do want me to dine with you, I'll come with pleasure. But
+the next time you ask me, please do it in a decent way."
+
+I saw mischief lurking in my wife's eye and shook my head at her
+rebukingly. But Jaffery stared at Liosha and gasped. It was all very
+well for Doria and Barbara to be ever putting him in the wrong: they
+were daughters of a subtle civilisation; but here was Liosha, who had
+once asked him to beat her, doing the same--woman was a more curious
+phenomenon than ever.
+
+"I'm sorry if my manners are not as they should be," said he with a
+touch of irony. "I'll try to mend 'em. Anyhow, it's awfully good of you
+to come."
+
+She smiled and bowed; not the deep bow of Albania, but the delicate
+little inclination of South Kensington. The quarrel was healed, the
+incident closed. He arranged to call for her in a taxi at a quarter to
+seven. Barbara looked at the clock and said that we must be going. We
+rose to take our leave. Maliciously I said:
+
+"But we've settled nothing about a remplacante for Mrs. Considine."
+
+"I guess we've settled everything," Liosha replied sweetly. "No one can
+replace Mrs. Considine."
+
+I quite enjoyed our little silent walk downstairs. Evidently Jaffery's
+theory of primitive woman had been knocked endways; and, to judge by the
+faint knitting of her brow, Barbara was uneasily conscious of a mission
+unfulfilled. Liosha had gained her independence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our friends carried out the evening's programme. Liosha behaved with
+extreme propriety, modelling her outward demeanour upon that of Mrs.
+Considine, and her attitude towards Jaffery on a literal interpretation
+of Barbara's reprehensible precepts. She was so dignified that Jaffery,
+lest he should offend, was afraid to open his mouth except for the
+purpose of shovelling in food, which he did, in astounding quantity.
+From what both of us gathered afterwards--and gleefully we compared
+notes--they were vastly polite to each other. He might have been
+entertaining the decorous wife of a Dutch Colonial Governor from whom he
+desired facilities of travel. The simple Eve travestied in guile took
+him in completely. Aware that it was her duty to treat him like an
+overgrown baby and mould him to her fancy and twist him round her finger
+and lead him whithersoever she willed, making him feel all the time that
+he was pointing out the road, she did not know how to begin. She sat
+tongue-tied, racking her brains to loss of appetite; which was a pity,
+for the maitre d'hotel, given a free hand by her barbarously ignorant
+host, had composed a royal menu. As dinner proceeded she grew shyer than
+a chit of sixteen. Over the quails a great silence reigned. Hers she
+could not touch, but she watched him fork, as it seemed to her, one
+after the other, whole, down his throat: and she adored him for it. It
+was her ideal of manly gusto. She nearly wept into her _Fraises
+Diane_--vast craggy strawberries (in March) rising from a drift of snow
+impregnated by all the distillations of all the flowers of all the
+summers of all the hills--because she would have given her soul to sit
+beside him on the table with the bowl on her lap and feed him with a
+tablespoon and, for her share of it, lick the spoon after his every
+mouthful. But it had been drummed into her that she was a woman of the
+world, the fashionable and all but incomprehensible world, the English
+world. She looked around and saw a hundred of her sex practising the
+well-bred deportment that Mrs. Considine had preached. She reflected
+that to all of those women gently nurtured in this queer English
+civilisation, equally remote from Armour's stockyards and from her
+Albanian fastness, the wisdom that Barbara had imparted to her a few
+hours before was but their A.B.C. of life in their dealings with their
+male companions. She also reflected--and for the reflection not Mrs.
+Considine or Barbara, only her woman's heart was responsible--that to
+the man whom she yearned to feed with great tablespoonfuls of delight,
+she counted no more than a pig or a cow--her instinctive similes, you
+must remember, were pastoral--or that peculiar damfool of a sister of
+his, Euphemia.
+
+When I think of these two children of nature, sitting opposite to one
+another in the fashionable restaurant trying to behave like
+super-civilised dolls, I cannot help smiling. They were both so
+thoroughly in earnest; and they bored themselves and each other so
+dreadfully. Conversation patched sporadically great expanses of silence
+and then they talked of the things that did not interest them in the
+least. Of course they smiled at each other, the smirk being essential to
+the polite atmosphere; and of course Jaffery played host in the orthodox
+manner, and Liosha acknowledged attentions with a courtesy equally
+orthodox. But how much happier they both would have been on a bleak
+mountain-side eating stew out of a pot! Even champagne and old brandy
+failed to exercise mellowing influences. The twain were petrified in
+their own awful correctitude. Perhaps if they had proceeded to a musical
+comedy or a farce or a variety entertainment where Jaffery could have
+expanded his lungs in laughter, their evening as a whole might have been
+less dismal. But a misapprehension as to the nature of the play had
+caused Jaffery to book seats for a gloomy drama with an ironical title,
+which stupefied them with depression.
+
+When they waited for the front door of the house in Queen's Gate to open
+to their ring, Liosha in her best manner thanked him for a most
+enjoyable evening.
+
+"Most enjoyable indeed," said Jaffery. "We must have another, if you
+will do me the honour. What do you say to this day week?"
+
+"I shall be delighted," said Liosha.
+
+So that day week they repeated this extraordinary performance, and the
+week after that, and so on until it became a grim and terrifying
+fixture. And while Jaffery, in a fog of theory as to the Eternal
+Feminine, was trying to do his duty, Liosha struggled hard to smother
+her own tumultuous feelings and to carry out Barbara's prescription for
+the treatment of overgrown babies; but the deuce of it was that though
+in her eyes Jaffery was pleasantly overgrown, she could not for the life
+of her regard him as a baby. So it came to pass that an unnatural pair
+continued to meet and mystify and misunderstand each other to the great
+content of the high gods and of one unimportant human philosopher who
+looked on.
+
+"I told you all this artificiality was spoiling her," Jaffery growled,
+one day. "She's as prim as an old maid. I can't get anything out of
+her."
+
+"That's a pity," said I.
+
+"It is." He reflected for a moment. "And the more so because she looks
+so stunning in her evening gowns. She wipes the floor with all the other
+women."
+
+I smiled. You can get a lot of quiet amusement out of your friends if
+you know how to set to work.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It was a gorgeous April day--one of those days when young Spring in
+madcap masquerade flaunts it in the borrowed mantle of summer. She could
+assume the deep blue of the sky and the gold of the sunshine, but
+through all the travesty peeped her laughing youth, the little tender
+leaves on the trees, the first shy bloom of the lilac, the swelling of
+the hawthorn buds, the pathetic immature barrenness of the walnuts.
+
+And even the leafless walnuts were full of alien life, for in their
+hollow boles chippering starlings made furtive nests, and in their
+topmost forks jackdaws worked with clamorous zeal. A pale butterfly here
+and there accomplished its early day, and queen wasps awakened from
+their winter slumber in cosy crevices, the tiniest winter-palaces in the
+world, sped like golden arrow tips to and from the homes they had to
+build alone for the swarms that were to come. The flower beds shone gay
+with tulips and hyacinths; in the long grass beyond the lawn and under
+the trees danced a thousand daffodils; and by their side warmly wrapped
+up in furs lay Doria on a long cane chair.
+
+She could not literally dance with the daffodils as I had prophesied,
+for her full strength had not yet returned, but there she was among
+them, and she smiled at them sympathetically as though they were dancing
+in her honour. She was, however, restored to health; the great circles
+beneath her eyes had disappeared and a tinge of colour shewed beneath
+her ivory cheek. Beside her, in the first sunbonnet of the year, sat
+Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . . . Lord! It scarcely seemed two years
+since Jaffery came from Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his
+arms and was struck all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So
+thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty
+yards, away. And once again--pleasant self repetition of
+history--Jaffery was expected. Doria, fresh from Nice, had spent a night
+at her father's house and had come down to us the evening before to
+complete her convalescence. She had wanted to go straight to the flat in
+St. John's Wood and begin her life anew with Adrian's beloved ghost, and
+she had issued orders to servants to have everything in readiness for
+her arrival, but Barbara had intervened and so had Mr. Jornicroft, a man
+of limited sympathies and brutal common sense. All of us, including
+Jaffery, who seemed to regard advice to Doria as a presumption only
+equalled by that of a pilgrim on his road to Mecca giving hints to Allah
+as to the way to run the universe, had urged her to give up the abode of
+tragic memories and find a haven of quietude elsewhere. But she had
+indignantly refused. The home of her wondrous married life was the home
+of her widowhood. If she gave it up, how could she live in peace with
+the consciousness ever in her brain that the Holy of Holies in which
+Adrian had worked and died was being profaned by vulgar tread? Our
+suggestions were callous, monstrous, everything that could arise from
+earth-bound non-percipience of sacred things. We could only prevail upon
+her to postpone her return to the flat until such time as she was
+physically strong enough to grapple with changed conditions.
+
+The pink sunbonnet was very near the dark head; both were bending over a
+book on Doria's knee--_Les Malheurs de Sophie_, which Susan, proud of
+her French scholarship, had proposed to read to Doria, who having just
+returned from France was supposed to be the latest authority on the
+language. I noticed that the severity of this intellectual communion was
+mitigated by Susan's favourite black kitten, who, sitting on its little
+haunches, seemed to be turning over pages rather rapidly. Then all of a
+sudden, from nowhere in particular, there stepped into the landscape
+(framed, you must remember, by the jambs of my door) a huge and familiar
+figure, carrying a great suit-case. He put this on the ground, rushed up
+to Doria, shook her by both hands, swung Susan in the air and kissed
+her, and was still laughing and making the welkin ring--that is to say,
+making a thundering noise--when I, having sped across the lawn, joined
+the group.
+
+"Hello!" said I, "how did you get here?"
+
+"Walked from the station," said Jaffery. "Came down by an earlier train.
+No good staying in town on such a morning. Besides--" He glanced at
+Doria in significant aposiopesis.
+
+"And you lugged that infernal thing a mile and a half?" I asked,
+pointing to the suit-case, which must have weighed half a ton. "Why
+didn't you leave it to be called for?"
+
+"This? This little _sachet_?" He lifted it up by one finger and grinned.
+
+Susan regarded the feat, awe-stricken. "Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are strong!"
+
+Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift the thing
+an inch from the ground with both her hands.
+
+"Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I felt as
+if I had been picked up by an iron crane."
+
+Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical
+strength. A colleague of his once told me that he had seen Jaffery in a
+nasty row in Caracas during a revolution, bend from his saddle and
+wrench up two murderous villains by the armpits, one in each hand, and
+dash their heads together over his horse's neck. But that is the sort of
+story that Jaffery himself never told.
+
+Barbara, who, flitting about the house on domestic duty, had caught
+sight of him through a window, came out to greet him.
+
+"Isn't it glorious to have her back?" he cried, waving his great hand
+towards Doria. "And looking so bonny. Nothing like the South. The
+sunshine gets into your blood. By Jove! what a difference, eh? Remember
+when we started for Nice?"
+
+He stood, legs apart and hands on hips, looking down on her with as much
+pride as if he had wrought the miracle himself.
+
+"Get some more chairs, dear," said Barbara.
+
+By good fortune seeing one of the gardeners in the near distance, I
+hailed him and shouted the necessary orders. That is the one
+disadvantage of summer: during the whole of that otherwise happy season,
+Barbara expects me to be something between a scene-shifter and a
+Furniture Removing Van.
+
+The chairs were fetched from a far-off summer house and we settled down.
+Jaffery lit his pipe, smiled at Doria, and met a very wistful look. He
+held her eyes for a space, and laid his great hand very gently on hers.
+
+"I know what you're thinking of," he said, with an arresting tenderness
+in his deep voice. "You won't have to wait much longer."
+
+"Is it at the printer's?"
+
+"It's printed."
+
+Barbara and I gave each a little start--we looked at Jaffery, who was
+taking no notice of us, and then questioningly at each other. What on
+earth did the man mean?
+
+"From to-morrow onwards, till publication, the press will be flooded
+with paragraphs about Adrian Boldero's new book. I fixed it up with
+Wittekind, as a sort of welcome home to you."
+
+"That was very kind, Jaffery," said Doria; "but was it necessary? I
+mean, couldn't Wittekind have done it before?"
+
+"It was necessary in a way," said Jaffery. "We wanted you to pass the
+proofs."
+
+Doria smiled proudly. "Pass Adrian's proofs? I? I wouldn't presume to do
+such a thing."
+
+"Well, here they are, anyway," said Jaffery.
+
+And to the bewilderment of Barbara and myself, he snapped open the hasps
+of his suit-case and drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs
+fastened by a clip at the left hand top corner, which he deposited on
+Doria's lap. She closed her eyes and her eyelids fluttered as she
+fingered the precious thing. For a moment we thought she was going to
+faint. There was breathless silence. Even Susan, who had been left out
+in the cold, let the black kitten leap from her knee, and aware that
+something out of the ordinary was happening, fixed her wondering eyes on
+Doria. Her mother and I wondered even more than Susan, for we had more
+reason. Of what manuscript, in heaven's name, were these the printed
+proofs? Was it possible that I had been mistaken and that Jaffery, in
+the assiduity of love, had made coherence out of Adrian's farrago of
+despair?
+
+Jaffery touched Doria's hand with his finger tips. She opened her eyes
+and smiled wanly, and looked at the front slip of the long proofs. At
+once she sat bolt upright.
+
+"'_The Greater Glory_.' But that wasn't Adrian's title. His title was
+'_God_.' Who has dared to change it?"
+
+[Illustration: He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs.]
+
+Her eyes flashed; her little body quivered. She flamed an incarnate
+indignation. For some reason or other she turned accusingly on me.
+
+"I knew nothing of the change," said I, "but I'm very glad to hear of it
+now."
+
+Many times before had I been forced to disclaim knowledge of what
+Jaffery had been doing with the book.
+
+"Wittekind wouldn't have the old title," cried Jaffery eagerly. "The
+public are very narrow minded, and he felt that in certain quarters it
+might be misunderstood."
+
+"Wittekind told dear Adrian that he thought it a perfect title."
+
+"Our dear Adrian," said I, pacifically, "was a man of enormous
+will-power and perhaps Wittekind hadn't the strength to stand up against
+him."
+
+"Of course he hadn't," exclaimed Doria. "Of course he hadn't when Adrian
+was alive: now Adrian's dead, he thinks he is going to do just as he
+chooses. He isn't! Not while I live, he isn't!"
+
+Jaffery looked at me from beneath bent brows and his eyes were turned to
+cold blue steel.
+
+"Hilary!" said he, "will you kindly tell Doria what we found on Adrian's
+blotting pad--the last words he ever wrote?"
+
+What he desired me to say was obvious.
+
+"Written three or four times," said I, "we found the words: 'The Greater
+Glory: A Novel by Adrian Boldero.'"
+
+"What has become of the blotting pad?"
+
+"The sheet seemed to be of no value, so we destroyed it with a lot of
+other unimportant papers."
+
+"And I came across further evidence," said Jaffery, "of his intention to
+rename the novel."
+
+Doria's anger died away. She looked past us into the void. "I should
+like to have had Adrian's last words," she whispered. Then bringing
+herself back to earth, she begged Jaffery's pardon very touchingly.
+Adrian's implied intention was a command. She too approved the change.
+"But I'm so jealous," she said, with a catch in her voice, "of my dear
+husband's work. You must forgive me. I'm sure you've done everything
+that was right and good, Jaffery." She held out the great bundle and
+smiled. "I pass the proofs."
+
+Jaffery took the bundle and laid it again on her lap. "It's awfully good
+of you to say that. I appreciate it tremendously. But you can keep this
+set. I've got another, with the corrections in duplicate."
+
+She looked at the proofs wistfully, turned over the long strips in a
+timid, reverent way, and abruptly handed them back.
+
+"I can't read it. I daren't read it. If Adrian had lived I shouldn't
+have seen it before it was published. He would have given me the finally
+bound book--an advance copy. These things--you know--it's the same to me
+as if he were living."
+
+The tears started. She rose; and we all did the same.
+
+"I must go indoors for a little. No, no, Barbara dear. I'd rather be
+alone." She put her arm round my small daughter. "Perhaps Susan will see
+I don't break my neck across the lawn."
+
+Her voice ended in a queer little sob, and holding on to Susan, who was
+mighty proud of being selected as an escort, walked slowly towards the
+house. Susan afterwards reported that, dismissed at the bedroom door,
+she had lingered for a moment outside and had heard Auntie Doria crying
+like anything.
+
+Barbara, who had said absolutely nothing since the miraculous draught of
+proofs, advanced, a female David, up to Goliath Jaffery.
+
+"Look here, my friend, I'm not accustomed to sit still like a graven
+image and be mystified in my own house. Will you have the goodness to
+explain?"
+
+Jaffery looked down on her, his head on one side.
+
+"Explain what?"
+
+"That!"
+
+She pointed to the proofs of which I had possessed myself and was
+eagerly scanning. Unblenching he met her gaze.
+
+"That is the posthumous novel of Adrian Boldero, which I, as his
+literary executor, have revised for the press. Hilary saw the rough
+manuscript, but he had no time to read it."
+
+They looked at one another for quite a long time.
+
+"Is that all you're going to tell me?"
+
+"That's all."
+
+"And all you're going to tell Hilary?"
+
+"Telling Hilary is the same as telling you."
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"And telling you is the same as telling Hilary."
+
+"By no manner of means," said Barbara tartly. She took him by the
+sleeve. "Come and explain."
+
+"I've explained already," said Jaffery.
+
+Barbara eyed him like a syren of the cornfields. "I'm going to dress a
+crab for lunch. A very big crab."
+
+Jaffery's face was transfigured into a vast, hairy smile. Barbara could
+dress crab like no one else in the world. She herself disliked the taste
+of crab. I, a carefully trained gastronomist, adored it, but a Puckish
+digestion forbade my consuming one single shred of the ambrosial
+preparation. Doria would pass it by through sheer unhappiness. And it
+was not fit food for Susan's tender years. Old Jaff knew this. One
+gigantic crab-shell filled with Barbara's juicy witchery and flanked by
+cool pink, meaty claws would be there for his own individual
+delectation. Several times before had he taken the dish, with a "One
+man, one crab. Ho! ho! ho!" and had left nothing but clean shells.
+
+"I'm going to dress this crab," said Barbara, "for the sake of the
+servants. But if you find I've put poison in it, don't blame me."
+
+She left us, her little head indignantly in the air. Jaffery laughed,
+sank into a chair and tugged at his pipe.
+
+"I wish Doria could be persuaded to read the thing," said he.
+
+"Why?" I asked looking up from the proofs.
+
+"It's not quite up to the standard of 'The Diamond Gate.'"
+
+"I shouldn't suppose it was," said I drily.
+
+"Wittekind's delighted anyhow. It's a different _genre_; but he says
+that's all the better."
+
+Susan emerged from my study door on to the terrace.
+
+"My good fellow," said I, "yonder is the daughter of the house,
+evidently at a loose end. Go and entertain her. I'm going to read this
+wonderful novel and don't want to be disturbed till lunch."
+
+The good-humoured giant lumbered away, and Susan finding herself in
+undisputed possession took him off to remote recesses of the kitchen
+garden, far from casual intruders. Meanwhile I went on reading, very
+much puzzled. Naturally the style was not that of "The Diamond Gate,"
+which was the style of Tom Castleton and not of Adrian Boldero. But was
+what I read the style of Adrian Boldero? This vivid, virile opening?
+This scene of the two derelicts who hated one another, fortuitously
+meeting on the old tramp steamer? This cunning, evocation of smells,
+jute, bilge water, the warm oils of the engine room? This expert
+knowledge so carelessly displayed of the various parts of a ship? How
+had Adrian, man of luxury, who had never been on a tramp steamer in his
+life, gained the knowledge? The people too were lustily drawn. They had
+a flavour of the sea and the breeziness of wide spaces; a deep-lunged
+folk. So that I should not be interrupted I wandered off to a secluded
+nook of the garden down the drive away from the house and gave myself up
+to the story. From the first it went with a rare swing, incident
+following incident, every trait of character presented objectively in
+fine scorn of analysis. There were little pen pictures of grim scenes
+faultless in their definition and restraint. There was a girl in it, a
+wild, clean-limbed, woodland thing who especially moved my admiration.
+The more I read the more fascinated did I become, and the more did I
+doubt whether a single line in it had been written by Adrian Boldero.
+
+After a long spell, I took out my watch. It was twenty past one. We
+lunched at half-past. I rose, went towards the house and came upon
+Jaffery and Susan. The latter I despatched peremptorily to her
+ablutions. Alone with Jaffery, I challenged him.
+
+"You hulking baby," said I, "what's the good of pretending with me? Why
+didn't you tell me at once that you had written it yourself?"
+
+He looked at me anxiously. "What makes you think so?"
+
+"The simple intelligence possessed by the average adult. First," I
+continued, as he made no reply but stood staring at me in ingenuous
+discomfort, "you couldn't have got this out of poor Adrian's mush;
+secondly, Adrian hadn't the experience of life to have written it;
+thirdly, I have read many brilliant descriptive articles in _The Daily
+Gazette_ and have little difficulty in recognising the hand of Jaffery
+Chayne."
+
+"Good Lord!" said he. "It isn't as obvious as all that?"
+
+I laughed. "Then you did write it?"
+
+"Of course," he growled. "But I didn't want you to know. I tried to get
+as near Tom Castleton as I could. Look here"--he gripped my
+shoulder--"if it's such a transparent fraud, what the blazes is going
+to happen?"
+
+To some extent I reassured him. I was in a peculiar position, having
+peculiar knowledge. Save Barbara, no other soul in the world had the
+faintest suspicion of Adrian's tragedy. The forthcoming book would be
+received without shadow of question as the work of the author of "_The
+Diamond Gate_." The difference of style and treatment would be
+attributed to the marvellous versatility of the dead genius. . . .
+Jaffery's brow began to clear.
+
+"What do you think of it--as far as you've gone?"
+
+My enthusiastic answer expressed the sincerity of my appreciation. He
+positively blushed and looked at me rather guiltily, like a schoolboy
+detected in the act of helping an old woman across the road.
+
+"It's awful cheek," said he, "but I was up against it. The only
+alternative was to say the damn thing had been lost or burnt and take
+the consequences. Somehow I thought of this. I had written about half of
+it all in bits and pieces about three or four years ago and put it
+aside. It wasn't my job. Then I pulled it out one day and read it and it
+seemed rather good, so, having the story in my head, I set to work."
+
+"And that's why you didn't go to Persia?"
+
+"How the devil could I go to Persia? I couldn't write a novel on the
+back of a beastly camel!"
+
+He walked a few steps in silence. Then he said with a rumble of a laugh.
+
+"I had an awful fright about that time. I suddenly dried up; couldn't
+get along. I must have spent a week, night after night, staring at a
+blank sheet of paper. I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew
+and was going the way of Adrian. By George, it taught me something of
+the Hades the poor fellow must have passed through. I've been in pretty
+tight corners in my day and I know what it is to have the cold fear
+creeping down my spine; but that week gave me the fright of my life."
+
+"I wish you had told me," said I, "I might have helped. Why didn't you?"
+
+"I didn't like to. You see, if this idea hadn't come off, I should have
+looked such a stupendous ass."
+
+"That's a reason," I admitted.
+
+"And I didn't tell you at first because you would have thought I was
+going off my chump. I don't look the sort of chap that could write a
+novel, do I? You would have said I was attempting the impossible, like
+Adrian. You and Barbara would have been scared to death and you would
+have put me off."
+
+Franklin came from the house. Luncheon was on the table. We hurried to
+the dining-room. Jaffery sat down before a gigantic crab.
+
+"Is it all right?" he asked.
+
+"Doria has interceded for you," said Barbara. "You owe her your life."
+
+Doria smiled. "It's the least I could do for you."
+
+Jaffery grinned by way of delicate rejoinder and immersed himself in
+crab. From its depths, as it seemed, he said:
+
+"Hilary has read half the book."
+
+"What do you think of it?" Barbara asked.
+
+I repeated my dithyrambic eulogy. Doria's eyes shone.
+
+"I do wish you could see your way to read it," said Jaffery.
+
+"I would give my heart to," said Doria. "But I've told you why I can't."
+
+"Circumstances alter cases," said I, platitudinously. "In happier
+circumstances you would have been presented with the novelist's fine,
+finished product. As it happens, Jaffery has had to fill up little gaps,
+make bridges here and there. I'm sure if you had been well enough," I
+added, with a touch of malice, for I had not quite forgiven his leaving
+me in the dark, "Jaffery would have consulted you on many points."
+
+I was very anxious to see what impression the book would make upon her.
+Although I had reassured Jaffery, I could, scarcely conceive the
+possibility of the book being taken as the work of Adrian.
+
+"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it. You
+weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree with
+Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are so jolly
+clumsy."
+
+Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be justified?"
+
+"Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."
+
+So it came to pass that, after lunch, Doria came into my study and
+demanded the set of proofs. She took them up to her bedroom, where she
+remained all the afternoon. I was greatly relieved. It was right that
+she should know what was going to be published under Adrian's name.
