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Title: The dream: A novel

Author: H. G. Wells

Release date: November 20, 2022 [eBook #69394]
                Most recently updated: October 19, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DREAM: A NOVEL ***

  THE DREAM

  _A NOVEL_


  BY

  H. G. WELLS



  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1924

  _All rights reserved_




  COPYRIGHT, 1923 and 1924,
  BY H. G. WELLS.

  Set up and electrotyped.
  Published April, 1924.


  Printed in the United States of America by
  THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE EXCURSION


CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM


CHAPTER THE THIRD

MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY


CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE WIDOW SMITH MOVES TO LONDON


CHAPTER THE FIFTH

FANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF


CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MARRIAGE IN WAR TIME


CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

LOVE AND DEATH


CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

THE EPILOGUE




PART I

How Harry Mortimer Smith Was Made



THE DREAM



CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE EXCURSION


§ 1

Sarnac had worked almost continuously for the better part of a year
upon some very subtle chemical reactions of the nervous cells of the
sympathetic system.  His first enquiries had led to the opening out
of fresh and surprising possibilities, and these again had lured him
on to still broader and more fascinating prospects.  He worked
perhaps too closely; he found his hope and curiosity unimpaired, but
there was less delicacy of touch in his manipulation, and he was
thinking less quickly and accurately.  He needed a holiday.  He had
come to the end of a chapter in his work and wished to brace himself
for a new beginning.  Sunray had long hoped to be away with him; she,
too, was at a phase in her work when interruption was possible, and
so the two went off together to wander among the lakes and mountains.

Their companionship was at a very delightful stage.  Their close
relationship and their friendship was of old standing, so that they
were quite at their ease with one another, yet they were not too
familiar to have lost the keen edge of their interest in each other's
proceedings.  Sunray was very much in love with Sarnac and glad, and
Sarnac was always happy and pleasantly exalted when Sunray was near
him.  Sunray was the richer-hearted and cleverer lover.  They talked
of everything in the world but Sarnac's work because that had to rest
and grow fresh again.  Of her own work Sunray talked abundantly.  She
had been making stories and pictures of happiness and sorrow in the
past ages of the world, and she was full of curious speculations
about the ways in which the ancestral mind has thought and felt.

They played with boats upon the great lake for some days, they sailed
and paddled and drew up their canoe among the sweet-scented rushes of
the islands and bathed and swam.  They went from one guest-house to
another upon the water and met many interesting and refreshing
people.  In one house an old man of ninety-eight was staying: he was
amusing his declining years by making statuettes of the greatest
beauty and humour; it was wonderful to see the clay take shape in his
hands.  Moreover, he had a method of cooking the lake fish that was
very appetising, and he made a great dish of them so that everyone
who was dining in the place could have some.  And there was a
musician who made Sunray talk about the days gone by, and afterwards
he played music with his own hands on a clavier to express the
ancient feelings of men.  He played one piece that was, he explained,
two thousand years old; it was by a man named Chopin, and it was
called the Revolutionary Etude.  Sunray could not have believed a
piano capable of such passionate resentment.  After that he played
grotesque and angry battle music and crude marching tunes from those
half-forgotten times, and then he invented wrathful and passionate
music of his own.

Sunray sat under a golden lantern and listened to the musician and
watched his nimble hands, but Sarnac was more deeply moved.  He had
not heard very much music in his life, and this player seemed to open
shutters upon deep and dark and violent things that had long been
closed to mankind.  Sarnac sat, cheek on hand, his elbow on the
parapet of the garden wall, looking across the steely blue of the
lake at the darkling night sky at the lower end.  The sky had been
starry, but a monstrous crescent of clouds like a hand that closes
was now gathering all the stars into its fist of darkness.  Perhaps
there would be rain to-morrow.  The lanterns hung still, except that
ever and again a little shiver of the air set them swaying.  Now and
then a great white moth would come fluttering out of the night and
beat about among the lanterns for a time and pass away.  Presently it
would return again or another moth like it would come.  Sometimes
there would be three or four of these transitory phantoms; they
seemed to be the only insects abroad that night.

A faint ripple below drew his attention to the light of a boat, a
round yellow light like a glowing orange, which came gliding close up
to the terrace wall out of the blue of the night.  There was the
sound of a paddle being shipped and a diminishing drip of water, but
the people in the boat sat still and listened until the musician had
done altogether.  Then they came up the steps to the terrace and
asked the master of the guest-house for rooms for the night.  They
had dined at a place farther up the lake.

Four people came by this boat.  Two were brother and sister, dark
handsome people of southern origin, and the others were fair women,
one blue-eyed and one with hazel eyes, who were clearly very much
attached to the brother and sister.  They came and talked about the
music and then of a climbing expedition they had promised themselves
in the great mountains above the lakes.  The brother and sister were
named Radiant and Starlight, and their work in life, they explained,
was to educate animals; it was a business for which they had an
almost instinctive skill.  The two fair girls, Willow and Firefly,
were electricians.  During the last few days Sunray had been looking
ever and again at the glittering snowfields and desiring them; there
was always a magic call for her in snowy mountains.  She joined very
eagerly in the mountain talk, and it was presently suggested that she
and Sarnac should accompany these new acquaintances up to the peaks
they had in mind.  But before they went on to the mountains, she and
Sarnac wanted to visit some ancient remains that had recently been
excavated in a valley that came down to the lake from the east.  The
four new-comers were interested in what she told them about these
ruins, and altered their own plans to go with her and Sarnac to see
them.  Then afterwards all six would go into the mountains.



§ 2

These ruins were rather more than two thousand years old.

There were the remains of a small old town, a railway station of some
importance, and a railway tunnel which came right through the
mountains.  The tunnel had collapsed, but the excavators had worked
along it and found several wrecked trains in it which had evidently
been packed with soldiers and refugees.  The remains of these people,
much disturbed by rats and other vermin, lay about in the trains and
upon the railway tracks.  The tunnel had apparently been blocked by
explosives and these trainloads of people entombed.  Afterwards the
town itself and all its inhabitants had been destroyed by poison-gas,
but what sort of poison-gas it was the investigators had still to
decide.  It had had an unusual pickling effect, so that many of the
bodies were not so much skeletons as mummies; and there were books,
papers, papier mâché objects or the like in a fair state of
preservation in many of the houses.  Even cheap cotton goods were
preserved, though they had lost all their colour.  For some time
after the great catastrophe this part of the world must have remained
practically uninhabited.  A landslide had presently blocked the lower
valley and banked back the valley waters so as to submerge the town
and cover it with a fine silt and seal up the tunnel very completely.
Now the barrier had been cut through and the valley drained again,
and all these evidences of one of the characteristic disasters of the
last war period in man's history had been brought back to the light
once more.

The six holiday-makers found the visit to this place a very vivid
experience, almost too vivid for their contentment.  On Sarnac's
tired mind it made a particularly deep impression.  The material
collected from the town had been arranged in a long museum gallery of
steel and glass.  There were many almost complete bodies; one invalid
old woman, embalmed by the gas, had been replaced in the bed from
which the waters had floated her, and there was a shrivelled little
baby put back again in its cradle.  The sheets and quilts were
bleached and browned, but it was quite easy to see what they had once
been like.  The people had been taken by surprise, it seemed, while
the midday meal was in preparation; the tables must have been set in
many of the houses; and now, after a score of centuries beneath mud
and weeds and fishes, the antiquaries had disinterred and reassembled
these old machine-made cloths and plated implements upon the tables.
There were great stores of such pitiful discoloured litter from the
vanished life of the past.

The holiday-makers did not go far into the tunnel; the suggestion of
things there were too horrible for their mood, and Sarnac stumbled
over a rail and cut his hand upon the jagged edge of a broken
railway-carriage window.  The wound pained him later, and did not
heal so quickly as it should have done.  It was as if some poison had
got into it.  It kept him awake in the night.

For the rest of the day the talk was all of the terrible days of the
last wars in the world and the dreadfulness of life in that age.  It
seemed to Firefly and Starlight that existence must have been almost
unendurable, a tissue of hate, terror, want and discomfort, from the
cradle to the grave.  But Radiant argued that people then were
perhaps no less happy and no happier than himself; that for everyone
in every age there was a normal state, and that any exaltation of
hope or sensation above that was happiness and any depression below
it misery.  It did not matter where the normal came.  "They went to
great intensities in both directions," he said.  There was more
darkness in their lives and more pain, but not more unhappiness.
Sunray was inclined to agree with him.

But Willow objected to Radiant's psychology.  She said that there
could be permanently depressed states in an unhealthy body or in a
life lived under restraint.  There could be generally miserable
creatures just as there could be generally happy creatures.

"Of course," interjected Sarnac, "given a standard outside
themselves."

"But why did they make such wars?" cried Firefly.  "Why did they do
such horrible things to one another?  They were people like
ourselves."

"No better," said Radiant, "and no worse.  So far as their natural
quality went.  It is not a hundred generations ago."

"Their skulls were as big and well shaped."

"Those poor creatures in the tunnel!" said Sarnac.  "Those poor
wretches caught in the tunnel!  But everyone in that age must have
felt caught in a tunnel."

After a time a storm overtook them and interrupted their
conversation.  They were going up over a low pass to a guest-house at
the head of the lake, and it was near the crest of the pass that the
storm burst.  The lightning was tremendous and a pine-tree was struck
not a hundred yards away.  They cheered the sight.  They were all
exhilarated by the elemental clatter and uproar; the rain was like a
whip on their bare, strong bodies and the wind came in gusts that
held them staggering and laughing, breathlessly unable to move
forward.  They had doubts and difficulties with the path; for a time
they lost touch with the blazes upon the trees and rocks.  Followed a
steady torrent of rain, through which they splashed and stumbled down
the foaming rocky pathway to their resting-place.  They arrived wet
as from a swim and glowing; but Sarnac, who had come behind the
others with Sunray, was tired and cold.  The master of this
guest-house drew his shutters and made a great fire for them with
pine-knots and pine-cones while he prepared a hot meal.

After a while they began to talk of the excavated town again and of
the shrivelled bodies lying away there under the electric light of
the still glass-walled museum, indifferent for evermore to the
sunshine and thunderstorms of life without.

"Did they ever laugh as we do?" asked Willow.  "For sheer happiness
of living?"

Sarnac said very little.  He sat close up to the fire, pitching
pine-cones into it and watching them flare and crackle.  Presently he
got up, confessed himself tired, and went away to his bed.



§ 3

It rained hard all through the night and until nearly midday, and
then the weather cleared.  In the afternoon the little party pushed
on up the valley towards the mountains they designed to climb, but
they went at a leisurely pace, giving a day and a half to what was
properly only one day's easy walking.  The rain had refreshed
everything in the upper valley and called out a great multitude of
flowers.

The next day was golden and serene.

In the early afternoon they came to a plateau and meadows of
asphodel, and there they sat down to eat the provisions they had
brought with them.  They were only two hours' climb from the
mountain-house in which they were to pass the night, and there was no
need to press on.  Sarnac was lazy; he confessed to a desire for
sleep; in the night he had been feverish and disturbed by dreams of
men entombed in tunnels and killed by poison-gas.  The others were
amused that anyone should want to sleep in the daylight, but Sunray
said she would watch over him.  She found a place for him on the
sward, and Sarnac laid down beside her and went to sleep with his
cheek against her side as suddenly and trustfully as a child goes to
sleep.  She sat up--as a child's nurse might do--enjoining silence on
the others by gestures.

"After this he will be well again," laughed Radiant, and he and
Firefly stole off in one direction, while Willow and Starlight went
off in another to climb a rocky headland near at hand, from which
they thought they might get a very wide and perhaps a very beautiful
view of the lakes below.

For some time Sarnac lay quite still in his sleep and then he began
to twitch and stir.  Sunray bent down attentively with her warm face
close to his.  He was quiet again for a time and then he moved and
muttered, but she could not distinguish any words.  Then he rolled
away from her and threw his arms about and said, "I can't stand it.
I can't endure it.  Nothing can alter it now.  You're unclean and
spoilt."  She took him gently and drew him into a comfortable
attitude again, just as a nurse might do.  "Dear," he whispered, and
in his sleep reached out for her hand....

When the others came back he had just awakened.

He was sitting up with a sleepy expression and Sunray was kneeling
beside him with her hand on his shoulder.  "Wake up!" she said.

He looked at her as if he did not know her and then with puzzled eyes
at Radiant.  "Then there is another life!" he said at last.

"Sarnac!" cried Sunray, shaking him.  "Don't you know me?"

He passed a hand over his face.  "Yes," he said slowly.  "Your name
is Sunray.  I seem to remember.  Sunray....  Not Hetty--  No.  Though
you are very like Hetty.  Queer!  And mine--mine is Sarnac.

"Of course!  I am Sarnac."  He laughed at Willow.  "But I thought I
was Harry Mortimer Smith," he said.  "I did indeed.  A moment ago I
was Henry Mortimer Smith....  Henry Mortimer Smith."

He looked about him.  "Mountains," he said, "sunshine, white
narcissus.  Of course, we walked up here this very morning.  Sunray
splashed me at a waterfall....  I remember it perfectly....  And yet
I was in bed--shot.  I was in bed....  A dream? ... Then I have had a
dream, a whole lifetime, two thousand years ago!"

"What do you mean?" said Sunray.

"A lifetime--childhood, boyhood, manhood.  And death.  He killed me.
Poor rat!--he killed me!"

"A dream?"

"A dream--but a very vivid dream.  The reallest of dreams.  If it was
a dream....  I can answer all your questions now, Sunray.  I have
lived through a whole life in that old world.  I know....

"It is as though that life was still the real one and this only a
dream....  I was in a bed.  Five minutes ago I was in bed.  I was
dying....  The doctor said, 'He is going.'  And I heard the rustle of
my wife coming across the room...."

"Your wife!" cried Sunray.

"Yes--my wife--Milly."

Sunray looked at Willow with raised eyebrows and a helpless
expression.

Sarnac stared at her, dreamily puzzled.  "Milly," he repeated very
faintly.  "She was by the window."

For some moments no one spoke.

Radiant stood with his arm on Firefly's shoulder.

"Tell us about it, Sarnac.  Was it hard to die?"

"I seemed to sink down and down into quiet--and then I woke up here."

"Tell us now, while it is still so real to you."

"Have we not planned to reach the mountain-house before nightfall?"
said Willow, glancing at the sun.

"There is a little guest-house here, within five minutes' walk of
us," said Firefly.

Radiant sat down beside Sarnac.  "Tell us your dream now.  If it
fades out presently or if it is uninteresting, we can go on; but if
it is entertaining, we can hear it out and sleep down here to-night.
It is a very pleasant place here, and there is a loveliness about
those mauve-coloured crags across the gorge, a faint mistiness in
their folds, that I could go on looking at for a week without
impatience.  Tell us your dream, Sarnac."

He shook his friend.  "Wake up, Sarnac!"

Sarnac rubbed his eyes.  "It is so queer a story.  And there will be
so much to explain."

He took thought for a while.

"It will be a long story."

"Naturally, if it is a whole life."

"First let me get some cream and fruit from the guest-house for us
all," said Firefly, "and then let Sarnac tell us his dream.  Five
minutes, Sarnac, and I will be back here."

"I will come with you," said Radiant, hurrying after her.


This that follows is the story Sarnac told.




CHAPTER THE SECOND

THE BEGINNING OF THE DREAM


§ 1

"This dream of mine began," he said, "as all our lives begin, in
fragments, in a number of disconnected impressions.  I remember
myself lying on a sofa, a sofa covered with a curious sort of hard,
shiny material with a red and black pattern on it, and I was
screaming, but I do not know why I screamed.  I discovered my father
standing in the doorway of the room looking at me.  He looked very
dreadful; he was partially undressed in trousers and a flannel shirt
and his fair hair was an unbrushed shock; he was shaving and his chin
was covered with lather.  He was angry because I was screaming.  I
suppose I stopped screaming, but I am not sure.  And I remember
kneeling upon the same hard red and black sofa beside my mother and
looking out of the window--the sofa used to stand with its back to
the window-sill--at the rain falling on the roadway outside.  The
window-sill smelt faintly of paint; soft bad paint that had blistered
in the sun.  It was a violent storm of rain and the road was an
ill-made road of a yellowish sandy clay.  It was covered with muddy
water and the storming rainfall made a multitude of flashing bubbles,
that drove along before the wind and burst and gave place to others.

"'Look at 'em, dearie,' said my mother.  'Like sojers.'

"I think I was still very young when that happened,
but I was not so young that I had not often
seen soldiers with their helmets and bayonets marching by."

"That," said Radiant, "was some time before the Great War, then, and
the Social Collapse."

"Some time before," said Sarnac.  He considered.  "Twenty-one years
before.  This house in which I was born was less than two miles from
the great military camp of the British at Lowcliff in England, and
Lowcliff railway station was only a few hundred yards away.  'Sojers'
were the most conspicuous objects in my world outside my home.  They
were more brightly coloured than other people.  My mother used to
wheel me out for air every day in a thing called a perambulator, and
whenever there were soldiers to be seen she used to say, 'Oh!  PRITTY
sojers!'

"'Sojers' must have been one of my earliest words.  I used to point
my little wool-encased finger--for they wrapped up children
tremendously in those days and I wore even gloves--and I would say:
'Sosher.'

"Let me try and describe to you what sort of home this was of mine
and what manner of people my father and mother were.  Such homes and
houses and places have long since vanished from the world, not many
relics of them have been kept, and though you have probably learnt
most of the facts concerning them, I doubt if you can fully realise
the feel and the reality of the things I found about me.  The name of
the place was Cherry Gardens; it was about two miles from the sea at
Sandbourne, one way lay the town of Cliffstone from which steamboats
crossed the sea to France, and the other way lay Lowcliff and its
rows and rows of ugly red brick barracks and its great
drilling-plain, and behind us inland was a sort of plateau covered
with raw new roads of loose pebbles--you cannot imagine such
roads!--and vegetable gardens and houses new-built or building, and
then a line of hills, not very high but steep and green and bare, the
Downs.  The Downs made a graceful sky-line that bounded my world to
the north as the sapphire line of the sea bounded it to the south,
and they were almost the only purely beautiful things in that world.
All the rest was touched and made painful by human confusion.  When I
was a very little boy I used to wonder what lay behind those Downs,
but I never went up them to see until I was seven or eight years old."

"This was before the days of aeroplanes?" asked Radiant.

"They came into the world when I was eleven or twelve.  I saw the
first that ever crossed the Channel between the mainland of Europe
and England.  That was considered a very wonderful thing indeed.
("It was a wonderful thing," said Sunray.)  I went with a lot of
other boys, and we edged through a crowd that stood and stared at the
quaint old machine; it was like a big canvas grasshopper with
outspread wings; in a field--somewhere beyond Cliffstone.  It was
being guarded, and the people were kept away from it by stakes and a
string.

"I find it hard to describe to you what sort of places Cherry Gardens
and Cliffstone were like--even though we have just visited the ruins
of Domodossola.  Domodossola was a sprawling, aimless town enough,
but these sprawled far more and looked with a far emptier aimlessness
into the face of God.  You see in the thirty or forty years before my
birth there had been a period of comparative prosperity and
productivity in human affairs.  It was not of course in those days
the result of any statesmanship or forethought; it just happened,--as
now and then in the course of a rain-torrent there comes a pool of
level water between the rapids.  But the money and credit system was
working fairly well; there was much trade and intercourse, no
extensive pestilences, exceptionally helpful seasons, and few very
widespread wars.  As a result of this conspiracy of favourable
conditions there was a perceptible rise in the standards of life of
the common people, but for the most part it was discounted by a huge
increase of population.  As our school books say, 'In those days Man
was his own Locust.'  Later in my life I was to hear furtive whispers
of a forbidden topic called Birth Control, but in the days of my
childhood the whole population of the world, with very few
exceptions, was in a state of complete and carefully protected
ignorance about the elementary facts of human life and happiness.
The surroundings of my childhood were dominated by an unforeseen and
uncontrollable proliferation.  Cheap proliferation was my scenery, my
drama, my atmosphere."

"But they had teachers and priests and doctors and rulers to tell
them better," said Willow.

"Not to tell them better," said Sarnac.  "These guides and pilots of
life were wonderful people.  They abounded, and guided no one.  So
far from teaching men and women to control births or avoid diseases
or work generously together, they rather prevented such teaching.
This place called Cherry Gardens had mostly come into existence in
the fifty years before my birth.  It had grown from a minute hamlet
into what we used to call an 'urban district.'  In that old world in
which there was neither freedom nor direction, the land was divided
up into patches of all sorts and sizes and owned by people who did
what they liked with it, subject to a few vexatious and unhelpful
restrictions.  And in Cherry Gardens, a sort of men called
speculative builders bought pieces of land, often quite unsuitable
land, and built houses for the swarming increase of population that
had otherwise nowhere to go.  There was no plan about this building.
One speculative builder built here and another there, and each built
as cheaply as possible and sold or let what he had built for as much
as possible.  Some of the houses they built in rows and some stood
detached each with a little patch of private garden--garden they
called it, though it was either a muddle or a waste--fenced in to
keep people out."

"Why did they keep people out?"

"They liked to keep people out.  It was a satisfaction for them.
They were not secret gardens.  People might look over the fence if
they chose.  And each house had its own kitchen where food was
cooked--there was no public eating-place in Cherry Gardens--and each,
its separate store of household gear.  In most houses there was a man
who went out to work and earn a living--they didn't so much live in
those days as earn a living--and came home to eat and sleep, and
there was a woman, his wife, who did all the services, food and
cleaning and everything, and also she bore children, a lot of
unpremeditated children--because she didn't know any better.  She was
too busy to look after them well, and many of them died.  Most days
she cooked a dinner.  She cooked it....  It was cooking!"

Sarnac paused--his brows knit.  "Cooking!  Well, well.  That's over,
anyhow," he said.

Radiant laughed cheerfully.

"Almost everyone suffered from indigestion.  The newspapers were full
of advertisements of cures," said Sarnac, still darkly retrospective.

"I've never thought of that aspect of life in the old world," said
Sunray.

"It was--fundamental," said Sarnac.  "It was a world, in every way,
out of health.

"Every morning, except on the Sunday, after the man had gone off to
his day's toil and the children had been got up and dressed and those
who were old enough sent off to school, the woman of the house tidied
up a bit and then came the question of getting in food.  For this
private cooking of hers.  Every day except Sunday a number of men
with little pony carts or with barrows they pushed in front of them,
bearing meat and fish and vegetables and fruit, all of it exposed to
the weather and any dirt that might be blowing about, came bawling
along the roads of Cherry Gardens, shouting the sort of food they
were selling.  My memory goes back to that red and black sofa by the
front window and I am a child once again.  There was a particularly
splendid fish hawker.  What a voice he had!  I used to try to
reproduce his splendid noises in my piping childish cries:
'Mackroo-E-y'are Macroo!  Fine Macroo!  Thee a Sheen.  _Macroo_!'