+
+In Jaffery's presence, I disclosed to Barbara the identity of the
+author. He said to her much the same as he had said to me before lunch,
+with, perhaps, a little more shamefacedness. Were it not for reiteration
+upon reiteration of the same things in talk, life would be a stark
+silence broken only by staccato announcement of facts. At last Barbara's
+eyes grew uncomfortably moist. Impulsively she flew to Jaffery and put
+her arms round his vast shoulders--he was sitting, otherwise she could
+not have done it--and hugged him.
+
+"You're a blessed, blessed dear," she said; and ashamed of this
+exhibition of sentiment she bolted from the room.
+
+Jaffery, looking very shy and uncomfortable, suggested a game of
+billiards.
+
+To Barbara and myself awaiting our guests in the drawing-room before
+dinner, the first to come was Doria, whom we hadn't seen since lunch; an
+arresting figure in her low evening dress; you can imagine a Tanagra
+figure in black and white ivory. Her face, however, was a passion of
+excitement.
+
+"It's wonderful," she cried. "More than wonderful. Even I didn't know
+till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things he
+describes--he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God! If only
+he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands before her eyes and
+dashed them swiftly away--"Jaffery has done his best, poor fellow. But
+oh! the bridges he speaks of--they're so crude, so crude! I can see
+every one. The murder--you remember?"
+
+It occurred in the first part of the novel. I had read it. Three or four
+splashes of blood on the page instead of ink and the thing was done.
+Admirable. The instinctive high light of the artist.
+
+"I thought it one of the best things in the book," said I.
+
+"Oh!" she waved a gesture of disgust. "How can you say so? It's
+horrible. It isn't Adrian. I can see the point where he left it to the
+imagination. Jaffery, with no imagination, has come in and spoiled it.
+And then the scene on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco, where Fenton
+finds Ellina Ray, the broken-down star of London musical comedy. Adrian
+never wrote it. It's the sort of claptrap he hated. He has often told me
+so. Jaffery thought it was necessary to explain Ellina in the next
+chapter, and so in his dull way, he stuck it in."
+
+That scene also had I read. It was a little flaming cameo of a low dive
+on the Barbary Coast, and a presentation of the thing seen, somewhat
+journalistic, I admit--but such as very few journalists could give.
+
+"That's pure Adrian," said I brazenly.
+
+"It isn't. There are disgusting little details that only a man that had
+been there could have mentioned. Oh! do you suppose I don't know the
+difference between Adrian's work and that of a penny-a-liner like
+Jaffery?"
+
+The door opened and Jaffery appeared. Doria went up to him and took him
+by the lapels of his dress coat.
+
+"I've read it. It's a work of genius. But, oh! Jaffery, I do want it to
+be without a flaw. Don't hate me, dear--I know you've done all that
+mortal man could do for Adrian and for me. But it isn't your fault if
+you're not a professional novelist or an imaginative writer. And you,
+yourself, said the bridges were clumsy. Couldn't you--oh!--I loathe
+hurting you, dear Jaffery--but it's all the world, all eternity to
+me--couldn't you get one of Adrian's colleagues--one of the famous
+people"--she rattled off a few names--"to look through the proofs and
+revise them--just in honour of Adrian's memory? Couldn't you, dear
+Jaffery?" She tugged convulsively at the poor old giant's coat. "You're
+one of the best and noblest men who ever lived or I couldn't say this to
+you. But you understand, don't you?"
+
+Jaffery's ruddy face turned as white as chalk. She might have slapped it
+physically and it would have worn the same dazed, paralysed lack of
+expression.
+
+"My life," said he, in a queer toned voice, that wasn't Jaffery's at
+all, "my life is only an expression of your wishes. I'll do as you say."
+
+"It's for Adrian's sake, dear Jaffery," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery passed his great glazed hand over his stricken face, from the
+roots of his hair to the point of his beard, and seemed to wipe
+therefrom all traces of day-infesting cares, revealing the sunny
+Reubens-like features that we all loved.
+
+"But apart from my amateur joining of the flats, you think the book's
+worthy of Adrian?"
+
+"Oh, I do," she cried passionately. "I do. It's a work of genius. It's
+Adrian in all his maturity, in all his greatness!"
+
+The door opened.
+
+"Dinner is served, madam," said Franklin.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+When, by way of comforting Jaffery, I criticised Doria's outburst, he
+fell upon me as though about to devour me alive. After what he had done
+for her, said I, given up one of the great chances of his career,
+carried her bodily from London to Nice, and made her a present of a
+brilliant novel so as to save Adrian's memory from shame, she ought to
+go on her knees and pray God to shower blessings on his head. As it was,
+she deserved whipping.
+
+Jaffery called me, among other things, an amazing ass--he has an Eastern
+habit of, facile vituperation--and roared about the drawing-room. The
+ladies, be it understood, had retired.
+
+"You don't seem to grip the elements of the situation. You haven't the
+intelligence of a rabbit. How in Hades could she know I've written the
+rotten book? She thinks it's Adrian's. And she thinks I've spoiled it.
+She's perfectly justified. For the little footling services I rendered
+her on the journey, she's idiotically grateful--out of all proportion.
+As for Persia, she knows nothing about it--"
+
+"She ought to," said I.
+
+"If you tell her, I'll break your neck," roared Jaffery.
+
+"All right," said I, desiring to remain whole. "So long as you're
+satisfied, it doesn't much matter to me."
+
+It didn't. After all, one has one's own life to live, and however
+understanding of one's friends and sympathetically inclined towards
+them one may be, one cannot follow them emotionally through all their
+bleak despairs and furious passions. A man doing so would be dead in a
+week.
+
+"It doesn't seem to strike you," he went on, "that the poor girl's
+mental and moral balance depends on the successful carrying out of this
+ghastly farce."
+
+"I do, my dear chap."
+
+"You don't. I wrote the thing as best I could--a labour of love. But
+it's nothing like Tom Castleton's work--which she thinks is Adrian's. To
+keep up the deception I had to crab it and say that the faults were
+mine. Naturally she believes me."
+
+"All right," said I, again. "And when the book is published and Adrian's
+memory flattered and Doria is assured of her mental and moral
+balance--what then?"
+
+"I hope she'll be happy," he answered. "Why the blazes do you suppose
+I've worried if it wasn't to give her happiness?"
+
+I could not press my point. I could not commit the gross indelicacy of
+saying: "My poor friend, where do you come in?" or words to that effect.
+Nor could I possibly lay down the proposition that a living second
+husband--stretching the imagination to the hypothesis of her taking
+one--is but an indifferent hero to the widow who spends her life in
+burning incense before the shrine of the demigod husband who is dead. We
+can't say these things to our friends. We expect them to have common
+sense as we have ourselves. But we don't, and--for the curious reason,
+based on the intense individualism of sexual attraction, that no man can
+appreciate, save intellectually, another man's desire for a particular
+woman--we can't realize the poor, fool hunger of his heart. The man who
+pours into our ears a torrential tale of passion moves us not to
+sympathy, but rather to psychological speculation, if we are kindly
+disposed, or to murderous inclinations if we are not. On the other
+hand, he who is silent moves us not at all. In any and every case,
+however, we entirely fail to comprehend why, if Neaera is obdurate, our
+swain does not go afield and find, as assuredly he can, some complaisant
+Amaryllis.
+
+I confess, honestly, that during this conversation I felt somewhat
+impatient with my dear, infatuated friend. There he was, casting the
+largesse of his soul at the feet of a blind woman, a woman blinded by
+the bedazzlement of a false fire, whose flare it was his religion to
+intensify. There he was doing this, and he did not see the imbecility of
+it! In after time we can correlate incidents and circumstances, viewing
+them in a perspective more or less correct. We see that we might have
+said and done a hundred helpful things. Well, we know that we did not,
+and there's an end on't. I felt, as I say, impatient with Jaffery,
+although--or was it because?--I recognised the bald fact that he was in
+love with Doria to the maximum degree of besottedness.
+
+You see, when you say to a man: "Why do you let the woman kick you?" and
+he replies, with a glare of indignation: "She has deigned to touch my
+unworthy carcass with her sacred boot!" what in the world are you to do,
+save resume the interrupted enjoyment of your cigar? This I did. I also
+found amusement in comparing his meek wooing, like that of an early
+Italian amorist, with his rumbustious theories as to marriage by capture
+and other primitive methods of bringing woman to heel.
+
+Doria, seeing him unresentful of kicking, continued to kick (when
+Barbara wasn't looking--for Barbara had read her a lecture on the polite
+treatment of trustees and executors) and made him more her slave than
+ever. He fetched and carried. He read poetry. He was Custodian of the
+Sacred Rubbers, when the grass was damp. He shielded her from over-rough
+incursions on the part of Susan. He chanted the responses in her Litany
+of Saint Adrian. He sacrificed his golf so that he could sit near her
+and hold figurative wool for her to unwind. It was very pretty to watch
+them. The contrast between them made its unceasing appeal. Besides,
+Doria did not kick all the time; there were long spells during which,
+touched by the giant's devotion, she repaid it in tokens of tender
+regard. At such times she was as fascinating an elf as one could wish to
+meet on a spring morning. He could bring, like no one else, the smile
+into her dark, mournful eyes. There is no doubt that, in her way and as
+far as her Adrian-bound emotional temperament permitted, she felt
+grateful to Jaffery. She also felt safe in his company. He was like a
+great St. Bernard dog, she declared to Barbara.
+
+These idyllic relations continued unruffled for some days, until a
+letter arrived from the eminent novelist to whom, with Doria's approval,
+Jaffery had sent the proofs.
+
+"A marvellous story," was the great man's verdict; "singularly different
+from 'The Diamond Gate,' only resembling it in its largeness of
+conception and the perfection of its kind. The alteration of a single
+word would spoil it. If an alien hand is there, it is imperceptible."
+
+At this splendid tribute Jaffery beamed with happiness. He tossed the
+letter to Barbara across the breakfast table.
+
+"No alien hand perceptible. Ho! ho! ho! But it's stunning, isn't it? I
+do believe the old fraud of a book is going to win through. This ought
+to satisfy Doria, don't you think so?"
+
+"It ought to," said Barbara. "I'll send it up to her room."
+
+But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain--and how could a work
+of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible,
+had touched it?--was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came
+downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little
+knitting of the brow before which his welcoming smile faded.
+
+"It's all right up to a point," she said, handing him back the letter.
+"Nobody with the rudiments of a brain could fail to recognise the merits
+of Adrian's work. But no novelist is possessed of the critical faculty."
+
+"Then why," asked Jaffery, after the way of men, "did you ask me to send
+him the novel?"
+
+"I took it for granted he had common sense," replied Doria, after the
+way of women.
+
+"And he hasn't any?"
+
+"Read the thing again."
+
+Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well, what's to be
+done now?"
+
+"I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original manuscript.
+Where is it?"
+
+Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied convincingly.
+
+"It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've destroyed it."
+
+"I thought everything was typed nowadays."
+
+"Typing takes time," replied Jaffery serenely. "And I'm not an advocate
+of feather-beds and rose-water baths for printers. As I wanted to rush
+the book out as quickly as possible, I didn't see why I should pamper
+them with type. Have you the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," said Doria.
+
+"Well--don't you see?" said Jaffery, with a smile.
+
+For the first time I praised Old Man Jornicroft. He had brought up his
+daughter far from the madding mechanics of the literary life. To my
+great relief, Doria swallowed the incredible story.
+
+"It was careless of you not to have given special instructions for the
+manuscript to be saved, I must say. But if it's gone, it's gone. I'm not
+unreasonable."
+
+"I think you are," said Barbara, who had been arranging flowers in the
+drawing-room, and had emerged onto the terrace. "You made Jaffery submit
+his careful editing to an expert, and you're honourably bound to accept
+the expert's verdict."
+
+"I do accept it," she retorted with a toss of her head and a flash of
+her eyes. "Have I ever said I didn't? But I'm at liberty to keep to my
+own opinion."
+
+Jaffery scratched his whiskers and beard and screwed up his face as he
+did in moments of perplexity.
+
+"What exactly do you want changed?" he asked.
+
+"Just those few coarse touches you admit are yours."
+
+"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco--not
+tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's encomium had aroused the
+artist's pride in his first-born. An altered word would spoil the book.
+"My dear girl," said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath
+which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very
+gently, "the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man
+of common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us
+do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as
+much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a thundering mess of it."
+
+Doria made a little gesture--a bit of a shrug--a bit of a resigned
+flicker of her hands.
+
+"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a woman
+with nobody to turn to"--she smiled with her lips, but there was no
+coordination of her eyes--"as I said before, I pass the proofs."
+
+She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving
+Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.
+
+"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"
+
+He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the
+threshold.
+
+"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to her morbid
+vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it birth. You know
+better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you send those proofs
+straight back to the publisher. If you let her persuade you to change
+one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll tell her the whole thing,
+and damn the consequences!"
+
+My exquisite Barbara's rare "damns" were oaths in the strictest sense.
+They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She would no more
+think of breaking a "damn" than her marriage vows or a baby's neck.
+
+"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said Jaffery.
+"But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying brute."
+
+"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped Barbara.
+"The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree. It's only the
+exceptional woman that can take command."
+
+I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly
+sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.
+
+"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold
+politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden
+chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open
+a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with
+a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove
+with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a
+question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have
+reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a
+little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal
+to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor
+old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
+of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
+masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
+direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian--for Jaffery is too
+splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once
+living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to
+these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation,
+deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and
+Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things,
+could, with little difficulty, divine the passionate struggle between
+love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty
+that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly
+appetited gentleman.
+
+You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am
+not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a
+barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty son of Pantagruel
+forced into the incongruous role of Sir Galahad. . . . During the term
+of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At
+last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more,
+permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his
+manners.
+
+The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited
+Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by
+an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night.
+But on Saturday evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for
+permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house,
+the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was
+Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's
+friend, and of course came back to us and speculated as to who and what
+this Mr. Fendihook might be.
+
+"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.
+
+"It would scarcely have been polite."
+
+We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I don't
+like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a vast deal
+too much."
+
+"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus started
+an old argument.
+
+On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the car, a
+two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and perceived
+between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly buttoned Burberry
+coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the middle of which
+projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha out.
+
+"This is Mr. Fendihook."
+
+"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.
+
+I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my
+chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by
+Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings and
+revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flashily attired. I
+know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against a black and
+white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a gold ring.
+
+"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good one, on
+which he had retained the band.
+
+"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."
+
+"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of all
+right here."
+
+"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha. "Ah,
+Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We followed. Mr.
+Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little shock, that he had
+kept on his gloves.
+
+"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of a blow
+would do our fair friend good."
+
+Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath the
+motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he preceded
+me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure in the middle
+of a crop of coarse brown hair. Again he looked round appreciatively and
+again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open French window.
+
+"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our friends? The
+long and the short of it, aren't they?"
+
+He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn. I told
+him their names.
+
+"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always talking
+about, her guardian or something."
+
+"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late husband."
+
+"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear, signified
+"Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his cigar. "Introduce
+me." And as I accompanied him across the lawn--"There's nothing like
+knowing everybody--getting it over at once. Then one feels at home."
+
+"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said I.
+
+"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I did." And
+the amazing creature patted me on the back.
+
+I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself delighted
+to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as conversation did not
+start spontaneously, he once more looked around, nodded at the landscape
+approvingly, and once more said "Tiptop!"
+
+"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford to retire
+and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a desirable
+residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's country house."
+
+"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?" queried
+Doria.
+
+He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."
+
+I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.
+
+Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running up.
+
+"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and say how
+d'ye do, Gwendoline."
+
+Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under the
+chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the image of
+her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the bowl of his pipe
+in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on some puzzling insect.
+
+"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor asked.
+
+"Pray do," said I. The sight of the fellow wandering about a garden
+bareheaded and gloved in yellow chamois leather had begun to affect my
+nerves. He peeled them off.
+
+"Look here, Gwendoline Arabella, my dear," he cried. "Catch!"
+
+He made a feint of throwing them.
+
+"Haven't you caught 'em?"
+
+"No."
+
+She stared at the man open-mouthed, for behold, his hands were empty.
+
+"Tut, tut!" said he. "Perhaps you can catch a handkerchief." He flicked
+a red silk handkerchief from his pocket, crumpled it into a ball and
+threw; but like the gloves it vanished. "Now where has it gone to?"
+
+Susan, who had shrunk beneath Jaffery's protecting shadow, crept forward
+fascinated. Mr. Fendihook took a sudden step or two towards a flower
+bed.
+
+"Why, there it is!"
+
+He stretched out a hand and there before our eyes the handkerchief hung
+limp over the pruned top of a standard rose.
+
+"Jolly good!" exclaimed Jaffery.
+
+"I hope you don't mind. I like amusing kiddies. Have you ever talked to
+angels, Araminta? No? Well, I have. Look."
+
+He threw half-crowns up into the air until they disappeared into the
+central blue, and then held a ventriloquial conversation, not in the
+best of taste, with the celestial spirits, who having caught the coins
+announced their intention of sticking to them. But threats of reporting
+to headquarters prevailed, and one by one the coins dropped and jingled
+in his hand. We applauded. Susan regarded him as she would a god.
+
+"Can you do it again?" she asked breathlessly.
+
+"Lord bless you, Eustacia, I can keep on doing it all day long."
+
+He balanced his cigar on the tip of his nose and with a snap caught it
+in his mouth. He turned to me with a grin, which showed white strong
+teeth. "More than you could do, old pal!"
+
+"You must have practised that a great deal," said Doria.
+
+"Two hours a day solid year in and year out--not that trick alone, of
+course. Here!" he burst into a laugh. "I'm blowed if you know who I
+am--I'm the One and Only Ras Fendihook--Illusionist, Ventriloquist, and
+General Variety Artist. Haven't you ever seen my turn?"
+
+We confessed, with regret, that we had missed the privilege.
+
+"Well, well, it's a queer world," he said philosophically. "You've never
+heard of me--and perhaps you two gentlemen are big bugs in your own
+line--and I've never heard of you. But anyhow, I never asked you, Mr.
+Chayne, to catch my gloves."
+
+"I haven't your gloves," said Jaffery, with his eye on Susan.
+
+"You have. You've got 'em in your pocket."
+
+And diving into Jaffery's jacket pocket, he produced the wash-leather
+gloves.
+
+"There, Petronella," said he, "that's the end of the matinee
+performance."
+
+Susan looked at him wide-eyed. "I'm not at all tired."
+
+"Aren't you? Then don't let that big black dog there chase the little
+one."
+
+He pointed with his finger and from behind the old yew arbour came the
+shrill clamour of a little dog in agony. It brought Barbara flying out
+of the house. Liosha followed leisurely. The yelping ceased. Mr. Ras
+Fendihook went to meet his hostess. Doria, Jaffery and I looked at one
+another in mutual and dismayed comprehension.
+
+"Old pal," quoted Doria.
+
+I glanced apprehensively across the strip of lawn. "I hope, for his
+sake, he's not calling Barbara 'old girl.'"
+
+"He calls everybody funny names," Susan chimed in. "See what a lot he
+called me."
+
+"Does your Royal Fairy Highness approve of him?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I should think so, Uncle Jaff," she replied fervently. "He's--he's
+_marvelious_!"
+
+"He is," said Jaffery, "and even that jewel of language doesn't express
+him."
+
+"My dear," said I, "you stick close to him all day, as long as mummy
+will let you."
+
+I have never got the credit I deserved for the serene wisdom of that
+suggestion. All through lunch, all through the long afternoon until it
+was Susan's bedtime, her obedience to my command saved over and over
+again a tense situation. To the guest in her house Barbara was the
+perfection of courtesy. But beneath the mask of convention raged fury
+with Liosha. A woman can seldom take a queer social animal for what he
+is and suck the honey from his flowers of unconventionality. She had
+never heard a man say "Right oh!" to a butler when offered a second
+helping of pudding. She had never dreamed of the possibility of a
+strange table-neighbour laying his hand on hers and requesting her to
+"take it from me, my dear." It sent awful shivers down her spine to hear
+my august self alluded to as her "old man." She looked down her nose
+when, to the apoplectic joy of Susan (supposed to be on her primmest
+behaviour at meals), he, with a significant wink, threw a new potato
+into the air, caught it on his fork and conveyed it to his mouth. Her
+smile was that of the polite hostess and not of the enthusiastic
+listener when he told her of triumphs in Manchester and Cincinnati. To
+her confusion, he presupposed her intimate acquaintance with the
+personalities of the World of Variety.
+
+"That's where I came across little Evie Bostock," he said
+confidentially. "A clipper, wasn't she? Just before she ran off with
+that contortionist--you know who I mean--handsome chap--what's his
+name?--oh, of course you know him."
+
+My poor Barbara! Daughter of a distinguished Civil servant, a K.C.B.,
+assumed to be on friendly terms with a Boneless Wonder!
+
+"But indeed I don't, Mr. Fendihook," she replied pathetically.
+
+"Yes, yes, you must." He snapped his fingers. "Got it. Romeo! You must
+have heard of Romeo."
+
+I sniggered--I couldn't help it--at Barbara's face. He went on with his
+reminiscences. Barbara nearly wept, whilst I, though displeased with
+Liosha for introducing such an incongruous element into my family
+circle, took the rational course of deriving from the fellow
+considerable entertainment. Jaffery would have done the same as myself,
+had not his responsibility as Liosha's guardian weighed heavily upon
+him. He frowned, and ate in silence, vastly. Doria, like my wife, I
+could see was shocked. The only two who, beside myself, enjoyed our
+guest were Susan and Liosha. Well, Susan was nine years old and a meal
+at which a guest broke her whole decalogue of table manners at once--to
+say nothing of the performance of such miracles as squeezing an orange
+into nothingness, without the juice running out, and subsequently
+extracting it from the neck of an agonised mother--was a feast of
+memorable gaudiness. Susan could be excused. But Liosha? Liosha, pupil
+of the admirable Mrs. Considine? Liosha, descendant of proud Albanian
+chieftains who had lain in gory beds for centuries? How could she admire
+this peculiarly vulgar, although, in his own line, peculiarly
+accomplished person? Yet her admiration was obvious. She sat by my side,
+grand and radiant, proud of the wondrous gift she had bestowed on us.
+She acclaimed his tricks, she laughed at his anecdotes, she urged him on
+to further exhibition of prowess, and in a magnificent way appeared
+unconscious of the presence at the table of her trustee and would-be
+dragon, Jaffery Chayne.
+
+After lunch Susan obeyed my instructions and stuck very close to Mr.
+Fendihook. Doria retired for her afternoon rest. Jaffery, having invited
+Liosha to go for a long walk with him and she having declined, with a
+polite smile, on the ground that her best Sunday-go-to-meeting long gown
+was not suitable for country roads, went off by himself in dudgeon.
+Barbara took Liosha aside and cross-examined her on the subject of Mr.
+Fendihook and as far as hospitality allowed signified her
+non-appreciation of the guest. After a time I took him into the billiard
+room, Susan following. As he was a brilliant player, giving me one
+hundred and fifty in two hundred and running out easily before I had
+made thirty, he found less excitement in the game than in narrating his
+exploits and performing tricks for the child. He did astonishing things
+with the billiard balls, making them run all over his body like mice and
+balancing them on cues and juggling with them five at a time. I think
+that day he must have gone through his whole repertoire.
+
+The party assembled for tea in the drawing-room. Fendihook's first words
+to Liosha were:
+
+"Hallo, my Balkan Queen, how have you been getting on?"
+
+"Very well, thank you," smiled Liosha.
+
+He turned to Jaffery. "She's not up to her usual form to-day. But
+sometimes she's a fair treat! I give you my word."
+
+He laughed loudly and winked. Jaffery, whose agility in repartee was
+rather physical than mental, glowered at him, rumbled something
+unintelligible beneath his breath, and took tea out to Doria, who was
+established on the terrace.
+
+"Seems to have got the pip," Mr. Fendihook remarked cheerfully.
+
+Barbara, with icy politeness, offered him tea. He refused, explaining
+that unless he sat down to a square meal, which, in view of the
+excellence of his lunch, he was unable to do, he never drank tea in the
+afternoon.
+
+"Could I have a whisky and soda, old pal?"
+
+The drink was brought. He pledged Barbara--"And may I drink to the
+success of that promising little affair"--he jerked a backward
+thumb--"between our pippy friend and the charming widow?"
+
+Barbara had passed the gasping stage.
+
+"Mr. Chayne," she said in the metallic voice that, before now, had made
+strong men grow pale, "Mr. Chayne stands in the same relation of trustee
+to Mrs. Boldero as he does to Mrs. Prescott."
+
+But Fendihook was undismayed. "Some fellows have all the luck! Here's to
+him, and here's to you, Sheba's Queen."
+
+He nodded to Liosha and pulled at his drink. But Liosha did not respond.
+A hard look appeared in her eyes and the knuckles of her hand showed
+white. Presently she rose and went onto the terrace, where she found
+Jaffery fixing a rebellious rug round Doria's feet. And this is what
+happened.