"The housewives would come out from their domestic mysteries to buy
or haggle and, as the saying went, 'pass the time of day' with their
neighbours.  But everything they wanted was not to be got from the
hawkers, and that was where my father came in.  He kept a little
shop.  He was what was called a greengrocer; he sold fruits and
vegetables, such poor fruits and vegetables as men had then learnt to
grow--and also he sold coals and paraffin (which people burnt in
their lamps) and chocolate and ginger-beer and other things that were
necessary to the barbaric housekeeping of the time.  He also sold
cut-flowers and flowers in pots, and seeds and sticks and string and
weed-killer for the little gardens.  His shop stood in a row with a
lot of other shops; the row was like a row of the ordinary houses
with the lower rooms taken out and replaced by the shop, and he 'made
his living' and ours by buying his goods as cheaply as he could and
getting as much as he could for them.  It was a very poor living
because there were several other able-bodied men in Cherry Gardens
who were also greengrocers, and if he took too much profit then his
customers would go away and buy from these competitors and he would
get no profit at all.

"I and my brother and sisters--for my mother had been unable to avoid
having six babies and four of us were alive--lived by and in and
round about this shop.  In the summer we were chiefly out of doors or
in the room above the shop; but in the cold weather it cost too much
trouble and money to have a fire in that room--all Cherry Gardens was
heated by open coal fires--and we went down into a dark underground
kitchen where my mother, poor dear! cooked according to her lights."

"You were troglodytes!" said Willow.

"Practically.  We always ate in that downstairs room.  In the summer
we were sunburnt and ruddy, but in the winter, because of
this--inhumation, we became white and rather thin.  I had an elder
brother who was monstrous in my childish memory; he was twelve years
older than I; and I had two sisters, Fanny and Prudence.  My elder
brother Ernest went out to work, and then he went away to London and
I saw very little of him until I too went to London.  I was the
youngest of the lot; and when I was nine years old, my father, taking
courage, turned my mother's perambulator into a little push-cart for
delivering sacks of coals and suchlike goods.

"Fanny, my elder sister, was a very pretty girl, with a white face
from which her brown hair went back in graceful, natural waves and
curls, and she had very dark blue eyes.  Prudence was also white but
of a duller whiteness, and her eyes were grey.  She would tease me
and interfere with me, but Fanny was either negligent or gracefully
kind to me and I adored her.  I do not, strangely enough, remember my
mother's appearance at all distinctly, though she was, of course, the
dominant fact of my childish life.  She was too familiar, I suppose,
for the sort of attention that leaves a picture on the mind.

"I learnt to speak from my family and chiefly from my mother.  None
of us spoke well; our common idioms were poor and bad, we
mispronounced many words, and long words we avoided as something
dangerous and pretentious.  I had very few toys: a tin railway-engine
I remember, some metal soldiers, and an insufficient supply of wooden
building-bricks.  There was no special place for me to play, and if I
laid out my toys on the living-room table, a meal was sure to descend
and sweep them away.  I remember a great longing to play with the
things in the shop, and especially with the bundles of firewood and
some fire-kindlers that were most seductively shaped like wheels, but
my father discouraged such ambitions.  He did not like to have me
about the shop until I was old enough to help, and the indoor part of
most of my days was spent in the room above it or in the underground
room below it.  After the shop was closed it became a very cold,
cavernous, dark place to a little boy's imagination; there were
dreadful shadows in which terrible things might lurk, and even
holding fast to my mother's hand on my way to bed, I was filled with
fear to traverse it.  It had always a faint, unpleasant smell, a
smell of decaying vegetation varying with the particular fruit or
vegetable that was most affected, and a constant element of paraffin.
But on Sundays when it was closed all day the shop was different, no
longer darkly threatening but very, very still.  I would be taken
through it on my way to church or Sunday school.  (Yes--I will tell
you about church and Sunday school in a minute.)  When I saw my
mother lying dead--she died when I was close upon sixteen--I was
instantly reminded of the Sunday shop....

"Such, my dear Sunray, was the home in which I found myself.  I
seemed to have been there since my beginning.  It was the deepest
dream I have ever had.  I had forgotten even you."



§ 2

"And how was this casually begotten infant prepared for the business
of life?" asked Radiant.  "Was he sent away to a Garden?"

"There were no Children's Gardens such as we know them, in that
world," said Sarnac.  "There was a place of assembly called an
elementary school.  Thither I was taken, twice daily, by my sister
Prudence, after I was six years old.

"And here again I find it hard to convey to you what the reality was
like.  Our histories tell you of the beginning of general education
in that distant time and of the bitter jealousy felt by the old
priesthoods and privileged people for the new sort of teachers, but
they give you no real picture of the ill-equipped and understaffed
schoolhouses and of the gallant work of the underpaid and ill-trained
men and women who did the first rough popular teaching.  There was in
particular a gaunt dark man with a cough who took the older boys, and
a little freckled woman of thirty or so who fought with the lower
children, and, I see now, they were holy saints.  His name I forget,
but the little woman was called Miss Merrick.  They had to handle
enormous classes, and they did most of their teaching by voice and
gesture and chalk upon a blackboard.  Their equipment was miserable.
The only materials of which there was enough to go round were a stock
of dirty reading-books, Bibles, hymn-books, and a lot of slabs of
slate in frames on which we wrote with slate pencils to economise
paper.  Drawing materials we had practically none; most of us never
learnt to draw.  Yes.  Lots of sane adults in that old world never
learnt to draw even a box.  There was nothing to count with in that
school and no geometrical models.  There were hardly any pictures
except a shiny one of Queen Victoria and a sheet of animals, and
there were very yellow wall-maps of Europe and Asia twenty years out
of date.  We learnt the elements of mathematics by recitation.  We
used to stand in rows, chanting a wonderful chant called our Tables:--

  "'_Twi_-swun two.
  _Twi_-stewer four.
  _Twi_-shee'r six.
  _Twi_-sfour' rate.'


"We used to sing--in unison--religious hymns for the most part.  The
school had a second-hand piano to guide our howlings.  There had been
a great fuss in Cliffstone and Cherry Gardens when this piano was
bought.  They called it a luxury, and pampering the working classes."

"Pampering the working classes!" Firefly repeated.  "I suppose it's
all right.  But I'm rather at sea."

"I can't explain everything," said Sarnac.  "The fact remains that
England grudged its own children the shabbiest education, and so for
the matter of fact did every other country.  They saw things
differently in those days.  They were still in the competitive cave.
America, which was a much richer country than England, as wealth went
then, had if possible meaner and shabbier schools for her common
people....  My dear! it was so.  I'm telling you a story, not
explaining the universe....  And naturally, in spite of the strenuous
efforts of such valiant souls as Miss Merrick, we children learnt
little and we learnt it very badly.  Most of my memories of school
are memories of boredom.  We sat on wooden forms at long, worn,
wooden desks, rows and rows of us--I can see again all the little
heads in front of me--and far away was Miss Merrick with a pointer
trying to interest us in the Rivers of England:--

  "Ty.  Wear.  Teasumber."


"Is that what they used to call swearing?" asked Willow.

"No.  Only Jogriphy.  And History was:--

  "Wi-yum the Conqueror.  Tessisstysiss.
  Wi-yum Ruefiss.  Ten eighty-seven."


"What did it mean?"

"To us children?  Very much what it means to you--gibberish.  The
hours, those interminable hours of childhood in school!  How they
dragged!  Did I say I lived a life in my dream?  In school I lived
eternities.  Naturally we sought such amusement as was possible.  One
thing was to give your next-door neighbour a pinch or a punch and
say, 'Pass it on.'  And we played furtive games with marbles.  It is
rather amusing to recall that I learnt to count, to add and subtract
and so forth, by playing marbles in despite of discipline."

"But was that the best your Miss Merrick and your saint with the
cough could do?" asked Radiant.

"Oh! they couldn't help themselves.  They were in a machine, and
there were periodic Inspectors and examinations to see that they kept
in it."

"But," said Sunray, "that Incantation about 'Wi-yum the Conqueror'
and the rest of it.  It meant something?  At the back of it, lost to
sight perhaps, there was some rational or semi-rational idea?"

"Perhaps," reflected Sarnac.  "But I never detected it."

"They called it history," said Firefly helpfully.

"They did," Sarnac admitted.  "Yes, I think they were trying to
interest the children of the land in the doings of the Kings and
Queens of England, probably as dull a string of monarchs as the world
has ever seen.  If they rose to interest at times it was through a
certain violence; there was one delightful Henry VIII with such a
craving for love and such a tender conscience about the sanctity of
marriage that he always murdered one wife before he took another.
And there was one Alfred who burnt some cakes--I never knew why.  In
some way it embarrassed the Danes, his enemies."

"But was that all the history they taught you?" cried Sunray.

"Queen Elizabeth of England wore a ruff and James the First of
England and Scotland kissed his men favourites."

"But history!"

Sarnac laughed.  "It is odd.  I see that--now that I am awake again.
But indeed that was all they taught us."

"Did they tell you nothing of the beginnings of life and the ends of
life, of its endless delights and possibilities?"

Sarnac shook his head.

"Not at school," said Starlight, who evidently knew her books; "they
did that at church.  Sarnac forgets the churches.  It was, you must
remember, an age of intense religious activity.  There were places of
worship everywhere.  One whole day in every seven was given up to the
Destinies of Man and the study of God's Purpose.  The worker ceased
from his toil.  From end to end of the land the air was full of the
sound of church bells and of congregations singing.  Wasn't there a
certain beauty in that, Sarnac?"

Sarnac reflected and smiled.  "It wasn't quite like that," he said.
"Our histories, in that matter, need a little revision."

"But one sees the churches and chapels in the old photographs and
cinema pictures.  And we still have many of their cathedrals.  And
some of those are quite beautiful."

"And they have all had to be shored up and underpinned and tied
together with steel," said Sunray, "because they were either so
carelessly or so faithlessly built.  And anyhow, these were not built
in Sarnac's time."

"Mortimer Smith's time," Sarnac corrected.

"They were built hundreds of years earlier than that."



§ 3

"You must not judge the religion of an age by its temples and
churches," said Sarnac.  "An unhealthy body may have many things in
it that it cannot clear away, and the weaker it is the less it can
prevent abnormal and unserviceable growths....  Which sometimes may
be in themselves quite bright and beautiful growths.

"But let me describe to you the religious life of my home and
upbringing.  There was a sort of State Church in England, but it had
lost most of its official standing in regard to the community as a
whole; it had two buildings in Cherry Gardens--one an old one dating
from the hamlet days with a square tower and rather small as churches
went, and the other new and spacious with a spire.  In addition there
were the chapels of two other Christian communities, the
Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists, and also one
belonging to the old Roman Catholic communion.  Each professed to
present the only true form of Christianity and each maintained a
minister, except the larger Church of England place, which had two,
the vicar and the curate.  You might suppose that, like the museums
of history and the Temples of Vision we set before our young people,
these places would display in the most moving and beautiful forms
possible the history of our race and the great adventure of life in
which we are all engaged, they would remind us of our brotherhood and
lift us out of selfish thoughts....  But let me tell you how I saw
it:--

"I don't remember my first religious instruction.  Very early I must
have learnt to say a rhymed prayer to--

  "'Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
  Look on me, a little child.'

And also another prayer about 'Trespassing' which I thought referred
to going into fields or woods where there was no public footpath, and
which began with the entirely incomprehensible words, 'Our Father
Charting Heaven, Haloed B thy Name.' Also one asked for one's 'daily
bread' and that God's Kingdom should come.  I learnt these two
prayers from my mother at an incredibly early age, and said them
every night and sometimes in the morning.  She held these words in
far too great reverence to explain them, and when I wanted to ask for
my 'daily bread and butter,' she scolded me bitterly.  I also wanted
to ask what would happen to good Queen Victoria when God's Kingdom
came, but I never mustered courage to ask my mother that.  I had a
curious idea that there could be a marriage but that nobody had
thought of that solution.  This must have been very early in my life,
because Victoria the Good died when I was five, during the course of
a long, far-away, and now almost-forgotten struggle called the Boer
War.

"These infantile perplexities deepened and then gave way to a kind of
self-protective apathy when I was old enough to go to church and
Sunday school.

"Sunday morning was by far the most strenuous part of all the week
for my mother.  We had all had a sort of bath overnight in the
underground kitchen, except my father and mother, who I don't think
ever washed all over--I don't know for certain--and on Sunday morning
we rose rather later than usual and put on our 'clean things' and our
best clothes.  (Everybody in those days wore a frightful lot of
clothes.  You see, they were all so unhealthy they could not stand
the least exposure to wet or cold.)  Breakfast was a hurried and
undistinguished meal on the way to greater things.  Then we had to
sit about, keeping out of harm's way, avoiding all crumpling or dirt,
and pretending to be interested in one of the ten or twelve books our
home possessed, until church time.  Mother prepared the Sunday meal,
almost always a joint of meat in a baking-dish which my elder sister
took in to the baker's next door but one to be cooked while we
worshipped.  Father rose later than anyone and appeared strangely
transformed in a collar, dickey and cuffs and a black coat and his
hair smoothed down and parted.  Usually some unforeseen delay arose;
one of my sisters had a hole in her stocking, or my boots wouldn't
button and nobody could find the buttonhook, or a prayer-book was
mislaid.  This engendered an atmosphere of flurry.  There were
anxious moments when the church bell ceased to ring and began a
monotonous 'tolling-in.'

"'Oh! we shall be late _again_!' said my mother.  'We shall be late
_again_.'

"'I'll go on with Prue,' my father would say.

"'Me too!' said Fanny.

"'Not till you've found that button'ook, Miss Huzzy,' my mother would
cry.  'For well I know you've 'ad it.'

"Fanny would shrug her shoulders.

"'Why 'e carn't 'ave lace-up shoes to 'is feet like any other kid, I
carn't understand,' my father would remark unhelpfully.

"My mother, ashen white with flurry, would wince and say, 'Lace-up
shoes at 'is age!  Let alone that 'e'd break the laces.'

"'What's that on the chiffoneer?' Fanny would ask abruptly.

"'Ah!  Naturally you know.'

"'Naturally I use my eyes.'

"'Tcha!  Got your answer ready!  Oh, you _wicked_ girl!'

"Fanny would shrug her shoulders again and stare out of the window.
There was more trouble afoot than a mislaid buttonhook between her
and my mother.  Overnight 'Miss Huzzy' had been abroad long after
twilight, a terrible thing from a mother's point of view, as I will
make plain to you later.

"My mother, breathing hard, would button my boots in a punitive
manner and then off we would go, Prue hanging on to father ahead,
Fanny a little apart and scornful, and I trying to wriggle my little
white-cotton-gloved hand out of my mother's earnest grip.

"We had what was called a 'sitting' at church, a long seat with some
hassocks and a kind of little praying-ledge at the back of the seat
in front.  We filed into our sitting and knelt and rose up, and were
ready for the function known as morning service."



§ 4

"And this service again was a strange thing.  We read about these
churches and their services in our histories and we simplify and
idealise the picture; we take everything in the account, as we used
to say in that old world, at its face value.  We think that the
people understood and believed completely the curious creeds of those
old-world religions; that they worshipped with a simple ardour; that
they had in their hearts a secret system of comforts and illusions
which some of us even now try to recover.  But life is always more
complicated than any account or representation of it can be.  The
human mind in those days was always complicating and overlaying its
ideas, forgetting primary in secondary considerations, substituting
repetition and habit for purposive acts, and forgetting and losing
its initial intentions.  Life has grown simpler for men as the ages
have passed because it has grown clearer.  We were more complicated
in our lives then because we were more confused.  And so we sat in
our pews on Sunday, in a state of conforming inattention, not really
thinking out what we were doing, feeling rather than knowing
significances and with our thoughts wandering like water from a leaky
vessel.  We watched the people about us furtively and minutely and we
were acutely aware that they watched us.  We stood up, we half knelt,
we sat, as the ritual of the service required us to do.  I can still
recall quite vividly the long complex rustle of the congregation as
it sat down or rose up in straggling unison.

"This morning service was a mixture of prayers and recitations by the
priests--vicar and curate we called them--and responses by the
congregation, chants, rhymed hymns, the reading of passages from the
Hebrew-Christian Bible, and at last a discourse.  Except for this
discourse all the service followed a prescribed course set out in a
prayer-book.  We hopped from one page of the prayer-book to another,
and 'finding your place' was a terrible mental exercise for a small
boy with a sedulous mother on one side and Prue on the other.

"The service began lugubriously and generally it was lugubrious.  We
were all miserable sinners, there was no health in us; we expressed
our mild surprise that our Deity did not resort to violent measures
against us.  There was a long part called the Litany in which the
priest repeated with considerable gusto every possible human
misfortune, war, pestilence, famine, and so on, and the congregation
interjected at intervals, 'Good Lord deliver us!' although you might
have thought that these were things within the purview of our
international and health and food administrators rather than matters
for the Supreme Being.  Then the officiating priest went on to a
series of prayers for the Queen, the rulers of the State, heretics,
unfortunate people, travellers, and the harvest, all of which I
concluded were being dangerously neglected by Divine Providence, and
the congregation reinforced the priest's efforts by salvos of 'We
beseech Thee to hear us, Good Lord.'  The hymns were of very variable
quality, but the greater part were effusive praises of our Maker,
with frequent false rhymes and bad quantities.  We thanked Heaven for
our 'blessings,' and that without a thought of irony.  Yet you would
imagine that a Deity of Infinite Power might easily have excused our
gratitude for the precarious little coal and greengrocery business in
Cherry Gardens and all my mother's toil and anxieties and my father's
worries.

"The general effect of this service beneath its surface adulation of
the worshipped God, was to blame Him thoroughly and completely for
every human misfortune and to deny the responsibility of mankind for
its current muddle and wretchedness.  Throughout the land and
throughout most of the world, Sunday after Sunday, by chant and hymn
and prayer and gesture, it was being dinned into the minds of young
people, whenever for a moment the service broke through the surface
of their protective instinctive inattention, that mankind was
worthless and hopeless, the helpless plaything of a moody, impulsive,
vain, and irresistible Being.  This rain of suggestion came between
their minds and the Sun of Life; it hid the Wonderful from them; it
robbed them of access to the Spirit of Courage.  But so alien was
this doctrine of abasement from the heart of man, that for the most
part the congregation sat or stood or knelt in rows in its pews
repeating responses and singing mechanically, with its minds
distracted to a thousand distant more congenial things, watching the
deportment of its neighbours, scheming about business or pleasure,
wandering in reverie.

"There would come at times into this service, sometimes but not
always, parts of another service, the Communion Service.  This was
the reduced remainder of that Catholic Mass of which we have all
learnt in our histories.  As you know, the world of Christianity was
still struggling, nineteen hundred years after Christianity had
begun, to get rid of the obsession of a mystical blood sacrifice, to
forget a traditional killing of a God-man, that was as old as
agriculture and the first beginnings of human settlement.  The
English State Church was so much a thing of compromise and tradition
that in the two churches it had in Cherry Gardens the teaching upon
this issue was diametrically opposed; one, the new and showy one, St.
Jude's, was devoted to an exaggeration of the importance of the
Communion, called it the Mass, called the table on which it was
celebrated the Altar, called the Rev. Mr. Snapes the Priest, and
generally emphasised the ancient pagan interpretation, while the
other, the little old church of St. Osyth, called its priest a
Minister, its altar the Lord's Table, and the Communion the Lord's
Supper, denied all its mystical importance, and made it merely a
memorial of the life and death of the Master.  These age-long
controversies between the immemorial temple worship of our race and
the new life of intellectual and spiritual freedom that had then been
dawning in the world for three or four centuries were far above my
poor little head as I fretted and 'behaved myself' in our sitting.
To my youthful mind the Communion Service meant nothing more than a
long addition to the normal tediums of worship.  In those days I had
a pathetic belief in the magic of prayer, and oblivious of the
unflattering implications of my request I would whisper throughout
the opening prayers and recitations of the morning: 'Pray God there
won't be a Communion Service.  Pray God there won't be a Communion
Service.'

"Then would come the sermon, the original composition of the Rev. Mr.
Snapes, and the only thing in the whole service that was not set and
prescribed and that had not been repeated a thousand times before.

"Mr. Snapes was a youngish pinkish man with pinkish golden hair and a
clean-shaven face; he had small chubby features like a cluster of
_champignons_, an expression of beatific self-satisfaction, and a
plump voice.  He had a way of throwing back the ample white sleeve of
his surplice when he turned the pages of his manuscript, a sort of
upthrow of the posed white hand, that aroused in me one of the
inexplicable detestations of childhood.  I used to hate this gesture,
watch for its coming and squirm when it came.

"The sermons were so much above my head that I cannot now tell what
any of them were about.  He would talk of things like the 'Comfort of
the Blessed Eucharist' and the 'Tradition of the Fathers of the
Church.' He would discourse too of what he called the Feasts of the
Church, though a collection plate was the nearest approach to
feasting we saw.  He made much of Advent and Epiphany and
Whitsuntide, and he had a common form of transition to modern
considerations, 'And we too, dear Brethren, in these latter days have
our Advents and our Epiphanies.'  Then he would pass to King Edward's
proposed visit to Lowcliffe or to the recent dispute about the Bishop
of Natal or the Bishop of Zanzibar.  You cannot imagine how remote it
was from anything of moment in our normal lives.

"And then suddenly, when a small boy was losing all hope of this
smooth voice ever ceasing, came a little pause and then the blessed
words of release: 'And now to God the Father, God the Son----'

"It was over!  There was a stir throughout the church.  We roused
ourselves, we stood up.  Then we knelt for a brief moment of apparent
prayer and then we scrabbled for hats, coats, and umbrellas, and so
out into the open air, a great pattering of feet upon the pavement,
dispersing this way and that, stiff greetings of acquaintances, Prue
to the baker's for the Sunday dinner and the rest of us straight home.

"Usually there were delightful brown potatoes under the Sunday joint
and perhaps there would be a fruit pie also.  But in the spring came
rhubarb, which I hated.  It was held to be peculiarly good for me,
and I was always compelled to eat exceptionally large helpings of
rhubarb tart.

"In the afternoon there was Sunday school or else 'Children's
Service,' and, relieved of the presence of our parents, we three
children went to the school-house or to the church again to receive
instruction in the peculiarities of our faith.  In the Sunday school
untrained and unqualified people whom we knew in the week-days as
shop assistants and an auctioneer's clerk and an old hairy deaf
gentleman named Spendilow, collected us in classes and discoursed to
us on the ambiguous lives and doings of King David of Israel and of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the misbehaviour of Queen Jezebel and
the like topics.  And we sang easy hymns in unison.  At times our
teachers spoke of the Master of Mankind, but they spoke without
understanding; they spoke of him as a sort of trickster who worked
miracles and achieved jail delivery from the tomb.  And so had
'saved' us--in spite of the manifest fact that we were anything but
saved.  The teaching of the Master was, you know, buried under these
tales of Resurrection and Miracles for two thousand years.  He was a
light shining in the darkness and the darkness knew it not.  And of
the great past of life, of the races of men and their slow growth in
knowledge, of fears and dark superstitions and the dawning victories
of truth, of the conquest and sublimation of human passions through
the ages, of the divinity of research and discovery, of the latent
splendour of our bodies and senses, and the present dangers and
possibilities amidst which the continually more crowded masses of our
race were then blundering so tragically and yet with such bright
gleams of hope and promise, we heard no talk at all.  We were given
no intimation that there was so much as a human community with a
common soul and an ultimate common destiny.  It would have been
scandalous and terrifying to those Sunday-school teachers to have
heard any such things spoken about in Sunday school.