+
+"Jaff Chayne," she said, "I want to have a word with you. You'll excuse
+me, Doria, but Jaff Chayne's as much my trustee as he is yours. I have
+business to talk."
+
+Doria eyed her coldly. "Talk as much business as you like, my dear girl.
+I'm not preventing you." Jaffery strode off with Liosha. As soon as they
+were out of earshot, she said:
+
+"Are you going to marry her?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Doria."
+
+Jaffery bent his brows on her. He was not in his most angelic mood.
+
+"What the blazes has that got to do with you? Just you mind your own
+business."
+
+"All right," she retorted, "I will."
+
+"Glad to hear it," said he. "And now I want a word with you. What do you
+mean by bringing that howling cad down here?"
+
+"It's you who howl, not he. He's a very kind gentleman and very clever
+and he makes me laugh. He's not like you."
+
+"He's a performing gorilla," cried Jaffery.
+
+They were both exceedingly angry, and having walked very fast, they
+found themselves in front of the gate of the walled garden.
+Instinctively they entered and had the place to themselves.
+
+"And a confounded bounder of a gorilla at that!" Jaffery continued.
+
+"How dare you speak so of my friend?"
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for having such a friend. And
+you're just going to drop him. Do you understand?"
+
+"Shan't!" said Liosha.
+
+"You shall. You're not going to be seen outside the house with him."
+
+There was battle clamorous and a trifle undignified. They said the same
+things over and over again. Both had worked themselves into a fury.
+
+"I forbid you to have anything to do with the fellow."
+
+"You, Jaff Chayne, told me to mind my own business. Just you mind
+yours."
+
+"It is my business," he shouted, "to see that you don't disgrace
+yourself with a beast of a fellow like that."
+
+"What did you say? Disgrace myself?" She drew herself up magnificently.
+"Do you think I would disgrace myself with any man living? You insult
+me."
+
+"Rot!" cried Jaffery. "Every woman's liable to make a blessed fool of
+herself--and you more than most."
+
+"I know one that's not going to make a fool of herself," she taunted,
+and flung an arm in the direction of the house.
+
+Jaffery blazed. "You leave me alone."
+
+"And you leave me alone."
+
+They glared inimically into each other's eyes. Liosha turned, marched
+superbly away, opened the garden door and, passing through, slammed it
+in his face. It had been a very pretty, primitive quarrel, free from all
+subtlety. Elemental instinct flamed in Jaffery's veins. If he could have
+given her a good sound thrashing he would have been a happy man. This
+accursed civilisation paralysed him. He stood for a few moments tearing
+at whiskers and beard. Then he started in pursuit, and overtook her in
+the middle of the lawn.
+
+"Anyhow, you'll take the infernal fellow away now and never bring him
+here again."
+
+"It's Hilary's house, not yours," she remarked, looking straight before
+her.
+
+"Well, ask him."
+
+"I will. Hilary!"
+
+At her hail and beckon I left the terrace where Mr. Fendihook had been
+discoursing irrepressibly on the Bohemian advantages of widowhood to a
+quivering Doria, and advanced to meet her, a flushed and bright-eyed
+Juno.
+
+"Would you like me to bring Ras Fendihook here again?"
+
+"Tell her straight," said Jaffery.
+
+Even Susan, looking from one to the other, would have been conscious of
+storms. I took her hand.
+
+"My dear Liosha," said I, "our social system is so complicated that it
+is no wonder you don't appreciate the more delicate ramifications--"
+
+"Oh! Talk sense to her," growled Jaffery.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook is not quite"--I hesitated--"not quite the kind of
+person, my dear, that we're accustomed to meet."
+
+"I know," said Liosha, "you want them all stamped out in a pattern, like
+little tin soldiers."
+
+"I see the point of your criticism, and it's true, as far as it goes."
+
+"Oh, go on--" Jaffery interrupted.
+
+"But--" I continued.
+
+"You'd rather not see him again?"
+
+"No," roared Jaffery.
+
+"I'm talking to Hilary, not you," said Liosha. She turned to me. "You
+and Barbara would like me to take him away right now?"
+
+I still held her hand, which was growing moist--and I suppose mine was
+too--and I didn't like to drop it, for fear of hurting her feelings. I
+gave it a great squeeze. It was very difficult for me. Personally, I
+enjoyed the frank, untrammelled and prodigiously accomplished scion of a
+vulgar race. As a mere bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should
+have taken him joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my
+microscope and studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that
+there was of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan
+who did not count, he was--I admit, deservedly--an object of loathing.
+So I squeezed Liosha's hand.
+
+"The beginning and end of the matter, my dear," said I, "is that he's
+not quite a gentleman."
+
+"All right," said Liosha, liberating herself. "Now I know."
+
+She left me and sailed to the terrace. I use the metaphor advisedly. She
+had a way of walking like a full-rigged ship before a breeze.
+
+"Ras Fendihook, it's time we were going."
+
+Mr. Fendihook looked at his watch and jumped up.
+
+"We must hook it!"
+
+Barbara asked conventionally: "Won't you stay to supper?"
+
+"Great Scott, no!" he exclaimed. "No offence meant. You're very kind.
+But it's Ladies' Night at the Rabbits and I'm Buck Rabbit for the
+evening and the Queen of Sheba's coming as my guest."
+
+"Who are the Rabbits?" asked Doria.
+
+Even I had heard of this Bohemian confraternity; and I explained with a
+learned inaccuracy that evoked a semi-circular grin on the pink, fleshy
+face of Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Ouf! Thank goodness!" said Barbara as the two-seater scuttered away
+down the drive.
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Doria.
+
+Jaffery shook his fist at the disappearing car.
+
+"One of these days, I'll break his infernal neck!"
+
+"Why?" asked Doria, on a sharp note of enquiry.
+
+"I don't like him," said Jaffery. "And he's taking her out to dine among
+all that circus crowd. It's damnable!"
+
+"For the lady whose father stuck pigs in Chicago," said Doria. "I should
+think it was rather a rise in the social scale."
+
+And she went indoors with her nose in the air. To every one save the
+puzzled Jaffery it was obvious that she disapproved of his interest in
+Liosha.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+"The Greater Glory" came out in due season, puzzled the reviewers and
+made a sensation; a greater sensation even than a legitimate successor
+to "The Diamond Gate" dictated by the spirit of Tom Castleton. The
+contrast was so extraordinary, so inexplicable. It was generally
+concluded that no writer but Adrian Boldero, in the world's history, had
+ever revealed two such distinct literary personalities as those that
+informed the two novels. The protean nature of his genius aroused
+universal wonder. His death was deplored as the greatest loss sustained
+by English letters since Keats. The press could do nothing but hail the
+new book as a masterpiece. Barbara and myself, who, alone of mortals,
+knew the strange history of the two books, did not agree with the press.
+In sober truth "The Greater Glory" was not a work of genius; for, after
+all, the only hallmark of a work of genius that you can put your finger
+on is its haunting quality. That quality Tom Castleton's work possessed;
+Jaffery Chayne's did not. "The Greater Glory" vibrated with life, it was
+wide and generous, it was a capital story; but, unlike "The Diamond
+Gate," it could not rank with "The Vicar of Wakefield" and "David
+Copperfield." I say this in no way to disparage my dear old friend, but
+merely to present his work in true proportion. Published under his own
+name it would doubtless have received recognition; probably it would
+have made money; but it could not have met with the enthusiastic
+reception it enjoyed when published under the tragic and romantic name
+of Adrian Boldero.
+
+Of course Jaffery beamed with delight. His forlorn hope had succeeded
+beyond his dreams. He had fulfilled the immediate needs of the woman he
+loved. He had also astonished himself enormously.
+
+"It's darned good to let you and Barbara know," said he, "that I'm not a
+mere six foot of beef and thirst, but that I'm a chap with brains,
+and"--he turned over a bundle of press-cuttings--"and 'poetic fancy' and
+'master of the human heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of
+things' and 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.'
+Ho! ho! ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
+years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
+complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling like
+blazes."
+
+It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
+ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
+spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His poorer
+human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now Adrian's
+restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria there would open
+a new life in which, with the past behind her, she could find a glory in
+the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom
+responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when
+Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the
+ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings
+of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever
+he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or
+perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
+Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
+reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
+blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
+reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to write on
+Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it and that of
+Jaffery Chayne?
+
+One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.
+
+"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery sacrificed
+his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together
+Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you
+treat him as if he were a dog."
+
+Doria protested. "I don't. I _am_ grateful. I don't know what I should
+do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can't
+alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work; and when I hear those
+very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied."
+
+"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by yourself,"
+said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be sane and civil."
+
+"I think you're horrid!" Doria exclaimed, "and if you weren't the wife
+of Adrian's trusted friend, I would never speak to you again."
+
+"Rubbish!" said Barbara. "I'm talking to you for your good, and you know
+it."
+
+Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little eyrie
+in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever leaving it.
+Arbuthnot of _The Daily Gazette_ satirically enquiring whether he wanted
+a job or still yearned for a season in Mayfair he consigned, in his
+grinning way, to perdition. Change was the essence of holiday-making,
+and this was his holiday. It was many years since he had one. When he
+wanted a job he would go round to the office.
+
+"All right," said Arbuthnot, "and, in the meantime, if you want to keep
+your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring us up."
+
+Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he liked.
+
+The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may
+have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me. I dismissed the
+excuse as fantastic. I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club,
+assuming my most sceptical manner.
+
+"Well," said he, "there's Doria. Somebody must look after her."
+
+"Doria," said I, "is a young woman, now that she is in sound health,
+perfectly capable of looking after herself. And if she does want a man's
+advice, she can always turn to me."
+
+"And there's Liosha."
+
+"Liosha," I remarked judiciously, "is also a young woman capable of
+looking after herself. If she isn't, she has given you very definitely
+to understand that she's going to try. Have you had any more interesting
+evenings out lately?"
+
+"No," he growled. "She's offended with me because I warned her off that
+low-down bounder."
+
+"I think you did your best," said I, "to make her take up with him."
+
+He protested. We argued the point, and I think I got the best of the
+argument.
+
+"Well, anyhow," he said with an air of infantile satisfaction, "she
+can't marry him."
+
+"Who's going to prevent her, if she wants to?"
+
+"The law of England." He laughed, mightily pleased. "The beggar is
+married already. I've found that out. He's got three or four wives in
+fact--oh, a dreadful hound--but only one real one with a wedding ring,
+and she lives up in the north with a pack of children."
+
+"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a villain."
+
+He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was not
+Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I agreed
+with him.
+
+"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as to look
+after her."
+
+"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company. She'll
+get a bad name."
+
+"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you devoting
+his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of mischief is too
+preposterous. Try me with something else."
+
+Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was writing
+another book.
+
+He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to know. He was
+getting along famously. He had had the story in his head for a long
+time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline very picturesquely.
+Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the development of the man
+Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had happened. The born novelist
+had just discovered himself and clamoured for artistic self-expression.
+He was writing this book just because he could not help it, finding
+gladness in the mere work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and
+letting himself go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become
+of it when written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a
+matter. Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new
+novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as closely as
+"Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be the deuce to
+pay. If he published it under his own name, he would render himself
+liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from the dead author of
+"The Greater Glory," and so complicate this already complicated web of
+literary theft; and if he threw sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria
+to enable him to publish under Adrian's name, he would be performing the
+task of the altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.
+
+Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his novel,
+looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and enjoying the
+society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds of passage like
+himself, who happened to be passing through London. Being a man of
+modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food, he found his small
+patrimony and the savings from his professional earnings quite adequate
+for amenable existence. When he wanted healthy, fresh air he came down
+to us to see Susan; when he wanted anything else he went to see Doria,
+which was almost daily.
+
+Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and Penates
+consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting,
+she entered the awful room--neither servants nor friends were allowed to
+cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay
+in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy
+tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave,
+over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his
+cooeperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent
+sculptor for a bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time,
+she bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion of
+Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. . . .
+And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign behests without a murmur
+and without a hint that he desired reward for his servitude. But, to
+those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed,
+to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who
+knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not
+last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one
+should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find
+august recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was
+not devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted
+everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery for his
+meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct must have
+revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath the exterior
+of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For one thing, she
+considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity perhaps blinded her
+judgment. At all events she did not realise that a change was bound to
+come in their relations. It came, inevitably.
+
+One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St. John's Wood
+flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of queer isolation
+from the world below, and from the strange world masked behind the vast
+superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said
+something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He
+also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest
+might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer
+laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a
+little sensuous charm. Doria replied sentimentally:
+
+"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of cliff, with
+the sea-gulls wheeling about it--bringing messages from the sunset lands
+across the blue, blue sea--" Poor dear! She forgot that sea lit by a
+westering sun is of no colour at all and that the blue water lies to the
+east; but no matter; Jaffery, drinking in her words, forgot it likewise.
+"Away from everything," she continued, "and two people who loved--with a
+great, great love--"
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down Maida
+Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted--the ripeness of youth
+and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained her ivory cheek--you
+will find the exact simile in Virgil. She was too desirable for
+Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in his chair--they were sitting
+face to face, so that he had his back to the motor omnibuses--and put
+his great hand on her knee.
+
+"Why not we two?"
+
+It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish--what you please; but every
+man's first declaration of love is bathos--the zenith of his passion
+connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration
+was made, without shadow of mistake.
+
+Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset and gulls
+and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from before her eyes,
+and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff Chayne.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"You know very well what I mean."
+
+He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The three-foot
+balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles. She put out a
+hand.
+
+"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so nervous."
+
+He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as if she
+had dealt him a slap in the face.
+
+"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I want
+you and I'll never be happy till I get you."
+
+She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.
+
+"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"
+
+"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.
+
+"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward glance.
+
+"Not with an obstinate devil like me."
+
+He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.
+
+"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the
+drawing-room.
+
+He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a footling
+balcony. What do you take me for?"
+
+"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave elf facing
+horrible ogre--and, either by chance or design, her hand touched and
+held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph of her late husband.
+
+"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.
+
+"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's memory
+when you say such things to me?"
+
+"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to the
+free woman he loves."
+
+"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."
+
+"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."
+
+"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of you,"--his blue
+eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his hands, but heedless she
+went on--"yes, mean and base and despicable of you to wish to betray
+him. Adrian--"
+
+"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and listen
+to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual disgusts and
+sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real live man who would
+walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail body in his great grasp,
+and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught up by a dynamo. "My love for
+you has nothing whatever to do with Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as
+one man can be to another, living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary
+and Barbara. But I want you. I've wanted you since the first moment I
+set eyes on you. You've got into my blood. You're going to love me.
+You're going to marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."
+
+He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely. She did
+not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were white and her
+face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And unconscious that
+his grip was giving her physical pain he continued:
+
+"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I heard you
+were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting. But, by
+God!"--and, not knowing what he did, he shook her backwards and
+forwards--"I'll not go on waiting for ever. You--you little bit of
+mystery--you little bit of eternity--you--you--ah!"
+
+With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not counted
+on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning, and she fell,
+knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp of horror and in an
+instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa, and on his knees beside
+her, with remorse oversurging his passion, behaved like a penitent fool,
+accusing himself of all the unforgivable savageries ever practised by
+barbaric male. Doria, who was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed
+to the door.
+
+"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."
+
+Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of
+reaction.
+
+"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."
+
+She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you out, but
+if Adrian was alive--Ha! ha! ha!--" she laughed with a touch of
+hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren rascal--how do you dare to think
+you can take the place of a man like Adrian?"
+
+[Illustration: "Go! You are nothing but a brute."]
+
+The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her up
+bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I would hold a
+cat or a rabbit.
+
+"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference between a man
+and a--"
+
+Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might have
+struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.
+
+"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going to hurt
+you."
+
+He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the lover who
+woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have thrown away
+his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed. Doria proved to
+Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration and nervous collapse,
+that she would never set eyes again upon the unqualifiable savage by
+whom her holiest sentiments had been outraged and her person
+disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a blood-curdling story into
+semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short work of her contention that
+Jaffery ought to have respected her as he would have respected the wife
+of a living friend, characterising it as morbid and indecent nonsense;
+and with regard to the physical violence she declared that it would have
+served her right had he smacked her.
+
+"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband, be
+faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man comes
+along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an honourable
+way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months all a man has
+to give, and then, when he tells you what you've known perfectly well
+all along, treat him as if he were making shameful proposals to
+you--especially a man like Jaffery; I have no patience with you."
+
+Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No one
+understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was aware. But
+when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery Chayne, she really
+thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore Barbara, rather angry at
+being brought up to London on a needless errand, involving loss of
+dinner and upset of household arrangements, administered a
+sleeping-draught and bade her wake in the morning in a less idiotic
+frame of mind.
+
+"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me later--to "behave
+like a cat" is her way of signifying a display of the vilest phases of
+feminine nature--"but I couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal
+of sense. It isn't as if I had never warned her about the way she has
+been treating Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian--I'm
+sick of his name--and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"
+
+This she said during a private discussion that night on the whole
+situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she returned to
+Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the first time in his
+life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent dinner, imploring me to
+tell him whether he should enlist for a soldier, or commit suicide, or
+lie prone on Doria's doormat until it should please her to come out and
+trample on him. He seemed rather surprised--indeed a trifle hurt--that
+neither of us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not
+Doria's--especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside of the
+scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about the
+drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.
+
+"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both of you,
+she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You--'a barren
+rascal'--you? Good God!"
+
+He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must take this
+from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on her. He
+oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He was a savage
+unfit for the society of any woman outside a wigwam.
+
+"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to bed.
+Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."
+
+The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I could not
+exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless, and with a large
+disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent him a suit of my
+meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same purpose.
+
+He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria and was
+denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned unopened. He passed
+a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose end in London during the
+height of the season. In despair he went to _The Daily Gazette_ office
+and proclaimed himself ready for a job. But for the moment the earth was
+fairly calm and the management could find no field for Jaffery's special
+activities. Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable
+weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of the
+proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the newspaper
+office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a disturber of traffic.
+Then he came down to Northlands for a while, where, for want of
+something to do, he hired himself out to my gardener and dug up most of
+the kitchen garden. His usual occupation of romping with Susan was gone,
+for she lay abed with some childish ailment which Barbara feared might
+turn into German measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or
+eating or sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless
+mood. At nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases
+wherein he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer
+the most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying
+with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when a
+merciful Providence gave him something definite to think about.
+
+It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my dressing-room
+when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding admittance, rushed in, clad
+in bath gown and slippers, flourishing a letter.
+
+"Read that."
+
+I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:
+
+     "Dear Jaff Chayne,
+
+     "As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm going
+     to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook--"
+
+I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."
+
+"He is. Read on."
+
+     "We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married at
+     Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an Albanian
+     it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in England, and
+     I would have to give up half my money to Government. But in France,
+     owing to different laws, I can get married without any fuss at all.
+     I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a lawyer, so it's all
+     right. I suppose when I am married you won't be my trustee any
+     more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and thank you for
+     all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and Barbara and
+     Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is Erasmus, but
+     you will when you know him better.
+
+     "Yours affectionately,
+
+     "LIOSHA PRESCOTT."
+
+The amazing epistle took my breath away.
+
+"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.
+
+"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look signified that
+it was he who intended to cause it.
+
+"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.
+
+"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He must have
+once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."
+
+I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of pity for
+our poor deluded Liosha.
+
+"We must get her out of this."
+
+"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."
+
+I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the room where
+she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in cap and
+peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with lather crinkling
+over one-half of my face, held first an indignation meeting, and then a
+council of war.
+
+"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He couldn't
+offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing bigamy, and I
+know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement; so he has invented
+this poisonous plot to get her out of England."
+
+"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said Barbara.
+
+"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?" asked
+Jaffery.
+
+I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but Barbara's
+eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws and
+formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the fact that,
+not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be sold to a young
+Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming to haggle over her
+price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in telling her wild fables
+of English life. Her ignorance in many ways was abysmal. Once having
+seen a photograph in the papers of the King in a bowler-hat she
+expressed her disappointment that he wore no insignia of royalty; and
+when I consoled her by saying that, by Act of Parliament, the King was
+obliged to wear his crown so many hours a day and therefore wore it
+always at breakfast, lunch and dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted
+my assurance with the credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara
+rebuked me for taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry
+indeed. How was she to know when and where not to believe me?
+
+"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any kind of
+plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a full account of
+it is a proof."
+
+"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled. "If
+Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."
+
+"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara. "She
+thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you know."
+
+"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said I.
+
+"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick knitting
+of the brow.
+
+"Precisely," said I.
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with the fellow
+already?"
+
+"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."
+
+He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while Barbara
+discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard to Liosha.
+
+Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.
+
+"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday. Fendihook left
+last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."
+
+We regarded each other in dismay.
+
+"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.
+
+"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from moustache
+downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When he was puzzled
+he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why should he leave the
+boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you. Because his London engagement
+was over and he had to put in a week's engagement at some provincial
+music-hall. Theatrical folks always travel on Sunday. If he was still
+working in London and wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have
+chosen Sunday. We can easily see by the advertisements in the morning
+paper. His London engagement was at the Atrium."
+
+"I've got the _Daily Telegraph_ here," said Barbara.
+
+She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken condition to
+which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest search among the
+ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement page. The attractions at
+the Atrium were set out fully; but the name of Ras Fendihook did not
+appear.
+
+"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where did she
+write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown pocket.
+"Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday afternoon. So
+she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was written on her own
+note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address, and then held it up
+before us. "See anything queer about this?"
+
+We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."
+
+"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come along. I can
+tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I seem to be a bit
+of an ass. Besides--you'll come, won't you?"
+
+"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."
+
+"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be prepared to
+come to Havre--all over France, if necessary."
+
+"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast coolness of
+the proposal.
+
+"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."
+
+"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave Susan."
+
+"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you can't."
+He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."
+
+"Where?" I asked, stupidly.
+
+"Wherever I take you."
+
+"But, my dear fellow--" I remonstrated.
+
+He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack his bag,
+and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."
+
+He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.
+
+"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by yourself?"
+
+"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me and I met
+the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help me to save a
+woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find somebody else."
+
+"Of course I'll come," said I.
+
+"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a breakfast."
+
+He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman heroes
+rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy, bellowing
+fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the normal tones of
+the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.
+
+I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that we should
+be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other people's lives?"
+
+She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's just
+because we've done nothing--nothing otherwise to justify our existence.
+We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and Susan. If we didn't
+take a share of other people's troubles we should die of congestion of
+the soul."
+
+I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the steady
+vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at a moment's
+notice for anywhere--perhaps Havre, perhaps Marseilles, perhaps
+Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which wouldn't suit
+me--anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving Jaffery might choose to
+ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with my translation of
+Firdusi. . . .
+
+"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin to put in
+an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs.
+Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately done
+black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we were
+calling in question the moral character of her establishment. She did
+not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone. She was not in
+the habit of putting such enquiries to her guests.
+
+"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.
+
+"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on Thursday. It was
+not my business to associate the two departures in any way."
+
+By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an old
+client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had been
+touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come without much
+ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms, paid her bill and
+departed with her trunks.
+
+"When did she give notice to leave you?"
+
+"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then she came
+with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things were packed
+and ready to be brought downstairs."
+
+"What address did she give to the cabman?"
+
+Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter. Jaffery
+repeated his question.
+
+"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.
+
+I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded it as the
+most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on me.
+
+"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying instructions--covering up
+her tracks. When she got to Westminster she told the driver to cross the
+bridge--and what railway station is the other end of the bridge?"
+
+"Waterloo," said I.
+
+"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from Southampton
+the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny, believe me."
+
+I said no more.
+
+The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his pocket.
+
+"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this
+district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."
+
+"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.
+
+"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was something
+fishy about it."
+
+"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne, and I'm
+surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my character. I had a
+short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday enclosing four other letters
+which she asked me to stamp and post, as I owed her fourpence change on
+her bill."
+
+"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.
+
+"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.
+
+"But the postmark on the envelope."
+
+She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been destroyed.
+
+"Then where is she?" I asked.
+
+"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at once."
+
+So after a visit to my bankers--for I am not the kind of person to set
+out for Santa Fe de Bogota with twopence halfpenny in my pocket--and
+after a hasty lunch at a restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient
+disgust--"Why the dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if
+we're to fool about wasting time over lunch?"--but as I explained, if I
+don't have regular meals, I get a headache--and after having made other
+sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase of a toothbrush,
+an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin, admirable fellow that
+he is, invariably forgets to put into my case, we started for
+Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth Road we went, through
+Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the Surrey Downs rolling warm in
+the sunshine, through Farnham, through grey, dreamy Winchester, past St.
+Cross, with its old-world almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill
+and down to Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a
+quarter. Jaffery drove.
+
+We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the various
+places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in Southampton.
+We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the Royal, the Star, the
+Dolphin, the Polygon--and found no trace of the runaways. Jaffery
+interviewed officials at the stations and docks, dapper gentlemen with
+the air of diplomatists, tremendous fellows in uniform, policemen,
+porters, with all of whom he seemed to be on terms of familiar
+acquaintance; but none of them could trace or remember such a couple
+having crossed by the midnight boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were
+their names down on the list of those who had secured berths in advance
+for this Saturday night.
+
+"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not displeased at
+my masterful friend's failure.
+
+"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly means
+that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on Monday. If it
+was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've only to wait and
+catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement, which is possible, he
+and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that case we'll cross ourselves
+and track them down."
+
+"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I murmured.
+
+"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement he must
+be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must be working in
+the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place besides this is
+Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only seventeen miles."
+
+"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful,
+comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to dine
+at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the car drove
+off.
+
+"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."
+
+"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow night's
+boat."
+
+"There isn't one on Sundays."
+
+"Then Monday night's boat."
+
+"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet him on
+the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down on my leg
+above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I should like to
+take you on an expedition. It would do you a thundering lot of good."
+
+We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of enquiries
+as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining Southsea could we find
+a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook, and still less of the obscure
+Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel. We dined very well. On that I
+insisted--without much expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me
+for a Sybarite and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on
+account of succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of
+excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we felt
+that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it so
+gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back to
+Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on the
+off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to catch the
+Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I cheerfully
+contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre. And as Jaffery
+(also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining me with juicy
+stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt equal to any
+dare-devil adventure.
+
+We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the
+South-Western Hotel--the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our uncertainty
+as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain.
+Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and
+obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was
+nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of
+darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid
+illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers--"St.
+Malo"--"Cherbourg"--"Jersey"--"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the
+Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and
+stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a stick at its master's
+feet.
+
+One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants
+swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the
+aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms
+encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all
+seemed alike--just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct,
+like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all
+around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures
+mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the
+slither and thud of trunks being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail
+of the packed wedge disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I
+went to the aft gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had
+seen Fendihook or Liosha.
+
+A second train produced results equally barren.
+
+There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We went
+aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.
+
+My method of travel has always been to arrange everything beforehand
+with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains and boats I have
+thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear therefore that there were
+no berths free and that we should have to pass the night either on the
+windy deck or in the red-plush discomfort of the open saloon caused me
+not unreasonable dismay. I had to choose and I chose the saloon.
+Jaffery, of course, chose the raw winds of heaven. All night I did not
+get a wink of sleep. There was a gross fellow in the next section of
+red-plush whose snoring drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long
+after they had cleared away the remains of supper from the long central
+table chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the
+world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the popping
+of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three a minute. I
+understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the human brain. I
+devised exquisite means of removing him from a nauseated world. Then
+there was a lamp which swung backwards and forwards and searched my
+eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I covered them.
+
+What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife and child
+and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got out to sea.
+There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of
+stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly hate a ship to do. And I
+was fully dressed and it seemed as if all the tender parts of my body
+were tied up with twine. What was I doing in this galley?
+
+When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning over me and
+all was deathly still.
+
+"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is there a
+fog?"
+
+"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of Havre."
+
+"What time is it?" I asked.
+
+"Half-past six."
+
+"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said I, lying
+down again.
+
+He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.
+
+The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck of
+Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.
+
+"What a ghastly night!"
+
+"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped over
+twenty miles."
+
+There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate numbers
+on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the companion
+onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the releasing gangway.
+I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans. The sky was overcast.
+It was very cold. The universe had an uncared-for, unswept appearance,
+like a house surprised at dawn, before the housemaids are up. The forced
+appearance of a well-to-do philosopher at such an hour was nothing less
+than an outrage. I glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and
+turned down its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool
+thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in
+charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I
+glanced over my shoulder.
+
+"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.
+
+At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us
+turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's
+eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm. Her
+eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then she
+turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just beyond
+the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even further away.
+The gangway was fixed and the movement of the conglomerate mass began.
+Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.
+
+"There's the brute waiting for her."
+
+And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a smile on
+his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the foot of the
+gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence, sought us anxiously
+with his gaze; then with an air of bravado waved his hat--a hard white
+felt--and cried out: "Cheer O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and
+linking his arm through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers
+hurrying across the stones to the custom-sheds.
+
+"Stop," Jaffery roared.
+
+They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook would
+have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the stream into a
+clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us. When we had struggled
+our slow way down and reached the quay she advanced a few steps looking
+very terrible in her wrath.
+
+"How dare you follow me?"
+
+"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an imperious
+gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the stern of the
+boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging, and a sergeant de
+ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.
+
+"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I didn't
+play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play dragon with
+a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."
+
+"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said jauntily.
+
+"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone. "You
+know very well why I'm here."
+
+"Jaff Chayne--" Liosha began.
+
+He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."
+
+"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."
+
+"He has got to tell me, not you."
+
+"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said Fendihook, with
+sudden nastiness.
+
+"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."
+
+"How are you going to do it?"
+
+Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter--"
+
+"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?" snarled
+Fendihook.
+
+"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."
+
+"Sure," said Liosha.
+
+"And are you going to marry this lady?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Why didn't you marry her in England?"
+
+"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here--we don't want any of
+your interference." And she planted herself by the side of her abductor,
+glaring defiance at Jaffery.
+
+Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and an
+Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and would
+forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little skunk!"
+
+The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked swiftly at
+Fendihook.
+
+"Wasn't it true what you told me?"
+
+"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in England as
+Mrs. Considine."
+
+She paid no attention to me.
+
+"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.
+
+Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that rot
+seriously, you silly cuckoo?"
+
+Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly. For the
+first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her candid mind.
+
+"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise to marry
+her in France."
+
+"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"
+
+"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."
+
+"Who says I can't?"
+
+"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."
+
+"I've divorced her."
+
+"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing. I've
+found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character."
+
+Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes
+burning.
+
+"He's married already--" she gasped.
+
+"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."
+
+Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for
+Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round
+Fendihook's throat.
+
+"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron strength.
+Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as white as a sheet.
+I tapped him on the arm.
+
+"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if you don't
+want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a scared look,
+"you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You had better stick
+to the sort you're accustomed to."
+
+"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."
+
+"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne. With my
+own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like and"--I made an
+expressive gesture--"throw him clean away."
+
+"Right O!" said he.
+
+He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck me. I
+overtook him.
+
+"Where are you staying in Havre?"
+
+He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know for?"
+
+"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be if we
+chanced upon the same hotel."
+
+"I'm staying at the Phares--the swagger one on the beach near the
+Casino."
+
+"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye, old pal," said he.
+
+He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.
+
+I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood
+unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down.
+Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but
+now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation.
+
+"Let her go!" I whispered.
+
+Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without moving
+her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have known exactly
+what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat helplessly.
+
+"_Monsieur_," said a voice close by, and we saw our little blue-bloused
+porter. He explained that he had been seeking us everywhere. If we did
+not make haste we would lose the Paris train.
+
+I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not pressed for
+time; but this little outside happening broke the situation.
+
+"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said Jaffery.
+
+She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground a
+leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She
+extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.
+
+"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.
+
+"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides, we'll have
+to stay the night."
+
+"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."
+
+"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."
+
+An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she wore
+cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly unconcerned with
+such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken face to all the world. I
+felt intensely sorry for her. She realised now from what a blatant
+scoundrel she had been saved; but she still bitterly resented our
+intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped naked walking between
+them"--that was her primitive account later of her state of mind.
+
+"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."
+
+She nodded, without looking at me.
+
+"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."
+
+She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but she
+remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended
+mechanically to her declarations.
+
+On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the cheery sun
+had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a glorious day. The
+luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took an open cab and rattled
+through the narrow flag-paved streets of the harbour quarter of the
+town. As we emerged into a more spacious thoroughfare, suddenly from a
+gaudy column at the corner flared the name of Ras Fendihook. I caught
+the heading of the _affiche_: "Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery
+was solved. Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left
+London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an
+engagement out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question:
+"Why Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat
+of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had eyes
+for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We passed another
+column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early
+hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni's was flung.
+We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to
+be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit dejeuner downstairs.
+Liosha left us without saying a word.
+
+Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good _cafe au lait_, gladdened
+by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning's work, quite a
+different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the
+sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before. My urbane dismissal of
+Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory. The glow of conscious heroism
+warmed me, even like last night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind.
+After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and
+sending up to Liosha's room a bunch of red roses we bought at a
+florist's hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the
+matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his
+pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.
+
+I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding
+of its _sous_, it is what you will. But it lives a spacious,
+out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like
+provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks abroad. It indulges in
+its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is intensely conscious of
+family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom. It is not Sundayfied
+into our vacuous boredom. It clings to the picturesque, in which it
+finds its dignified delight. The little soldier clad in blue tunic and
+red trousers struts along with his _fiancee_ or _maitresse_ on his arm;
+the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the
+cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks
+syrup at a neighbouring table in your cafe. The work-girls, even on
+Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly
+street. The cure in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday
+happens not to be the _jour de repos hebdomadaire_ ordained by law, in
+their blue _sarreau_; the peasants from outlying villages--the men in
+queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in
+dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black,
+with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and
+greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous
+cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an
+inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with
+their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned
+waiters standing by cafe tables--all these types are distinct, picked
+out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the
+stage is dressed.
+
+So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day,
+I replied:
+
+"Sit here."
+
+"Don't you want to see the place?"
+
+"The place," said I, "is parading before us."
+
+"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."
+
+"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in
+a mood for jaunts."
+
+"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her.
+Oh, that swine of a blighter!"
+
+His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth
+time we went over the story.
+
+"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go
+back to the boarding-house."
+
+"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."
+
+"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary,
+there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew
+the right way to take her."
+
+The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I
+assented to Jaffery's proposition.
+
+"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish
+gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and
+honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock
+for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled
+herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."
+
+And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us
+past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman
+would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to
+soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her
+into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in
+fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid
+figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white
+gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the
+morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her
+lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.
+
+We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.
+
+"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."
+
+We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked
+steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.
+
+"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."
+
+"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather
+indiscreet."
+
+"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.
+
+"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your
+breakfast?"
+
+She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she
+have now? I sent a waiter for cafe-au-lait and a brioche and lectured
+her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a
+smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism
+with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for
+the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the
+little tray and the _verseur_ poured out the coffee and milk. We watched
+her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.
+
+"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.
+
+"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We
+watched the London trains carefully."
+
+"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to
+bed at once."
+
+"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you
+doing at Southsea?"
+
+"Staying with Emma--Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick
+that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her
+to put me up."
+
+"So that's why you went on Thursday?"
+
+"That's why."
+
+"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs.
+Considine--I mean Mrs. Jupp--into your confidence?"
+
+"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to
+Havre--to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff
+Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."
+
+We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue
+that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday
+for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no
+Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris.
+Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from
+London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy
+out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His
+fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to
+accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst
+of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of
+his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he
+worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage
+back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway
+network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into
+the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure
+he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left
+penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp
+swallowed her up forever.
+
+For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul
+must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had
+guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey.
+Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his
+instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit
+of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be
+posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to
+the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to
+Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.
+
+She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon
+the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all
+day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the
+town from his swagger hotel on the _plage_, we carried out Jaffery's
+proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight
+from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of
+fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged
+needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden
+grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the
+sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a
+deep breath.
+
+"Oh, let us all come and live here."
+
+We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the
+fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few
+belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to
+the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch
+at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and
+afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery
+was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing,
+and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended
+solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy
+gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled
+her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and
+sipped _creme de menthe_ with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a
+naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds
+itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away.
+Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet--or
+rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of
+blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her
+wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the
+first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a
+spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy--she was
+dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her
+immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the
+same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing
+and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.
+
+To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's
+category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many
+restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his
+benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile
+exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl
+it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be
+felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At
+Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand
+to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and
+ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would
+have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with
+grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the
+deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.
+
+It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the
+fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The
+smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed
+conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery
+suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the
+edge of the inspiring cliffs?
+
+"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he
+throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."
+
+Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick
+ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the
+wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought
+of the Winged Victory.
+
+"I'm not a bit tired," she said.
+
+But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists,
+she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary
+to his desires?" and settled down beside him.
+
+So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea
+and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a
+steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny
+golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact
+giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke
+the spell.
+
+"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed
+him."
+
+Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.
+
+"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.
+
+"I did strike him once."
+
+"Oh?" said I.
+
+"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the
+details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But
+she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I
+was an honest woman and talked about marriage."
+
+Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear,"
+said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders--it was the full shrug of the un-English
+child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away.
+"He was so funny."
+
+"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle
+remonstrance.
+
+"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was
+different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much.
+You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave
+like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to
+dinner."
+
+Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."
+
+"What can I say?"--she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't
+to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think
+it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into
+the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say
+it was not ladylike--but he--he did not say so. He laughed. His friends
+used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off
+my stays"--she threw out her hands largely--"ouf!"
+
+"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.
+
+"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd
+of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big
+difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low
+voice.
+
+I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for
+her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can
+understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some
+moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new
+white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible
+something--something, for want of a better word, like a ripple--sweep
+through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her
+neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.
+
+"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.
+
+She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and
+clutched his shoulder.
+
+"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
+understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
+prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
+breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
+hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."
+
+Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.
+
+"What are you talking about?"
+
+She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
+spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.
+
+"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
+forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
+words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
+Chayne, the mountains of Albania."
+
+"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
+remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"
+
+She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
+swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
+now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
+I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
+things."
+
+"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.
+
+"And what have you done?"
+
+"I've broken out of prison and run away."
+
+"That's what I did," said Liosha.
+
+Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
+her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.
+
+"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
+comes to."
+
+No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
+had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
+wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
+restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
+him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
+given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.
+
+"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
+been so kind to me."
+
+"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
+as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
+beads."
+
+"So do I," said Liosha.
+
+I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
+chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
+consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment
+afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of
+babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to
+my feet and pursued them.
+
+"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the
+decencies of civilised life."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+"_Arretez! 'Arretez!_" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.
+
+We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The
+chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and
+disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side
+to side of the Boulevard Maritime.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in
+characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and
+laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking
+fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a
+curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he
+carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having
+subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.
+
+"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the
+door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at
+Tortoni's."
+
+Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took
+off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed
+manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a
+stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next
+Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established
+himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery.
+Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the
+partition. The car started.
+
+"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From
+Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports
+thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"
+
+"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round.
+"We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."
+
+"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."
+
+"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.
+
+"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.
+
+"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.
+
+"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile.
+"He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."
+
+"Remember that night off Vigo?"
+
+"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and
+go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the
+time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was
+responsible for the saving of his ship.
+
+"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.
+
+"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.
+
+"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself
+included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."
+
+Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks,
+holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to
+side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a
+hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing
+from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come--No.
+It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty--I
+thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was
+violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest
+desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the
+two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.
+
+"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"
+
+"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I
+grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board
+ship."
+
+He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the
+entertainment of a pretty woman.
+
+"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.
+
+"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man
+doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying
+that I love the sea."
+
+With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel,
+Restaurant and Cafe Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was
+thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families
+enjoying the Sunday afternoon _aperitif_.
+
+"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the
+crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But
+Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our
+table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first,
+I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and
+chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha
+was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain
+Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink
+than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an
+appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.
+
+"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with
+yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"
+
+"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross
+Line--Ellershaw & Co.--trading between Havre and Mozambique."
+
+"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.
+
+I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese
+East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."
+
+"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.
+
+"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda
+into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me,
+exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his
+drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us--for he was not a
+spontaneously communicative man--that he now had a very good command:
+steamship _Vesta_, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but
+sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he
+had ever set eyes on.
+
+"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.
+
+"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."
+
+Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.
+
+"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"
+
+"Yes, worse luck."
+
+"Why worse luck?" I asked.
+
+"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.
+
+Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar
+before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden
+at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.
+
+"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.
+
+Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr.
+Chayne?"
+
+Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth
+showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his
+hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder--"Why not? You and I. Out of this
+rotten civilisation?"
+
+Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I.
+I thought he was going mad.
+
+"Would you like it?" he asked.
+
+"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her
+face.
+
+Captain Maturin leaned forward.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly
+there's no accommodation for ladies."
+
+Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
+sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
+did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
+any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
+cabin? There's always one."
+
+"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."
+
+Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
+his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
+crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
+very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
+and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.
+
+"Let us have a private palaver about this."
+
+They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
+Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
+disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:
+
+"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"
+
+"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.
+
+"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
+her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
+hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."
+
+I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
+craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.
+
+"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
+believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
+another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
+in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
+Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
+food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
+sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
+a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
+seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
+always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
+see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
+does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
+about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
+misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
+suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and
+always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the
+wind--to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods
+catching fire, and the wheezing mediaeval boilers bursting and sending
+you all to glory--"
+
+I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on
+hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed
+interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:
+
+"I should love it! I should love it!"
+
+"But it's lunatic," said I.
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But the proprieties."
+
+She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out
+her hands towards me.
+
+"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff
+Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari
+to London?"
+
+"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"
+
+It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to
+defensive sombreness admitted its significance.
+
+"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same."
+She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.
+"If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any
+difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara
+that."
+
+"I will do so--" said I.
+
+"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not
+going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over
+another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the
+proprieties"--she snapped her fingers--"they be--they be anything'd!"
+
+To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank
+the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the
+manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat
+anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.
+
+"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will
+always be in the way."
+
+"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.
+
+We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now
+about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by
+the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.
+
+"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands
+the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and
+North and South Amerikee,' come."
+
+"But this is midsummer madness," said I.
+
+"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously
+caught a waiter by the arm. "_Meme chose pour tout le monde_." He
+flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it?
+The _Vesta_ isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No
+luxuries. I hope you understand."
+
+"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.
+
+"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you
+mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as
+one of the crew?"
+
+"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the
+binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."
+
+"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her
+incredulity.
+
+"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux
+aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.
+
+"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.
+
+"The _what_?" I asked.
+
+"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me
+have dunnage."
+
+"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a
+parrot in a cage."
+
+Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light
+mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to
+become of the forty-odd _colis_ that we passed through the customs this
+morning?"
+
+"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his
+third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him
+along? I told him he'd come in useful."
+
+"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man,
+give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage?
+They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be
+arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of
+expedition. We can forward the luggage by _grande vitesse_ or _petite
+vitesse_--how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier
+voyage--'_Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka_'?"
+
+"Four months," said Captain Maturin.
+
+"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in
+time."
+
+I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing
+difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a
+nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates
+belonging to a woman who is not my wife.
+
+There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the
+others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins
+and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated
+argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them
+from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with
+excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of
+thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so
+tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and
+apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted
+mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Cafe-Restaurant,
+where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not
+one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a
+schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth--it might
+have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or
+cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and
+clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such
+plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table,
+after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight--I whispered the
+information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to
+Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it
+more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the
+performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty;
+but his heart--poor fellow!--was not in his food. It was partly in
+Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of
+having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman
+of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century
+finery, who was sitting next to him.
+
+Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before
+turning in--including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's
+outfit--and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new
+deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts,
+he would see to their adequate reception.
+
+"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he,
+with a grip like--like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and
+clamping in a steamer's machinery--and athwart his green-grey eyes
+filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour--"There's still
+time."
+
+"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all
+my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."
+
+If I am not urbane, I am nothing.
+
+He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The
+rearrangement of her luggage--"dunnage," I corrected--would be a lengthy
+process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the
+trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to
+Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the
+hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain
+upon my household--and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very
+middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and
+respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in
+a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!"
+and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner
+recesses of the hotel.
+
+Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in
+France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with
+traditions of _le flegme britannique_; but there was not much _flegme_
+about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.
+
+There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after
+her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively
+artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there
+was the bill to pay. We sat down again.
+
+"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one
+of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of
+getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner
+instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."
+
+I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in
+those terms to Liosha."
+
+"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned
+cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."
+
+It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.
+
+"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."
+
+"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I
+contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment.
+But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short
+of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the
+morning."
+
+"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."
+
+"Give them to me now," said I.
+
+He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up,
+some day--I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should
+crop up."
+
+He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document,
+which I put into my letter case.
+
+"And what about letters?"
+
+"Don't want any. Unless"--said he, after a little pause, frowning in the
+plenitude of his content--"if you and Barbara can make things right
+again with Doria--then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a
+schedule of dates."
+
+"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.
+
+"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only
+one woman in the world."
+
+"Let us have a final drink," said I.
+
+We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.
+
+When I awoke the next morning the _Vesta_ was already four hours on her
+way to Madagascar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County
+of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it.
+I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are--which, thank Heaven, I am
+not--I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my
+person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot
+keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and
+Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer
+containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so
+forever and ever--for the key is lost. Such important documents as I
+desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are
+trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My
+other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any
+rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying
+on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a
+freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case
+wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on
+my arrival at Northlands.
+
+"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this
+thing."
+
+But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept
+the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to
+the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's
+flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.
+
+"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not
+going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."
+
+"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable
+length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it.
+If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the
+topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description
+you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly
+miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."
+
+I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship
+_Vesta_.
+
+As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's
+Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be
+a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened
+myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the
+small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery
+left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of
+housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an
+hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal
+appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his
+books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos,
+of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs
+and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care
+upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which
+reposed--most useful piece of furniture--in the middle of the
+hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the
+place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention
+on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the
+tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one
+drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it
+into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the
+original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper
+and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer
+of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his
+bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and
+looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed
+two photographs on his dressing-table--one of his mother, whom I
+remembered, and, one of Doria--these I laid face downwards so that the
+light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from
+beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling
+paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark
+alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was
+nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour
+and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the
+drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat,
+summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter
+with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow
+that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a
+friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the
+labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and
+myself had, at least, one thing in common--videlicet, the keyless habit.
+I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden
+_trait-d'union_. Now I had found it.
+
+And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial
+Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the _Vesta_. The
+weather had changed from summer calm to storm. The gentleman from the
+meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about
+cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west
+coasts of France. The same was likely to continue. The wind blew hard
+enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay? As a
+matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a
+short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips
+considerably later--for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to
+the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal's pole-axe--they had made
+their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they
+apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag. Heavy seas washed the
+deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been
+procurable. It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to
+pass. I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their
+communications. "I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so
+happy in my life," wrote Liosha. "Hilary should have been with us,"
+wrote Jaffery. "It would have made a man of him. Liosha in splendid
+fettle. She goes about in men's clothes and oilskins and can turn her
+hand to anything when she isn't lashed to a stanchion." You can just
+imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing
+in wet and dirt. . . .
+
+About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all
+too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit
+since Jaffery's outrageous conduct. She was glad to make friends with us
+once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.
+She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the
+terrible episode in less vehement terms. It was obvious to us both that
+she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself. In her
+reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.
+Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his
+constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven. Now
+that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life's
+neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.
+After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she
+admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her. He
+had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a
+beating. In her heart she repented. Otherwise why should she take so ill
+Jaffery's flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and
+Liosha's flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?
+
+"I can't talk to Barbara about it," she said to me on the Sunday
+morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a
+disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back
+in my writing-chair. "Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman. One
+would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain."
+
+"In one specific way," I replied, "I think she is."
+
+"Oh, rubbish, Hilary!" she smiled, and swung her little foot. "You, a
+man of the world, how can you talk so? First she runs off with that
+dreadful fellow and a few hours afterwards runs off with Jaffery. What
+respectable woman--well, what honest woman, according to the term of the
+lower classes--would run away with two men within twenty-five hours?"
+
+"She went off with Fendihook, honourably, thinking he was going to marry
+her. She has joined Jaffery honourably, too, because there's no question
+of marriage or anything else between them."
+
+"_Sancta simplicitas!_" She shook her head from side to side and looked
+at me pityingly. "I'll allow Jaffery is just a fool. But she isn't. The
+best one can say for her is that she has no moral sense. I know the
+type."
+
+"Where have you studied it, my dear?" I asked.
+
+She coloured, taken aback, but after half a second she replied with her
+ready sureness:
+
+"In my father's drawing-room among city people and in my own among
+literary people."
+
+"H'm!" said I. "Lioshas don't grow on every occasional chair."
+
+"You're as bemused as Barbara."
+
+"I haven't studied what you call the type," I replied. "But I've studied
+an individual, which you haven't."
+
+She swung off the table. "Oh, well, have it your own way--Paul and
+Virginia, if you like. What does it matter to me?"
+
+"Yes, my dear," said I. "That's just it--what the dickens does it matter
+to you?"
+
+"Nothing at all." She snapped a dainty finger and thumb.
+
+"You've turned Jaffery out of your house," I continued, with malicious
+intent. "You've sworn never to set eyes on him again. You've banished
+him beyond your horizon. His doings now can be no concern of yours. If
+he chose to elope with the fat woman in a freak museum, why shouldn't
+he? What would it have to do with you?"
+
+"Only this," said Doria, coming back to the table corner but not sitting
+on it. "It would make Jaffery's declaration to me all the more
+insulting."
+
+"'Having known me to decline'?" I quoted.