"And mind you," said Sarnac, "there was no better preparation for
life in all the world then than the sort of thing I was getting.  The
older church of St. Osyth was in the hands of the Rev. Thomas
Benderton, who dispersed a dwindling congregation by bellowing
sermons full of the threat of hell.  He had scared my mother to the
church of St. Jude by his frequent mention of the devil, and the
chief topic of his discourse was the sin of idolatry; he treated it
always with especial reference to the robes adopted by Mr. Snapes
when he celebrated Holy Communion and to something obscure that he
did with small quantities of bread and wine upon his Communion table.

"Of what the Congregationalists and the Primitive Methodists did and
taught in their places of resort, their chapels and Sunday schools, I
do not know very exactly, because my mother would have been filled
with a passion of religious terror if ever I had gone near those
assemblies.  But I know that their procedure was only a plainer
version of our church experiences with still less of the Mass and
still more of the devil.  The Primitive Methodists, I know, laid
their chief stress upon the belief that the greater portion of
mankind, when once they had done with the privations and miseries of
this life, would be tortured exquisitely for ever and ever in hell.
I got this very clearly because a Primitive Methodist boy a little
older than myself conveyed his anxieties to me one day when we had
gone for a walk into Cliffstone.

"He was a bent sort of boy with a sniff and he wore a long white
woollen comforter; there hasn't been such a figure in the world now
for hundreds of years.  We walked along the promenade that followed
the cliff edge, by the bandstand and by the people lounging in
deck-chairs.  There were swarms of people in their queer holiday
clothes, and behind, rows of the pallid grey houses in which they
lodged.  And my companion bore his testimony.  'Mr. Molesly 'e says
that the Day of Judgment might come any minute--come in fire and
glory before ever we get to the end of these Leas.  And all them
people'd be tried....'

"'Jest as they are?'

"'Jest as they are.  That woman there with the dog and that fat man
asleep in 'is chair and--the policeman.'

"He paused, a little astonished at the Hebraic daring of his
thoughts.  'The policeman,' he repeated.  'They'd be weighed and
found wanting, and devils would come and torture them.  Torture that
policeman.  Burn him and cut him about.  And everybody.  Horrible,
horrible torture....'

"I had never heard the doctrines of Christianity applied with such
particularity before.  I was dismayed.

"'I sh'd 'ide,' I said.

"''_E_'d see you.  '_E_'d see you and tell the devils,' said my
little friend.  ''_E_ sees the wicked thoughts in us now....'"

"But did people really believe such stuff as that?" cried Sunray.

"As far as they believed anything," said Sarnac.  "I admit it was
frightful, but so it was.  Do you realise what cramped, distorted
minds grew up under such teaching in our under-nourished, infected
bodies?"

"Few people could have really believed so grotesque a fairy-tale as
hell," said Radiant.

"More people believed than you would think," said Sarnac.  "Few
people, of course, held it actively for long--or they would have gone
mad--but it was in the background of a lot of minds.  And the others?
The effect of this false story about the world upon the majority of
minds was a sort of passive rejection.  They did not deny, but they
refused to incorporate the idea with the rest of their thoughts.  A
kind of dead place, a scar, was made just where there ought to have
been a sense of human destiny, a vision of life beyond the immediate
individual life ...

"I find it hard to express the state of mind into which one grew.
The minds of the young had been outraged by these teachings; they
were no longer capable of complete mental growth, a possibility had
been destroyed.  Perhaps we never did really take into ourselves and
believe that grotesque fairy-tale, as you call it, about hell but,
because of what it had done to our minds, we grew up without a living
faith and without a purpose.  The nucleus of our religious being was
this suppressed fear of hell.  Few of us ever had it out fairly into
the light of day.  It was considered to be bad taste to speak of any
such things, or indeed of any of the primaries of life, either by way
of belief or denial.  You might allude circuitously.  Or joke.  Most
of the graver advances in life were made under a mask of
facetiousness.

"Mentally that world in the days of Mortimer Smith was a world
astray.  It was astray like a lost dog and with no idea of direction.
It is true that the men of that time were very like the men of this
time--in their possibilities--but they were unhealthy in mind as well
as body, they were adrift and incoherent.  Walking as we do in the
light, and by comparison simply and directly, their confusion, the
tortuous perplexity of their thoughts and conduct, is almost
inconceivable to us.  There is no sort of mental existence left in
our world now, to which it can be compared."



§ 5

"I think I mentioned the line of hills, the Downs that bounded the
world of my upbringing to the north.  What lay beyond them was a
matter for wonder and speculation to me long before I was able to
clamber to their crests.  In summer time the sun set behind them to
the north-west, often in a glow of gold and splendour, and I remember
that among my fancies was a belief that the Day of Judgment was over
there and that Celestial City to which Mr. Snapes would some day lead
us--in procession, of course, and with a banner.

"My first ascent of this childhood's boundary must have occurred when
I was eight or nine.  I do not remember with whom I went or any other
particulars, but I have a very acute memory of my disappointment at
looking down a long, very gentle slope and seeing nothing but fields
and hedges and groups of large sheep feeding.  What I had expected to
find I cannot now remember.  I seem to have noted only the foreground
then, and it must have been after many such excursions that I began
to realise the variegated spaciousness of the country to the north.
The view indeed went very far; on a clear day we saw blue hills
nearly twenty miles away; there were woodlands and parklands, brown
ridges of plough-land that became golden ridges of corn in summer
time, village churches amidst clustering greenery, and the gleaming
of ponds and lakes.  Southward the horizon lifted as the Downs were
ascended and the breadth of the sea-belt increased.  It was my father
who drew my attention to that, on the first occasion of our crossing
the Downs together.

"'Go as 'igh as you like, 'Arry,' he said, 'and the sea goes up as
'igh.  There it is, you see--level with us and we ever so 'igh above
Cherry Gardens.  And yet it don't _drown'd_ Cherry Gardens!  And why
don't it drown'd Cherry Gardens seeing that it might?  Tell me that,
'Arry.'

"I couldn't.

"'Providence,' said my father triumphantly.  'Providence does it.
'Olds back the sea, Thus Far.  And over there, see 'ow plain it is!
is France.'

"I saw France and it was exceptionally plain.

"'Sometimes you see France and sometimes you don't,' said my father.
'There's a lesson in that too, my boy, for those who care to take it.'

"It had always been the custom of my father to go out after tea on
Sundays, summer and winter alike, and walk right over the Downs to
Chessing Hanger, six miles and more away.  He went, I knew, to see my
Uncle John, Uncle John Julip, my mother's brother, who was gardener
to Lord Bramble of Chessing Hanger Park.  But it was only when he
began to take me with him that I realised that these walks had any
other motive than fraternal (in law) affection and the natural desire
of a pent-up shopkeeper for exercise.  But from the first journey on
I knew that the clue to these expeditions lay in the burthens with
which we returned to Cherry Gardens.  Always there was supper in the
cosy little gardener's cottage, and always as we departed we picked
up an unobtrusive load of flowers, fruit or vegetables, celery, peas,
aubergines, mushrooms or what-not, and returned through the dusk or
moonlight or darkness or drizzle as the season and the weather might
determine to the little shop.  And sometimes my father would be
silent or whistle softly and sometimes he would improve our journey
with a discourse on the wonders of nature, the beauty of goodness,
and the beneficence of Providence to man.

"He talked of the moon one moonlight night.  'Look at it, 'Arry,' he
said--'a dead world.  Like a skull it is, up there, stripped of its
soul which is its flesh so to speak and all its trees, which, if you
take me, were its 'air and its whiskers--stripped and dead for ever
and ever.  Dry as a bone.  And everyone who lived there gone too.
Dust and ashes and gone.'

"'Where they gone, farver?' I would ask.

"'Gorn to their judgment,' he would explain with gusto.  'Kings and
greengroshers, all the lot of 'em, tried and made sheep and goats of,
and gone to their bliss or their sufferings, 'Arry.  According to
their iniquities.  Weighed and found wanting.'

"Long pause.

"'It's a pity,' he said.

"'What is, farver?'

"'Pity it's over.  It 'ud be something to look at, them running about
up there.  Friendly-like it 'ud be.  But that's questioning the ways
of Providence, that is.  I suppose we'd be always staring up and
falling over things....  You never see a thing in this world, 'Arry,
that you think isn't right but what when you come to think it out it
isn't wiser than you knew.  Providence is as deep as E is I and you
can't get be'ind 'im.  And don't go banging them pears against your
side, my boy; they'm Wi'yums, and they won't like it.'

"About the curious habits of animals and the ways and migrations of
birds my father would also talk very freely.

"'Me and you, 'Arry, we walk by the light of reason.  We 'ave
reasonable minds given us to do it with.  But animals and birds and
worms and things, they live by Instink; they jus' feel they 'ave to
do this or that and they do it.  It's Instink keeps the whale in the
sea and the bird in the air; but we go where our legs carry us as
reason 'as directed.  You can't ask an animal Why did you do this? or
Why did you do that?--you just 'it it; but a man you ask and 'e 'as
to answer, being a reasonable creature.  That's why we 'as jails and
punishment and are answerable for our sins, 'Arry.  Every sin we 'as
to answer for, great or small.  But an animal don't 'ave to answer.
It's innocent.  You 'it it or else you leave it be....'

"My father thought for a time.  'Except for dogs and some _old_
cats,' he said.  He mused among his memories for a time.  'I've known
some _sinful_ cats, 'Arry,' he said.

"He would enlarge on the wonders of instinct.

"He would explain how swallows and starlings and storks and such-like
birds were driven by instinct thousands of miles, getting drowned on
the way and dashed to pieces against lighthouses.  'Else they'd
freeze and starve where they was, 'Arry,' said my father.  And every
bird knew by instinct what sort of nest it had to build, no one ever
showing it or telling it.  Kangaroos carried their young in pouches
by instinct, but man being a reasonable creature made perambulators.
Chickens ran about by instinct directly they were born; not like
human children, who had to be carried and taken care of until reason
came.  And jolly lucky that was for the chicken, 'For 'ow a 'en would
carry them,' said my father, 'I carn't imagine.'

"I remember that I put my father into a difficulty by asking him why
Providence had not given birds an instinct against beating themselves
against lighthouses and moths against the gas-jet and the
candle-flame.  For in the room over the shop on a summer's night it
was quite unpleasant to read a book because of the disabled flies and
moths that fell scorched upon its pages.  'It's to teach 'em some
lesson,' said my father at last.  'But what it's to teach them,
'Arry, I don't rightly know.'

"And sometimes he would talk, with illustrative stories, of
ill-gotten gold never staying with the getter, and sometimes he would
talk of murders--for there were still many murders in the world--and
how they always came out, 'hide them as you may.' And always he was
ready to point out the goodness and wisdom, the cleverness,
forethought, ingenuity, and kindliness of Providence in the most
earnest and flattering manner.

"With such high discourse did we enliven our long trudges between
Cherry Gardens and Chessing Hanger, and my father's tone was always
so exalted that with a real shock I presently came to realise that
every Sunday evening we were in plain English stealing and receiving
stolen produce from Lord Bramble's gardens.  Indeed, I cannot imagine
how we should have got along without that weekly raid.  Our little
home at Cherry Gardens was largely supported by my father's share in
the profits of these transactions.  When the produce was too good and
costly for Cherry Gardens' needs, he would take it down to Cliffstone
and sell it to a friend there who had a fashionable trade."

Sarnac paused.

"Go on," said Radiant.  "You are making us believe in your story.  It
sounds more and more as if you had been there.  It is so
circumstantial.  Who was this Lord Bramble?  I have always been
curious about Lords."



§ 6

"Let me tell my story in my own way," said Sarnac.  "If I answer
questions I shall get lost.  You are all ready to ask a hundred
questions already about things I have mentioned and points familiar
to me but incomprehensible to you because our world has forgotten
them, and if I weaken towards you you will trail me away and away
further and further from my father and my Uncle Julip.  We shall just
talk about manners and customs and about philosophy and history.  I
want to tell my story."

"Go on with your story," said Sunray.

"This Uncle John Julip of mine, although he was my mother's brother,
was a cynical, opinionated man.  He was very short and fatter than
was usual among gardeners.  He had a smooth white face and a wise,
self-satisfied smile.  To begin with, I saw him only on Sundays and
in white shirt sleeves and a large straw hat.  He made disparaging
remarks about my physique and about the air of Cherry Gardens every
time he saw me.  His wife had been a dissenter of some sort and had
become a churchwoman under protest.  She too was white-faced and her
health was bad.  She complained of pains.  But my Uncle John Julip
disparaged her pains because he said they were not in a reasonable
place.  There was stomachache and backache and heartburn and the
wind, but her pains were neither here nor there; they were therefore
pains of the imagination and had no claim upon our sympathy.

"When I was nearly thirteen years old my father and uncle began
planning for me to go over to the Chessing Hanger gardens and be an
under-gardener.  This was a project I disliked very greatly; not only
did I find my uncle unattractive, but I thought weeding and digging
and most of the exercises of a garden extremely tiring and boring.  I
had taken very kindly to reading, I liked languages, I inherited
something of my father's loquaciousness, and I had won a special
prize for an essay in my school.  This had fired the most
unreasonable ambitions in me--to write, to write in newspapers,
possibly even to write books.  At Cliffstone was what was called a
public library to which the householders of Cliffstone had access and
from which members of their families could borrow books--during
holidays I would be changing my book almost every day--but at
Chessing Hanger there were no books at all.  My sister Fanny
encouraged me in my reading; she too was a voracious reader of
novels, and she shared my dislike of the idea that I should become a
gardener.

"In those days, you must understand, no attempt was made to gauge the
natural capacity of a child.  Human beings were expected to be
grateful for any opportunity of 'getting a living.'  Parents bundled
their children into any employment that came handy, and so most
people followed occupations that were misfits, that did not give full
scope for such natural gifts as they possessed and which commonly
cramped or crippled them.  This in itself diffused a vague discontent
throughout the community, and inflicted upon the great majority of
people strains and restraints and suppressions that ate away their
possibility of positive happiness.  Most youngsters as they grew up,
girls as well as boys, experienced a sudden tragic curtailment of
freedom and discovered themselves forced into some unchosen specific
drudgery from which it was very difficult to escape.  One summer
holiday came, when, instead of enjoying delightful long days of play
and book-devouring in Cliffstone, as I had hitherto done, I was sent
off over the hills to stay with Uncle John Julip, and 'see how I got
on' with him.  I still remember the burning disgust, the sense of
immolation, with which I lugged my little valise up the hills and
over the Downs to the gardens.

"This Lord Bramble, Radiant, was one of the landlords who were so
important during the reigns of the Hanoverian Kings up to the time of
Queen Victoria the Good.  They owned large areas of England as
private property; they could do what they liked with it.  In the days
of Victoria the Good and her immediate predecessors these landlords
who had ruled the Empire through the House of Lords made a losing
fight for predominance against the new industrialists, men who
employed great masses of people for their private gain in the iron
and steel industries, cotton and wool, beer and shipping, and these
again gave way to a rather different type who developed advertisement
and a political and financial use of newspapers and new methods of
finance.  The old land-holding families had to adapt themselves to
the new powers or be pushed aside.  Lord Bramble was one of those
pushed aside, an indignant, old-fashioned, impoverished landowner.
He was in a slough of debts.  His estates covered many square miles;
he owned farms and woodlands, a great white uncomfortable house, far
too roomy for his shrunken means, and two square miles of park.  The
park was greatly neglected, it was covered with groups of old trees
infested and rotten with fungus; rabbits and moles abounded, and
thistles and nettles.  There were no young trees there at all.  The
fences and gates were badly patched; and here and there ran
degenerating roads.  But boards threatening trespassers abounded, and
notices saying 'NO THOROUGHFARE.'  For it was the dearest privilege
of the British landlord to restrict the free movements of ordinary
people, and Lord Bramble guarded his wilderness with devotion.  Great
areas of good land in England in those days were in a similar state
of picturesquely secluded dilapidation."

"Those were the lands where they did the shooting," said Radiant.

"How did you know?"

"I have seen a picture.  They stood in a line along the edge of a
copse, with brown-leaved trees and a faint smell of decay and a touch
of autumnal dampness in the air, and they shot lead pellets at birds."

"They did.  And the beaters--I was pressed into that service once or
twice--drove the birds, the pheasants, towards them.  Shooting
parties used to come to Chessing Hanger, and the shooting used to go
on day after day.  It was done with tremendous solemnity."

"But why?" asked Willow.

"Yes," said Radiant.  "Why did men do it?"

"I don't know," said Sarnac.  "All I know is that at certain seasons
of the year the great majority of the gentlemen of England who were
supposed to be the leaders and intelligence of the land, who were
understood to guide its destinies and control its future, went out
into the woods or on the moors to massacre birds of various sorts
with guns, birds bred specially at great expense for the purpose of
this slaughter.  These noble sportsmen were marshalled by
gamekeepers; they stood in rows, the landscape was animated with the
popping of their guns.  The highest in the land participated gravely
in this national function and popped with distinction.  The men of
this class were in truth at just that level above imbecility where
the banging of a gun and the thrill of seeing a bird swirl and drop
is inexhaustibly amusing.  They never tired of it.  The bang of the
gun seems to have been essential to the sublimity of the sensations
of these sportsmen.  It wasn't mere killing, because in that case
these people could also have assisted in killing the sheep and oxen
and pigs required by the butchers, but this sport they left to men of
an inferior social class.  Shooting birds on the wing was the
essential idea.  When Lord Bramble was not killing pheasants or
grouse he shot in the south of France at perplexed pigeons with
clipped wings just let out of traps.  Or he hunted--not real animal
hunting, not a fair fight with bear or tiger or elephant in a jungle,
but the chasing of foxes--small stinking red animals about the size
of water-spaniels, which were sedulously kept from extinction for
this purpose of hunting; they were hunted across cultivated land, and
the hunters rode behind a pack of dogs.  Lord Bramble dressed himself
up with extreme care in a red jacket and breeches of pigskin to do
this.  For the rest of his time the good man played a card game
called bridge, so limited and mechanical that anyone nowadays would
be able to read out the results and exact probabilities of every deal
directly he saw his cards.  There were four sets of thirteen cards
each.  But Lord Bramble, who had never learnt properly to count up to
thirteen, found it full of dramatic surprises and wonderful
sensations.  A large part of his time was spent in going from
race-course to race-course; they raced a specially flimsy breed of
horses in those days.  There again he dressed with care.  In the
illustrated papers in the public library I would see photographs of
Lord Bramble, with a silk hat--a top hat, you know--cocked very much
on one side 'in the Paddock' or 'snapped with a lady friend.'  There
was much betting and knowingness about this horse-racing.  His
Lordship dined with comparative intelligence, erring only a little on
the excessive side with the port.  People still smoked in those days,
and Lord Bramble would consume three or four cigars a day.  Pipes he
thought plebeian and cigarettes effeminate.  He could read a
newspaper but not a book, being incapable of sustained attention;
after dinner in town he commonly went to a theatre or music-hall
where women could be seen, more or less undraped.  The clothing of
that time filled such people as Lord Bramble with a coy covetousness
for nakedness.  The normal beauty of the human body was a secret and
a mystery, and half the art and decoration of Chessing Hanger House
played stimulatingly with the forbidden vision.

"In that past existence of mine I took the way of life of Lord
Bramble as a matter of course, but now that I recall it I begin to
see the enormous absurdity of these assassins of frightened birds,
these supporters of horses and ostlers, these peepers at feminine
thighs and shoulder-blades.  Their women sympathised with their
gunmanship, called their horses 'the dears,' cultivated dwarfed and
crippled breeds of pet dogs, and yielded the peeps expected of them.

"Such was the life of the aristocratic sort of people in those days.
They set the tone of what was considered a hard, bright, healthy
life.  The rest of the community admired them greatly and imitated
them to the best of its ability.  The tenant farmer, if he could not
shoot pheasants, shot rabbits, and if he could not bet twenty-pound
notes at the fashionable race-meeting at Goodwood, put his half-crown
upon his fancy at the Cliffstone races on Byford Downs--with his hat
cocked over one eye as much like Lord Bramble and King Edward as
possible.

"Great multitudes of people there were whose lives were shaped
completely by the habits and traditions of these leaders.  There was
my Uncle John Julip for example.  His father had been a gardener and
his grandfather before him, and almost all his feminine ancestry and
his aunts and cousins were, as the phrase went, 'in service.'  None
of the people round and about the downstairs of Chessing Hanger had
natural manners; all were dealing in some more or less plausible
imitation of some real lady or gentleman.  My Uncle John Julip found
his ideal in a certain notorious Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson.  He
sought similar hats and adopted similar attitudes.

"He bet heavily in imitation of his model, but he bet less
fortunately.  This my aunt resented, but she found great comfort in
the way in which his clothing and gestures under-studied Sir John.

"'If only he'd been _born_ a gentleman,' said my aunt, 'everything
'ud a-been all right.  'E's a natural sportsman; 'e eats 'is 'eart
out in the gardens.'

"He certainly did not work his heart out.  I do not remember ever
seeing him dig or carry or wheel a barrow.  My memory of him in the
garden is of one who stood, one hand gripping a hoe as if it were a
riding whip under the tail of his coat, and the other gesticulating
or pointing out what had to be done.

"To my father and myself he was always consciously aristocratic,
bearing himself in the grand manner.  This he did, although my father
was a third as tall again as he was and far more abundantly
intelligent.  He always called my father 'Smith.'

"'What are you going to do with that boy, Smith?' he would ask.
'Seems to me, wants feedin' up and open air.'

"My father, who secretly shared the general view that my Uncle John
under happier stars would have made a very fine gentleman, always
tried, as he expressed it, 'to keep his end up' by calling my uncle
'John.'  He would answer, 'Carn't say as I've rightly settled that,
John.  'E's a regular book-worm nowadays, say what you like to him.'

"'Books!' said my Uncle John Julip with a concentrated scorn of books
that was essentially English.  'You can't get anything out of books
that 'asn't been put into them.  It stands to reason.  There's
nothing in books that didn't first come out of the sile.  Books is
flattened flowers at the best, as 'is Lordship said at dinner only
the other night.'

"My father was much struck by the idea.  'That's what I tell 'im,' he
said--inexactly.

"'Besides, who's going to put anything into a book that's worth
knowing?' said my uncle.  'It's like expecting these here tipsters in
the papers to give away something worth keeping to theirselves.  Not
it!'

"''Arf the time,' my father agreed, 'I expect they're telling you
lies in these books of yours and larfing at you.  All the same,' he
reflected with an abrupt lapse from speculation to reverence,
'there's One Book, John.'

"He had remembered the Bible.

"'I wasn't speaking of that, Smith,' said my uncle sharply.
'Sufficient unto the day----  I mean, that's Sunday Stuff.'