+
+"Precisely."
+
+She tossed her head, in her wounded pride. But unknowingly she had
+swallowed my bait. I had hooked my little fish. I smiled to myself. She
+was eaten up with jealousy.
+
+"Well," said I, "you remember the French proverb about the absent being
+always in the wrong. Let us wait until they come back and hear what
+they've got to say for themselves."
+
+She put her hands behind her back. As she stood, her little black and
+ivory head was not much above the level of mine. "What they may say is a
+matter of perfect indifference to me."
+
+I bent forward. "I think I ought to tell you what
+Jaffery's--practically--last words to me were: 'There's only one woman
+in the world for me.' Meaning you." She broke away with a laugh. "And to
+prove it, he elopes with the fat woman! Oh, Hilary"--with the tips of
+her fingers she brushed my hair--"you really are a simple old dear!"
+
+"All the same--" I began.
+
+"All the same," she interrupted, "this is a very untidy conversation. I
+didn't come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you
+have one."
+
+She turned to scan my shelves. I joined her and took down _Les Fleurs du
+Mal_. She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.
+
+Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness. It was good discipline.
+It would give her a sense of values. Should she ever get Jaffery back
+again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not
+only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him
+would put up with a little more. Whether she would marry him was another
+story. I had every reason to believe that she would not. Adrian reigned
+her bosom's lord. In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered. She
+regarded a second marriage with horror. That was comprehensible enough,
+with her husband but seven months dead. No, should she ever get Jaffery
+back, I didn't think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would
+treat him with more consideration and respect. These, of course, were my
+conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact
+that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously
+jealous of Liosha.
+
+It was several weeks before we saw her again. August arrived. Barbara
+and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy. I swore by all my gods I
+would not leave Northlands. I went on vowing until I arrived with a
+mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on
+the Lido. Our days were unimportant. We bathed in the Adriatic. We
+revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice. We mingled
+with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our
+faces) of an Othello family. Doria, too, made holiday abroad. Every
+August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months' civic and
+other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her
+marriage, accompanied him. She and Barbara exchanged letters about
+nothing in particular. The time passed smoothly.
+
+Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having
+subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the
+normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands,
+coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were
+given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and
+swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with
+paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had
+struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera,
+had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side
+by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could
+not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and
+Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake,
+had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the
+trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in
+disgraceful fringes.
+
+"I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks
+anything but utterly miserable."
+
+"I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained.
+
+"Well, it's her own skin."
+
+"More's the pity," Barbara retorted.
+
+What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last
+word.
+
+The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards
+Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted
+flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her
+father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a
+series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its
+sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her
+unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she
+asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity
+rather than indifference.
+
+Meanwhile the autumn publishing season was in full swing. Wittekind's
+list of new novels in its deep black framing border stared at you from
+the advertisement pages of every periodical you picked up, and so did
+the list of every other publisher. Day after day Doria's eyes fell on
+this announcement of Wittekind, and day after day her indignation
+swelled at the continued omission of "The Greater Glory." All these
+nobodies, these ephemeral scribblers, were being thrust flamboyantly on
+public notice and her Adrian, the great Sun of the firm, was allowed to
+remain in eclipse. For what purpose had he lived and died if his memory
+was treated with this dark ingratitude? I strove to reason with her.
+Adrian's book had been prodigally advertised in the spring. It had sold
+enormously. It was still selling. There was no need to advertise it any
+longer. Besides, advertisement cost money, and poor Wittekind had to do
+his duty by his other authors. He had to push his new wares.
+"Tradesman!" cried Doria. If he wasn't, I remonstrated, if he wasn't a
+tradesman in a certain sense, an expert in the art of selling books, how
+could Adrian's novels have attained their wide circulation? It was to
+his interest to increase that circulation as much as possible. Why not
+let him run his very successful business his own way? Doria loftily
+assured me that she had no interest in his business, in the mere vulgar
+number of copies sold. Adrian's glory was above such sordid things. Of
+far higher importance was it that his name should be kept, like a
+beacon, before the public. Not to do so was callous ingratitude and
+tradesman's niggardliness on the part of Wittekind. Something ought to
+be done. I confessed my inability to do anything.
+
+"I know you have nothing to do with the literary side of the
+executorship. Jaffery undertook it. And now, instead of looking after
+his duties, he has gone on this impossible voyage."
+
+Here was another grievance against the unfortunate Jaffery. I might have
+asked her who drove him to Madagascar, for had she been kind, he would
+have made short work of Liosha, after having rescued her from Fendihook,
+and would have returned meekly to Doria's feet. But what would have been
+the use? I was tired of these windy arguments with Doria, and worn out
+with the awful irony of upholding our poor Adrian's genius.
+
+"I'm sorry he's not here," said I, somewhat tartly, "because he might
+have prevailed upon you to listen to common sense."
+
+A little while after this, another firm of publishers announced an
+_edition de luxe_ of the works of a brilliant novelist cut off like
+Adrian in the flower of his age. It was printed on special paper and
+illustrated by a famous artist, and limited to a certain number of
+copies. This set Doria aflare. From Scotland, where she was paying one
+of her restless visits, she sent me the newspaper cutting. If the
+commercial organism, she said, that passed with Wittekind for a soul
+would not permit him to advertise Adrian's spring book in his autumn
+list, why couldn't he do like Mackenzie & Co., and advertise an _edition
+de luxe_ of Adrian's two novels? And if Mackenzie & Co. thought it worth
+while to bring out such an edition of an entirely second-rate author,
+surely it would be to Wittekind's advantage to treat Adrian equally
+sumptuously. I advised her to write to Wittekind. She did. Accompanied
+by a fury of ink, she sent me his most courteous and sensible answer.
+Both books were doing splendidly. There was every prospect of a golden
+aftermath of cheap editions. The time was not ripe for an _edition de
+luxe_. It would come, a pleasurable thing to look forward to, when other
+sales showed signs of exhaustion.
+
+"He talks about exhaustion," she wrote. "I suppose he means when he
+sends the volumes to be pulped, 'remainder or waste'--there's a foolish
+woman here who evidently has written a foolish book, and has shown me
+her silly contract with a publisher. 'Remainder or waste.' That's what
+he's thinking of. It's intolerable. I've no one, dear Hilary, to turn to
+but you. Do advise me."
+
+I sent her a telegram. For one thing, it saved the trouble of concocting
+a letter, and, for another, it was more likely to impress the recipient.
+It ran:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I advise you strongly to go to Wittekind yourself and bite him."
+
+I was rather pleased at the humour--may I venture to qualify it as
+mordant?--of the suggestion. Even Barbara smiled. Of course, I was
+right. Let her fight it out herself with Wittekind.
+
+But I have regretted that telegram ever since.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Luckily, I have kept most of Jaffery's letters written to me from all
+quarters of the globe. Excepting those concerned with the voyage of the
+_S.S. Vesta_, they were rare phenomena. Ordinarily, if I heard from him
+thrice a year I had to consider that he was indulging in an orgy of
+correspondence. But what with Doria and Adrian and Liosha, and what with
+Barbara and myself being so intimately mixed up in the matters which
+preoccupied his mind, the voyage of the _Vesta_ covered a period of
+abnormal epistolary activity. Instead of a wife, our amateur sailor
+found a post office at every port. He wrote reams. He had the
+journalist's trick of instantaneous composition. Like the Ouidaesque
+hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a
+University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand
+hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could
+scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported
+writing-pad. In ordinary circumstances--that is to say in what, to
+Jaffery, were ordinary circumstances--he performed these literary
+gymnastics for the sake of his newspaper; but the voyage of the _Vesta_
+was an exceptional affair. Save incidentally--for he did send
+descriptive articles to _The Daily Gazette_--he was not out on
+professional business. The gymnastics were performed for my benefit--yet
+with an ulterior motive. He had sailed away, not on a job, but to
+satisfy a certain nostalgia, to escape from civilisation, to escape from
+Doria, to escape from desire and from heartache . . . and the deeper he
+plunged into the fatness of primitive life, the closer did the poor ogre
+come to heartache and to desire. He wrote spaciously, in the foolish
+hope that I would reply narrowly, following a Doria scent laid down with
+the naivete of childhood. I received constant telegrams informing me of
+dates and addresses--I who, Jaffery out of England, never knew for
+certain whether he was doing the giant's stride around the North Pole or
+horizontal bar exercise on the Equator. It was rather pathetic, for I
+could give him but little comfort.
+
+Besides the letters, he (and Liosha) deluged us with photographs taken
+chiefly by the absurd second mate, from which it was possible to
+reconstruct the _S.S. Vesta_ in all her dismalness. You have seen scores
+of her rusty, grimy congeners in any port in the world. You have only to
+picture an old, two-masted, well-decked tramp with smokestack and foul
+clutter of bridge-house amidships, and fore and aft a miserable bit of a
+deck broken by hatches and capstans and donkey-engines and stanchions
+and chains and other unholy stumbling blocks and offences to the casual
+promenader. From the photographs and letters I learned that the
+dog-hole, intended by the Captain for Jaffery, but given over to Liosha,
+was away aft, beneath a kind of poop and immediately above the scrunch
+of the propeller; and that Jaffery, with singular lack of privacy,
+bunked in the stuffy, low cabin where the officers took their meals and
+relaxations. The more vividly did they present the details of their
+life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence
+for having been spared so dreadful an experience.
+
+Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have
+their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual
+enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha. For instance, here is an extract
+from one of his letters:
+
+"It's a grand life, my boy! You're up against realities all the time.
+Not a sham within the horizon. You eat till you burst, work till you
+sleep, and sleep till you're kicked awake. You should just see Liosha.
+Maturin says he has only met one other woman sailor like her, and that
+was the daughter of a trader sailing among the Islands, who had lived
+all her life since birth on his ship and had scarcely slept ashore.
+She's as much born to it as any shell-back on board. She has the amazing
+gift of looking part of the tub, like the stokers and the man at the
+wheel. Unlike another woman, she's never in the way, and the more work
+you can give her to do, the happier she is. She's in magnificent health
+and as strong as a horse. At first the hands didn't know what to make of
+her; now she's friends with the whole bunch. The difficulty is to keep
+her from overfamiliar intercourse with them, for though she signed on as
+cook's mate, she eats in the cabin with the officers, and between the
+cabin and the fo'c'sle lies a great gulf. They come and tell her about
+their wives and their girls and what rotten food they've got--'Everybody
+has got rotten food on board ship, you silly ass!' quoth Liosha. 'What
+do you expect--sweetbreads and ices?'--and what soul-shattering
+blighters they've shipped with, and what deeds of heroism (mostly
+imaginary) they have performed in pursuit of their perilous calling.
+They're all children, you know, when you come to the bottom of them,
+these hell-tearing fellows--children afflicted with a perpetual thirst
+and a craving to punch heads--and Liosha's a child, too; so there's a
+kind of freemasonry between them.
+
+"There was the devil's own row in the fo'c'sle the other evening. The
+first mate went to look into it and found Liosha standing enraptured at
+the hatch looking down upon a free fight. There were knives about. The
+mate, being a blasphemous and pugilistic dog, soon restored order. Then
+he came up to Liosha--you and Barbara should have seen her--it was
+sultry, not a breath of air--and she just had on a thin bodice open at
+her throat and the sleeves rolled up and a short ragged skirt and was
+bareheaded.
+
+"'Why the Hades didn't you stop 'em, missus?'
+
+"For some reason or the other, the whole ship's company, except the
+skipper and myself, call her 'missus.' She gazed on him like an ox-eyed
+Juno; you know her way.
+
+"'Why should I interfere with their enjoyment?'
+
+"'Enjoyment--!' he gasped. 'Oh, my Gawd!' He flung out his arms and came
+over to me. I was smoking against the taffrail. 'There they was trying
+to cut one another's throats, and she calls it enjoyment.'
+
+"He went off spluttering. I watched Liosha. A Dutchman--what you would
+call a Swede--a hulking beggar, came up from the fo'c'sle very much the
+worse for wear. Liosha says:
+
+"'Mr. Andrews was very angry, Petersen.'
+
+"He grinned. 'He was, missus.'
+
+"'What was it all about?'
+
+"He explained in his sea-English, which is not the English of that
+mildewed Boarding House in South Kensington. Bill Figgins had called him
+a ----, he had retaliated, and the others had taken a hand, too."
+
+It is I who suppress the actual words reported by Jaffery. But, believe
+me, they were enough to annoy anybody.
+
+"She shouted down the stairway. 'Here you, Bill Figgins, come on deck
+for a minute.'
+
+"A lean, wiry, black-looking man-spawn of the Pool of London, emerged.
+
+"'What's the matter?'
+
+"Why did you call Petersen a ----?' she asked pleasantly and
+word-perfect.
+
+"'Cos he is one.'
+
+"'He isn't,' said Liosha. 'He's a very nice man. And so are you. And you
+both fought fine; I was looking on, and I was mad not to see the end of
+it. But Mr. Andrews doesn't like fighting. So see here, if you two don't
+shake hands, right now, and make friends and promise not to fight again,
+I'll not speak a word to either of you for the rest of the voyage.'
+
+"If I had tackled them like this, hefty chap that I am, they would have
+consigned me to a shambles of perdition. And if any other woman had
+attempted it, even our valiant Barbara, they would have told her in
+perhaps polite, but anyhow forcible, terms to mind her own business. In
+either case they would have resented to the depths of their simple souls
+the alien interference. But with Liosha it was different. Of course sex
+told. Naturally. But she was a child like themselves. She had looked on,
+placidly, and had caught the flash of knives without turning a hair.
+They felt that if she were drawn into a melee she would use a knife with
+the best of them. I'm panning out about this, because it seems so deuced
+interesting and I should like to know what you and Barbara think. Do you
+remember Gulliver? For all the world it was like Glumdalclitch making
+the peace between two little nine-year-old Brobdingnagians. The two men
+looked at each other sheepishly. Half a dozen grinning heads appeared at
+the fo'c'sle hatch. You never saw anything so funny in your life. At
+last the lean Bill Figgins stuck out his hand sideways to the Dutchman,
+without looking at him.
+
+"'All right, mate.'
+
+"And the Swede shook it heartily, and the grimy hands cried 'Bravo,
+missus!' and Liosha, turning and catching sight of me just a bit abaft
+the funnel beneath the bridge, for the first time, swung up the deck
+towards me, as pleased as Punch."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Here is another extract. . . . Well, wait for a minute.
+
+Jaffery's letters are an embarrassment of riches. If I printed them in
+full they would form a picturesque handbook to the coast of the African
+continent from Casablanca in Morocco, all the way round by the Cape of
+Good Hope to Port Said. But Jaffery, in his lavish way, duplicated these
+travel-pictures in articles to _The Daily Gazette_, which, supplemented
+by memory, he has already published in book form for all the world to
+read. Therefore, if I recorded his impressions of Grand Bassam, Cape
+Lopez, Boma, Matadi, Delagoa Bay, Montirana, Mombasa and other
+apocalyptic places, I should be merely plagiarising or infringing
+copyright, or what-not; and in any case I should be introducing matter
+entirely irrelevant to this chronicle. You must just imagine the rusty
+_Vesta_ wallowing along, about nine knots an hour, around Africa,
+disgorging cotton goods and cheap jewelry at each God-forsaken port, and
+making up cargo with whatever raw material could find a European market.
+If I had gone this voyage, I would tell you all about it; but you see, I
+remained in England. And if I subjected Jaffery's correspondence to
+microscopic examination, and read up blue books on the exports and
+imports of all the places on the South African coast line, and told you
+exactly what was taken out of the _S.S. Vesta_ and what was put into
+her, I cannot conceive your being in the slightest degree interested. To
+do so, would bore me to death. To me, cargo is just cargo. The
+transference of it from ship to shore and from shore to ship is a matter
+of awful noise and perspiring confusion. I have travelled, in so-called
+comfort, as a first-class passenger to Africa. I know all about it.
+Generally, the ship cannot get within quarter of a mile of the shore. On
+one side of it lies a fleet of flat-bottomed lighters manned by
+glistening and excited negroes. On board is a donkey-engine working a
+derrick with a Tophetical clatter. Vast bales and packing cases are
+lifted from the holds. A dingily white-suited officer stands by with
+greasy invoice sheets, while another at the yawning abyss whence the
+cargo emerges makes the tropical day hideous with horrible imprecations.
+And the merchandise swings over the side and is received in the lighter,
+by black uplifted arms, in the midst of a blood-curdling babel of
+unmeaning ferocity. That is all that unloading cargo means to me; and I
+cannot imagine that it means any more to any of the sons or daughters of
+men who are not intimately concerned in a particular trade. . . . You
+must imagine, I say, the _S.S. Vesta_ repeating this monotonous
+performance; Jaffery and Liosha and the little, black-bearded skipper,
+all clad in decent raiment, going ashore, and being entertained
+scraggily or copiously by German, French, Portuguese, English,
+fever-eyed commissioners, who took them on the _tour du proprietaire_,
+among the white wooden government buildings, the palm-covered huts of
+the natives, and shewed them the Mission Chapels and the new Custom
+Houses and the pigeon-like fowls and the little dirty naked nigger
+children, and the exiguity of their stock of glass and china, and the
+yearning of their souls for the fleshpots of the respective Egypts to
+which they belonged. You must imagine this. If anything relevant to the
+story of Jaffery, which, as you will remember, is all that I have to
+relate, happened at any of these ports, I should tell you. I should have
+chapter and verse for it in Jaffery's letters. But as far as I can make
+out, the moment they put foot on shore, they behaved like the
+best-conducted globe-trotters who dwell habitually in a semi-detached
+residence in Peckham Rye. I know Jaffery will be furious when he reads
+this. But great is the Truth, and it shall prevail. It was on the sea,
+away from ports and mission stations and exiles hungering for the last
+word of civilisation, and shore-going clothes, that life as depicted by
+Jaffery swelled with juiciness; and to my taste, the juiciest parts of
+his letters are those humoristically concerned with the doings of
+Liosha.
+
+As to his hopeless passion for Doria, he says very little. When Jaffery
+put pen to paper he was objective, loving to describe what he saw and
+letting what he felt go hang. In consequence the shy references to Doria
+were all the more poignant by reason of their rarity. But Liosha was the
+central figure in many a picture.
+
+Here, I say, is another extract:
+
+     "Liosha continues to thrive exceedingly. But there's one thing that
+     worries me about her. What the blazes are we going to do with her
+     after this voyage? No doubt she would like to keep on going round
+     and round Africa for the rest of her life. But I can't go with her.
+     I must get back and begin to earn my living. And I don't see her
+     settling down to afternoon tea and respectability again. I think
+     I'll have to set her up as a gipsy with a caravan and a snarling
+     tyke for company. How a creature with her physical energy has
+     managed to lie listless for all these months I can't imagine. It
+     shews strength of character anyway. But I don't see her putting in
+     another long stretch. . . .
+
+     "She has taken her position as cook's mate seriously, and shares
+     the galley with the cook, a sorrow-stricken little Portugee whose
+     wife ran away with another man during the last trip. He pours out
+     his woes to her while she wipes away the tears from the lobscouse.
+     I don't know how she stands it, for even I, who've got a pretty
+     strong stomach, draw the line at the galley. But she loves it. Now
+     and again, when it's my watch--I'm on the starboard watch, you
+     know--I see her turn out in the morning at two bells. She stands
+     for a few moments right aft of her cabin-door, and fills her lungs.
+     And the wind tugs at her hair beneath her cap, and at her skirts,
+     and the spindrift from the pale grey sea of dawn stings at her
+     face; and then she lurches like a sailor down the wet, slanting
+     deck--and I can tell you, she looks a devilish fine figure of a
+     woman. And soon afterwards there comes from the galley the smell of
+     bacon and eggs--my son, if you don't know the conglomerate smell of
+     fried bacon and eggs, bilge water, and the salt of the pure early
+     morning ocean, your ideas of perfume are rudimentary. She and the
+     Portugee between them, he contributing the science and she the
+     good-will, give us excellent grub; of course you would turn your
+     nose up at it--but you've never been hungry in your life! and there
+     hasn't been a grumble in the cabin. Maturin has offered her the
+     permanent job. Certainly she looks after us and attends to our
+     comforts in a way sailor men on tramps aren't accustomed to. She's
+     a great pal of the second mate's and at night they play
+     spoiled-five at a corner of the table, with the greasiest pack of
+     cards you ever saw, and she's perfectly happy.
+
+     "Now and again we discuss the future, without arriving at any
+     result. A day or two ago I chaffed her about marriage. She
+     considered the matter gravely.
+
+     "'I guess I'll have to. I'm twenty-four. But I haven't had much
+     luck so far, have I?'
+
+     "I replied: 'You won't always strike wrong 'uns.'
+
+     "'I don't know what kind of a man I'm going to strike,' she said.
+     'Not any of those little billy-goats in dinner jackets I used to
+     meet at Mrs. Jardine's. No, sirree. And no more Ras Fendihooks!'
+
+     "She rose--we had been sitting on the cabin sky-light--and leaned
+     over the taffrail and looked wistfully out to sea. I joined her.
+     She was silent for a bit. Then she said:
+
+     "'I guess I'm not going to marry at all; for I'm not going to marry
+     a man I don't love, and I couldn't love a man who couldn't beat
+     me--and there ain't many. That's the kind of fool way I'm built.'
+
+     "She turned and left me. I suppose she meant it. Liosha doesn't
+     talk through her hat. But if she ever does fall in love with a man
+     who can beat her, there'll be the devil to pay. Liosha in love
+     would be a tornado of a spectacle. But I shouldn't like it.
+     Honest--I shouldn't like it. I've got so used to this clean great
+     Amazon of a Liosha, that I should loathe the fellow were he as
+     decent a sort as you please."
+
+It is curious to observe how, as the voyage proceeded, Jaffery's horizon
+gradually narrowed to the small shipboard circle, just as an invalid's
+interests become circumscribed by the walls of his sick-room. He tells
+us of childish things, a catch of fish, a quarrel between the first and
+second mate over Liosha, second having accused first of a disrespectful
+attitude towards the lady, the sail-cloth screen rigged up aft behind
+which Liosha had her morning tub of sea-water, the stubbing of Liosha's
+toe and her temporary lameness, the illness of the Portugee cook and
+Liosha's supremacy in the galley. And he wrote it all with the air of
+the impresario vaunting the qualities of his prima donna, nay more--with
+a fatuous air of proprietorship, as though he himself had created
+Liosha.
+
+Here is the beginning of another letter, addressed to us both:
+
+     "A thousand thanks, dearest people, for what you tell me of Doria.
+     If she just misses me a little bit, all may be well. I've bought
+     some jolly gold barbaric ornaments that she may accept when I reach
+     home; and do try to persuade her that the poor old bear is rough
+     only on the outside.
+
+     "Things going on just as usual. Liosha has got a monkey given her
+     by the donkey-man. . . ."
+
+There follows a description of the monkey and its antics, and a long
+account of a chase all over the ship, in which all the ship's company
+including the captain took part, to the subversion of discipline and
+navigation. But you see--he switches off at once to Liosha and the
+trivial records of the humdrum day.
+
+At last he had something less trivial to write about. They were in the
+Mozambique Channel, making for Madagascar:
+
+     "Now that this darned cabin table is comparatively straight, I can
+     scribble a few lines to you. We've had a beast of a time. The
+     dirtiest weather ever since we left Beira and the cranky old tub
+     rolling and pitching and standing on her head as I've never known
+     ship do before. Consequence was the cargo got shifted and there was
+     a list to port, so that every time she ducked that side, she
+     shipped half the channel. Skies black as thunder and the sea the
+     colour of inky water. We had the devil's own job getting the cargo
+     straight. Just imagine a black rolling dungeon full of great
+     packing cases weighing about half a ton each all gone murderous
+     mad. Just imagine getting down among them, as practically all hands
+     had to do, save the engine-room, and sweating and fighting and
+     straining and lashing for hour after hour. And half the time the
+     port side of the lame old duck under water. How she didn't turn
+     turtle is known only to Allah and Maturin; and One is great and the
+     other's a damned fine sailor. Of course, I had to go down into the
+     inferno of the hold like the others. Part of the day's work; but I
+     didn't like it; no one liked it.
+
+     "When the order was given all hands tumbled up to the hatchway and
+     began swarming down the iron ladder. It was a swaying, staggering
+     crowd. When you stand on a wet deck at an angle of forty-five
+     degrees one way and thirty degrees another and constantly shifting
+     both angles, with nothing but a rope lashed athwart the ship to
+     catch hold of, your mind is pretty well concentrated on yourself. I
+     know mine was. I slipped and wallowed on my belly hanging on to the
+     rope like grim death till my turn came for the ladder. I got my
+     feet on the rungs. I was all right, when looking up into the livid
+     daylight whom do you think I saw calmly preparing to follow me?
+     Liosha. I hadn't noticed her. She had sea-boots and a jersey and
+     looked just like a man. I roared:
+
+     "'Clear out. This is no place for you.'
+
+     "'I'm coming. Go along down.'
+
+     "She put her foot on the rung just below my face. I gripped as much
+     of her ankle as the stiff leather allowed.
+
+     "'Clear out. Don't be a fool.'
+
+     "Andrews, the first mate, poured out a flood of blasphemy. What the
+     this, that and the other were we waiting for?
+
+     "'Mr. Andrews,' I shouted, 'send this woman to her cabin.'
+
+     "'Oh, go to hell! Tumble down every one of you, or I'll damn soon
+     make you,' cried Andrews.
+
+     "He was in a vile temper, being responsible for the snugness of the
+     cargo, and the cargo lay about as snug as a dormitory of devils. He
+     was sorry afterwards, poor chap, for his lack of courtesy, but at
+     the moment he didn't care who went down into the hold, or who was
+     killed, so long as this infernal cargo was righted and the crazy
+     old tub didn't go down.
+
+     "So I descended. It was ordained. Liosha followed. And once down we
+     were carried away out of ourselves by a nightmare of toil and
+     peril. Andrews and second were there yelling orders. We obeyed in
+     some subconscious way. How we heard I don't know. For peace and
+     quiet give me a battlefield. Twenty men in semi-darkness, scarce
+     able to stand, fighting blind, mad forces of half a ton each. The
+     huge crates of deal seemed so innocent and harmless on the
+     quay-side, but charging about that swaying, rocking lower deck,
+     they looked malignant, like grimy blocks of Hell's anger. I don't
+     know what I did. All I can say is that I never before felt my
+     muscles about to snap--queer feeling that--and I think I'm about as
+     tough as they make 'em.
+
+     "Liosha worked as well as any man in the bunch. I only caught sight
+     of her now and then . . . you see what we had to do, don't
+     you? . . . We had to secure all these infernal things that were
+     running amuck and ease up the rest of the cargo that had got
+     jammed on the port side. There were accidents. Three or four were
+     knocked out. Petersen, the Swede, had his leg crushed. I don't know
+     what was wrong at the time. He was working next me, and a roll of
+     the ship brought an ugly crate over him. He couldn't get up. He
+     looked ghastly. So I took him on my back and clawed my way up the
+     iron ladder and reached the deck somehow, and staggered along,
+     barging into everything--it was blowing half a gale--and once I
+     fell and he screamed like a pig, poor devil. But I picked him up
+     and got him into the fo'c'sle and stuck him in a bunk. The Portugee
+     cook, sick of fever--I think he's a blighted malingerer--was the
+     only creature there. I routed him out, in the dim mephitic place
+     reeking of sour bedding, and put Petersen in his charge. Then I
+     went back through the drenching seas to the hatch. There was just
+     enough room for a man's body to squeeze through down the ladder. I
+     went down into the same hell-broth of sweat and confusion. The
+     ground you stood upon might have been the back of a super-Titanic
+     butterfly. Stability was a nonexistent term. It was a helpless
+     scuttering surge of men and vast wooden cubes. Most of the men had
+     torn off their upper garments and fought half naked, the sweat
+     glistening on their skins in the feeble light. Soon the heat became
+     unbearable and I too tore off jersey and shirt. Liosha joined me
+     and we worked together without speaking. Her long thick hair had
+     come down and she had hastily tied it in a knot, just as you might
+     tie a knot in a towel, and she had thrown off things like everybody
+     else and only a flimsy cotton, sleeveless bodice, or whatever it's
+     called, drenched through and sticking to her, made a pretence of
+     covering her from her waist.
+
+     "You had to get like flies round these infernal things and wait
+     your time--if you could--for the roll, and push and then scramble
+     with ropes and make fast; awl at the same time dance out of the way
+     of the slithering hulks that bore down on you with fantastic
+     murderousness. And through it all thundered the roaring of the
+     storm, the grind of the engines, the shattering of the propeller
+     lifted above the waves, and the shrieks and creakings of every
+     plank and plate of this steam-driven old Noah's Ark.
+
+     "We had just, with exhausted muscles, made a whole stack fast, and
+     were standing by, panting, haggard eyed, the sweat running down
+     anyhow, twenty of us, Dagoes, Dutchmen, Englishmen, in the dim
+     twilight--just a shaft of pale illumination coming slick down the
+     ladder where the hatch was open,--hanging on to edges and corners
+     of cargo, when suddenly the ship, caught on top of a wave, vibrated
+     in a sickening shudder, plunged, and then with an impetus of
+     cataclysm wallowed to starboard. Andrews shrieked, 'Stand clear!'
+     Most of the men leaped and flung themselves away. But I stumbled
+     and fell. Before I realized the danger of a vast sliding crate,
+     two strong arms were curled round my waist and I was flung aside,
+     to slither and roll down the swaying deck until I was stopped by
+     the bulkhead. When I picked myself up, I saw half the men securing
+     the crate and the other half grovelling around something on the
+     deck. It was Liosha. She lay white and senseless with blood
+     streaming from her head.
+
+     [Illustration: Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung
+     aside.]
+
+     "In a mortal funk I took her up the ladder with the help of another
+     fellow, and carried her to her cabin. I never before realised the
+     appalling length of this vessel. We got her into her bunk aft; I
+     sent the other chap for brandy and first-aid appliances from the
+     ship's stores, and did what I could to discover how far she was
+     injured. . . .
+
+     "Thank God, nothing worse had happened than a nasty scalp wound.
+     But her escape had been miraculous. She had saved my life; for as I
+     lay on the deck, the crate charging direct would have squashed my
+     skull into jelly, and crushed my body against the side of the hold.
+     A fraction of a second later and it would have been her skull and
+     her body instead of mine; but she just managed to roll practically
+     clear until she got caught by the swerving side of the crate. I
+     hope you'll understand what a heroic thing she did. She faced what
+     seemed to be certain death for me; and it is thanks to Liosha that
+     I'm able to tell you that I'm alive. And she, God bless her, walks
+     about with her head bandaged, among an adoring ship's company, and
+     refuses to admit having done anything wonderful."
+
+And, indeed, to confirm Jaffery's last statement, here is a bit of a
+scrawl from Liosha--her complete account of the incident:
+
+     "We've just had the most awful storm I ever did see. The cargo go
+     loose in the hold and we had to fix it up. I got a cut on the head
+     and had to stay in bed till the storm finished. I must say it gave
+     me an awful headache, but there I guess I'm better now."
+
+Well, that seems to be the most exciting thing that happened to them.
+Afterwards, in the mind of each, it loomed as the great event in the
+amazing voyage. A man does not forget having his life saved by a woman
+at the risk of her own; and a woman, no matter how heroic in action and
+how magnanimous in after modesty, does not forget it either. Although he
+had been credited (to his ingenuous delight) by reviewers of "The
+Greater Glory" with uncanny knowledge of the complexities of a woman's
+nature, I have never met a more dunder-headed blunderer in his dealings
+with women. He perceived the symptoms of this unforgetfulness on
+Liosha's part, but seems to have been absolutely fogged in diagnosis.
+
+     "Liosha flourishes," he writes in one of his last _Vesta_ letters,
+     "like a virgin forest of green bay trees. Gosh! She's splendid. I
+     take back and swallow every presumptuous word I've said about her.
+     And, I suppose, owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy, she has
+     adopted a protective, motherly attitude towards me. In her great,
+     spacious, kind way, she gives you the impression that she owns
+     Jaffery Chayne, and knows exactly what is for his good. Women's
+     ways are wonderful but weird."
+
+He must have thought himself vastly clever with his alliterative
+epigram. But he hadn't the faintest idea of the fount of Liosha's
+motherliness.
+
+"Owing to our knockabout sort of intimacy"! Oh, the silly ass!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+It was not until the end of October that Doria completed her round of
+country-house visits and returned to the flat in St. John's Wood. The
+morning after her arrival in town she took my satirical counsel and
+called at Wittekind's office, and, I am afraid, tried to bite that very
+pleasant, well-intentioned gentleman. She went out to do battle,
+arraying herself in subtle panoply of war. This I gather from Barbara's
+account of the matter. She informs me that when a woman goes to see her
+solicitor, her banker, her husband's uncle, a woman she hates, or a man
+who really understands her, she wears in each case an entirely different
+kind of hat. Judging from a warehouse of tissue-paper-covered millinery
+at the top of my residence, which I once accidentally discovered when
+tracking down a smell of fire, I know that this must be true. Costumes
+also, Barbara implies, must correspond emotionally with the hats. I
+recognised this, too, as philosophic truth; for it explained many
+puzzling and apparently unnecessary transformations in my wee wife's
+personal appearance. And yet, the other morning when I was going up to
+town to see after some investments, and I asked her which was the more
+psychological tie, a green or a violet, in which to visit my
+stockbroker, she lost as much of her temper as she allows herself to
+lose and bade me not he silly. . . . But this has nothing to do with
+Doria.
+
+Doria, I say, with beaver cocked and plumes ruffled, intent on striking
+terror into the heart of Wittekind, presented herself in the outer
+office and sent in her card. At the name of Mrs. Adrian Boldero, doors
+flew open, and Doria marched straight away into Wittekind's comfortably
+furnished private room. Wittekind himself, tall, loose-limbed,
+courteous, the least tradesman-like person you can imagine, rose to
+receive her. For some reason or the other, or more likely against
+reason, she had pictured a rather soapy, smug little man hiding crafty
+eyes behind spectacles; but here he was, obviously a man of good
+breeding, who smiled at her most charmingly and gave her to understand
+that she was the one person in the world whom he had been longing to
+meet. And the office was not a sort of human _charcuterie_ hung round
+with brains of authors for sale, but a quiet, restful place to which
+valuable prints on the walls and a few bits of real Chippendale gave an
+air of distinction. Doria admits to being disconcerted. She had come to
+bite and she remained to smile. He seated her in a nice old armchair
+with a beautiful back--she was sensitive to such things--and spoke of
+Adrian as of his own blood brother. She had not anticipated such warmth
+of genuine feeling, or so fine an appreciation of her Adrian's work.
+
+"Believe me, my dear Mrs. Boldero," said he, "I am second only to you in
+my admiration and grief, and there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep your
+husband's memory green. But it is green, thank goodness. How do I know?
+By two signs. One that people wherever the English language is spoken
+are eagerly reading his books--I say reading, because you deprecate the
+purely commercial side of things; but you must forgive me if I say that
+the only proof of all their reading is the record of all their buying.
+And when people buy and read an author to this prodigious extent, they
+also discuss him. Adrian Boldero's name is a household word. You want
+advertisement and an _edition de luxe_. But it is only the little man
+that needs the big drum."
+
+"But still, Mr. Wittekind," Doria urged, "an _edition de luxe_ would be
+such a beautiful monument to him. I don't care a bit about the money,"
+she went on with a splendid disregard of her rights that would have sent
+a shiver down the incorporated back of the Incorporated Society of
+Authors, "I'm only too willing to contribute towards the expense. Please
+understand me. It's a tribute and a monument."
+
+"You only put up monuments to those who are dead," said Wittekind.
+
+"But my husband--"
+
+"--isn't dead," said he.
+
+"Oh!" said Doria. "Then--"
+
+"The time for your _edition de luxe_ is not yet."
+
+"Yet? But--you don't think Adrian's work is going to die?"
+
+She looked at him tragically. He reassured her.
+
+"Certainly not. Our future sumptuous edition will be a sign that he is
+among the immortals. But an _edition de luxe_ now would be a wanton _Hic
+jacet_."
+
+All of this may have been a bit sophistical, but it was sound business
+from the publisher's point of view, and conveyed through the medium of
+Wittekind's unaffected urbanity it convinced Doria. I listened to her
+account of it with a new moon of a smile across my soul--or across
+whatever part of oneself one smiles with when one's face is constrained
+to immobility.
+
+"I'm so glad I plucked up courage to come and see you, Mr. Wittekind,"
+she said. "I feel much happier. I'm quite content to leave Adrian's
+reputation in your hands. I wish, indeed, I had come to see you before."
+"I wish you had," said he.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has been most kind; but--"
+
+"Jaffery Chayne isn't you," he laughed. "But all the same, he's a
+splendid fellow and an admirable man of business."
+
+"In what way?" she asked, rather coldly.
+
+"Well--so prompt."
+
+"That's the very last word I should apply to him. He took an
+unconscionable time," said Doria.
+
+"He had a very difficult and delicate work of revision to do. Your
+husband's work was a first draft. The novel had to be pulled together.
+He did it admirably. That sort of thing takes time, although it was a
+labour of love."
+
+"It merely meant writing in bits of scenes. Oh, Mr. Wittekind," she
+cried, reverting to an old grievance, "I do wish I could see exactly
+what he wrote and what Adrian wrote. I've been so worried! Why do your
+printers destroy authors' manuscripts?"
+
+"They don't," said Wittekind. "They don't get them nowadays. They print
+from a typed copy."
+
+"'The Greater Glory' was printed from my husband's original manuscript."
+
+Wittekind smiled and shook his head. "No, my dear Mrs. Boldero. From two
+typed copies--one in England and one in America."
+
+"Mr. Chayne told me that in order to save time he sent you Adrian's
+original manuscript with his revisions."
+
+"I'm sure you must have misunderstood him," said Wittekind. "I read the
+typescript myself. I've never seen a line of your husband's manuscript."
+
+"But 'The Diamond Gate' was printed from Adrian's manuscript."
+
+"No, no, no. That, too, I read in type."
+
+Doria rose and the colour fled from her cheeks and her great dark eyes
+grew bigger, and she brought down her little gloved hand on the writing
+desk by which the publisher, cross-kneed, was sitting. He rose, too.
+
+"Mr. Chayne has definitely told me that both Adrian's original
+manuscripts went to the printers and were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"It's impossible," said Wittekind, in much perplexity. "You're making
+some extraordinary mistake."
+
+"I'm not. Mr. Chayne would not tell me a lie."
+
+Wittekind drew himself up. "Neither would I, Mrs. Boldero. Allow me."
+
+He took up his "house" telephone. "Ask Mr. Forest to come to me at
+once." He turned to Doria. "Let us get to the bottom of this. Mr. Forest
+is my literary adviser--everything goes through his hands."
+
+They waited in silence until Mr. Forest appeared. "You remember the
+Boldero manuscripts?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What were they, manuscript or typescript?"
+
+"Typescript."
+
+"Have you even seen any of Mr. Boldero's original manuscript?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Do you think any of it has ever come into the office?"
+
+"I'm sure it hasn't."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Forest."
+
+The reader retired.
+
+"You see," said Wittekind.
+
+"Then where are the original manuscripts of 'The Diamond Gate' and 'The
+Greater Glory'?"
+
+"I'm very sorry, dear Mrs. Boldero, but I have no means of knowing."
+
+"Mr. Chayne said they were sent here, and used by the printers and
+destroyed by the printers."
+
+"I'm sure," said Wittekind, "there's some muddling misunderstanding.
+Jaffery Chayne, in his own line, is a distinguished man--and a man of
+unblemished honour. A word or two will clear up everything."
+
+"He's in Madagascar."
+
+"Then wait till he comes back."
+
+Doria insisted--and who in the world can blame her for insisting?
+
+"You may think me a silly woman, Mr. Wittekind; but I'm not--not to the
+extent of an hysterical invention. Mr. Chayne has told me definitely
+that those two manuscripts came to your office, that the books were
+printed from them and that they were destroyed by the printers."
+
+"And I," said Wittekind, "give you my word of honour--and I have also
+given you independent testimony--that no manuscript of your husband's
+has ever entered this office."
+
+"Suppose they had come in his handwriting, would they have been
+destroyed?"
+
+"Certainly not. Every sheet would have been returned with the proofs.
+Typed copy may or may not be returned."
+
+"But autograph copy is valuable?"
+
+"Naturally."
+
+"The manuscripts of Adrian's novels might be worth a lot of money?"
+
+"Quite a lot of money."
+
+"So you don't think Mr. Chayne destroyed them?"
+
+"It's an act of folly of which a literary man like Mr. Chayne would be
+incapable."
+
+"And you've never seen any of it?"
+
+"I've given you my word of honour."
+
+"Then it's very extraordinary," said Doria.
+
+"It is," said Wittekind, stiffly.
+
+She thrust out her hand and flashed a generous glance.
+
+"Forgive me for being bewildered. But it's so upsetting. You have
+nothing whatever to do with it. It's all Jaffery Chayne." She looked up
+at the loosely built, kindly man. "It's for him to give explanations. In
+the meanwhile, I leave my dear, dear husband's memory in your hands--to
+keep green, as you say"--tears came into her eyes--"and you will, won't
+you?"
+
+The pathos of her attitude dissolved all resentment. He bent over her,
+still holding her hand.
+
+"You may be quite sure of that," said he. "Even we publishers have our
+ideals--and our purest is to distribute through the world the works of a
+man of genius."
+
+So Doria having telephoned for permission to come and see us on urgent
+business, arrived at Northlands late in the afternoon, full of the
+virtues of Wittekind and the vices of Jaffery. She gave us a full
+account of her interview and appealed to me for explanations of
+Jaffery's extraordinary conduct. I upbraided myself bitterly for having
+counselled her to bite Wittekind. I ought, instead, to have thrown every
+possible obstacle in the way of her meeting him. I ought to have
+foreseen this question of the manuscripts, the one weak spot in our web
+of deception. Now I may be a liar when driven by necessity from the
+paths of truth, but I am not an accomplished liar. It is not my fault.
+Mere providence has guided my life through such gentle pastures that I
+have had no practice worth speaking of. Barbara, too, is an amateur in
+mendacity. Both of us were sorely put to it under Doria's indignant and
+suspicious cross-examination.
+
+"You saw the original manuscript of 'The Greater Glory'?"
+
+"Yes," I lied.
+
+"Did you see the original manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate'?"
+
+"No," I lied again.
+
+"Was it among Adrian's papers?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge. Probably if Adrian didn't send it to the printers,
+he destroyed it."
+
+"I don't believe he destroyed it. Jaffery has got it, and he has also
+got the manuscript of 'The Greater Glory.' What does he want them for?"
+
+"That's a leading question, my dear, which I can't answer, because I
+don't know whether he has them or not. In fact, I know nothing whatever
+about them."
+
+"It sounds horrid and ungracious, Hilary, after all you've done for me,"
+said Doria, "but I really think you ought to know something."
+
+From her point of view, and from any outside person's point of view, she
+was perfectly right. My bland ignorance was disgraceful. If she had
+brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts
+and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge
+would have flayed me alive. . . . Put yourself in her place for a
+minute--God knows I tried to do so hard enough--and you will see the
+logic of her position, all through. She was not a woman of broad human
+sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow. Her whole
+being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life;
+it was concentrated now on his memory. To her, as to all the world, he
+flamed a dazzling meteor. Her faults, which were many and hard to bear
+with, all sprang from the bigotry of love. Nothing had happened to cloud
+her faith. She had come up against many incomprehensible things: the
+delay in publication of Adrian's book; the change of title; the burning
+of Adrian's last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures
+that were obviously not Adrian's; the consignment to a printer's Limbo
+of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the
+literary side of the executorship. She had accepted them--not without
+protest; but she had in fact accepted them. Now she struck a reef of
+things more incomprehensible still. Jaffery had lied to her
+outrageously. I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.
+
+But what on earth could I do? What on earth could my poor Barbara do? We
+sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while
+Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library,
+inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts. And I dared
+not know anything at all about them. She had every reason to reproach
+me.
+
+Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said: "You mustn't blame Hilary.
+When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special
+department. Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary's management of
+financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side
+of things. It has worked very well. This silly muddle about the
+manuscripts doesn't matter a little bit."
+
+"But it does matter," cried Doria.
+
+And it did. Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by
+the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of
+her passionate self craved their possession. We argued futilely, as
+people must, who haven't the ghost of a case.
+
+"But why has Jaffery lied?"
+
+"The manuscript of 'The Diamond Gate,'" I declared, again perjuring
+myself, "has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me. As I've told
+you it was not among Adrian's papers which we went through together.
+We're narrowed down to 'The Greater Glory.' Possibly," said I, with a
+despairing flash, "Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it
+with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it,
+and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer's. Now that I
+remember, he did say something of the kind."
+
+"Yes, he did," said Barbara.
+
+Doria brushed away the hypothesis. "You poor things! You're merely
+saying that to shield him. A blind imbecile could see through you"--I
+have already apologised to you for our being the unconvincing liars that
+we were--"you know nothing more about it than I do. You ought to, as
+I've already said. But you don't. In fact, you know considerably less.
+Shall I tell you where the manuscripts are at the present moment?"
+
+"No, my dear," said Barbara, in the plaintive voice of one who has come
+to the end of a profitless talk; for you cannot imagine how utterly
+wearied we were with the whole of the miserable business. "Let us wait
+till Jaffery comes home. It won't be so very long."
+
+"Yes, Doria," said I, soothingly. "Barbara's right. You can't condemn a
+man without a hearing?"
+
+Doria laughed scornfully. "Can't I? I'm a woman, my dear friend. And
+when a woman condemns a man unheard she's much more merciful than when
+she condemns him after listening to his pleadings. Then she gets really
+angry, and perhaps does the man injustice."
+
+I gasped at the monstrous proposition; but Barbara did not seem to
+detect anything particularly wrong about it.
+
+"At any rate," said I, "whether you condemn him or not, we can't do
+anything until he comes home. So we had better leave it at that."
+
+"Very well," said Doria. "Let us leave it for the present. I don't want
+to be more of a worry to you dear people than I can help. But that's
+where Adrian's manuscripts are, both of them"--and she pointed to the
+key of Jaffery's flat hanging with its staring label against my library
+wall.
+
+Of course it was rather mean to throw the entire onus on to Jaffery. But
+again, what could we do? Doria put her pistol at our heads and demanded
+Adrian's original manuscripts. She had every reason to believe in their
+existence. Wittekind had never seen them. Vandal and Goth and every kind
+of Barbarian that she considered Jaffery to be, it was inconceivable
+that he had deliberately destroyed them. It was equally inconceivable
+that he had sold the precious things for vulgar money. They remained
+therefore in his possession. Why did he lie? We could supply no
+satisfactory answer; and the more solutions we offered the more did we
+confirm in her mind the suspicion of dark and nefarious dealings. If it
+were only to gain time in order to think and consult, we had to refer
+her to the absent Jaffery.
+
+"My dear," said I to Barbara, when we were alone, "we're in a deuce of a
+mess."
+
+"I'm afraid we are."
+
+"Henceforward," said I, "we're going to live like selfish pigs, with no
+thought about anybody but ourselves and our own little pig and about
+anything outside our nice comfortable sty."
+
+"We'll do nothing of the kind," said Barbara.
+
+"You'll see," said I. "I'm a lion of egotism when I'm roused."
+
+We dined and had a pleasant evening. Doria did not raise the disastrous
+topic, but talked of Marienbad and her visits, and discussed the modern
+tendencies of the drama. She prided herself on being in the forefront of
+progress, and found no dramatic salvation outside the most advanced
+productions of the Incorporated Stage Society. I pleaded for beauty,
+which she called wedding-cake. She pleaded for courage and truth in the
+presentation of actual life, which I called dull and stupid photography
+which any dismal fool could do. We had quite an exciting and entirely
+profitless argument.
+
+"I'm not going to listen any longer," she cried at last, "to your silly
+old early Victorian platitudes!"
+
+"And I," I retorted, "am not going to be browbeaten in my own home by
+one-foot-nothing of crankiness and chiffon."
+
+So, laughingly, we parted for the night, the best of friends. If only, I
+thought, she could sweep her head clear of Adrian, what a fascinating
+little person she might be. And I understood how it had come to pass
+that our hulking old ogre had fallen in love with her so desperately.
+
+The next morning I was in the garden, superintending the planting of
+some roses in a new, bed, when Doria, in hat and furs, came through my
+library window, and sang out a good-bye. I hurried to her.
+
+"Surely not going already? I thought you were at least staying to
+lunch."
+
+No; she had to get back to town. The car, ordered by Barbara, was
+waiting to take her to the station.
+
+"I'll see you into the train," said I.
+
+"Oh, please don't trouble."
+
+"I will trouble," I laughed, and I accompanied her down the slope to the
+front door where stood Barbara by the car and Franklin with the luggage.
+Doria and I drove to the station. For the few minutes before the train
+came in we walked up and down the platform. She was in high spirits,
+full of jest and laughter. An unwonted flush in her cheeks and a
+brightness in her deep eyes rendered her perfectly captivating.
+
+"I haven't seen you looking so well and so pretty for ever such a long
+time," I said.
+
+The flush deepened. "You and Barbara have done me all the good in the
+world. You always do. Northlands is a sort of Fontaine de Jouvence for
+weary people."
+
+That was as graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a
+short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for
+our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever
+before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we
+had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had
+been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned
+me from my contemplative occupation.
+
+"Yes, dear?" said I, at the library window.
+
+"Have you written to Rogers?"
+
+Rogers was a plumber.
+
+"He's a degraded wretch," said I, "and unworthy of receiving a letter
+from a clean-minded man."
+
+"Meanwhile," said Barbara, "the servants' bathroom continues to be
+unusable."
+
+"Good God!" said I, "does Rogers hold the cleanliness of this household
+in his awful hands?"