"I hated my days of trial in the gardens.  Once or twice during that
unpleasant month I was sent with messages up to the kitchen and once
to the pantry of the great house.  There I said something unfortunate
for my uncle, something that was to wipe out all possibility of a
gardener's career for me.

"The butler, Mr. Petterton, was also a secondary aristocrat, but in a
larger and quite different manner from that of my uncle.  He towered
up and looked down the slopes of himself, his many chins were pink
and stabbed by his collar, and his hair was yellow and very shiny.  I
had to deliver into his hands a basket of cucumbers and a bunch of
blue flowers called borage used in the mixing of summer drinks.  He
was standing at a table talking respectfully to a foxy little man in
tweeds who was eating bread-and-cheese and drinking beer; this I was
to learn later was Lord Bramble's agent.  There was also a young
footman in this room, a subterranean room it was with heavily barred
windows, and he was cleaning silver plate with exemplary industry.

"'So you brought this from the gardens,' said Mr. Petterton with fine
irony.  'And may I ask why Mr.--why Sir John did not condescend to
bring them himself?'

"''E tole me to bring them,' I said.

"'And pray who may you be?'

"'I'm 'Arry Smith,' I said.  'Mr. Julip, 'e's my uncle.'

"'Ah!' said Mr. Petterton and was struck by a thought.  'That's the
son of Smith who's a sort of greengrosher in Cliffstone.'

"'Cherry Gardens, sir, we live at.'

"'Haven't seen you over here before, my boy.  Have you ever visited
us before?'

"'Not 'ere, sir.'

"'Not here!  But you come over to the gardens perhaps?'

"'Nearly every Sunday, sir.'

"'Exactly.  And usually I suppose, Master Smith, there's something to
carry back?'

"'Almost always, sir.'

"'Something a bit heavy?'

"'Not too heavy,' I said bravely.

"'You see, sir?' said Mr. Petterton to the foxy little man in tweeds.

"I began to realise that something unpleasant was in the wind when
this latter person set himself to cross-examine me in a rapid,
snapping manner.  What was it I carried?  I became very red about the
face and ears and declared I did not know.  Did I ever carry grapes?
I didn't know.  Pears?  I didn't know.  Celery?  I didn't know.

"'Well, _I_ know,' said the agent.  '_I_ know.  So why should I ask
you further?  Get out of here.'

"I went back to my uncle and said nothing to him of this very
disagreeable conversation, but I knew quite well even then that I had
not heard the last of this matter."




CHAPTER THE THIRD

MISFORTUNES COME UPON THE SMITH FAMILY


§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "I have to tell of a tornado of mischances
that broke up our precarious little home at Cherry Gardens
altogether.  In that casual, planless, over-populated world there
were no such things as security or social justice as we should
understand these words nowadays.  It is hard for us to imagine its
universal ramshackle insecurity.  Think of it.  The whole world
floated economically upon a cash and credit system that was
fundamentally fictitious and conventional, there were no adequate
protections against greedy abuses of those monetary conventions, no
watch kept over world-production and world-consumption, no knowledge
of the variations of climate year by year, and the fortunes not only
of individuals but of states and nations fluctuated irrationally and
uncontrollably.  It was a world in which life was still almost as
unsafe for men and women as life remains to-day for a field-mouse or
a midge, which is never safe from one moment to another in a world of
cats and owls and swallows and the like.  People were born haphazard,
gladdened, distressed, glorified or killed haphazard, and no one was
ready for either their births or their deaths.  Sudden death there is
still in the world, a bright adventure--that lightning yesterday
might have killed all or any of us, but such death is a rare thing
and a clean thing.  There is none of the distressful bearing-down to
death through want, anxiety, and illness ill-tended and
misunderstood, that was the common experience in the past.  And one
death does not devastate a dozen or more lives as deaths often did in
the old days.  A widow in the old days had lost not only her lover
but her 'living.'  Yet life is full of subtle compensations.  We did
not feel our endless dangers in those days.  We had a wonderful power
of disregard until the chances struck us.

"All children," said Sarnac, "start with an absolute confidence in
the permanence of the things they find about them.  Disillusionment
about safety postulates clear-headedness.  You could not realise your
dangers unless you were clear-headed, and if you were clear-headed
you had the fortitude to face your dangers.  That old world was
essentially a world of muddle-headed sophisticated children, blind to
the universal catastrophe of the top-heavy and collapsing
civilisation in which they played their parts.  They thought that
life was generally safe in a world of general insecurity.  Misfortune
astonished everyone in those days, though I cannot understand why
they should have been astonished at any misfortune.

"The first blow fell without notice about six weeks after I had come
back from Chessing Hanger to my last half year of schooling before I
became a gardener.  It was late afternoon and I was home from school.
I was downstairs reading a book and my mother was clearing away tea
and grumbling at Fanny who wanted to go out.  The lamp was lit, and
both I and my father who was having what he called 'a bit of a read
at the noosepaper' were as close up to its insufficient light as we
could get.  We heard the shop bell jangle overhead.

"'Drat it!' said my father.  'Whaddey want this time o' day?'

"He removed his spectacles.  He had bought a pair haphazard at a
pawnbroker's shop and always used them when he read.  They magnified
his large mild eyes very greatly.  He regarded us protestingly.  What
_did_ they want?  We heard the voice of Uncle John Julip calling down
the staircase.

"'Mort'mer,' he said in a voice that struck me as unusual.  I had
never heard him call my father anything but Smith before.

"'That you, John?' said my father standing up.

"'It's me.  I want to speak to you.'

"'Come down and 'ave some tea, John,' cried my father at the bottom
of the stairs.

"'Somethin' to tell you.  You better come up here.  Somethin'
serious.'

"I speculated if it could be any misdeed of mine he had come over
about.  But my conscience was fairly clear.

"'Now whatever can it be?' asked my father.

"'You better go up and arst 'im,' my mother suggested.

"My father went.

"I heard my uncle say something about, 'We're busted.  We've bin give
away and we're busted,' and then the door into the shop closed.  We
all listened to the movements above.  It sounded as though Uncle
Julip was walking up and down as he talked.  My sister Fanny in her
hat and jacket flitted unobtrusively up the stairs and out.  After a
time Prue came in; she had been helping teacher tidy up, she said,
though I knew better.  Then after a long interval my father came
downstairs alone.

"He went to the hearthrug like one in a trance and stood, staring
portentously in order to make my mother ask what was the matter.
'Why hasn't John come down for a bit of tea or something?  Where's he
gone, Morty?'

"''E's gorn for a van,' said my father; 'that's where 'e's gone.  For
a van.'

"'Whatever for?' asked my mother.

"'For a removal,' said my father.  'That's what for.'

"'Removal?'

"'We got to put 'em up 'ere for a night or so.'

"'Put'em up!  Who?'

"''Im and Adelaide.  He's coming to Cherry Gardens.'

"'You done mean, Morty, 'e's lost 'is situation?'

"'I do.  S'Lordship turned against 'im.  Mischief 'as been made.
Spying.  And they managed to get 'im out of it.  Turned out 'e is.
Tole to go.'

"'But surely they give 'im notice!'

"'Not a bit of it.  S'Lordship came down to the gardens 'ot and
strong.  "'Ere," 'e said, "get out of it!"  Like that 'e said it.
"You thank your lucky stars," 'e said, "I ain't put the 'tecs on to
you and your snivellin' brother-in-law."  Yes.  S'Lordship said that.'

"'But what did 'e mean by it, Morty?'

"'Mean?  'E meant that certain persons who shall be nameless 'ad put
a suspicion on John, told lies about 'im and watched 'im.  Watched
'im they did and me.  They've drawed me into it, Martha.  They've
drawed in young 'Arry.  They've made up a tale about us....  I always
said we was a bit too regular....  There it is, 'e ain't a 'ead
gardener any more.  'E ain't going to 'ave references give 'im; 'e
ain't ever going to 'ave another regular job.  'E's been betrayed and
ruined, and there we are!'

"'But they say 'e took sompthing?--my brother John took sompthing?'

"'Surplus projuce.  What's been a perquisite of every gardener since
the world began....'

"I sat with burning ears and cheeks pretending not to hear this
dreadful conversation.  No one knew of my own fatal share in my
uncle's downfall.  But already in my heart, like the singing of a
lark after a thunderstorm, was arising a realisation that now I might
never become a gardener.  My mother expressed her consternation
brokenly.  She asked incredulous questions which my father dealt with
in an oracular manner.  Then suddenly my mother pounced savagely on
my sister Prue, reproaching her for listening to what didn't concern
her instead of washing up."

"This is a very circumstantial scene," said Radiant.

"It was the first great crisis of my dream life," said Sarnac.  "It
is very vivid in my memory.  I can see again that old kitchen in
which we lived and the faded table-cloth and the paraffin lamp with
its glass container.  I think if you gave me time I could tell you
everything there was in that room."

"What's a hearthrug?" asked Firefly suddenly.  "What sort of thing
was your hearthrug?"

"Like nothing on earth to-day.  A hearthrug was a sort of rug you put
in front of a coal fire, next to the fender, which prevented the
ashes creeping into the room.  This one my father had made out of old
clothes, trousers and such-like things, bits of flannel and bits of
coarse sacking, cut into strips and sewn together.  He had made it in
the winter evenings as he sat by the fireside, sewing industriously."

"Had it any sort of pattern?"

"None.  But I shall never tell my story, if you ask questions.  I
remember that my uncle, when he had made his arrangements about the
van, came in for a bread-and-cheese supper before he walked back to
Chessing Hanger.  He was very white and distressed looking, Sir John
had all faded away from him; he was like a man who had been dragged
out from some hiding-place, he was a very distressed and pitiful man
exposed to the light.  I remember my mother asked him, ''Ow's
Adelaide taking it?'

"My uncle assumed an expression of profound resignation.  'Starts a
new pain,' he said bitterly.  'At a time like this.'

"My father and mother exchanged sympathetic glances.

"'I tell you----' said my uncle, but did not say what he told us.

"A storm of weak rage wrung him.  'If I knew who'd done all this,' he
said.  'That--that cat of a 'ousekeeper--cat I call her--she's got
someone what wanted my place.  If she and Petterton framed it up----'

"He struck the table, but half-heartedly.

"My father poured him out some beer.

"'Ugh!' said my uncle and emptied the glass.

"'Got to face it,' said my uncle, feeling better.  'Got to go through
with it.  I suppose with all these tuppenny-apenny villa gardens 'ere
there's jobbing work to be got.  I'll get something all right....
Think of it!  Jobbing gardener!  Me--a Jobber!  By the Day!  It'll
set up some of these 'ere season-ticket clerks no end to 'ave Lord
Bramble's gardener dragging a lawn-mower for them.  I can see 'em
showing me to their friends out of the window.  Bin 'ead-gardener to
a Lord, they'll say.  Well, well----!

"'It's a come-down,' said my father when my uncle had departed.  'Say
what you like, it's a come-down.'

"My mother was preoccupied with the question of their accommodation.
'She'll 'ave to 'ave the sofa in the sitting-room I expect, and 'e'll
'ave a bit of a shake-up on the floor.  Don't suppose she'll like it.
They'll 'ave their own bedding of course.  But Adelaide isn't the
sort to be comfortable on a sofa.'

"Poor woman! she was not.  Although my uncle and my father and mother
all pointed out to her the untimeliness and inconsiderateness of her
conduct she insisted upon suffering so much that a doctor had to be
called in.  He ordered a prompt removal to a hospital for an
immediate operation.

"Those were days," said Sarnac, "of the profoundest ignorance about
the body.  The ancient Greeks and the Arabs had done a little anatomy
during their brief phases of intellectual activity, but the rest of
the world had only been studying physiology in a scientific way for
about three hundred years.  People in general still knew practically
nothing of vital processes.  As I have told you they even bore
children by accident.  And living the queer lives they did, with
abnormal and ill-prepared food in a world of unchecked infections,
they found the very tissues of the bodies going wrong and breaking
out into the queerest growths.  Parts of these bodies would cease to
do anything but change into a sort of fungoid proliferation----"

"Their bodies were like their communities!" said Radiant.

"The same sort of thing.  They had tumours and cancers and such-like
things in their bodies and Cherry-Garden urban-districts on their
countrysides.  But these growths!--they are dreadful even to recall."

"But surely," said Willow, "in the face of such a horrible
possibility which might afflict anyone, all the world must have
wanted to push on with physiological research."

"Didn't they see," said Sunray, "that all these things were
controllable and curable?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sarnac.  "They didn't positively like these
tumours and cancers, but the community was too under-vitalised to put
up a real fight against these miseries.  And everyone thought that he
or she would escape--until it had them.  There was a general apathy.
And the priests and journalists and so forth, the common opinion
makers, were jealous of scientific men.  They did their best to
persuade people that there was nothing hopeful in scientific
research, they did all they could to discredit its discoveries, to
ridicule its patient workers and set people against them."

"That's what puzzles me most," said Sunray.

"Their mental habits were different.  Their minds hadn't been trained
to comprehensive thinking.  Their thinking was all in compartments
and patches.  The morbid growths in their bodies were nothing to the
morbid growths in their minds."



§ 2

"My aunt in the hospital, with that lack of consideration for my
uncle that had always distinguished her, would neither recover nor
die.  She was a considerable expense to him and no help; she added
greatly to his distresses.  After some days and at the urgent
suggestion of my mother he removed himself from our sitting-room to a
two-roomed lodging in the house of a bricklayer in an adjacent
street; into this he crowded his furniture from Chessing Hanger, but
he frequented my father's shop and showed a deepening attachment to
my father's company.

"He was not so successful a jobbing gardener as he had anticipated.
His short contemptuous way with his new clients in the villas of
Cliffstone failed to produce the respect he designed it to do; he
would speak of their flower-beds as 'two penn'orths of all-sorts' and
compare their gardens to a table-cloth or a window box; and instead
of welcoming these home-truths, they resented them.  But they had not
the manliness to clear up this matter by a good straightforward
argument in which they would have had their social position very
exactly defined; they preferred to keep their illusions and just
ceased to employ him.  Moreover, his disappointment with my aunt
produced a certain misogyny, which took the form of a refusal to take
orders from the wives of his patrons when they were left in sole
charge of the house.  As many of these wives had a considerable
influence over their husbands, this too injured my uncle's prospects.
Consequently there were many days when he had nothing to do but stand
about our shop to discuss with my father as hearer the defects of
Cliffstone villa-residents, the baseness of Mr. Petterton and that
cat ('cat' he called her) and the probable unworthiness of any casual
customer who strayed into range of comment.

"Nevertheless my uncle was resolved not to be defeated without a
struggle.  There was a process which he called 'keeping his pecker
up,' which necessitated, I could not but perceive, periodic visits to
the Wellington public-house at the station corner.  From these visits
he returned markedly more garrulous, more like Sir John
ffrench-Cuthbertson, and exhaling a distinctively courageous smell
when he coughed or breathed heavily.  After a time, as his business
difficulties became more oppressive, my father participated in these
heartening excursions.  They broadened his philosophical outlook but
made it, I fancied, rather less distinct.

"My uncle had some indefinite sum of money in the Post Office Savings
Bank, and in his determination not to be beaten without a struggle he
did some courageous betting on what he called 'certs' at the
race-meetings on Byford Downs."

"'Cert' beats me altogether," said Radiant.

"A 'cert' was a horse that was certain to win and never did.  A 'dead
cert' was an extreme form of the 'cert.'  You cannot imagine how the
prospects and quality of the chief race-horses were discussed
throughout the land.  The English were not a nomadic people, only a
minority could ride horses, but everybody could bet on them.  The
King was, so to speak, head of the racing just as he was head of the
army.  He went in person to the great race-meetings as if to bless
and encourage the betting of his subjects.  So that my Uncle John
Julip was upheld by the most loyal and patriotic sentiments when he
wasted his days and his savings on Byford Downs.  On several of these
occasions my father went with him and wrestled with fortune also.
They lost generally, finally they lost most of what they had, but on
one or two occasions, as my uncle put it, they 'struck it rich.'  One
day they pitched upon a horse called Rococo, although it was regarded
as the very reverse of a 'cert' and the odds were heavy against it,
but an inner light seems to have guided my uncle; it came in first
and they won as much as thirty-five pounds, a very large sum for
them.  They returned home in a state of solemn exaltation, which was
only marred by some mechanical difficulty in pronouncing the name of
the winning horse.  They began well but after the first syllable they
went on more like a hen that had laid an egg than like rational souls
who had spotted a winner.  'Rocococo' they would say or 'Rococococo.'
Or they would end in a hiccup.  And though each tried to help the
other out, they were not really helpful to each other.  They diffused
an unusually powerful odour of cigars and courage.  Never had they
smelt so courageous.  My mother made them tea.

"'_Tea!_' said my uncle meaningly.  He did not actually refuse the
cup she put before him, but he pushed it a little aside.

"For some moments it seemed doubtful whether he was going to say
something very profound or whether he was going to be seriously ill.
Mind triumphed over matter.  'Knew it would come, Marth,' he said.
'Knew allong it would come.  Directly I heard name.  Roc----'  He
paused.

"'Cococo,' clucked my father.

"'Cocococo--hiccup,' said my uncle.  'I knew ourour 'ad come.  Some
men, Smith, some men 'ave that instink.  I would 'ave put my shirt on
that 'orse, Marth--only....  They wouldn't 'ave took my shirt.'

"He looked suddenly very hard at me.  'They wouldn't 'ave took it,
'Arry,' he said.  'They done _take_ shirts!'  "'No,' he said and
became profoundly thoughtful.

"Then he looked up.  'Thirty-six to one against,' he said.  'We'd
'ave 'ad shirts for a lifetime.'

"My father saw it from a wider, more philosophical point of view.
'Might never 'ave been spared to wear 'em out,' he said.  'Better as
it is, John.'

"'And mind you,' said my uncle; 'this is only a beginning.  Once I
start spotting 'em I go on spotting 'em--mind that.  This Roc----'

"'Cococo.'

"'Cocococo--whatever it is, s'only a beginning.  S'only the
firs'-ray-sunlight 'v' a glorious day.'

"'In that case,' said my mother, 't'seems to me some of us might have
a share.'

"'Certainly,' said my uncle, 'certainly, Marth.'  And amazingly he
handed me a ten-shilling piece--in those days we had gold coins and
this was a little disk of gold.  Then he handed Prue the same.  He
gave a whole sovereign, a golden pound, to Fanny and a five-pound
Bank of England note to my mother.

"'Hold on!' said my father warningly.

"'Tha's a' right, Smith,' said my uncle with a gesture of princely
generosity.  'You share, seventeen pounce ten.  Six pounce ten leaves
'leven.  Lessee.  One 'n' five six--seven--eight--nine--ten--'leven.
_Here!_'

"My father took the balance of the money with a puzzled expression.
Something eluded him.  'Yers,' he said; 'but----'

"His mild eye regarded the ten-shilling piece I still held exposed in
my hand.  I put it away immediately but his gaze followed my hand
towards my pocket until it met the table edge and got into
difficulties.

"'Thout the turf, Smith, there wouldn't be such a country as
England,' said my Uncle John, and rounded his remarks off with, 'Mark
my words.'

"My father did his best to do so."



§ 3

"But this hour of success was almost the only bright interlude in a
steady drift to catastrophe.  In a little while I gathered from a
conversation between my mother and my father that we were 'behind
with the rent.'  That was a quarterly payment we paid to the
enterprising individual who owned our house.  I know all that sounds
odd to you, but that is the way things were done.  If we got behind
with our rent the owner could turn us out."

"But where?" asked Firefly.

"Out of the house.  And we weren't allowed to stay in the street.
But it is impossible for me to explain everything of that sort in
detail.  We were behind with the rent and catastrophe impended.  And
then my sister Fanny ran away from us.

"In no other respect," said Sarnac, "is it so difficult to get
realities over to you and make you understand how I thought and felt
in that other life than in matters of sex.  Nowadays sex is so
simple.  Here we are free and frank men and women; we are trained so
subtly that we scarcely know we are trained, not to be stupidly
competitive, to control jealous impulses, to live generously, to
honour the young.  Love is the link and flower of our choicest
friendships.  We take love by the way as we take our food and our
holidays, the main thing in our lives is our creative work.  But in
that dark tormented world in which I passed my dream life, all the
business of love was covered over and netted in by restraints and put
in fetters that fretted and tortured.  I will tell you at last how I
was killed.  Now I want to convey to you something; of the reality of
this affair of Fanny.

"Even in this world," said Sarnac, "my sister Fanny would have been a
conspicuously lovely girl.  Her eyes could be as blue as heaven, or
darken with anger or excitement so that they seemed black.  Her hair
had a brave sweep in it always.  Her smile made you ready to do
anything for her; her laughter made the world clean and brightly
clear about her even when it was touched with scorn.  And she was
ignorant----  I can hardly describe her ignorance.

"It was Fanny first made me feel that ignorance was shameful.  I have
told you the sort of school we had and of our religious teachers.
When I was nine or ten and Fanny was fifteen, she was already
scolding me for fumbling with the pronunciation of words and
particularly with the dropping of the aspirate.

"'Harry,' she said, 'if you call me Fenny again it's war and
pinching.  My name's Fanny and yours is Harry and don't you forget
it.  It's not English we talk in this place; it's mud.'

"Something had stung her.  She had been talking with someone with a
better accent and she had been humiliated.  I think that someone may
have mocked her.  Some chance acquaintance it must have been, some
ill-bred superior boy upon the Cliffstone promenade.  But Fanny was
setting out now to talk good English and make me do the same, with a
fury all her own.

"'If only I could talk French,' she said.  'There's France in sight
over there; all its lighthouses winking at us, and all we've got to
say is, "Parley vous Francy," and grin as if it was a joke.'  She
brought home a sixpenny book which professed but failed to teach her
French.  She was reading voraciously, greedily, to know.  She read
endless novels but also she was reading all sorts of books, about the
stars, about physiology (in spite of my mother's wild scoldings at
the impropriety of reading a book 'with pictures of yer insides' in
it), about foreign countries.  Her passion that I should learn was
even greater than her own passion for knowledge.

"At fourteen she left school and began to help earn her living.  My
mother had wanted her to go into 'service,' but she had resisted and
resented this passionately.  While that proposal was still hanging
over her, she went off by herself to Cliffstone and got a job as
assistant book-keeper in a pork butcher's shop.  Before a year was
out she was book-keeper, for her mind was as neat as it was nimble.
She earned enough money to buy books and drawing material for me and
to get herself clothes that scandalised all my mother's ideas of what
was becoming.  Don't imagine she 'dressed well,' as we used to say;
she experimented boldly, and some of her experiments were cheap and
tawdry.

"I could lecture to you for an hour," said Sarnac, "of what dress and
the money to buy dresses meant for a woman in the old world.

"A large part of my sister's life was hidden from me; it would have
been hidden altogether but for the shameless tirades of my mother,
who seemed to prefer to have an audience while she scolded Fanny.  I
can see now that my mother was bitterly jealous of Fanny because of
her unexhausted youth, but at the time I was distressed and puzzled
at the gross hints and suggestions that flew over my head.  Fanny had
a maddening way of not answering back or answering only by some minor
correction.  'It's horrible, mother,' she would say.  'Not 'orrible.'

"Behind her defensive rudenesses, unlit, unguided, poor Fanny was
struggling with the whole riddle of life, presented to her with an
urgency no man can fully understand.  Nothing in her upbringing had
ever roused her to the passion for real work in the world; religion
for her had been a grimace and a threat; the one great reality that
had come through to her thoughts was love.  The novels she read all
told of love, elusively, partially, and an impatience in her
imagination and in her body leapt to these hints.  Love whispered to
her in the light and beauty of things about her; in the moonlight, in
the spring breezes.  Fanny could not but know that she was beautiful.
But such morality as our world had then was a morality of abject
suppression.  Love was a disgrace, a leering fraud, a smutty joke.
She was not to speak about it, not to look towards it until some good
man--the pork butcher was a widower and seemed likely to be the good
man in her case--came and spoke not of love indeed but marriage.  He
would marry her and hurry home with his prize and tear the wrappings
from her loveliness, clumsily, stupidly, in a mood of morbidly
inflamed desire."

"Sarnac," said Firefly, "you are horrible."

"No," said Sarnac.  "But that world of the past was horrible.  Most
of the women, your ancestors, suffered such things.  And that was
only the beginning of the horror.  Then came the birth and
desecration of the children.  Think what a delicate, precious and
holy thing a child is!  They were begotten abundantly and abnormally,
born reluctantly, and dropped into the squalour and infection of an
overcrowded disordered world.  Bearing a child was not the jolly
wholesome process we know to-day; in that diseased society it was an
illness, it counted as an illness, for nearly every woman.  Which the
man her husband resented--grossly.  Five or six children in five or
six years and a pretty girl was a cross, worried wreck of a woman,
bereft of any shred of spirit or beauty.  My poor scolding, worried
mother was not fifty when she died.  And one saw one's exquisite
infants grow up into ill-dressed, under-nourished, ill-educated
children.  Think of the agony of shamed love that lay beneath my poor
mother's slaps and scoldings!  The world has forgotten now the hate
and bitterness of disappointed parentage.  That was the prospect of
the moral life that opened before my sister Fanny; that was the
antistrophe to the siren song of her imagination.

"She could not believe this of life and love.  She experimented with
love and herself.  She was, my mother said, 'a bold, bad girl.'  She
began I know with furtive kissings and huggings in the twilight, with
boy schoolfellows, with clerks and errand-boys.  Some gleam of
nastiness came into these adventures of the dusk and made her recoil.
At any rate she became prim and aloof to Cherry Gardens, but only
because she was drawn to the bands and lights and prosperity of
Cliffstone.  That was when she began to read and correct her accent.
You have heard of our old social stratifications.  She wanted to be
like a lady; she wanted to meet a gentleman.  She imagined there were
gentlemen who were really gentle, generous, wise and delightful, and
she imagined that some of the men she saw on the cliff promenade at
Cliffstone were gentlemen.  She began to dress herself as I have told.

"There were scores of such girls in every town in Europe," said
Sarnac, "turning their backs on their dreadful homes.  In a sort of
desperate hope.

"When you hear about the moral code of the old world," Sarnac went
on, "you are apt to think of it as a rule that everyone respected in
exactly the same way that you think everyone believed the professed
religions.  We have not so much a moral code now as a moral training,
and our religion involves no strain on reason or instincts, and so it
is difficult for us to understand the tortuosity and evasions and
defiances and general furtiveness and meanness of a world in which
nobody really understood and believed the religious creeds, not even
the priests, and nobody was really convinced to the bone of the
sweetness and justice of the moral code.  In that distant age almost
everybody was sexually angry or uncomfortable or dishonest; the
restraints we had did not so much restrain as provoke people.  It is
difficult to imagine it now."

"Not if you read the old literature," said Sunray.  "The novels and
plays are pathological."

"So you have my pretty sister Fanny, drawn by impulses she did not
understand, flitting like a moth out of our dingy home in Cherry
Gardens to the lights, bright lights of hope they seemed to her,
about the bandstand and promenade of Cliffstone.  And there staying
in the lodging-houses and boarding-houses and hotels were limited and
thwarted people, keeping holiday, craving for bright excitements,
seeking casual pleasures.  There were wives who had tired of their
husbands and husbands long weary of their wives, there were separated
people who could not divorce and young men who could not marry
because they could not afford to maintain a family.  With their poor
hearts full of naughtiness, rebellious suppressions, jealousies,
resentments.  And through this crowd, eager, provocative, and
defenceless, flitted my pretty sister Fanny."



§ 4

"On the evening before Fanny ran away my father and my uncle sat in
the kitchen by the fire discoursing of politics and the evils of
life.  They had both been keeping up their peckers very resolutely
during the day and this gave a certain rambling and recurrent quality
to their review.  Their voices were hoarse, and they drawled and were
loud and emphatic and impressive.  It was as if they spoke for the
benefit of unseen listeners.  Often they would both be talking
together.  My mother was in the scullery washing up the tea-things
and I was sitting at the table near the lamp trying to do some
homework my teacher had given me, so far as the distraction of this
conversation so close to me and occasional appeals to me to 'mark'
this or that, would permit.  Prue was reading a book called
_Ministering Children_ to which she was much addicted.  Fanny had
been helping my mother until she was told she was more a hindrance
than a help.  Then she came and stood at my side looking over my
shoulder at what I was doing.

"'What's spoiling trade and ruining the country,' said my uncle, 'is
these 'ere strikes.  These 'ere strikes reg'ler
destrushion--destruction for the country.'

"'Stop everything,' said my father.  'It stands to reason.'

"'They didn't ought to be allowed.  These 'ere miners'r paid and paid
'andsomely.  Paid 'andsomely they are.  'Andsomely.  Why!  I'd be
glad of the pay they get, glad of it.  They 'as bulldogs, they 'as
pianos.  Champagne.  Me and you, Smith, me and you and the middle
classes generally; we don't get pianos.  We don't get champagne.
Not-tit....'

"'Ought to be a Middle Classes Union,' said my father, 'keep these
'ere workers in their places.  They 'old up the country and stop
trade.  Trade!  Trade's orful.  Why! people come in now and look at
what you got and arst the price of this and that.  Think twice they
do before they spend a sixpence....  And the coal you're expected to
sell nowadays!  I tell 'em, if this 'ere strike comes off this 's
'bout the last coal you're likely to see, good or bad.  Straight out,
I tell 'em....'

"'You're not working, Harry,' said Fanny without troubling to lower
her voice.  'Don't see how you can work, with all this jawing going
on.  Come out for a walk.'

"I glanced up at her and rose at once.  It wasn't often Fanny asked
me to go for a walk with her.  I put my books away.

"'Going out for a bit of fresh air, mother,' said Fanny, taking her
hat down from its peg.

"'No, you don't--not at this time,' cried my mother from the
scullery.  'Ain't I said, once and for all----?'

"'It's all right, mother, Harry's going with me.  He'll see no one
runs away with me and ruins me....  You've said it once and for
all--times enough.'

"My mother made no further objection, but she flashed a look of
infinite hate at my sister.

"We went upstairs and out into the street.

"For a time we said nothing, but I had a sense that I was going to be
'told things.'

"'I've had about enough of all this,' Fanny began presently.  'What's
going to become of us?  Father and uncle 've been drinking all day;
you can see they're both more than half-screwed.  Both of 'em.  It's
every day now.  It's worse and worse and worse.  Uncle hasn't had a
job these ten days.  Father's always with him.  The shop's getting
filthy.  He doesn't sweep it out now for days together.'

"'Uncle seems to have lost 'eart,' I said, 'since he heard that Aunt
Adelaide would have to have that second operation.'

"'Lost heart!  He never had any heart to lose.'  My sister Fanny said
no more of my uncle--by an effort.  'What a home!' she cried.

"She paused for a moment.  'Harry,' she said, 'I'm going to get out
of this.  Soon.'

"I asked what she meant by that.

"'Never mind what I mean.  I've got a situation.  A different sort of
situation....  Harry, you--you care for me, Harry?'

"Professions of affection are difficult for boys of thirteen.  'I'd
do anything for you, Fanny,' I said after a pause.  'You know I
would.'

"'And you wouldn't tell on me?'

"'Whad you take me for?'

"'Nohow?'

"'No'ow.'

"'I knew you wouldn't,' said Fanny.  'You're the only one of the
whole crew I'll be sorry to leave.  I do care for you, Harry.
Straight, I do.  I used to care for mother.  Once.  But that's
different.  She's scolded me and screamed at me till it's gone.
Every bit of it.  I can't help it,--it's gone.  I'll think of you,
Harry--often.'

"I realised that Fanny was crying.  Then when I glanced at her again
her tears were over.

"'Look here, Harry,' she said, 'would you do--something--for me?
Something--not so very much--and not tell?  Not tell afterwards, I
mean.'

"'I'd do anything, Fanny.'

"'It's not so very much really.  There's that little old portmanteau
upstairs.  I've put some things in it.  And there's a little bundle.
I've put 'em both under the bed at the back where even Prying Prue
won't think of looking.  And to-morrow--when father's out with uncle
like he is now every day, and mother's getting dinner downstairs and
Prue's pretending to help her and sneaking bits of bread--if you'd
bring those down to Cliffstone to Crosby's side-door....  They aren't
so very heavy.'

"'I ain't afraid of your portmanteau, Fanny.  I'd carry it more miles
than that for you.  But where's this new situation of yours, Fanny?
and why ain't you saying a word about it at home?'

"'Suppose I asked you something harder than carrying a portmanteau,
Harry?'

"'I'd do it, Fanny, if I could do it.  You know that, Fanny.'

"'But if it was just to ask no questions of where I am going and what
I am going to do?  It's--it's a good situation, Harry.  It isn't hard
work.'

"She stopped short.  I saw her face by the yellow light of a street
lamp and I was astonished to see it radiant with happiness.  And yet
her eyes were shining with tears.  What a Fanny it was, who could
pass in a dozen steps from weeping to ecstasy!

"'Oh!  I wish I could tell you all about it, Harry,' she said.  'I
wish I could tell you all about it.  Don't you worry about me, Harry,
or what's going to happen to me.  You help me, and after a bit I'll
write to you.  I will indeed, Harry.'

"'You aren't going to run away and marry?' I asked abruptly.  'It'd
be like you, Fanny, to do that.'

"'I won't say I am; I won't say I'm not; I won't say anything, Harry.
But I'm as happy as the sunrise, Harry!  I could dance and sing.  If
only I can do it, Harry.'

"'There's one thing, Fanny.'

"She stopped dead.  'You're not going back on me, Harry?'

"'No.  I'll do what I've promised, Fanny.  But----'  I had a moral
mind.  I hesitated.  'You're not doing anything wrong, Fanny?'

"She shook her head and did not answer for some moments.  The look of
ecstasy returned.

"'I'm doing the rightest thing that ever I did, Harry, the rightest
thing.  If only I can do it.  And you are a dear to help me, a
perfect dear.'

"And suddenly she put her arms about me and drew my face to hers and
kissed me and then she pushed me away and danced a step.  'I love all
the world to-night,' said Fanny.  'I love all the world.  Silly old
Cherry Gardens!  You thought you'd got me!  You thought I'd never get
away!'

"She began a sort of chant of escape.  'To-morrow's my last day at
Crosby's, my very last day.  For ever and ever.  Amen.  He'll never
come too near me again and breathe down my neck.  He'll never put his
fat hand on my bare arm and shove his face close to mine while he
looks at my cash-sheet.  When I get to----, wherever I'm going,
Harry, I'll want to send him a post card.  Good-bye, Mr. Crosby,
good-bye, _dear_ Mr. Crosby.  For ever and ever.  Amen!'  She made
what I knew to be her imitation of Mr. Crosby's voice.  'You're the
sort of girl who ought to marry young and have a steady husband older
than yourself, my dear.  Did I ought?  And who said you might call me
your dear, dear Mr. Crosby?  Twenty-five shillings a week and pawings
about and being called dear, thrown in....  I'm wild to-night,
Harry--wild to-night.  I could laugh and scream, and yet I want to
cry, Harry, because I'm leaving you.  And leaving them all!  Though
why I care I don't know.  Poor, boozy, old father!  Poor, silly,
scolding mother!  Some day perhaps I may help them if only I get
away.  And you--you've got to go on learning and improving, Harry,
learning, learning.  Learn and get out of Cherry Gardens.  Never
drink.  Never let drink cross your lips.  Don't smoke.  For why
should anyone smoke?  Take the top side of life, for it's easier up
there.  Indeed, it's easier.  Work and read, Harry.  Learn French--so
that when I come back to see you, we can both talk together.'

"'You're going to learn French?  You're going to France?'

"'Farther than France.  But not a word, Harry.  Not a word of it.
But I wish I could tell you everything.  I can't.  I mustn't.  I've
given my promise.  I've got to keep faith.  All one has to do in the
world is to love and keep faith.  But I wish mother had let me help
wash-up to-night, my last night.  She hates me.  She'll hate me more
yet....  I wonder if I'll keep awake all night or cry myself to
sleep.  Let's race as far as the goods-station, Harry, and then walk
home.'"



§ 5

"The next night Fanny did not come home at all.  As the hours passed
and the emotion of my family deepened I began to realise the full
enormity of the disaster that had come upon our home."

Sarnac paused and smiled.  "Never was there so clinging a dream.  I
am still half Harry Mortimer Smith and only half myself.  I am still
not only in memory but half in feeling also that young English
barbarian in the Age of Confusion.  And yet all the time I am looking
at my story from our point of view and telling it in Sarnac's voice.
Amidst this sunshine....  Was it really a dream? ... I don't believe
I am telling you a dream."

"It isn't a bit like a dream," said Willow.  "It is a story--a real
story.  Do you think it was a dream?"

Sunray shook her head.  "Go on," she said to Sarnac.  "Whatever it
is, tell it.  Tell us how your family behaved when Fanny ran away."

"You must keep in mind that all these poor souls were living in a
world of repressions such as seem almost inconceivable now.  You
think they had ideas about love and sex and duty different from our
ideas.  We are taught that they had different ideas.  But that is not
the truth; the truth is that they had no clear, thought-out ideas
about such things at all.  They had fears and blank prohibitions and
ignorances where we have ideas.  Love, sex, these were things like
the enchanted woods of a fairy tale.  It was forbidden even to go in.
And--none of us knew to what extent--Fanny had gone in.

"So that evening was an evening of alarm deepening to a sort of moral
panic for the whole household.  It seemed to be required of my family
that they should all behave irrationally and violently.  My mother
began to fret about half-past nine.  'I've tole 'er, once for all,'
she said, partly to herself but also for my benefit.  'It's got to
stop.'  She cross-examined me about where Fanny might be.  Had she
said anything about going on the pier?  I said I didn't know.  My
mother fumed and fretted.  Even if Fanny had gone on the pier she
ought to be home by ten.  I wasn't sent to bed at the usual hour so
that I saw my father and uncle come in after the public-house had
closed.  I forget now why my uncle came in to us instead of going
straight home, but it was not a very unusual thing for him to do so.
They were already disposed to despondency and my mother's white face
and anxious tiding deepened their gloom.

"'Mortimer,' said my mother, 'that gal of yours 'as gone a bit too
far.  Sarf-pars' ten and she isn't 'ome yet.'

"''Aven't I tole 'er time after time,' said my father, 'she's got to
be in by nine?'

"'Not times enough you 'aven't,' said my mother, 'and 'ere's the
fruit!'

"'I've tole 'er time after time,' said my father.  'Time after time.'
And he continued to repeat this at intervals throughout the
subsequent discussion until another refrain replaced it.

"My uncle said little at first.  He took up his position on the
hearthrug my father had made and stood there, swaying slightly,
hiccupping at intervals behind his hand, frowning and scrutinising
the faces of the speakers.  At last he delivered his judgment.
'Somethin'sappened to that girl,' he said.  'You mark my words.'

"Prue had a mind apt for horrors.  'She's bin in 'naccident per'aps,'
she said.  'She may've bin knocked down.'

"'I've tole 'er,' said my father, 'time after time.'

"'If there's bin 'naccident,' said my uncle sagely.  'Well ...
'nything ma've 'appened.'  He repeated this statement in a louder,
firmer voice.  ''Nything ma've 'appened.'

"'Stime you went to bed, Prue,' said my mother, ''igh time.  'N' you
too, 'Arry.'

"My sister got up with unusual promptitude and went out of the room.
I think she must have had an idea then of looking for Fanny's things.
I lingered.

"'May've been 'naccident, may not,' said my mother darkly.  'Sworse
things than accidents.'

"'Whaddyoumean by that, Marth?' asked my uncle.

"'Never mind what I mean.  That girl's worried me times and oft.
There's worse things than accidents.'

"I listened, thrilled.  'You be orf to bed, 'Arry,' said my mother.

"Whaddyou got to do,--simple,' said my uncle, leaning forward on his
toes.  'Telephone 'ospitals.  Telephone plice.  Old Crow at the
Wellington won't've gone to bed.  'Sgot telephone.  Good customers.
'E'll telephone.  Mark my words--s'snaccident.'

"And then Prue reappeared at the top of the stairs.

"'_Mother!_' she said in a loud whisper.

"'You be orf to bed, miss,' said my mother.  ''Aven't I got worries
enough?'

"'Mother,' said Prue.  'You know that little old portmantle of
Fanny's?'

"Everyone faced a new realisation.

"'Sgorn,' said Prue.  'And her two best 'ats and all 'er undercloe's
and 'er other dress--gorn too.'

"'Then she's took 'em!' said my father.

"'And 'erself!' said my mother.

"'Time after time I tole her,' said my father.

"'She's run away!' said my mother with a scream in her voice.  'She's
brought shame and disgrace on us!  She's run away!'

"'Some one's got 'old of 'er,' said my father.

"My mother sat down abruptly.  'After all I done for 'er!' she cried,
beginning to weep.  'With an honest man ready to marry 'er!  Toil and
sacrifice, care and warnings, and she's brought us to shame and
dishonour!  She's run away!  That I should 'ave lived to see this
day!  Fanny!'

"She jumped up suddenly to go and see with her own eyes that Prue's
report was true.  I made myself as inconspicuous as possible, for I
feared some chance question might reveal my share in our family
tragedy.  But I didn't want to go to bed; I wanted to hear things out.

"'Sanny good my going to the plice-station for you on my way 'ome?'
my uncle asked.

"'Plice!' said my father.  'What good's plice?  Gaw!  If I 'ad my
'ands on that villain's throat--I'd plice 'im!  Bringing shame on me
and mine!  _Plice_!  'Ere's Fanny, my little daughter Fanny, beguiled
and misled and carried away! ... I'm 'asty....  Yes, John.  You go in
and tell the plice.  It's on your way.  Tell 'em from me.  I won't
leave not a single stone unturned so's to bring 'er back.'

"My mother came back whiter than ever.  'It's right enough,' she
said.  'She's gorn!  She's off.  While we stand 'ere, disgraced and
shamed, she's away.'

"'Who with?' said my father.  That's the question, who with?  'Arry,
'ave you ever seen anyone about with your sister?  Anyone 'anging
about?  Any suspicious-looking sort of dressed-up fancy man?  'Ave
you ever?'

"I said I hadn't.

"But Prue had evidence.  She became voluble.  About a week ago she
had seen Fanny and a man coming along from Cliffstone, talking.  They
hadn't seen her; they had been too wrapped up in each other.  Her
description of the man was very vague and was concerned chiefly with
his clothes; he had worn a blue serge suit and a grey felt hat; he
was 'sort of a gentleman like.'  He was a good lot older than
Fanny--Prue wasn't sure whether he had a moustache or not.

"My father interrupted Prue's evidence by a tremendous saying which I
was to hear him repeat time after time during the next week.
'Sooner'n this sh'd've 'appened,' said my father, 'I'd 've seen 'er
lying dead at my feet--_gladly_ I'd 've seen 'er lying dead at my
feet!'

"'Poor girl!' said my uncle.  'Sabitter lesson she 'as before 'er.  A
_bitter_ lesson!  Poo' chile!  Poo' little Fanny!'

"'Poor Fanny indeed!' cried my mother vindictively, seeing it all, I
perceived, from an entirely different angle.  'There she is prancin'
about with 'er fancy gentleman now in all 'er fallals; dinners and
wine she'll 'ave, flowers she'll 'ave, dresses and everything.  Be
took about and shown things!  Shown off and took to theayters.  The
shame of it!  And us 'ere shamed and disgraced and not a word to say
when the neighbours ask us questions!  'Ow can I look 'em in the
face?  'Ow can I look Mr. Crosby in the face?  That man was ready to
go down on 'is bended knees to 'er and worship 'er.  Stout though 'e
was.  'E'd 'ave given 'er anything she arst for--in reason.  What 'e
could see in 'er, I could never make out.  But see it 'e did.  And
now I've got to face 'im and tell 'im I've told 'im wrong.  Time
after time I've said to 'im--"_You wait.  You wait, Mr. Crosby_."
And that 'uzzy!--sly and stuck-up and deep!  Gorn!'

"My father's voice came booming over my mother's shrill outcry.
'Sooner'n this should've 'appened I'd 've seen er dead at my feet!'

"I was moved to protest.  But for all my thirteen years I found
myself weeping.  ''Ow d'you know,' I blubbered, 'that Fanny 'asn't
gone away and got married?  'Ow d'you know?'

"'Merried!' cried my mother.  'Why should she run away to be merried?
If it was merridge, what was to prevent 'er bringing 'im 'ome and
having 'im interjuced to us all, right and proper?  Isn't her own
father and mother and 'ome good enough for her, that she 'as to run
away and get merried?  When she could 'ave 'ad it 'ere at St. Jude's
nice and respectable with your father and your uncle and all of us
and white favours and a carriage and all.  I wish I could 'ope she
was merried!  I wish there was a chance of it!'

"My uncle shook his head in confirmation.

"'Sooner 'n this should 've 'appened,' boomed my father, 'I'd 've
seen 'er dead at my feet!'

''Last night,' said Prue, 'she said 'er prayers.'

"'Didn't she always say 'er prayers?' asked my uncle, shocked.

"'Not kneeling down,' said Prue.  'But last night she was kneeling
quite a long time.  She thought I was asleep but I watched 'er.'

"'That looks bad,' said my uncle.  'Y'know, Smith; that looks bad.  I
don't like that praying.  Sominous.  I don't like it.'

"And then suddenly and violently Prue and I were packed off upstairs
to bed.

"For long the sound of their voices went on; the three of them came
up into the shop and stood at the front door while my uncle gradually
took leave, but what further things they said I did not hear.  But I
remember that suddenly I had a brilliant idea, suggested no doubt by
Prue's scrap of evidence.  I got out of bed and knelt down and said,
'Pray God, be kind to my Fanny!  Pray God not to be hard on Fanny!
I'm sure she means to get merried.  For ever and ever.  Amen.'  And
after putting Providence upon his honour, so to speak, in this
fashion, I felt less mentally distracted and got back into bed and
presently I fell asleep."

Sarnac paused.

"It's all rather puzzling," said Willow.