+
+"He does."
+
+"Then I will sink my pride and write to him."
+
+"Write now," said Barbara, leading me to my chair. "You ought to have
+done it three days ago."
+
+So with three days' bathlessness of my domestic staff upon my
+conscience, and with Barbara at my elbow, I wrote my summons. I turned
+in my chair, holding it up in my hand.
+
+"Is this sufficiently dignified and imperious?"
+
+I began to declaim it. "Sir, it has been brought to my notice that the
+pipes--". I broke off short. "Hullo!" said I, my eyes on the wall, "what
+has become of the key of Jaffery's flat?"
+
+There was the brass-headed nail on which I had hung it, impertinently
+and nakedly bright. The labelled key had vanished.
+
+"You've got it in your pocket, as usual," said Barbara.
+
+I may say that I have a habit of losing things and setting the household
+from the butler to the lower myrmidons of the kitchen in frantic search,
+and calling in gardeners and chauffeurs and nurses and wives and
+children to help, only to discover that I have had the wretched object
+in my pocket all the time. So accustomed is Barbara to this wolf-cry
+that if I came up to her without my head and informed her that I had
+lost it, she would be profoundly sceptical.
+
+But this time I was blameless. "I haven't touched it," I declared, "and
+I saw it this morning."
+
+"I don't know about this morning," said Barbara. "But I grant you it was
+there yesterday evening, because Doria drew our attention to it."
+
+"Doria!" I cried, and I rose, with mouth agape, and our eyes met in a
+sudden stare.
+
+"Good Heavens! do you think she has taken it?"
+
+"Who else?" said I. "She came out from here to say good-bye to me in the
+garden. She had the opportunity. She was preternaturally animated and
+demonstrative at the station--your sex's little guileful way ever since
+the world began. She had the stolen key about her. She's going straight
+to Jaffery's flat to hunt for those manuscripts."
+
+"Well, let her," said Barbara. "We know she can't find them, because
+they don't exist."
+
+"But, my darling Barbara," I cried, "everything else does. And
+everything else is there. And there's not a blessed thing locked up in
+the place!"
+
+"Do you mean--?" she cried aghast.
+
+"Yes, I do. I must get up to town at once and stop her."
+
+"I'll come with you," said Barbara.
+
+So once more, on altruistic errand, I motored post-haste to London. We
+alighted at St. Quentin's Mansions. My friend the porter came out to
+receive us.
+
+"Has a lady been here with a key of Mr. Chayne's flat?"
+
+"No, sir, not to my knowledge."
+
+We drew breaths of relief. Our journey had been something of a strain.
+
+"Thank goodness!" said Barbara.
+
+"Should a lady come, don't allow her to enter the flat," said I.
+
+[Illustration: And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.]
+
+"I shouldn't give a strange lady entrance in any case," said the porter.
+
+"Good!" said I, and I was about to go. But Barbara, with her ready
+common-sense, took me aside and whispered:
+
+"Why not take all these compromising manuscripts home with us?"
+
+In my letter case I had the half-forgotten power of attorney that
+Jaffery had given me at Havre. I shewed it to the porter.
+
+"I want to get some things out of Mr. Chayne's flat."
+
+"Certainly, sir," said the porter. "I'll take you up."
+
+We ascended in the lift. The porter opened Jaffery's door. We entered
+the sitting-room. And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and
+strewn papers, with her head against the cannon-ball on the hearthrug,
+lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+If a ministering angel walks abroad through this world of many sorrows,
+it is my wife Barbara. To her and to her alone did the soul-stricken
+little creature owe her life and her reason. For a fortnight she
+scarcely left Doria's room, sleeping for odd hours anywhere, and
+snatching meals with the casual swiftness of a swallow. For a whole
+fortnight she wrestled with the powers of darkness, which like Apollyon
+straddled quite over all the breadth of the way, and by sheer valiancy
+and beauty of heart, she made them spread forth their dragon's wings and
+speed them away so that Doria for a season saw them no more. How she
+fought and with what weapons, who am I to tell you? These things are
+written down; but in a Book which no human eye can see.
+
+We carried her moaning and distraught from that room of awful
+revelation, put her into the car, and brought her back to Northlands. It
+was the only thing to be done. Barbara's instinct foresaw madness if we
+took her to the flat in St. John's Wood. Her father's house, her natural
+refuge, was equally impossible. For what explanation could we have given
+to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors
+to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of
+diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy;
+which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the
+gloom. The first coherent words that Doria said were:
+
+"Let me stay with you for a little. I've nowhere in the world to go. I
+can't ask father--and I can't go back home. It would drive me mad."
+
+Of course it would have driven her mad to return to the haunted
+flat--haunted now by no gracious ghost, but by an Unutterable Presence,
+the thought of which, even in her quiet, lavender-scented country
+bedroom, made her scream of nights. For she knew all. To save her
+reason, Barbara, with her wonderful tenderness, had bridged over the
+chasms between her stark peaks of discovery. She knew all that we knew.
+Further attempts at deception would have been vain cruelty. Barbara
+could palliate the offence; she could show how irresistible had been the
+temptation; she could prove how our love for Adrian had been unshaken by
+disastrous knowledge and urge that Doria's love should be unshaken
+likewise; she could apply all the healing remedies of which she only has
+the secret--but she could not leave the poor soul to stumble blindly in
+uncertainty.
+
+Doria could never enter her dishallowed paradise again. Even I, when I
+went through the place in order to make arrangements for closing it
+altogether, felt a teeth-chattering shiver in the condemned cell where
+Adrian had worked out his doom. It had been sacrosanct; not a thing had
+been disturbed; there was the iron safe empty, but yet a grim receptacle
+of abominable secrets; the quill pen, its point stained with idle ink,
+lay on the office writing-table. And the blotting-pad was still there
+under a clump of dusty, unused scribbling-paper. On a little stool in
+the corner stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a
+syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or
+even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated
+it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had
+affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the
+cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting
+despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. But now
+Doria knew. He had lost her love, the rock on which he had built his
+hope of salvation. He was damned to eternity. It is the supreme and
+unspeakable horror of eternal life that you cannot dash your head
+against a wall and plunge into nothingness. Yet he tried. The awful
+Presence of Adrian was dashing his head against those bare and ghastly
+walls. . . .
+
+I never was so glad to breathe God's honest November fog again. Of
+course my affright was a silly matter of nerves. But I would not have
+slept in that flat for anything in the world.
+
+I had to make, of course, another expedition to Jaffery's chambers, in
+order to restore to order the chaos that Doria had made. She had
+ransacked every drawer in the place and strewn the contents of the old
+portmanteau, Adrian's mass of incoherent manuscript, about the floor. I
+did what I ought to have done on my first visit; I brought the tragic
+lumber to Northlands, and having made a bonfire in a corner of the
+kitchen garden, burned the whole lot. Why Jaffery had not got rid of the
+evidence of Adrian's guilt, I could not at the time imagine. It was only
+later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason. He could not burn
+the papers in his flat, because he had no fire--only the electric
+radiator. You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six
+thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on. Jaffery had his
+idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian's study; on his
+next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the
+cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and
+throw it overboard. By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two
+voyages that year--if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage--at a
+moment's notice. In each case he had not had occasion to call at his
+chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made. As for
+discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to
+discover them? Such friends as he had would never pry into his private
+concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole
+matter to them was unintelligible. While he was living in St. Quentin's
+Mansions, he considered himself secure. When he realised, at Havre, that
+he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge. That I
+bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to
+destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say. For a long time I felt
+the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms. If I had been
+a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I
+have always prided myself on being--not the last word, for that would
+not be consonant with my natural modesty--but, say, the penultimate word
+of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an
+ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my
+brain. Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other's
+bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless
+fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to
+anybody.
+
+The fact was accomplished. Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great
+fall, and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could ever
+set Humpty-Dumpty up again.
+
+Greek tragedies are all very well in their way. They are vastly
+interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. _Moi qui
+vous parle_, I have read all of them; and I like them. I have even seen
+some of them acted. I have seen, for instance, the Agamemnon given by
+the boys of Bradfield College, in their model open-air Greek theatre,
+built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat gripped from beginning to end
+by the tremendous drama. I am not talking foolishly. I know as much as
+the ordinary man need know about Greek tragedy. But in spite of
+Aristotle (who ought to have been strangled at birth, like all other
+bland doctrinaires--and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none
+been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the
+pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the omoplate of a bison was
+clubbed by the superior person of his day who could not draw for
+nuts)--in spite of Aristotle and the rest of the theorists, I assert
+that, as far as my experience goes, in the ordinary wary modern life to
+which we are accustomed, doom and inevitableness do not matter a hang.
+If we have any common-sense we can dodge them. Most of us do. Of course,
+if a woman marries a congenital idiot there are bound to be
+ructions--here we are entering the domain of pathology, which is as
+doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent.
+of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The
+history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of
+coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist
+that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to
+look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an
+Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is
+another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I
+do not desire to discuss the subject. I only maintain that, had it not
+been for sheer chance, Adrian's secret would never have been discovered
+a second time. I cannot see any doom about it. A series of sheer, silly
+accidents on the part of Jaffery and myself had brought Doria face to
+face with these incriminating papers. As for her having gained access
+to the flat without the porter's knowledge, that had been calculation
+on her part. She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken
+some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable
+stairs.
+
+I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles; but in
+view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What useful purpose
+would have been served? He would have left the steamship _Vesta_ and
+travelled post-haste overland, dragging with him a resentful Liosha, and
+rushed like a mad bull into an upheaval in which he could have no place.
+We had arranged by correspondence that, after he had parted from the
+good Captain Maturin at Havre, he would come straight to us, in order to
+leave Liosha temporarily in our care. For what else could be done with
+her? Let him bring her, then, according to programme. It would be far
+better, we agreed, Barbara and I, to let them fulfil their lunatic
+adventure undisturbed, and on Jaffery's arrival at Northlands to break
+the disastrous tidings. It would give us time to watch Doria and see
+what direction the resultant of the forces now tearing her soul would
+take.
+
+"Let Jaffery stay away as long as possible," said Barbara. "I can't be
+bothered with him. I wish his old voyage could be extended for a year."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a great
+pity smote my heart. The ivory of her face had turned to wax, and she
+had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered the
+apprehension of an ill-treated dog. I put my arm round her and hugged
+her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a few silly
+words. Then I settled her down before the drawing-room fire, and rushed
+out into the garden and cut the last poor lingering autumn roses, and,
+returning, cast them into her lap. And we talked hard about the roses;
+and I told her which were Madame Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de
+Salisbury, and which Frau Karl Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady
+Hillingdon. We did not refer at all to unhappy things.
+
+It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the veil of
+her awful desolation. But she had no need to tell me. Any fool could
+have divined it. Together with far less shattering of idols has many a
+woman's reason been brought down. And in our poor Doria's case it was
+not only the shattering of idols.
+
+"Hilary, dear," she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile. "I can't
+go on living here for ever."
+
+"Why not?" I asked. "This is a vast barrack of a place, and you're only
+just a bit of a wee white mouse. And we love our pets. Why do you want
+to go?"
+
+We were walking up and down the drive. It was a warm, damp morning and
+the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their leaves around us in
+a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen lay sodden on the grass
+borders. Here and there a surviving blossom of antirrhinum swaggered
+among its withered brethren as if to maintain the illusion of summer. A
+partridge or two whirred across the path from copse to meadow. The
+gentle sadness of the autumn day had moved her to discourse on the
+mutability of mundane things. Hence, by chain of association, I suppose,
+her sudden remark.
+
+"I don't want to go," she replied. "I should like to stay in the dreamy
+peace of Northlands for ever. But I have been a pet for such a long
+time--for years, and I've shown myself to be such a bad pet--biting the
+hand that fed me."
+
+I bade her not talk foolishly. She moved her small shoulder.
+
+"It's true. While the three of you--you and Barbara and Jaffery--were
+doing for me what has never been done for another human being, I was all
+the time snarling and snapping. I can't make out how you can bear the
+sight of me." She clenched her hands and straightened her arms down
+tense. "The thought of it scorches me," she cried suddenly.
+
+"Whatever you did, dear," said I, "was so natural; and we understood it
+all. How could we blame you?"
+
+We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods to whom
+human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion on which to
+tell her so. I don't like the devil being called the father of lies. I
+am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was a warm-hearted
+philanthropist, who has never received due credit, and that the devil
+having seized hold of his discovery perverted it to his own diabolical
+uses. It is the sort of plagiaristic thing that devils, whether they
+promote ancient Gehennas or modern companies, have been doing since the
+world began.
+
+"That doesn't make it any the easier to me," said Doria. "The horrible
+things I said and did--the ghastliness of it--"
+
+"My dear girl," I interrupted, as kindly as I could. "Don't let this
+mere fringe of tragedy worry you."
+
+She laughed shrilly, with a set, white face; which is the most
+unmirthful kind of laugh you can imagine.
+
+"Don't you know that it's the fringe that is the maddening irritation?
+The big central thing numbs and stupefies, when it doesn't kill. And for
+some reason"--she threw out her little gloved hands--"the big thing
+hasn't killed me--it has paralysed me. The springs of feeling"--she
+clutched her bosom--"are dried up. My heart is withered and dead. I
+can't explain. For all the dead things I'm not responsible. I've gone
+through Hell the last two or three weeks and they've been burned up
+altogether. But what hasn't been burned up is the fringe, as you call
+it. That's only red-hot. It scorches me, and I can't sleep for the
+torture of it. . . ." She stopped, and fronting me laid an appealing
+touch on my arm. "Oh, Hilary, forgive me. I didn't mean to go on in this
+wild way. I thought I had a better hold on myself."
+
+"I don't see," said I, "why you shouldn't unburden your heart to one who
+has proved himself to be a friend not only of yours, but of Adrian."
+
+She released me, and with a wide gesture, swayed across the gravel path.
+I stepped to her side and mechanically we walked on, a few paces, before
+either of us spoke.
+
+"I have told you," she said at last. "I have no heart to unburden. There
+never was an Adrian."
+
+"There was indeed," said I, warmly.
+
+"Yours. Not mine."
+
+"Have you no forgiveness for him, then?" I asked earnestly.
+
+She halted again and looked at me and at the back of her great eyes
+gleamed black ice.
+
+"No," she said.
+
+I went straight to bed-rock.
+
+"He was the father of your dead child," said I.
+
+Her small frame heaved and she looked away from me down the drive. "I
+can only thank God that the child didn't live."
+
+Barbara had told me something of the fear in which she seemed to hold
+Adrian's memory. But I had not in the least realised it till now when I
+heard the profession from her own lips. In fact, I know that she had
+never yet spoken to Barbara with such passionate directness.
+
+"You oughtn't to say such a thing, Doria," I said sternly.
+
+"I am as God made me."
+
+"Adrian loved you. He sinned for your sake--in order to get you."
+
+She dismissed the argument with a gesture.
+
+"You must have pity on him," I insisted, "for the unspeakable torment of
+those months of barrenness, of abortive attempts at creation."
+
+She was silent for a moment. Having reached the front gates we turned
+and began to walk up the drive. Then she said:
+
+"Yes, I do pity him. It's enough to tear one's brain out,--his when he
+was alive--and mine now. The thought of it will freeze my soul for all
+eternity. I can't tell you what I feel." She cast out her hands
+imploringly to the autumn fields. "I pity him as I would pity some one
+remote from me--a criminal whom I might have seen done to death by awful
+tortures. It's a matter of the brain, not of the heart. No. I have all
+the understanding. But I can't find the pardon."
+
+"That will come," said I.
+
+"In the next world, perhaps, not in this."
+
+Her tone of finality forbade argument. Besides what was there to argue
+about? She had said: "There never was an Adrian." From her point of
+view, she was mercilessly right.
+
+"It's horrible to think," she went on after a pause, "that all this time
+I've been living, first on stolen property and now on charity--Jaffery's
+charity--and he hasn't even had a word of thanks. Quite the contrary."
+Again she laughed the shrill, dead laugh. "You see, I must go home--to
+my father's--I'm strong enough now--and start my life, such as it is,
+all over again. I can't touch another penny of the Wittekind money.
+Castleton's people and Jaffery must be paid."
+
+"Tom Castleton," I said, "was alone in the world, and Jaffery's not the
+man to take back a free gift beautifully given. If you don't like to
+keep the money--I appreciate your feelings--you can devote it to
+philanthropic purposes."
+
+"Yes, I might do that," she agreed. "But is this fraud--this false
+reputation--to go on forever?"
+
+"I'm afraid it must," said I. "Nobody would be benefited by throwing
+such a bombshell of scandal into society. If anybody living were
+suffering from wrong it might be different. But there's no reason to
+blacken unnecessarily the name you bear."
+
+"Then you really think I should be justified in keeping the secret?" she
+asked anxiously.
+
+"I think it would be outrageous of you to do anything else," said I.
+
+"That eases my mind. If it were essential for me to make things public,
+I would do it. I'm not a coward. But I should die of the disgrace."
+
+"To poor Adrian," said I.
+
+She flashed a quick, defiant glance.
+
+"To me."
+
+"To Adrian," I insisted, smitten with a queer inspiration. "He
+sinned--the unpardonable sin, if you like. But he expiated it. He's
+expiating it now. And you love him. And it's for his sake, not yours,
+that you shrink from public disgrace. You were so irrevocably wrapped up
+in him"--I pursued my advantage--"that you feel yourself a partner in
+his guilt. Which means that you love him still."
+
+She raised a stark, terror-stricken face. I touched her shoulder. Then,
+all of a sudden, she collapsed, and broke into an agony of sobs and
+tears. I drew her to a desolate rustic bench and put my arm round her
+and let her sob herself out.
+
+After that we did not speak of Adrian.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+At last news came from Havre of the end of the preposterous voyage.
+
+     "Crossing to-night. Coming straight to you. Send car to meet us
+     Reading. Local trains beastly. Both fit as elephants. Love to all.
+
+     "JAFFERY."
+
+Such was the telegram. I wired to Southampton acquiescence in his
+proposal. It was far more sensible to come direct to Reading than to
+make a detour through London. Rooms were got ready. In the one destined
+for Liosha, we had already stowed the cargo of trunks which the Great
+Swiftness had delivered in the nick of time. The next day I took the car
+to Reading and waited for the train.
+
+From the far end of it I saw two familiar figures descend, and a moment
+afterwards the station resounded with a familiar roar.
+
+"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"
+
+Jaffery, red-bearded, grinning, perhaps a bit mightier, hairier, redder
+than ever, his great hands uplifted, rushed at me and shook me in his
+lunatic way, so that train, passengers, porters and Liosha all rocked
+and reeled before my eyes. He let me go, and, before I could recover,
+Liosha threw her arms round my neck and kissed me. A porter who picked
+up my hat restored me to mental equipoise. Then I looked at them, and
+anything more splendid in humanity than that simple, happy pair of
+gigantic children I have never seen in my life. I, too, felt the
+laughter of happiness swell in my heart, for their gladness at the sight
+of me was so true, so unaffected, and I wrung their hands and laughed
+aloud foolishly. It is good to be loved, especially when you've done
+nothing particular to deserve it. And in their primitive way these two
+loved me.
+
+"Isn't she fit?" roared Jaffery.
+
+"Magnificent," said I.
+
+She was. The thick tan of exposure to wind and sun gave her a gipsy
+swarthiness beneath which glowed the rich colour of health. When I had
+parted from her at Havre there had been just a thread of soft increase
+in her generous figure; but now all superfluous flesh had hardened down
+into muscle, and the superb lines proclaimed her splendour. And there
+seemed to be more authority in her radiant face and a new masterfulness
+and a quicker intelligence in her brown eyes. I noticed that it was she
+who first broke away from the clamour of greeting and gave directions as
+to the transport of their "dunnage." Jaffery followed her with the tail
+of his eye; then turned to me with a bass chuckle.
+
+"We're a sort of Jaff Chayne and Co., according to her, and she thinks
+she's managing director. Ho! ho! ho!" He put his arm round my shoulder
+and suddenly grew serious. "How's everybody?"
+
+"Flourishing," said I.
+
+"And Doria?"
+
+"At Northlands."
+
+"She knows I'm coming?"
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+Liosha joined us, accompanied by a porter, carrying their exiguous
+baggage. We walked to the exit, without saying much, and settled
+ourselves in the limousine, my guests in the back seat, I on one of the
+little chairs facing them. We started.
+
+"My dear old chap," said I, leaning forward. "I've got something to tell
+you. I didn't like to write about it. But it has got to be told, and I
+may as well get it over now."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was a subdued and half-scared Jaffery who greeted Barbara and Susan
+at our front door. The jollity had gone out of him. He was nothing but a
+vast hulk filled with self-reproach. It was his fault, his very grievous
+and careless fault for having postponed the destruction of the papers,
+and for having left them loose and unsecured in his rooms. He all but
+beat his breast. If Doria had died of the shock his would be the blame.
+He saluted Barbara with the air of one entering a house of mourning.
+
+"You mustn't look so woe-begone," she said. "Something like this was
+bound to happen. I have dreaded it all along--and now it has happened
+and the earth hasn't come to an end."
+
+We stood in the hall, while Franklin divested the visitors of their
+outer wraps and trappings.
+
+"And, Liosha," Barbara continued, throwing her arms round as much of
+Liosha as they could grasp--she had already kissed her a warm
+welcome--"it's a shame, dear, to depress you the moment you come into
+the place. You'll wish you were at sea again."
+
+"I guess not," said Liosha. "I know now I'm among folks who love me.
+Isn't that true, Susan?"
+
+"Daddy loves you and mummy loves you and I adore you," cried Susan.
+
+Whereupon there was much hugging of a spoiled monkey.
+
+We went upstairs. At the drawing-room door Barbara gave me one of her
+queer glances, which meant, on interpretation, that I should leave her
+alone with Jaffery for a few minutes so that she could pour the balm of
+sense over his remorseful soul, and that in the meantime it would be
+advisable for me to explain the situation to Liosha. Aloud, she said,
+before disappearing:
+
+"Your old room, Liosha, dear--you'll find everything ready."
+
+In order to carry out my wife's orders, I had to disentangle Susan from
+Liosha's embrace and pack her off rueful to the nursery. But the promise
+to seat her at lunch between the two seafarers brought a measure of
+consolation.
+
+"Come into the library, Liosha," said I, throwing the door open. I
+followed her and settled her in an armchair before a big fire; and then
+stood on the hearthrug, looking at her and feeling rather a fool. I
+offered her refreshment. She declined. I commented again on her fine
+physical appearance and asked her how she was. I drew her attention to
+some beautiful narcissi and hyacinths that had come from the greenhouse.
+The more I talked and the longer she regarded me in her grave, direct
+fashion, the less I knew how to tell her, or how much to tell her, of
+Doria's story. The drive had been a short one, giving time only for a
+narration of the facts of the discovery. Liosha, although accepting my
+apology, had sat mystified; also profoundly disturbed by Jaffery's
+unconcealed agitation. Her life with him during the past four months had
+drawn her into the meshes of the little drama. For her own sake, for
+everybody's sake, we could not allow her to remain in complete
+ignorance. . . . I gave her a cigarette and took one myself. After the
+first puff, she smiled.
+
+"You want to tell me something."
+
+"I do. Something that is known only to four people in the world--and
+they're in this house."
+
+"If you tell me, I guess it'll be known only to five," said Liosha.
+
+To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to insult
+truth itself.
+
+"All right," said I. "You'll be the fifth and last." And then, as simply
+as I could, I told her all there was to know. She grasped the literary
+details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found afterwards that the
+long months of the voyage had not been entirely taken up with the
+cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there had been long
+stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things under heaven, and
+aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her mental horizon had
+broadened prodigiously through constant association with a cultivated
+man. . . . When I reached the point in my story where Jaffery gave up
+the Persian expedition, she gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips
+worked in their familiar quiver.
+
+"He must have loved her to do that," she said in a low voice.
+
+I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous affair, the
+more was I convinced that it would he better for her to understand
+clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria. You see, I knew all along,
+as all along I hope I have given you to understand--ever since the day
+when she asked him to beat her with a golf-stick--that the poor girl
+loved Jaffery, heart and soul. I knew also that she made for herself no
+illusions as to Jaffery's devotion to Doria. On that point her words to
+me at Havre had left me in no doubt whatever. But since Havre all sorts
+of extraordinary things had happened. There had been their intimate
+comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few
+months. There was now Doria's awful change of soul-attitude towards
+Adrian. It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional
+subtleties that underlay the bare facts. It seemed cruel to tell her of
+the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man
+she loved and the other woman. But her unflinching bravery and her great
+heart demanded it. And as I told her, walking nervously about the room,
+she followed me with her steadfast eyes.
+
+"So that's why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me."
+
+"I suppose so," said I.
+
+"If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her out of
+the window."
+
+"I dare say. But you wouldn't have been Jaff Chayne."
+
+"That's true," she assented. "No man like him ever walked the earth. And
+how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I can't imagine."
+
+"Her head was full of another man, you see."