"It seemed perfectly natural at the time," said Sarnac.

"That pork butcher was evidently a repulsive creature," said Firefly.
"Why didn't they object to him?"

"Because the importance of the marriage ceremonial was so great in
those days as to dominate the entire situation.  I knew Crosby quite
well; he was a cunning-faced, oily-mannered humbug with a bald head,
fat red ears, a red complexion and a paunch.  There are no such
people in the world now; you must recall some incredible gross
old-world caricature to imagine him.  Nowadays you would as soon
think of coupling the life of a girl with some gross heavy animal as
with such a man.  But that mattered nothing to my father or my
mother.  My mother I suspect rather liked the idea of the physical
humiliation of Fanny.  She no doubt had had her own humiliations--for
the sexual life of this old world was a tangle of clumsy ignorances
and secret shames.  Except for my mother's real hostility to Fanny I
remember scarcely a scrap of any simple natural feeling, let alone
any reasonable thinking, in all that terrible fuss they made.  Men
and women in those days were so much more complex and artificial than
they are now; in a muddled way they were amazingly intricate.  You
know that monkeys, even young monkeys, have old and wrinkled faces,
and it is equally true that in the Age of Confusion life was so
perplexing and irrational that while we were still children our minds
were already old and wrinkled.  Even to my boyish observation it was
clear that my father was acting the whole time; he was behaving as he
imagined he was expected to behave.  Never for a moment either when
drunk or sober did he even attempt to find out, much less to express,
what he was feeling naturally about Fanny.  He was afraid to do so.
And that night we were all acting--all of us.  We were all afraid to
do anything but act in what we imagined would be regarded as a
virtuous rôle."

"But what were you afraid of?" asked Radiant.  "Why did you act?"

"I don't know.  Afraid of blame.  Afraid of the herd.  A habit of
fear.  A habit of inhibition."

"What was the objection to the real lover?" asked Firefly.  "I don't
understand all this indignation."

"They guessed rightly enough that he did not intend to marry Fanny."

"What sort of a man was he?"

"I never saw him until many years afterwards.  But I will tell you
about that when I come to it."

"Was he--the sort of man one could love?"

"Fanny loved him.  She had every reason to do so.  He took care of
her.  He got her the education she craved for.  He gave her a life
full of interest.  I believe he was an honest and delightful man."

"They stuck to each other?"

"Yes."

"Then why didn't he marry her--if it was the custom?"

"He was married already.  Marriage had embittered him.  It embittered
many people.  He'd been cheated.  He had been married by a woman who
pretended love to impose herself upon him and his fortunes and he had
found her out."

"Not a very difficult discovery," said Firefly.

"No."

"But why couldn't they divorce?"

"In those days it took two to make a divorce.  She wouldn't let him
loose.  She just stuck on and lived on his loneliness.  If he had
been poor he would probably have tried to murder her, but as it
happened he had the knack of success and he was rich.  Rich people
could take liberties with marriage-restrictions that were absolutely
impossible for the poor.  And he was, I should guess, sensitive,
affectionate and energetic.  Heaven knows what sort of mind he was in
when he came upon Fanny.  He 'picked her up,' as people used to say
casually.  The old world was full of such pitiful adventures in
encounter.  Almost always they meant disaster, but this was an
exceptional case.  Perhaps it was as lucky for him that he met her as
it was for her that she met him.  Fanny, you know, was one of those
people you have to be honest with; she was acute and simple; she cut
like a clean sharp knife.  They were both in danger and want; the
ugliest chances might have happened to her and he was far gone on the
way to promiscuity and complete sexual degradation....  But I can't
go off on Fanny's story.  In the end she probably married him.  They
were going to marry.  In some way the other woman did at last make it
possible."

"But why don't you know for certain?"

"Because I was shot before that happened.  If it happened at all."



§ 6

"_No!_" cried Sarnac, stopping a question from Willow by a gesture.

"I shall never tell my story," said Sarnac, "if you interrupt with
questions.  I was telling you of the storm of misfortunes that
wrecked our household at Cherry Gardens....

"My father was killed within three weeks of Fanny's elopement.  He
was killed upon the road between Cherry Gardens and Cliffstone.
There was a young gentleman named Wickersham with one of the new
petrol-driven motor-cars that were just coming into use; he was
hurrying home as fast as possible, he told the coroner, because his
brakes were out of order and he was afraid of an accident.  My father
was walking with my uncle along the pavement, talking.  He found the
pavement too restricted for his subject and gestures, and he stepped
off suddenly into the roadway and was struck by the car from behind
and knocked headlong and instantly killed.

"The effect upon my uncle was very profound.  For some days he was
thoughtful and sober and he missed a race-meeting.  He was very
helpful over the details of the funeral.

"'You can't say 'e wasn't prepared, Marth,' he told my mother.  'You
can't say 'e wasn't prepared.  Very moment 'e was killed, 'e 'ad the
name 'v' Providence on 'is lips.  'E'd been saying 'ow sorely 'e'd
been tried by this and that.'

"''E wasn't the only one,' said my mother.

"''E was saying 'e knew it was only to teach 'im some lesson though
he couldn't rightly say what the lesson was.  'E was convinced that
everything that 'appened to us, good though it seemed or bad though
it seemed, was surely for the best....'

"My uncle paused dramatically.

"'And then the car 'it 'im,' said my mother, trying to picture the
scene.

"'Then the car 'it 'im,' said my uncle."




CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE WIDOW SMITH MOVES TO LONDON


§ 1

"In those days," said Sarnac, "the great majority of the dead were
put into coffins and buried underground.  Some few people were burnt,
but that was an innovation and contrary to the very materialistic
religious ideas of the time.  This was a world in which you must
remember people were still repeating in perfect good faith a creed
which included 'the resurrection of the body and the life
everlasting.'  Intellectually old Egypt and her dreaming mummies
still ruled the common people of the European world.  The Christian
creeds were themselves mummies from Lower Egypt.  As my father said
on one occasion when he was discussing this question of cremation:
'It might prove a bit orkward at the Resurrection.  Like not 'aving a
proper wedding garment so to speak....

"'Though there's Sharks,' said my father, whose mental transitions
were sometimes abrupt.  'And them as 'ave been eat by lions.  Many of
the best Christian martyrs in their time was eat by lions....  They'd
_certainly_ be given bodies....

"'And if _one_ is given a body, why not another?' said my father,
lifting mild and magnified eyes in enquiry.

"'It's a difficult question,' my father decided.

"At any rate there was no discussion of cremation in his case.  We
had a sort of hearse-coach with a place for the coffin in front to
take him to the cemetery, and in this vehicle my mother and Prue
travelled also; my elder brother Ernest, who had come down from
London for the occasion, and my uncle and I walked ahead and waited
for it at the cemetery gates and followed the coffin to the
grave-side.  We were all in black clothes, even black gloves, in
spite of the fact that we were wretchedly poor.

"''Twon't be my last visit to this place this year,' said my uncle
despondently, 'not if Adelaide goes on as she's doing.'

"Ernest was silent.  He disliked my uncle and was brooding over him.
From the moment of his arrival he had shown a deepening objection to
my uncle's existence.

"'There's luck they say in funerals,' said my uncle presently,
striking a brighter note.  'Fi keep my eye open I dessay I may get a
'int of somethin'.'

"Ernest remained dour.

"We followed the men carrying the coffin towards the cemetery chapel
in a little procession led by Mr. Snapes in his clerical robes.  He
began to read out words that I realised were beautiful and touching
and that concerned strange and faraway things: 'I am the Resurrection
and the Life.  He that believeth in Me though he were dead yet shall
he live....'

"'I know that my Redeemer liveth and that He shall stand at the
latter day upon the earth....'

"'We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry
nothing out.  The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be
the Name of the Lord.'

"Suddenly I forgot the bickerings of my uncle and brother and was
overcome with tenderness and grief for my father.  A rush from my
memory of many clumsy kindlinesses, a realisation of the loss of his
companionship came to me.  I recalled the happiness of many of my
Sunday tramps by his side in spring-time, on golden summer evenings,
in winter when the frost had picked out every twig in the downland
hedgerows.  I thought of his endless edifying discourses about
flowers and rabbits and hillsides and distant stars.  And he was
gone.  I should never hear his voice again.  I should never see again
his dear old eyes magnified to an immense wonder through his
spectacles.  I should never have a chance of telling him how I cared
for him.  And I had never told him I cared for him.  Indeed, I had
never realised I cared for him until now.  He was lying stiff and
still and submissive in that coffin, a rejected man.  Life had
treated him badly.  He had never had a dog's chance.  My mind leapt
forward beyond my years and I understood what a tissue of petty
humiliations and disappointments and degradations his life had been.
I saw then as clearly as I see now the immense pity of such a life.
Sorrow possessed me.  I wept as I stumbled along after him.  I had
great difficulty in preventing myself from weeping aloud."



§ 2

"After the funeral my brother Ernest and my uncle had a violent
wrangle about my mother's future.  Seeing that my Aunt Adelaide was
for all practical purposes done for, my uncle suggested that he
should sell up most of his furniture, 'bring his capital' into the
greengrocery business and come and live with his sister.  But my
brother declared that the greengrocery business was a dying concern,
and was for my mother moving into a house in Cliffstone when she
might let lodgings, Prue would be 'no end of a 'elp' in that.  At
first this was opposed by my uncle and then he came round to the idea
on condition that he participated in the benefits of the scheme, but
this Ernest opposed, asking rather rudely what sort of help my uncle
supposed he would be in a lodging-house.  'Let alone you're never out
of bed before ten,' he said, though how he knew of this fact did not
appear.

"Ernest had been living in London, working at a garage; he drove
hired cars by the month or job, and his respect for the upper classes
had somehow disappeared.  The dignity of Sir John ffrench-Cuthbertson
at secondhand left him cold and scornful.  'You ain't going to 'ave
my mother to work for you and wait on you, no'ow,' he said.

"While this dispute went on my mother with the assistance of Prue was
setting out the cold collation which in those days was the redeeming
feature of every funeral.  There was cold ham and chicken.  My uncle
abandoned his position of vantage on my father's rag hearthrug and we
all sat down to our exceptional meal.

"For some little time the cold ham and chicken made a sort of truce
between my brother Ernest and my uncle, but presently my uncle
sighed, drank off his beer and reopened the argument.  'You know I
think, Marth,' he said, spearing a potato from the dish neatly with
his fork, 'you ought to 'ave some voice in what is going to become of
you.  Me and this young man from London 've been 'aving a bit of a
difference 'bout what you ought to do.'

"I realised abruptly from the expression of my mother's white face, a
sort of white intentness which her widow's cap seemed to emphasise,
that she was quite determined to have not only some voice but a
decisive voice in this matter, but before she could say anything my
brother Ernest had intervened.

"'It's like this, mother,' he said, 'you got to do something, 'aven't
you?'

"My mother was about to reply when Ernest snatched a sort of assent
from her and proceeded: 'Well, naturally I ask, what sort of thing
can you do?  And as naturally, I answer Lodgings.  You carn't expect
to go on being a greengrocer, because that ain't natural for a woman,
considering the weights and coal that 'as to be lifted.'

"'And could be lifted easy, with a man to 'elp 'er,' said my uncle.

"'If 'e _was_ a man,' said my brother Ernest with bitter sarcasm.

"'Meaning----?' asked my uncle with cold hauteur.

"'What I say,' said brother Ernest.  'No more, no less.  So if you
take my advice, mother, what you'll do is this.  You go down early
to-morrow to Cliffstone to look for a suitable little 'ouse big
enough to 'old lodgers and not so big as to break your back, and I'll
go and talk to Mr. Bulstrode about ending up your tenancy 'ere.  Then
we'll be able to see where we are.'

"Again my mother attempted to speak and was overborne.

"''Fyou think I'm going to be treated as a nonentity,' said my uncle,
'you're making the biggest mistake you ever made in your life.  See?
Now you listen to me, Marth----'

"'You shut up!' said my brother.  'Mother's _my_ business first and
foremost.'

"'_Shut up!_' echoed my uncle.  'Wot manners!  At a funeral.  From a
chap not a third my age, a mere 'azardous empty boy.  _Shut_ up!  You
shut up yourself, my boy, and listen to those who know a bit more
about life than you do.  I've smacked your 'ed before to-day.  Not
once or twice either.  And I warmed your 'ide when you stole them
peaches--and much good it did you!  I oughter've took yer skin off!
You and me 'ave never got on much, and unless you keep a civil tongue
in your head we ain't going to get on now.'

"'Seeing which,' said brother Ernest with a dangerous calmness, 'the
sooner you make yourself scarce the better for all concerned.'

"'Not to leave my on'y sister's affairs in the 'ands of a cub like
you.'

"Again my mother essayed to speak, but the angry voices disregarded
her.

"'I tell you you're going to get out, and if you can't get out of
your own discretion I warn you I'll 'ave to 'elp you.'

"'Not when you're in mourning,' said my mother.  'Not wearing your
mourning.  And besides----'

"But they were both too heated now to attend to her.

"'You're pretty big with your talk,' said my uncle, 'but don't you
preshume too far on my forbearance.  I've 'ad about enough of this.'

"'So've I,' said my brother Ernest and stood up.

"My uncle stood up too and they glared at one another.

"'That's the door,' said my brother darkly.

"My uncle walked back to his wonted place on the hearthrug.  'Now
don't let's 'ave any quarrelling on a day like this,' he said.  'If
you 'aven't any consideration for your mother you might at least
think of 'im who has passed beyond.  My objec' 'ere is simply to try
n'range things so's be best for all.  And what I say is this, the
ideer of your mother going into a lodging-'ouse alone, without a
man's 'elp, is ridiculous, perfectly ridiculous, and only a
first-class inconsiderate young fool----'

"My brother Ernest went and stood close to my uncle.  'You've said
enough,' he remarked.  'This affair's between me and my mother and
your motto is Get Out.  See?'

"Again my mother had something to say and again she was silenced.
"'This is man's work, mother,' said Ernest.  'Are you going to shift
it, uncle?'

"My uncle faced up to this threat of Ernest.  'I've a juty to my
sister----'

"And then I regret to say my brother laid hands on him.  He took him
by the collar and by the wrist and for a moment the two black-clad
figures swayed.

"'Lea' go my coat,' said my uncle.  'Lea' go my coat collar.'

"But a thirst for violence had taken possession of Ernest.  My mother
and Prue and I stood aghast.

"'Ernie!' cried my mother, 'You forget yourself!'

"'Sall _right_, mother,' said Ernie, and whirled my uncle violently
from the hearthrug to the bottom of the staircase.  Then he shifted
his grip from my uncle's wrist to the seat of his tight black
trousers and partly lifted and partly impelled him up the staircase.
My uncle's arms waved wildly as if he clutched at his lost dignity.

"'John!' cried my mother.  ''Ere's your 'at!'

"I had a glimpse of my uncle's eye as he vanished up the staircase.
He seemed to be looking for his hat.  But he was now offering no
serious opposition to my brother Ernest's handling of him.

"'Give it 'im, 'Arry,' said my mother.  'And there's 'is gloves too.'

"I took the black hat and the black gloves and followed the struggle
upstairs.  Astonished and unresisting, my uncle was propelled through
the front door into the street and stood there panting and regarding
my brother.  His collar was torn from its stud and his black tie
disarranged.  Ernest was breathing heavily.  'Now you be orf and mind
your own business,' said Ernie.

"Ernie turned with a start as I pushed past him.  ''Ere's your 'at
and gloves, uncle,' I said, handing them to him.  He took them
mechanically, his eyes still fixed on Ernest.

"'And you're the boy I trained to be 'onest,' said my uncle to my
brother Ernest, very bitterly.  'Leastways I tried to.  You're the
young worm I fattened up at my gardens and showed such kindness to!
_Gratitood!_'

"He regarded the hat in his hand for a moment as though it was some
strange object, and then by a happy inspiration put it on his head.

"'God 'elp your poor mother,' said my Uncle John Julip.  'God 'elp
'er.'

"He had nothing more to say.  He looked up the street and down and
then turned as by a sort of necessity in the direction of the
_Wellington_ public-house.  And in this manner was my Uncle John
Julip on the day of my father's funeral cast forth into the streets
of Cherry Gardens, a prospective widower and a most pathetic and
unhappy little man.  That dingy little black figure in retreat still
haunts my memory.  Even from the back he looked amazed.  Never did a
man who has not been kicked look so like a man who has been.  I never
saw him again.  I have no doubt that he carried his sorrows down to
the _Wellington_ and got himself thoroughly drunk, and I have as
little doubt that he missed my father dreadfully all the time he was
doing so.

"My brother Ernest returned thoughtfully to the kitchen.  He was
already a little abashed at his own violence.  I followed him
respectfully.

"'You didn't ought t'ave done that,' said my mother.

'What right 'as 'e to plant 'imself on you to be kept and waited on?'

''E wouldn't 'ave planted 'imself on me,' my mother replied.  'You
get 'eated, Ernie, same as you used to do, and you won't listen to
anything.'

"'I never did fancy uncle,' said Ernie.

"'When you get 'eated, Ernie, you seem to forget everything,' said my
mother.  'You might've remembered 'e was my brother.'

"'Fine brother!' said Ernie.  'Why!--who started all that stealing?
Who led poor father to drink and bet?'

"'All the same,' said my mother, 'you 'adn't no right to 'andle 'im
as you did.  And your poor father 'ardly cold in 'is grave!'  She
wept.  She produced a black-bordered handkerchief and mopped her
eyes.  'I did 'ope your poor father would 'ave a nice funeral--all
the trouble and expense--and now you've spoilt it.  I'll never be
able to look back on this day with pleasure, not if I live to be a
'undred years.  I'll always remember 'ow you spoilt your own father's
funeral--turning on your uncle like this.'

"Ernest had no answer for her reproaches.  'He shouldn't 've argued
and said what he did,' he objected.

"'And all so unnecessary!  All along I've been trying to tell you you
needn't worry about me.  I don't want no lodging-'ouse in
Cliffstone--_with_ your uncle or _without_ your uncle.  I wrote to
Matilda Good a week come Tuesday and settled everything with
'er--everything.  It's settled.'

"'What d'you mean?' asked Ernest.

"'Why, that 'ouse of hers in Pimlico.  She's been wanting trusty 'elp
for a long time, what with her varicose veins up and downstairs and
one thing 'nother, and directly she got my letter about your poor
dear father she wrote orf to me.  "You need never want a 'ome," she
says, "so long as I got a lodger.  You and Prue are welcome," she
says, "welcome 'elp, and the boy can easy find work up 'ere--much
easier than 'e can in Cliffstone."  All the time you was planning
lodging-'ouses and things for me I was trying to tell you----

"'You mean it's settled?'

"'It's settled.'

"'And what you going to do with your bits of furniture 'ere?'

"'Sell some and take some....'

"'It's feasible,' said Ernest after reflection.


"'And so we needn't reely 'ave 'ad that--bit of a' argument?' said
Ernest after a pause.  'Not me and uncle?'

"'Not on my account you needn't,' said my mother.

"'Well--we 'ad it,' said Ernest after another pause and without any
visible signs of regret."



§ 3

"If my dream was a dream," said Sarnac, "it was a most circumstantial
dream.  I could tell you a hundred details of our journey to London
and how we disposed of the poor belongings that had furnished our
home in Cherry Gardens.  Every detail would expose some odd and
illuminating difference between the ideas of those ancient days and
our own ideas.  Brother Ernest was helpful, masterful and irascible.
He got a week's holiday from his employer to help mother to settle up
things, and among other things that were settled up I believe my
mother persuaded him and my uncle to 'shake hands,' but I do not know
the particulars of that great scene, I did not see it, it was merely
mentioned in my hearing during the train journey to London.  I would
like to tell you also of the man who came round to buy most of our
furniture, including that red and black sofa I described to you, and
how he and my brother had a loud and heated argument about some
damage to one of its legs, and how Mr. Crosby produced a bill, that
my mother understood he had forgiven us on account of Fanny long ago.
There was also some point about something called 'tenant's fixtures'
that led my brother and the landlord, Mr. Bulstrode, to the verge of
violence.  And Mr. Bulstrode, the landlord, brought accusations of
damage done to the fabric of his house that were false, and he made
extravagant claims for compensation based thereon and had to be
rebutted with warmth.  There was also trouble over carting a parcel
of our goods to the railway station, and when we got to the terminus
of Victoria in London it was necessary, I gathered, that Ernest
should offer to fight a railway porter--you have read of railway
porters?--before we received proper attention.

"But I cannot tell you all these curious and typical incidents now
because at that rate I should never finish my story before our
holidays are over.  I must go on now to tell you of this London, this
great city, the greatest city it was in the world in those days, to
which we had transferred our fates.  All the rest of my story, except
for nearly two years and a half I spent in the training camp and in
France and Germany during the First World War, is set in the scenery
of London.  You know already what a vast congestion of human beings
London was; you know that within a radius of fifteen miles a
population of seven and a half million people were gathered together,
people born out of due time into a world unready for them and born
mostly through the sheer ignorance of their procreators, gathered
together into an area of not very attractive clay country by an
urgent need to earn a living, and you know the terrible fate that at
last overwhelmed this sinfully crowded accumulation; you have read of
west-end and slums, and you have seen the cinema pictures of those
days showing crowded streets, crowds gaping at this queer ceremony or
that, a vast traffic of clumsy automobiles and distressed horses in
narrow unsuitable streets, and I suppose your general impression is a
nightmare of multitudes, a suffocating realisation of jostling
discomfort and uncleanness and of an unendurable strain on eye and
ear and attention.  The history we learn in our childhood enforces
that lesson.

"But though the facts are just as we are taught they were, I do not
recall anything like the distress at London you would suppose me to
have felt, and I do remember vividly the sense of adventure, the
intellectual excitement and the discovery of beauty I experienced in
going there.  You must remember that in this strange dream of mine I
had forgotten all our present standards; I accepted squalor and
confusion as being in the nature of things, and the aspects of this
city's greatness, the wonder of this limitless place and a certain
changing and evanescent beauty, rise out of a sea of struggle and
limitation as forgetfully as a silver birch rises out of the swamp
that bears it.

"The part of London in which we took up our abode was called Pimlico.
It bordered upon the river, and once there had been a wharf there to
which ships came across the Atlantic from America.  This word Pimlico
had come with other trade in these ships; in my time it was the last
word left alive of the language of the Algonquin Red Indians, who had
otherwise altogether vanished from the earth.  The Pimlico wharf had
gone, the American trade was forgotten, and Pimlico was now a great
wilderness of streets of dingy grey houses in which people lived and
let lodgings.  These houses had never been designed for the
occupation of lodgers; they were faced with a lime-plaster called
stucco which made a sort of pretence of being stone; each one had a
sunken underground floor originally intended for servants, a door
with a portico and several floors above which were reached by a
staircase.  Beside each portico was a railed pit that admitted light
to the front underground room.  As you walked along these Pimlico
streets these porticos receded in long perspectives and each portico
of that endless series represented ten or a dozen misdirected,
incomplete and rather unclean inhabitants, infected mentally and
morally.  Over the grey and dingy architecture rested a mist or a
fog, rarely was there a precious outbreak of sunlight; here and there
down the vista a grocer's boy or a greengrocer's boy or a fish hawker
would be handing in food over the railings to the subterranean
members of a household, or a cat (there was a multitude of cats)
would be peeping out of the railings alert for the danger of a
passing dog.  There would be a few pedestrians, a passing cab or so,
and perhaps in the morning a dust-cart collecting refuse filth--set
out for the winds to play with in boxes and tin receptacles at the
pavement edge--or a man in a uniform cleaning the streets with a
hose.  It seems to you that it must have been the most depressing of
spectacles.  It wasn't, though I doubt if I can make clear to you
that it wasn't.  I know I went about Pimlico thinking it rather a
fine place and endlessly interesting.  I assure you that in the early
morning and by my poor standards it had a sort of grey spaciousness
and dignity.  But afterwards I found the thing far better done, that
London architectural aquatint, in Belgravia and round about Regent's
Park.

"I must admit that I tended to drift out of those roads and squares
of lodging-houses either into the streets where there were shops and
street-cars or southward to the Embankment along the Thames.  It was
the shops and glares that drew me first as the lights began to fail
and, strange as it may seem to you, my memories of such times are
rich with beauty.  We feeble children of that swarming age had, I
think, an almost morbid gregariousness; we found a subtle pleasure
and reassurance in crowds and a real disagreeableness in being alone;
and my impressions of London's strange interest and charm are, I
confess, very often crowded impressions of a kind this world no
longer produces, or impressions to which a crowded foreground or
background was essential.  But they were beautiful.

"For example there was a great railway station, a terminus, within
perhaps half a mile of us.  There was a great disorderly yard in
front of the station in which hackney automobiles and omnibuses
assembled and departed and arrived.  In the late twilight of an
autumn day this yard was a mass of shifting black shadows and gleams
and lamps, across which streamed an incessant succession of bobbing
black heads, people on foot hurrying to catch the trains: as they
flitted by the lights one saw their faces gleam and vanish again.
Above this foreground rose the huge brown-grey shapes of the station
buildings and the façade of a big hotel, reflecting the flares below
and pierced here and there by a lit window; then very sharply came
the sky-line and a sky still blue and luminous, tranquil and aloof.
And the innumerable sounds of people and vehicles wove into a deep,
wonderful and continually varying drone.  Even to my boyish mind
there was an irrational conviction of unity and purpose in this
spectacle.

"The streets where there were shops were also very wonderful and
lovely to me directly the too-lucid and expository daylight began to
fade.  The variously coloured lights in the shop-windows which
displayed a great diversity of goods for sale splashed the most
extraordinary reflections upon the pavements and roadway, and these
were particularly gem-like if there had been rain or a mist to wet
the reflecting surfaces.  One of these streets--it was called Lupus
Street, though why it had the name of an abominable skin disease that
has long since vanished from the earth I cannot imagine--was close to
our new home and I still remember it as full of romantic
effectiveness.  By daylight it was an exceedingly sordid street, and
late at night empty and echoing, but in the magic hours of London it
was a bed of black and luminous flowers, the abounding people became
black imps and through it wallowed the great shining omnibuses, the
ships of the street, filled with light and reflecting lights.

"There were endless beauties along the river bank.  The river was a
tidal one held in control by a stone embankment, and the roadway
along the embankment was planted at the footway edge with plane trees
and lit by large electric lights on tall standards.  These planes
were among the few trees that could flourish in the murky London air,
but they were unsuitable trees to have in a crowded city because they
gave off minute specules that irritated people's throats.  That,
however, I did not know; what I did know was that the shadows of the
leaves on the pavements thrown by the electric glares made the most
beautiful patternings I had ever seen.  I would walk along on a warm
night rejoicing in them, more particularly if now and then a light
breeze set them dancing and quivering.

"One could walk from Pimlico along this Thames Embankment for some
miles towards the east.  One passed little black jetties with
dangling oil lamps; there was a traffic of barges and steamers on the
river altogether mysterious and romantic to me; the frontages of the
houses varied incessantly, and ever and again were cleft by crowded
roadways that brought a shining and twinkling traffic up to the
bridges.  Across the river was a coming and going of trains along a
railway viaduct; it contributed a restless _motif_ of clanks and
concussion to the general drone of London, and the engines sent puffs
of firelit steam and sudden furnace-glows into the night.  One came
along this Embankment to the great buildings at Westminster, by
daylight a pile of imitation Gothic dominated by a tall clock-tower
with an illuminated dial, a pile which assumed a blue dignity with
the twilight and became a noble portent standing at attention, a
forest of spears, in the night.  This was the Parliament House, and
in its chambers a formal King, an ignoble nobility and a fraudulently
elected gathering of lawyers, financiers and adventurers took upon
themselves, amidst the general mental obscurity of those days, a
semblance of wisdom and empire.  As one went on beyond Westminster
along the Embankment came great grey-brown palaces and houses set
behind green gardens, a railway bridge and then two huge hotels,
standing high and far back, bulging with lit windows; there was some
sort of pit or waste beneath them, I forget what, very black, so that
at once they loomed over one and seemed magically remote.  There was
an Egyptian obelisk here, for all the European capitals of my time,
being as honest as magpies and as original as monkeys, had adorned
themselves with obelisks stolen from Egypt.  And farther along was
the best and noblest building in London, St. Paul's Cathedral; it was
invisible by night, but it was exceedingly serene and beautiful on a
clear, blue, windy day.  And some of the bridges were very lovely
with gracious arches of smutty grey stone, though some were so clumsy
that only night could redeem them.

"As I talk I remember," said Sarnac.  "Before employment robbed me of
my days I pushed my boyish explorations far and wide, wandering all
day and often going without any meal, or, if I was in pocket, getting
a bun and a glass of milk in some small shop for a couple of pennies.
The shop-windows of London were an unending marvel to me; and they
would be to you too if you could remember them as I do; there must
have been hundreds of miles of them, possibly thousands of miles.  In
the poorer parts they were chiefly food-shops and cheap clothing
shops and the like, and one could exhaust their interest, but there
were thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly and narrow Bond
Street and Oxford Street crammed with all the furnishings of the life
of the lucky minority, the people who could spend freely.  You will
find it difficult to imagine how important a matter the mere buying
of things was in the lives of those people.  In their houses there
was a vast congestion of objects neither ornamental nor useful;
purchases in fact; and the women spent large portions of every
week-day in buying things, clothes, table-litter, floor-litter,
wall-litter.  They had no work; they were too ignorant to be
interested in any real thing; they had nothing else to do.  That was
the world's reward, the substance of success--purchases.  Through
them you realised your well-being.  As a shabby half-grown boy I
pushed my way among these spenders, crowds of women dressed, wrapped
up rather, in layer after layer of purchases, scented, painted.  Most
of them were painted to suggest a health-flushed face, the nose
powdered a leprous white.

"There is one thing to be said for the old fashion of abundant
clothing; in that crowded jostling world it saved people from
actually touching each other.

"I would push through these streets eastward to less prosperous
crowds in Oxford Street and to a different multitude in Holborn.  As
you went eastward the influence of women diminished and that of young
men increased.  Cheapside gave you all the material for building up a
twentieth-century young man from the nude.  In the shop-windows he
was disarticulated and priced: hat five and sixpence, trousers
eighteen shillings, tie one and six; cigarettes tenpence an ounce;
newspaper a half-penny, cheap novel sevenpence; on the pavement
outside there he was put together and complete and the cigarette
burning, under the impression that he was a unique immortal creature
and that the ideas in his head were altogether his own.  And beyond
Cheapside there was Clerkenwell with curious little shops that sold
scarcely anything but old keys or the parts of broken-up watches or
the like detached objects.  Then there were great food markets at
Leadenhall Street and Smithfield and Covent Garden, incredible
accumulations of raw stuff.  At Covent Garden they sold fruits and
flowers that we should think poor and undeveloped, but which everyone
in those days regarded as beautiful and delicious.  And in Caledonian
Market were innumerable barrows where people actually bought and took
away every sort of broken and second-hand rubbish, broken ornaments,
decaying books with torn pages, second-hand clothing--a wonderland of
litter for any boy with curiosity in his blood....

"But I could go on talking endlessly about this old London of mine
and you want me to get on with my story.  I have tried to give you
something of its endless, incessant, multitudinous glittering quality
and the way in which it yielded a thousand strange and lovely effects
to its changing lights and atmosphere.  I found even its fogs, those
dreaded fogs of which the books tell, romantic.  But then I was a boy
at the adventurous age.  The fog was often very thick in Pimlico.  It
was normally a soft creamy obscurity that turned even lights close at
hand into luminous blurs.  People came out of nothingness within six
yards of you, were riddles and silhouettes before they became real.
One could go out and lose oneself within ten minutes of home and
perhaps pick up with a distressed automobile driver and walk by his
headlights, signalling to him where the pavement ended.  That was one
sort of fog, the dry fog.  But there were many sorts.  There was a
sort of yellow darkness, like blackened bronze, that hovered about
you and did not embrace you and left a clear nearer world of deep
browns and blacks.  And there was an unclean wet mist that presently
turned to drizzle and made every surface a mirror."

"And there was daylight," said Willow, "sometimes surely there was
daylight."

"Yes," Sarnac reflected; "there was daylight.  At times.  And
sometimes there was quite a kindly and redeeming sunshine in London.
In the spring, in early summer or in October.  It did not blaze, but
it filled the air with a mild warmth, and turned the surfaces it lit
not indeed to gold but to amber and topaz.  And there were even hot
days in London with skies of deep blue above, but they were rare.
And sometimes there was daylight without the sun....

"Yes," said Sarnac and paused.  "At times there was a daylight that
stripped London bare, showed its grime, showed its real
ineffectiveness, showed the pitiful poverty of intention in its
buildings, showed the many coloured billstickers' hoardings for the
crude and leprous things they were, brought out the shabbiness of
unhealthy bodies and misfitting garments....

"Those were terrible, veracious, unhappy days.  When London no longer
fascinated but wearied and offended, when even to an uninstructed boy
there came some intimation of the long distressful journey that our
race had still to travel before it attained even to such peace and
health and wisdom as it has to-day."



§ 4

Sarnac stopped short in his talk and rose with something between a
laugh and a sigh.  He stood facing westward and Sunray stood beside
him.

"This story will go on for ever if I digress like this.  See! the sun
will be behind that ridge in another ten minutes.  I cannot finish
this evening, because most of the story part still remains to be
told."

"There are roast fowls with sweet corn and chestnuts," said Firefly.
"Trout and various fruits."

"And some of that golden wine?" said Radiant.

"Some of that golden wine."

Sunray, who had been very still and intent, awoke.  "Sarnac dear,"
she said, slipping her arm through his.  "What became of Uncle John
Julip?"

Sarnac reflected.  "I forget," he said.

"Aunt Adelaide Julip died?" asked Willow.

"She died quite soon after we left Cherry Gardens.  My uncle wrote, I
remember, and I remember my mother reading the letter at breakfast
like a proclamation and saying, 'Seems if she was reely ill after
all.'  If she had not been ill then surely she had carried
malingering to the last extremity.  But I forget any particulars
about my uncle's departure from this world.  He probably outlived my
mother, and after her death the news of his end might easily have
escaped me."

"You have had the most wonderful dream in the world, Sarnac," said
Starlight, "and I want to hear the whole story and not interrupt, but
I am sorry not to hear more of your Uncle John Julip."

"He was such a perfect little horror," said Firefly....

Until the knife-edge of the hills cut into the molten globe of the
sun, the holiday-makers lingered watching the shadows in their last
rush up to the mountain crests, and then, still talking of this
particular and that in Sarnac's story, the six made their way down to
the guest-house and supper.

"Sarnac was shot," said Radiant.  "He hasn't even begun to get shot
yet.  There is no end of story still to come."

"Sarnac," asked Firefly, "you weren't killed in the Great War, were
you?  Suddenly?  In some inconsequent sort of way?"

"Not a bit of it," said Sarnac.  "I am really beginning to be shot in
this story though Radiant does not perceive it.  But I must tell my
story in my own fashion."

At supper what was going on was explained to the master of the
guest-house.  Like so many of these guest-house-keepers he was a
jolly, convivial, simple soul, and he was amused and curious at
Sarnac's alleged experience.  He laughed at the impatience of the
others; he said they were like children in a Children's Garden, agog
for their go-to-bed fairy-tale.  After they had had coffee they went
out for a time to see the moonlight mingle with the ruddy afterglow
above the peaks; and then the guest-master led the way in, made up a
blazing pinewood fire and threw cushions before it, set out an
after-dinner wine, put out the lights and prepared for a good night's
story-telling.

Sarnac remained thoughtful, looking into the flames until Sunray set
him off again by whispering: "Pimlico?"



§ 5

"I will tell you as briefly as I can of the household in Pimlico
where we joined forces with my mother's old friend, Matilda Good,"
said Sarnac; "but I confess it is hard to be reasonably brief when
one's mind is fuller of curious details than this fire is of sparks."

"That's excellent!" said the master of the guest-house.  "That's a
perfect story-teller's touch!" and looked brightly for Sarnac to
continue.

"But we are all beginning to believe that he has been there,"
whispered Radiant, laying a restraining hand on the guest-master's
knee.  "And he"--Radiant spoke behind his hand--"he believes it
altogether."

"Not _really_?" whispered the guest-master.  He seemed desirous of
asking difficult questions and then subsided into an attention that
was at first a little constrained and presently quite involuntary.

"These houses in Pimlico were part of an enormous proliferation of
houses that occurred between a hundred years and seventy years before
the Great War.  There was a great amount of unintelligent building
enterprise in those decades in London, and at the building, as I have
already told you, I think, was done on the supposition that there was
an endless supply of fairly rich families capable of occupying a big
house and employing three or four domestic servants.  There were
underground kitchens and servants' rooms, there was a dining-room and
master's study at the ground level, there was a 'drawing-room floor'
above, two rooms convertible into one by a device known as folding
doors, and above this were bedrooms on a scale of diminishing
importance until one came to attics without fire-places in which the
servants were to sleep.  In large areas and particularly in Pimlico,
these fairly rich families of the builder's imagination, with servile
domestics all complete, never appeared to claim the homes prepared
for them, and from the first, poorer people, for whom of course no
one had troubled to plan houses, adapted these porticoed plaster
mansions to their own narrower needs.  My mother's friend, Matilda
Good, was a quite typical Pimlico householder.  She had been the
trusted servant of a rich old lady in Cliffstone who had died and
left her two or three hundred pounds of money----"

The master of the guest-house was endlessly perplexed and made an
interrogative noise.

"Private property," said Radiant very rapidly.  "Power of bequest.
Two thousand years ago.  Made a Will, you know.  Go on, Sarnac."

"With that and her savings," said Sarnac, "she was able to become
tenant of one of these Pimlico houses and to furnish it with a sort
of shabby gentility.  She lived herself in the basement below and in
the attic above, and all the rest of the house she had hoped to let
in pieces, floor by floor or room by room, to rich or at least
prosperous old ladies, and to busy herself in tending them and
supplying their needs and extracting a profit and living out of them,
running up and down her staircase as an ant runs up and down a rose
stem tending its aphides.  But old ladies of any prosperity did not
come into Pimlico.  It was low and foggy, the children of its poorer
streets were rough and disrespectful, and it was close to the river
embankment over which rich, useless old ladies naturally expected to
be thrown.  So Matilda Good had to console herself with less
succulent and manageable lodgers.

"I remember Matilda Good giving us an account of those she had as we
sat in her front downstairs room having a kind of tea supper on the
evening of our arrival.  Ernest had declined refreshment and
departed, his task as travel conductor done, but there were my mother
and Prue and myself, all in dingy black and all a little stiff and
strange, thawing slowly to tea and hot buttered toast with a poached
egg each, our mouths very full and our eyes and ears very attentive
to Matilda Good.

"She appeared quite a grand lady to me that night.  She was much
larger than any lady I had hitherto been accustomed to; she had a
breadth and variety of contour like scenery rather than a human
being; the thought of her veins being varicose, indeed of all her
anatomy being varicose and fantastic, seemed a right and proper one.
She was dressed in black with outbreaks of soiled lace, a large
gold-rimmed brooch fastened her dress at the neck and she had a gold
chain about her, and on her head was what was called a 'cap,' an
affair like the lower shell of an oyster inverted, made of layers of
dingy lace and adorned with a black velvet bow and a gold buckle.
Her face had the same landscape unanatomical quality as her body; she
had a considerable moustache, an overhung slightly mischievous mouth
and two different large dark-grey eyes with a slightly vertical cast
in them and very marked eyelashes.  She sat sideways.  One eye looked
at you rather sidelong, the other seemed to watch something over your
head.  She spoke in a whisper which passed very easily into wheezy,
not unkindly laughter.

"'You'll get no end of exercise on these stairs, my dear,' she said
to sister Prue, 'no end of exercise.  There's times when I'm going up
to bed when I start counting 'em, just to make sure that they aren't
taking in lodgers like the rest of us.  There's no doubt this 'ouse
will strengthen your legs, my dear.  Mustn't get 'em too big and
strong for the rest of you.  But you can easy manage that by carrying
something, carrying something every time you go up or down.
Ugh--ugh.  That'll equalise you.  There's always something to carry,
boots it is, hot water it is, a scuttle of coals or a parcel.'

"'I expect it's a busy 'ouse,' said my mother, eating her buttered
toast like a lady.

"'It's a toilsome 'ouse,' said Matilda Good.  'I don't want to
deceive you, Martha; it's a toilsome 'ouse.

"'But it's a 'ouse that keeps full,' said Matilda Good, challenging
me with one eye and ignoring me with the other.  'Full I am now, and
full I've been since last Michaelmas, full right up; two permanents
I've 'ad three years on end and those my best floors.  I've something
to be thankful for, all things considered, and now I got 'elp of a
sort that won't slide downstairs on a tea tray or lick the
ground-floor's sugar lump by lump knowing the lumps was counted and
never thinking that wetness tells, the slut! we'll get on swimmingly.
The sluts I've 'ad, Martha!  These board-schools turn them out a
'orror to God and a danger to men.  I can't tell you.  It's a comfort
to set eyes on any girl as I can see at once 'as been brought up to
take a pride in 'erself.  'Ave a little of that watercress with your
toast, my dear.  It'll do that complexion of yours good.'

"My sister Prue reddened and took some watercress.

"'The drawing-room floor,' said Matilda Good, 'is a lady.  It isn't
often you keep a lady three years, what with the things they know and
the things they fancy they know, but I've kept her.  She's a real
lady--born.  Bumpus 'er name is--Miss Beatrice Bumpus.  I don't know
whether you'll like her, Martha, when you set eyes on her, but she's
got to be studied.  She's a particular sort of Warwickshire Bumpus
that hunts.  She'll ask you if you want the vote, Martha, directly
she sees you're a fresh face.  It isn't a vote or any old vote she
asks you to want, it's _the_ vote.'  The whispering voice grew
thicker and richer and a persuasive smile spread far and wide over
the face.  'If it's all the same to you, Martha, you better say you
do.'

"My mother was sipping her fourth cup of tea.  'I don't know,' she
said, 'as I altogether 'old with this vote.'

"Matilda Good's great red hands, which had been lying apparently
detached in her lap, produced short arms and lace cuffs and waved
about in the air, waving my mother's objections away.  ''Old with it
on the drawing-room floor,' wheezed Matilda.  ''Old with it on the
drawing-room floor.'

"'But if she arsts questions?'

"'She won't wait to have them answered.  It won't be difficult,
Martha.  I wouldn't put you into a position of difficulty, not if I
could 'elp it.  You just got to 'old with 'er quietly and she'll do
the rest.'

"'Mother,' said Prue, who was still too overawed by Matilda Good to
address her directly.  'Mother, what _is_ this here vote?'

"'Vote for Parliament, my dear,' said Matilda Good.

"'When shall we get it?' asked my mother.

"'You won't get it,' said Matilda Good.

"'But if we did, what should we have to do with it, like?'

"'_Nothing_,' said Matilda Good with bottomless contempt.  'All the
same it's a great movement, Martha, and don't you forget it.  And
Miss Bumpus she works night and day, Martha, gets 'it about by
policemen, and once she was actually in prison a night, getting you
and me the vote.'

"'Well, it shows a kind nature,' said my mother.

"'My ground-floor's a gentleman.  The worst of 'im is the books there
are to dust, books and books.  Not that 'e ever reads 'em much....
Very likely you'll 'ear 'im soon playing his pianola.  You can 'ear
it down 'ere almost as if you were inside it.  Mr. Plaice, 'e's an
Oxford gentleman and he works at a firm of publishers, Burrows and
Graves, they're called; a very 'igh-class firm I'm told--don't go in
for advertisements or anything vulgar.  He's got photographs of Greek
and Latin statues and ruins round above his bookshelves and shields
with College arms.  Naked some of the statues are, but for all that
none of them are anything but quite nice and genteel, _quite_
genteel.  You can see at once he's a University gentleman.  And
photographs of Switzerland he's got.  He goes up mountains in
Switzerland and speaks the language.  He's a smoker; sets with a pipe
writing or reading evening after evening and marking things with his
pencil.  Manuscripts he reads and proofs.  Pipes he has with a pipe
for every day in the week, and a smoker's outfit all made with
bee-utiful stone, serpentine they call it, sort of bloodshot green it
is; tobacco-jar and a pot for feathers to clean his pipes, little
places for each day's pipe, everything all of stone; it's a regular
monument.  And when you're dusting it--remember if you drop this here
serpentine it breaks like earthenware.  Most of the maids I've 'ad
'ave 'ad a chip at that tobacco graveyard of 'is.  And mind you----'
Matilda Good leant forward and held out her hand to arrest any
wandering of my mother's attention.  '_'E don't 'old with Votes for
Women_!  See?'

"'One's got to be careful,' said my mother.

"'One has.  He's got one or two little whims, has Mr. Plaice, but if
you mind about them he don't give you much trouble.  One of 'is whims
is to pretend to 'ave a bath every morning.  Every morning he 'as a
shallow tin bath put out in his room and a can of cold water and a
sponge, and every morning he pretends to splash about in it something
fearful and makes a noise like a grampus singing a hymn--calls it 'is
Tub, he does; though it's a lot more like a canary's saucer.  Says he
must have it as cold as possible even if there's ice on it.  Well----'

"Matilda Good performed a sort of landslide over the arm of her
chair, her head nodded, and the whisper became more confidential.
'He _doesn't_,' wheezed Matilda Good.

"'You mean he doesn't get into the bath?'

"'Not-tit,' said Matilda Good.  'You can see when he's really been in
by his wet footmarks on the floor.  Not 'arf the time does he have
that bath.  Per'aps 'e used to have it when he was a young man at
College.  I wonder.  But it's always got to be put out and the can
always got to be lugged up and poured out and poured away again, and
nobody's ever to ask if he'd like the chill taken off.  Not the sort
of thing you ask a University gentleman.  No.  All the same,' said
Matilda Good, 'all the same I've caught 'im pouring his hand and
shaving water into that water-splash in the winter, after he'd been
going dirty for a week.  But have a can of warm?  Have the chill
taken off his water?  Not Tim!  It's curious, ain't it?  But that's
one of his whims.