+
+"Oh yes, I see," she said with a touch of contempt. "And such a man! You
+were fond of him I know. But he was a sham. He used to look on me, I
+remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the Zoological Gardens. It
+never occurred to him that I had sense. He was a fool."
+
+Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she had ever
+expressed an opinion regarding Adrian. We had assumed that, having
+touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy figure in her
+mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned us, she had viewed
+him with entire indifference. But her keen feminine brain had picked out
+the fatal flaw in poor Adrian's character, the shallow glitter that made
+us laugh and the want of vision from which he died.
+
+"Go on," said Liosha.
+
+I continued. In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for setting
+Adrian on his towering pinnacle. Liosha nodded. She understood. False
+gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped, had for a time the
+mystifying power of concealing their falsehood. And during that time
+they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus, flaming Joves to poor
+mortal Semeles. Liosha quite understood.
+
+I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard,
+uncomprehending, in the car.
+
+"And that's how it stands," said I.
+
+I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I turned aside
+and lit another cigarette. Liosha remained silent for a while, resting
+her cheek on her hand. At last she said in her deep tones:
+
+"Poor little devil! Good God! Poor little devil!"
+
+Tears flooded her eyes.
+
+"By heavens," I cried, "you're a good creature."
+
+"I'm nothing of the sort," said Liosha. She rose. "I guess I must have a
+clean up before lunch," and she made for the door.
+
+I looked at my watch. "You just have time," said I.
+
+I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in front of the
+fire. Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the serene young
+barbarian who had come to us two and a half years before blandly
+characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she would not let her buy
+a stocked chicken incubator and take it to the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie
+wolf from the noble Great Dane. Her nature had undergone remarkable
+developments. As Jaffery had prophesied at Havre, she treated things in
+a big way, and she had learned restraint, not the restraint of
+convention, for not a convention would have stopped her from doing what
+she chose, but the restraint of self-discipline. And she had learned
+pity. A year ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every
+woman's reason for hating. A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in
+her heart. If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family
+had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks before
+her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt whether she
+would have cut off one single head.
+
+A tap at the window aroused me. It was Jaffery in the rain, which had
+just begun to fail, seeking admittance. I let him in.
+
+"This is an awful business, old man," he said gloomily.
+
+From which I gather that for once Barbara's soothing had been of little
+avail.
+
+"Have you seen Doria yet?" I asked.
+
+He shook his head. "Barbara is with her. She's coming in to lunch."
+
+At the anti-climax, I smiled. "That shews she's not quite dead yet."
+
+But to Jaffery it was no smiling matter. "Look here, Hilary," he said
+hoarsely, "don't you think it would be better for me to cut the whole
+thing and go away right now?"
+
+"Go away--?" I stared at him. "What for?"
+
+"Why should I force myself on that poor, tortured child? Think of her
+feelings towards me. She must loathe the sound of my name."
+
+"Jaff Chayne," said I, "I believe you're afraid of mice."
+
+He frowned. "What the blazes do you mean?"
+
+"You're in a blue funk at the idea of meeting Doria."
+
+"Rot," said Jaffery.
+
+But he was.
+
+Franklin summoned us to luncheon. We went into the drawing-room where
+the rest of our little party were assembled, Susan and her governess,
+Liosha, Barbara and Doria. Doria stepped forward valiantly with
+outstretched hand, looking him squarely in the face.
+
+"Welcome back, Jaffery. It's good to see you again."
+
+Jaffery grew very red and bending over her hand muttered something into
+his beard.
+
+"You'll have to tell me about your wonderful voyage."
+
+"There was nothing so wonderful about it," said Jaffery.
+
+That was all for the moment, for Barbara hustled us into the
+dining-room. But the terrible meeting that both had dreaded was over.
+Nobody had fainted or shed tears; it was over in a perfectly well-bred
+way. At lunch Susan, between Liosha and Jaffery, became the centre of
+attention and saved conversation from constraint.
+
+To Doria, who had lingered at Northlands, in order to lose no time in
+setting herself right with Jaffery,--her own phrase--the ordinary table
+small-talk would have been an ordeal. As it was, she sat on my left,
+opposite Liosha, lending a polite ear to the answers to Susan's eager
+questions. The child had not received such universal invitation to
+chatter at mealtime since she had learned to speak. But, in spite of her
+inspiring assistance, a depressing sense of destinies in the balance
+pervaded the room, and we were all glad when the meal came to an end.
+Susan, refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to
+the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship _Vesta_. Barbara
+and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I, after a
+perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them. We talked for a while on
+different things, the child's robustious health, the garden, the
+weather, our summer holiday, much in the same dismal fashion as
+assembled mourners talk before the coffin is brought downstairs. At last
+Barbara said:
+
+"I must go and write some letters."
+
+And I said: "I'm going to have my afternoon nap."
+
+Both the others cried out with simultaneous anxiety and scarlet faces:
+
+"Oh, don't go, Barbara, dear."
+
+"Can't you cut the sleep out for once?"
+
+"I must!" said Barbara.
+
+"No," said I.
+
+And we left our nervous ogre and our poor little elf to fight out
+between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps it was
+cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come to mutual
+understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had the afternoon
+before them. It was pouring with rain. They had nothing else to do. In
+order that they should be undisturbed, Barbara had given orders that we
+were not at home to visitors. Besides, we were actuated by motives not
+entirely altruistic. If I seem to have posed before you as a
+noble-minded philanthropist, I have been guilty of careless
+misrepresentation. At the best I am but a not unkindly, easy-going man
+who loathes being worried. And I (and Barbara even more than myself) had
+been greatly worried over our friends' affairs for a considerable
+period. We therefore thought that the sooner we were freed from these
+worries the better for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts
+against their joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.
+
+"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going to
+happen?"
+
+"She'll marry him, of course."
+
+"She won't," said I.
+
+"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."
+
+"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that young
+woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against Jaffery."
+
+"If," she said. "But you haven't."
+
+"All right," said I.
+
+"All right," said Barbara.
+
+We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to become of
+Liosha?"
+
+Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."
+
+"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall be."
+
+"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.
+
+"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
+drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity and
+realised failure; the woman--as it seemed to me, smoking reflectively in
+my library armchair, for sleep was impossible--the woman in the calm of
+desperation. The man who had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to
+shield her from harm, who lavished on her all the devotion and
+tenderness of his simple heart; the woman who owed him her life, and,
+but for fool accident and her own lack of faith in him, would still be
+owing him the twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not
+met, or exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
+John's Wood flat, when he had told her that he loved her, and by the
+sheer mischance of his hulking strength had thrown her to the ground;
+since that day when she had spat out at him her hatred and contempt,
+when she had called him "a barren rascal," and had lashed him into fury;
+when, white with realisation that the secret was about to escape from
+his lips, he had laid her on the sofa and had gone blindly into the
+street. Now facing each other for the first time after many months, they
+remembered all too poignantly that parting. The barren rascal who stood
+before her was the man who had written every word of Adrian's triumphant
+second novel, and had given it to her out of the largesse of his love.
+And he had borne with patience all her imperious strictures and had
+obeyed all her crazy and jealous whims. He had fooled her--quixotically
+fooled her, it is true--but fooled her as never woman had been fooled in
+the world before. And knowing Adrian to be the barren rascal, all the
+time, never had he wavered in his loyalty, never had he uttered one
+disparaging word. And he had secured the insertion of a life of Adrian
+in the next supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography; and he
+had helped her to set up that staring white marble monument in Highgate
+Cemetery, with its lying inscription. Never had human soul been invested
+in such a Nessus shirt of irony. No wonder she had passed through
+Hell-fire. No wonder her soul had been scorched and shrivelled up. No
+wonder the licking fires of unutterable shame kept her awake of nights.
+And if she writhed in the flaming humiliation of it all when she was
+alone, what was that woman's anguish of abasement when she stood face to
+face, and compelled to speech, with the man whose loving hand had
+unwittingly kindled that burning torment?
+
+The poor human love for Adrian was not dead. That secret I had plucked
+out of her heart a few weeks ago in the garden. How did she regard the
+man who must have held Adrian in the worst of contempt, the contempt of
+pity? She hated him. I was sure she hated him. I could not take my mind
+off those two closeted together. What was happening? Again and again I
+went over the whole disastrous story. What would be the end? I wearied
+myself for a long, long time with futile speculation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My library door opened, and Liosha, bright-eyed, with quivering lip and
+tragic face, burst in, and seeing me, flung herself down by my side and
+buried her head on the arm of the chair and began to cry wretchedly.
+
+"My dear, my dear," said I, bewildered by this tornado of misery. "My
+dear," said I, putting an arm round her shoulders, "what is the matter?"
+
+"I'm a fool," she wailed. "I know I'm a fool, but I can't help it. I
+went in there just now. I didn't know they were there. Susan's music
+mistress came and I had to go out of the nursery--and I went into the
+drawing-room. Oh, it's hard, Hilary, dear--it's damned hard."
+
+"My poor Liosha," said I.
+
+"There doesn't seem to be a place in the world for me."
+
+"There's lots of places in our hearts," I said as soothingly as I could.
+But the assurance gave her little comfort. Her body shook.
+
+"I wish the cargo had killed me," she said.
+
+I waited for a little, then rose and made her sit in my chair. I drew
+another near her.
+
+"Now," said I. "Tell me all about it."
+
+And she told me in her broken way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She walked into the drawing-room thinking to find Barbara. Instead, she
+sailed into a surging sea of passion. Doria crouched on a sofa hiding
+her face--the flame, poor little elf in the Nessus shirt, had been
+lapping her round, and with both hands outstretched she motioned away
+Jaffery who stood over her.
+
+"Don't touch me, don't touch me! I couldn't bear it!" she cried; and
+then, aware of Liosha's sudden presence, she started to her feet. Liosha
+did not move. The two women glared at each other.
+
+"What do you mean by coming in here?" cried Doria.
+
+"You had better leave us, Liosha," said Jaffery sombrely.
+
+But Liosha stood firm. The spurning of Jaffery by Doria struck a chord
+of the heroic that ran through her strange, wild nature. If this man she
+loved was not for her, at least no other woman should scorn him. She
+drew herself up in her full-bosomed magnificence.
+
+"Instead of telling him not to touch you, you little fool, you ought to
+fall at his feet. For what he has done for you, you ought to steal the
+wide world and give it to him. And you refuse your footling little
+insignificant self. If you had a thousand selves, they wouldn't be
+enough for him."
+
+"Stop!" shouted Jaffery.
+
+She wheeled round on him. "Hold your tongue, Jaff Chayne. I guess I've
+the right, if anybody has, to fix up your concerns."
+
+"What right?" Doria demanded.
+
+"Never mind." She took a step forward. "Oh, no; not that right! Don't
+you dare to think it. Jaff Chayne doesn't care a tinker's curse for me
+that way. But I have a right to speak, Jaff Chayne. Haven't I?"
+
+Jaffery's mind went back to the Bedlam of the slithering cargo. He
+turned to Doria.
+
+"Let her say what she wants."
+
+"I want nothing!" cried Liosha. "Nothing for myself. Not a thing! But I
+want Jaff Chayne to be happy. You think you know all he has done for
+you, but you don't. You don't know a bit. They offered him thousands of
+pounds to go to Persia, and he would have come back a great man, and he
+didn't go because of you."
+
+"Persia? I never heard of that," said Doria.
+
+"The job didn't suit me," Jaffery growled.
+
+"And you told her all about it?"
+
+"No, he didn't," said Liosha. "Hilary told me to-day."
+
+"I take your word for it," said Doria coldly. "It only shows that I'm
+under one more obligation than I thought to Mr. Chayne."
+
+From what I could gather, the word "obligation" infuriated Liosha. She
+uttered an avalanche of foolish things. And Jaffery (for what is man in
+a woman's battle but an impotent spectator?) looked in silence from one:
+to the other; from the little ivory, black and white Tanagra figure to
+the great full creature whom he had seen, but a few days ago, with the
+salt spray in her hair and the wind in her vestments. And at last she
+said:
+
+"If I were a woman like you and wouldn't marry a man who loved me like
+Jaff Chayne, and who had done for me all that Jaff Chayne had done for
+you, I'd pray to God to blast me and fill my body with worms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And then she burst out of the room, and, like a child seeking
+protection, came and threw herself down by my side.
+
+What happened when she left them I know, because Jaffery kept me up till
+three o'clock in the morning narrating it to me, while he poured into
+his Gargantuan self hogsheads of whisky and soda.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Liosha had gone, they eyed one another for a while in embarrassing
+silence, until Doria spoke:
+
+"She misunderstood--when she came in. Quite natural. It was your touch
+of pity that I couldn't bear. I wasn't repelling you, as she seemed to
+think."
+
+"It cut me to the heart to see you in such grief," said Jaffery. "I only
+thought of comforting you."
+
+"I know." She sat on a chair by the window and looked out at the pouring
+rain.
+
+"Tell me," she said, without turning round, "what did she mean by saying
+she had the right to interfere in your affairs?"
+
+"She saved my life at the risk of her own," replied Jaffery.
+
+"I see. And you saved my life once; so perhaps you have rights over
+me."
+
+"That would be damnable!" he cried. "Such a thought has never entered my
+head."
+
+"It is firmly fixed in mine," said Doria.
+
+She sat for a while, with knitted brows deep in thought. Jaffery stood
+dejectedly by the fire, his hands in his pockets. Presently she rose.
+
+"Besides saving my life and doing for me the things I know, there must
+be many things you've done for me that I never heard of--like this
+sacrifice of the Persian expedition. Liosha was right. I ought to go on
+my knees to you. But I can't very well do that, can I?"
+
+"No," replied Jaffery, scrabbling at whiskers and beard. "That would be
+stupid. You mustn't worry about me at all. Whatever I did for you, my
+dear, I'd do a thousand times over again!"
+
+"You must have your reward, such as it is. God knows you have earned
+it."
+
+"Don't talk about rights or rewards," said he. "As I've said repeatedly
+this afternoon, I've forfeited even your thanks."
+
+"And I've said I forgive you--if there's anything to forgive," she
+smiled, just a little wearily. "So that is wiped out. All the rest
+remains. Let us bury all past unhappiness between us two."
+
+"I wish we could. But how?"
+
+"There is a way."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"You make things somewhat hard for me. You might guess. But I'll tell
+you. Liosha again was right. . . . If you want me still, I will marry
+you. Not quite yet; but, say, in six months' time. You are a
+great-hearted, loyal man"--she continued bravely, faltering under his
+gaze--"and I will learn to love you and will devote my life to making
+you happy."
+
+She glanced downwards with averted head, awaiting some outcry of
+gladness, surrendering herself to the quick clasp of strong arms. But
+no outcry came, and no arms clasped. She glanced up, and met a stricken
+look in the man's eyes.
+
+For Jaffery could not find a word to utter. A chill crept about his
+heart and his blood became as water. He could not move; a nightmare
+horror of dismay held him in its grip. The inconceivable had happened.
+He no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted his thoughts for
+over two years, for whom he had made quixotic sacrifices, for whom he
+had made a mat of his great body so that she should tread stony paths
+without hurt to her delicate feet, was his now for the taking--nobly
+self-offered--and with all the world as an apanage he could not have
+taken her. The phenomenon of sex he could not explain. Once he had
+desired her passionately. The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired
+his blood. He had fought with beasts. He had wrestled with his soul in
+the night watches. He had loved her purely and sweetly, too. But now, as
+she stood before him, recoiling a little from his fixed stare of pain,
+though she had suffered but little loss in beauty and in that of her
+which was desirable, he realised, in a kind of paralysis, that he
+desired her no more, that he loved her no more with the idealised love
+he had given to the elfin princess of his dreams. Not that he would not
+still do her infinite service. The pathos of her broken life moved him
+to an anguish of pity. For her soothing he would give all that life held
+for him, save one thing--which was no longer his to give. Another man
+glib of tongue and crafty of brain might have lied his way out of an
+abominable situation. But Jaffery's craft was of the simplest. He could
+not trick the dead love into smiling semblance of life. His nature was
+too primitive. He could only stare in spellbound affright at the icy
+barrier that separated him from Doria.
+
+"I see," she said tonelessly, moving slowly away from him. "Your
+feelings have changed. I am sorry."
+
+Then he found power of motion and speech. He threw out his arms. "My
+God, dear, forgive me!" he groaned, and sat down and clutched his head
+in his hands. She returned to the window and looked out at the rain. And
+there she fought with her woman's indignant humiliation. And there was a
+long, dead silence, broken only by the faintly heard notes of Susan's
+piano in the nursery and the splash of water on the terrace.
+
+Presently all that was good in Doria conquered. She crossed the room and
+laid a light hand on Jaffery's head. It was the finest moment in her
+life.
+
+"One can't help these things. I know it too well. And no hearts are
+broken. So it's all for the best."
+
+He groaned again. "I didn't know. I'd like to shoot myself."
+
+She smiled, conscious of feminine superiority. "If you did, I should
+die, too. I tell you, it's all for the best. I love you as I never loved
+you before. I usen't to love you a little bit. But I should have had to
+learn to love you as a wife--and it might have been difficult."
+
+A moment afterwards she appeared in the library, serenely
+matter-of-fact. Liosha started round in her chair and looked defiantly
+at her rival.
+
+"Would both of you mind coming into the drawing-room for a minute?"
+
+We followed her. She held the door, which I was about to shut, and left
+it open. Before Jaffery had time to rise at our entrance, I caught sight
+of him sitting as she had left him, great clumps of his red hair
+sticking through his fingers. His face was a picture of woe. I can
+imagine nothing more like it than that of a conscience smitten lion.
+Doria ran her arm through mine and kept me near the doorway.
+
+"I've asked Jaffery to marry me," she said, in a steady voice, "and he
+doesn't want to. It's because he loves a much better woman and wants to
+marry her."
+
+Then while Jaffery and Liosha gasped in blank astonishment, she swung me
+abruptly out of the room and slammed the door behind her.
+
+"There," she said, and flung up her little bead, "what do you think of
+that?"
+
+"Magnificent," said I, "but bewildering. Did Jaffery really--?"
+
+In a few words, she put me into possession of the bare facts.
+
+"I'm not sorry," she added. "Sometimes I love Jaffery--because he's so
+lovable. Sometimes I hate him--because--oh, well--because of Adrian. You
+can't understand."
+
+"I'm not altogether a fool," said I.
+
+"Well, that's how it is. I would have worn myself to death to try to
+make him happy. You believe me?"
+
+"I do indeed, my dear," I replied. And I replied with unshakable
+conviction. She was a woman who once having come under the domination of
+an idea would obey it blindly, ruthlessly, marching straight onwards,
+looking neither to right nor left. The very virtue that had made her
+overcruel to him in the past would have made her overkind to him in the
+future. Unwittingly she had used a phrase startlingly true. She would
+have worn herself to death in her determination to please. Incidentally
+she would have driven him mad with conscientious dutifulness.
+
+"He would have found no fault with me that I could help," she said. "But
+we needn't speak of it any more. I'm not the woman for him. Liosha is.
+It's all over. I'm glad. At any rate, I've made atonement--at least,
+I've tried--as far as things lay in my power."
+
+I took both her hands, greatly moved by her courage.
+
+"And what's going to happen to you, my dear?"
+
+"Now that all this is straight," she replied, with a faint smile, "I can
+turn round and remake my life. You and Barbara will help."
+
+"With all our hearts," said I.
+
+"It won't be so hard for you, ever again, I promise. I shall be more
+reasonable. And the first favour I'll ask you, dear Hilary, is to let me
+go this afternoon. It would be a bit of a strain on me to stay."
+
+"I know, my dear," I said. "The car is at your service."
+
+"Oh, no! I'll go by train."
+
+"You'll do as you're told, young woman, and go by car."
+
+At this rubbishy speech, the tears, for the first time, came into her
+eyes. She pulled down my shoulders--I am rather lank and tall--and
+kissed me.
+
+"You're a dear," she said, and went off in search of Barbara.
+
+I returned to my library, rang the bell, and gave orders for the
+chauffeur to stand at Mrs. Boldero's disposal. Then I sat down at a
+loose end, very much like a young professional man, doctor or
+estate-agent, waiting for the next client. And like the young
+professional man at a loose end, I made a pretence of looking through
+papers. Presently I became aware that I only had to open a window in
+order to summon a couple of clients at once. For there in the gathering
+November dusk and in the rain--it had ceased pouring, but it was
+drizzling, and therefore it was rain--I saw our pair of delectable
+savages strolling across the wet, sodden lawn, in loverlike proximity,
+for all the world as though it were a flowery mead in May. I might have
+summoned them, but it would have been an unprofessional thing to do.
+Instead, I drew my curtains and turned on the light, and continued to
+wait. I waited a long time. At last Barbara rushed in.
+
+"Doria's ready."
+
+"You've heard all about it?" She nodded. "I said there would be no
+marriage," I remarked blandly.
+
+"You said she wouldn't marry him. I said she would. And so she would, if
+he had let her. I know you're prepared to argue," she said, rather
+excitedly, "but it's no use. I was right all the time."
+
+I yielded.
+
+"You're always right, my dear," said I.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That is practically all, up to the present, that I have to tell you
+about Jaffery. What words passed between him and Liosha in the
+drawing-room I have never known. Jaffery, with conscience still sore,
+and childishly anxious that I should not account him a traitor and a
+scoundrel, and a brute too despicable for human touch, told me, as I
+have already stated, over and over again, until I yawned for weariness
+in the small hours of the morning, what had taken place in his
+staggering interview with Doria; but as regards Liosha, he was shyly
+evasive. After all, I fancy, it was a very simple affair. She had told
+me bluntly that when the two men, Jaffery and Prescott, rode into the
+scene of Balkan desolation in which she was the central figure, Jaffery
+was the one who caused her heart to throb. And in her chaste, proud way
+she had loved him ever since that extraordinary moment. And though
+Jaffery has never confessed it, I am absolutely certain that, just as
+Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose, _sans le savoir_, so, without knowing it,
+was Jaffery in love with Liosha when she drove away from Northlands in
+Mr. Ras Fendihook's car. Perhaps before. _Quien sabe?_ But he imagined
+himself to be in love with a moonbeam. And the moonbeam shot like a
+glamorous, enchanted sword between him and Liosha, and kept them apart
+until the moment of dazed revelation, when he saw that the moonbeam
+was merely a pale, earnest, anxious, suffering little human thing, alien
+to his every instinct, a firmament away, in every vital essential, from
+the goddess of his idolatry.
+
+[Illustration: There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as
+war correspondent. Liosha is there, too.]
+
+That is how I explain--and I have puzzled my head into aching over any
+other possible explanation--the attitude of Jaffery towards Liosha on
+the _Vesta_ voyage. Well, my conjectures are of not much value. I have
+done my best to put the facts, as I know them, before you; and if you
+are interested in the matter you can go on conjecturing to your heart's
+content. "Look here, my friend," said I, as soon as I could attune my
+mind to new conditions, "what about your new novel?"
+
+He frowned portentously. "It can go to blazes!" "Aren't you going to
+finish it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But you must. Don't you realise that you're a born novelist?"
+
+"Don't you realise," he growled, "that you're a born fool?"
+
+"I don't," said I.
+
+He walked about the library in his space--occupying way.
+
+"I'm going to tear the damned thing up! I'm never going to write a novel
+again. I cut it out altogether. It's the least I can do for her."
+
+"Isn't that rather quixotic?" I asked.
+
+"Suppose it is. What have you to say against it?"
+
+"Nothing," said I.
+
+"Well, keep on saying it," replied Jaffery, with the steel flash in his
+eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were married. Our vicar performed the ceremony. I gave the bride
+away. Liosha revealed the feminine kink in her otherwise splendid
+character by insisting on the bridal panoply of white satin, veil and
+orange blossoms. I confess she looked superb. She looked like a Valkyr.
+A leather-visaged war correspondent, named Burchester, whom I had never
+seen before, and have not seen since, acted as best man. Susan, tense
+with the responsibilities of office, was the only bridesmaid. Mrs. Jupp
+(late Considine) and her General were our only guests. Doria excused
+herself from attendance, but sent the bride a travelling-case fitted
+with a myriad dazzling gold-stoppered bottles and a phantasmagoria of
+gold-mounted toilette implements.
+
+And then they went on their honeymoon. And where do you think they went?
+They signed again on the steamship _Vesta_. And Captain Maturin gave
+them his cabin, which is more than I would have done, and slept, I
+presume, in the dog-hole. And they were as happy as the ship was
+abominable.
+
+Now, as I write, there is a war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is
+there as the correspondent of _The Daily Gazette_. Liosha is there, too,
+as the inseparable and peculiarly invaluable companion of Jaffery
+Chayne. They live impossible lives. But what has that got to do with you
+or me? They like it. They adore it. A more radiantly mated pair the
+earth cannot produce. Their two-year-old son is learning the practice of
+the heroic virtues at Cettinje, while his parents loaf about
+battlefields in full eruption.
+
+"Poor little mite!" says Barbara.
+
+But I say:
+
+"Lucky little Pantagruel!"
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Jaffery, by William J. Locke
+
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