"'I sometimes think,' said Matilda Good still more extravagantly
confidential, 'that perhaps he climbs all those mountains in
Switzerland same way as he takes his bath....'

"She rolled back large portions of her person into a less symmetrical
attitude.  'This Mr. Plaice you must know,' she said, 'has a voice
between a clergyman's and a schoolmaster's, sort of hard and
superior, and when you say anything to him he's apt to make a noise,
"Arrr ... Arrr ... Arrr," a sort of slow neighing it is, as though he
doesn't think much of you but doesn't want to blame you for that and
anyhow can't attend to you properly.  You mustn't let it annoy you.
It's the way he's been brought up.  And he has a habit of using long
condescending sort of words to you.  And calling you insulting names.
He'll think nothing of calling you "My worthy Abigail," or "Come in,
my rosy-fingered Aurora," when you knock in the morning.  Just as
though a girl could keep 'er 'ands pink and clean with all these
fires to light!  He'll ask of me 'How's the Good Matilda?  How's
honest Matilda Good to-day?"--sort of fiddling about with your name.
Of course he don't mean to be rude; it's just his idea of being
pleasant and humorous, and making you feel you're being made fun of
in a gentle sort of way instead of being terrible like he might be,
and--seeing he's good pay and very little trouble, Martha--it's no
good getting offended with him.  All the same I can't help thinking
at times of how he'd get on if I answered 'im back, and which of us
two would be left alive if we had a fair match of it, making fun of
one another.  The things--the things I could say!  But that,' said
Matilda Good, breaking into an ingratiating smile of extraordinary
extent and rolling one eye at me--'is just a dream.  It isn't the
sort of dream to indulge in in this 'ouse.  I've rehearsed it a bit,
I admit.  Says 'e--but never mind what 'e says or what I says back to
him....  Ugh!  Ugh! ... He's good pay and regular, my dear; he ain't
likely to lose his job and he ain't likely ever to get another, and
in this Vale anyhow we got to put up with 'is whims.  And----'

"Matilda Good spoke as one who confesses to a weakness.  'His pianola
cheers me up at times.  I will say that for 'im.  It's almost the
only noise one hears from him.  Except when he takes off his boots.

"'Well, up above my drawing-room at present is my second floor front,
the Reverend Moggeridge and his good lady.  They been here five
months now and they seem like taking root.'

"'Not a clergyman?' said my mother respectfully.

"'A very poor clergyman,' said Matilda, 'but a clergyman.  So much to
our credit, Martha.  Oh!  but they're poor old things!  Poor old
things!  Been curate or something all his life in some
out-of-the-world place.  And lost his job.  Somebody had the heart to
turn 'em out.  Or something happened.  I wonder.  'E's a funny old
man....

"'He dodders off nearly every Saturday on supply, they call it, to
take services somewhere over the Sunday, and like as not he comes
back with his cold worse than ever, sniffing and sniffing.  It's
cruel how they treat these poor old parsons on supply, fetch 'em from
the station in open traps they do, in the worst of weather, and often
the rectory tee-total without a drop of anything for a cold.
Christianity!  I suppose it's got to be....  The two of them just
potter about upstairs and make shift to get their meals, such as they
are, over the bedroom fire.  She even does a bit of her own washing.
Dragging about.  Poor old things!  Old and forgotten and left about.
But they're very little trouble and there it is.  And as I
say--anyhow--he's a clergyman.  And in the other room at the back
there's a German lady who teaches--well, anything she can persuade
anyone to be taught.  She hasn't been here more than a month, and I
don't know whether I like her or not, but she seems straight enough
and she keeps herself pretty much to herself and when one has a room
to let one can't always pick and choose.

"'And that's the lot, my dear.  To-morrow we'll have to begin.
You'll go up presently and settle into your two rooms at the top.
There's a little one for Mortimer and a rather bigger one for you and
Prue.  There's pegs and curtains for your things.  I'm next door to
you.  I'll give you my little old alarum clock and show you all about
it and to-morrow at seven sharp down we come, you and me and Prue.
My Lord, I suppose, has the privilege of his sex and doesn't come
down until half-past!  Oh!  I'm a suffragette, Martha,--same as Miss
Bumpus.  First thing is this fire, and unless we rake the ashes well
forward the boiler won't heat.  Then there's fires and boots, dust
the front rooms and breakfasts: Mr. Plaice at eight sharp and mind it
is, and Miss Bumpus at eight-thirty, and get away with Mr. Plaice if
you can first because of the shortness of tablespoons.  Five I got
altogether and before I lost my last third floor back I 'ad seven.
'E was a nice lot; 'e was.  The old people get their own breakfast
when they want it, and Frau Buchholz has a tray, just bread and
butter and tea, whenever we can manage it after the drawing-room's
been seen to.  That's the programme, Martha.'

"'I'll do my best, 'Tilda,' said my mother.  '_As_ you know.'

"'Hullo!' said Matilda indicating the ceiling, 'the concert's going
to begin.  That bump's him letting down the pianola pedals.'

"And then suddenly through the ceiling into our subterranean
tea-party came a rush of Clavier notes--I can't describe it.

"One of the few really good things of that age was the music.
Mankind perfected some things very early; I suppose precious-stone
work and gold work have never got very much beyond the levels it
reached under the Seventeenth Dynasty in Egypt, ages ago, and marble
statuary came to a climax at Athens before the conquests of
Alexander.  I doubt if there has ever come very much sweeter music
into the world than the tuneful stuff we had away back there in the
Age of Confusion.  This music Mr. Plaice was giving us was some bits
of Schumann's _Carnaval_ music; we hear it still played on the
Clavier; and it was almost the first good music I ever heard.  There
had been brass bands on Cliffstone promenade, of course, but they
simply made a glad row.  I don't know if you understand what a
pianola was.  It was an instrument for playing the Clavier with
hammers directed by means of perforated rolls, for the use of those
who lacked the intelligence and dexterity to read music and play the
Clavier with their hands.  Because everyone was frightfully unhandy
in those days.  It thumped a little and struck undiscriminating
chords, but Mr. Plaice managed it fairly well and the result came,
filtered through the ceiling----  As we used to say in those days, it
might have been worse.

"At the thoughts of that music I recall--and whenever I hear Schumann
as long as I live I shall recall--the picture of that underground
room, the little fire-place with the kettle on a hob, the
kettle-holder and the toasting fork beside the fire-place jamb, the
steel fender, the ashes, the small blotched looking-glass over the
mantel, the little china figures of dogs in front of the glass, the
gaslight in a frosted glass globe hanging from the ceiling and
lighting the tea-things on the table.  (Yes, the house was lit by
coal-gas; electric light was only just coming in....  My dear
Firefly! can I possibly stop my story to tell you what coal-gas was?
A good girl would have learnt that long ago.)

"There sat Matilda Good reduced to a sort of imbecile ecstasy by
these butterflies of melody.  She nodded her cap, she rolled her head
and smiled; she made appreciative rhythmic gestures with her hands;
one eye would meet you in a joyous search for sympathy while the
other contemplated the dingy wall-paper beyond.  I too was deeply
stirred.  But my mother and sister Prue sat in their black with an
expression of forced devotion, looking very refined and correct,
exactly as they had sat and listened to my father's funeral service
five days before.

"'Sputiful,' whispered my mother, like making a response in church,
when the first piece came to an end....

"I went to sleep that night in my little attic with fragments of
Schumann, Bach and Beethoven chasing elusively about my brain.  I
perceived that a new phase of life had come to me....

"Jewels," said Sarnac.  "Some sculpture, music--just a few lovely
beginnings there were already of what man could do with life.  Such
things I see now were the seeds of the new world of promise already
there in the dark matrix of the old."



§ 6

"Next morning revealed a new Mathilda Good, active and urgent, in a
loose and rather unclean mauve cotton wrapper and her head wrapped up
in a sort of turban of figured silk.  This costume she wore most of
the day except that she did her hair and put on a cotton lace cap in
the afternoon.  (The black dress and the real lace cap and the
brooch, I was to learn, were for Sundays and for week-day evenings of
distinction.)  My mother and Prue were arrayed in rough aprons which
Matilda had very thoughtfully bought for them.  There was a great
bustle in the basement of the house, and Prue a little before eight
went up with Matilda to learn how to set out breakfast for Mr.
Plaice.  I made his acquaintance later in the day when I took up the
late edition of the _Evening Standard_ to him.  I found him a
stooping, tall gentleman with a cadaverous face that was mostly
profile, and he made great play with my Christian name.

"'Mortimer,' he said and neighed his neigh.  'Well--it might have
been Norfolk-Howard.'

"There was an obscure allusion in that: for once upon a time, ran the
popular legend, a certain Mr. Bugg seeking a less entomological name
had changed his to Norfolk-Howard, which was in those days a very
aristocratic one....  Whereupon vulgar people had equalised matters
by calling the offensive bed-bugs that abounded in London,
'Norfolk-Howards.'

"Before many weeks were past it became evident that Matilda Good had
made an excellent bargain in her annexation of our family.  She had
secured my mother's services for nothing, and it was manifest that my
mother was a born lodging-house woman.  She behaved like a partner in
the concern, and the only money Matilda ever gave her was to pay her
expenses upon some specific errand or to buy some specific thing.
Prue, however, with unexpected firmness, insisted upon wages, and
enforced her claim by going out and nearly getting employment at a
dressmaker's.  In a little while Matilda became to the lodgers an
unseen power for righteousness in the basement and all the staircase
work was left to my mother and Prue.  Often Matilda did not go up
above the ground level once all day until, as she said, she 'toddled
up to bed.'

"Matilda made some ingenuous attempts to utilise me also in the
service of the household: I was exhorted to carry up scuttles of
coal, clean boots and knives and make myself useful generally.  She
even put it to me one day whether I wouldn't like a nice suit with
buttons--in those days they still used to put small serving boys in
tight suits of green or brown cloth, with rows of gilt buttons as
close together as possible over their little chests and stomachs.
But the very thought of it sent my mind to Chessing Hanger, where I
had conceived an intense hatred and dread of 'service' and 'livery,'
and determined me to find some other employment before Matilda Good's
large and insidious will enveloped and overcame me.  And, oddly
enough, a talk I had with Miss Beatrice Bumpus helped me greatly in
my determination.

"Miss Bumpus was a slender young woman of about five and twenty, I
suppose.  She had short brown hair, brushed back rather prettily from
a broad forehead, and she had freckles on her nose and quick
red-brown eyes.  She generally wore a plaid tweed costume rather
short in the skirt and with a coat cut like a man's; she wore green
stockings and brown shoes--I had never seen green stockings
before--and she would stand on her hearthrug in exactly the attitude
Mr. Plaice adopted on his hearthrug downstairs.  Or she would be
sitting at a writing-desk against the window, smoking cigarettes.
She asked me what sort of man I intended to be, and I said with the
sort of modesty I had been taught to assume as becoming my station,
that I hadn't thought yet.

"To which Miss Bumpus answered, 'Liar.'

"That was the sort of remark that either kills or cures.  I said,
'Well, Miss, I want to get educated and I don't know how to do it.
And I don't know what I ought to do.'

"Miss Bumpus held me with a gesture while she showed how nicely she
could send out smoke through her nose.  Then she said, 'Avoid Blind
Alley Occupations.'

"'Yes, Miss.'

"'But you don't know what Blind Alley Occupations are?'

"'No, Miss.'

"'Occupations that earn a boy wages and lead nowhere.  One of the
endless pitfalls of this silly man-made pseudo-civilisation.  Never
do anything that doesn't lead somewhere.  Aim high.  I must think
your case out, Mr. Harry Mortimer.  I might be able to help you....'

"This was the opening of quite a number of conversations between
myself and Miss Bumpus.  She was a very stimulating influence in my
adolescence.  She pointed out that although it was now late in the
year, there were many evening classes of various sorts that I might
attend with profit.  She told me of all sorts of prominent and
successful people who had begun their careers from beginnings as
humble and hopeless as mine.  She said I was 'unhampered' by my sex.
She asked me if I was interested in the suffrage movement, and gave
me tickets for two meetings at which I heard her speak, and she
spoke, I thought, very well.  She answered some interrupters with
extreme effectiveness, and I cheered myself hoarse for her.
Something about her light and gallant attitude to life reminded me of
Fanny.  I said so one day, and found myself, before I knew it,
telling her reluctantly and shamefully the story of our family
disgrace.  Miss Bumpus was much interested.

"'She wasn't like your sister Prue?'

"'No, Miss.'

"'Prettier?'

"'A lot prettier.  Of course--you could hardly call Prue _pretty_,
Miss.'

"'I hope she's got on all right,' said Miss Bumpus.  'I don't blame
her a bit.  But I hope she got the best of it.'

"'I'd give anything, Miss, to hear Fanny was all right....  I did
care for Fanny, Miss....  I'd give anything almost to see Fanny
again....  You won't tell my mother, Miss, I told you anything about
Fanny?  It kind of slipped out like.'

"'Mortimer,' said Miss Bumpus, 'you're a sticker.  I wish I had a
little brother like you.  There!  I won't breathe a word.'

"I felt we had sealed a glorious friendship.  I adopted Votes for
Women as the first plank of my political platform.  (No, Firefly, I
won't explain.  I won't explain anything.  You must guess what a
political platform was and what its planks were.)  I followed up her
indications and found out about classes in the district where I could
learn geology and chemistry and how to speak French and German.  Very
timidly I mooted the subject of my further education in the basement
living-room."



§ 7

Sarnac looked round at the fire-lit faces of his listeners.

"I know how topsy-turvy this story must seem to you, but it is a fact
that before I was fourteen I had to plead for education against the
ideas and wishes of my own family.  And the whole household from top
to bottom was brought into the discussion by Matilda or my mother.
Except for Miss Bumpus and Frau Buchholz, everyone was against the
idea.

"'Education,' said Matilda, shaking her head slowly from side to side
and smiling deprecatingly.  'Education!  That's all very well for
those who have nothing better to do, but you want to get on in the
world.  You've got to be earning, young man.'

"'But if I have education I'll be able to earn more.'

"Matilda screwed up her mouth in a portentous manner and pointed to
the ceiling to indicate Mr. Plaice.  'That's what comes of education,
young man.  A room frowsty with books and just enough salary not to
be able to do a blessed thing you want to do.  And giving yourself
Airs.  Business is what you want, young man, not education.'

"'And who's to pay for all these classes?' said my mother.  'That's
what _I_ want to know.'

"'That's what we all want to know,' said Matilda Good.

"'If I can't get education----' I said, and left the desperate
sentence unfinished.  I am afraid I was near weeping.  To learn
nothing beyond my present ignorance seemed to me then like a sentence
of imprisonment for life.  It wasn't I who suffered that alone.
Thousands of poor youngsters of fourteen or fifteen in those days
knew enough to see clearly that the doors of practical illiteracy
were closing in upon them, and yet did not know enough to find a way
of escape from this mental extinction.

"'Look here!' I said, 'if I can get some sort of job during the day,
may I pay for classes in the evening?'

"'If you can earn enough,' said Matilda.  'It's no worse I suppose
than going to these new cinema shows or buying sweets for girls.'

"'You've got to pay in for your room here and your keep, Morty,
first,' said my mother.  'It isn't fair on Miss Good if you don't.'

"'I know,' I said, with my heart sinking.  'I'll pay in for my board
and lodging.  Some'ow.  I don't want to be dependent.'

"'What good you think it will do you,' said Matilda Good, 'I _don't_
know.  You'll pick up a certain amount of learning perhaps, get a
certificate or something and ideas above your station.  You'll give
all the energy you might use in shoving your way up in some useful
employment.  You'll get round-shouldered and near-sighted.  And just
to grow up a discontented misfit.  Well--have it your own way if you
must.  If you earn the money yourself it's yours to spend.'

"Mr. Plaice was no more encouraging.  'Well, my noble Mortimer,' he
said, 'they tell me _Arr_ that you aspire to university honours.'

"'I want to learn a little more than I know, Sir.'

"'And join the ranks of the half-educated proletariat?'

"It sounded bad.  'I hope not, Sir,' I said.

"'And what classes do you propose to attend, Mortimer?'

"'Whatever there are.'

"'No plan?  No aim?'

"'I thought they'd know.'

"'Whatever they give you--eh?  A promiscuous appetite.  And while
you--while you _Arr_ indulge in this mixed feast of learning, this
futile rivalry with the children of the leisured classes, somebody I
suppose will have to keep _you_.  Don't you think it's a bit hard on
that kind mother of yours who toils day and night for you, that you
shouldn't work and do your bit, eh?  One of the things, Mortimer, we
used to learn in our much-maligned public schools, was something we
called _playing cricket_.  Well, I ask you, is this--this
disinclination to do a bit of the earning, _Arr_, is it playing
cricket?  I could expect such behaviour from an 'Arry, you know, but
not from a Mortimer.  _Noblesse oblige_.  You think it over, my boy.
There's such a thing as learning, but there's such a thing as Duty.
Many of us have to be content with lives of unassuming labour.  Many
of us.  Men who under happier circumstances might have done great
things....'

"The Moggeridges were gently persuasive in the same strain.  My
mother had put her case to them also.  Usually I was indisposed to
linger in the Moggeridge atmosphere; they had old-fashioned ideas
about draughts, and there was a peculiar aged flavour about them;
they were, to be plain, a very dirty old couple indeed.  With
declining strength they had relaxed by imperceptible degrees from the
not very exacting standards of their youth.  I used to cut into their
room and out of it again as quickly as I could.

"But half a century of the clerical life among yielding country folk
had given these bent, decaying, pitiful creatures a wonderful way
with their social inferiors.  'Morning, Sir and Mam,' I said, and put
down the coals I had brought and took up the empty scuttle-lining I
had replaced.

"Mrs. Moggeridge advanced shakily so as to intercept my retreat.  She
had silvery hair, a wrinkled face and screwed-up red-rimmed eyes; she
was short-sighted and came peering up very close to me whenever she
spoke to me, breathing in my face.  She held out a quivering hand to
arrest me; she spoke with a quavering voice.  'And how's Master Morty
this morning?' she said, with kindly condescending intonations.

"'Very well thank you, Mam,' I said.

"'I've been hearing rather a sad account of you, Morty, rather a sad
account.'

"'Sorry, Mum,' I said, and wished I had the courage to tell her that
my life was no business of hers.

"They say you're discontented, Morty.  They say you complain of God's
Mercies.'

"Mr. Moggeridge had been sitting in the armchair by the fire-place.
He was in his slippers and shirt-sleeves and he had been reading a
newspaper.  Now he looked at me over his silver-rimmed spectacles and
spoke in a rich succulent voice.

"'I'm sorry you should be giving trouble to that dear mother of
yours,' he said.  'Very sorry.  She's a devoted saintly woman.'

"'Yessir,' I said.

"'Very few boys nowadays have the privilege of such an upbringing as
yours.  Some day you may understand what you owe her.'

("'I begin to,'" interjected Sarnac.)

"'It seems you want to launch out upon some extravagant plan of
classes instead of settling down quietly in your proper sphere.  Is
that so?'

"'I don't feel I know enough yet, Sir,' I said.  'I feel I'd like to
learn more.'

"'Knowledge isn't always happiness, Morty,' said Mrs. Moggeridge
close to me--much too close to me.

"'And what may these classes be that are tempting you to forget the
honour you owe your dear good mother?' said Mr. Moggeridge.

"'I don't know yet, Sir.  They say there's classes in geology and
French and things like that.'

"Old Mr. Moggeridge waved his hand in front of himself with an
expression of face as though it was I who emitted an evil odour.
'Geology!' he said.  'French--the language of Voltaire.  Let me tell
you one thing plainly, my boy, your mother is quite right in
objecting to these classes.  Geology--geology is--All Wrong.  It has
done more harm in the last fifty years than any other single
influence whatever.  It undermines faith.  It sows doubt.  I do not
speak ignorantly, Mortimer.  I have seen lives wrecked and destroyed
and souls lost by this same geology.  I am an old learned man, and I
have examined the work of many of these so-called geologists--Huxley,
Darwin and the like; I have examined it very, very carefully and
very, very tolerantly, and I tell you they are all, all of them,
_hopelessly mistaken men_....  And what good will such knowledge do
you?  Will it make you happier?  Will it make you better?  No, my
lad.  But I know of something that will.  Something older than
geology.  Older and better.  Sarah dear, give me that book there,
please.  Yes'--reverentially--'_the_ Book.'

"His wife handed him a black-bound Bible, with its cover protected
against rough usage by a metal edge.  'Now, my boy,' he said, 'let me
give you this--this old familiar book, with an old man's blessing.
In that is all the knowledge worth having, all the knowledge you will
ever need.  You will always find something fresh in it and always
something beautiful.'  He held it out to me.

"Accepting it seemed the shortest way out of the room, so I took it.
'Thank you, Sir,' I said.

"'Promise me you will read it.'

"'Oh yes, Sir.'

"I turned to go.  But giving was in the air.

"'Now, Mortimer,' said Mrs. Moggeridge, 'do please promise me to seek
strength where strength is to be found and try to be a better son to
that dear struggling woman.'  And as she spoke she proffered for my
acceptance an extremely hard, small, yellow orange.

"'Thank you, Mam,' I said, made shift to stow her gift in my pocket,
and with the Bible in one hand and the empty coal-scuttle-lining in
the other, escaped.

"I returned wrathfully to the basement and deposited my presents on
the window-sill.  Some impulse made me open the Bible, and inside the
cover I found, imperfectly erased, the shadowy outlines of these
words, printed in violet ink: 'Not to be Removed from the
Waiting-Room.'  I puzzled over the significance of this for some
time."

"And what did it signify?' asked Firefly.

"I do not know to this day," said Sarnac.  "But apparently the
reverend gentleman had acquired that Book at a railway-station during
one of his journeys as a Sunday supply."

"You mean----?" said Firefly.

"No more than I say.  He was in many ways a peculiar old gentleman,
and his piety was, I fancy, an essentially superficial exudation.  He
was--I will not say 'dishonest,' but 'spasmodically acquisitive.'
And like many old people in those days he preferred his refreshment
to be stimulating rather than nutritious, and so he may have blurred
his ethical perceptions.  An odd thing about him--Matilda Good was
the first to point it out--was that he rarely took an umbrella away
with him when he went on supply and almost always he came back with
one--and once he came back with two.  But he never kept his
umbrellas; he would take them off for long walks and return without
them, looking all the brighter for it.  I remember one day I was in
the room when he returned from such an expedition, there had been a
shower and his coat was wet.  Mrs. Moggeridge made him change it and
lamented that he had lost his umbrella _again_.

"'Not lost,' I heard the old man say in a voice of infinite
gentleness.  'Not lost, dear.  Not lost; but gone before....  Gone
before the rain came....  The Lord gave....  Lord hath taken 'way.'

"For a time he was silent, coat in hand.  He stood with his
shirt-sleeve resting on the mantel-shelf, his foot upon the fender,
and his venerable hairy face gazing down into the fire.  He seemed to
be thinking deep, sad things.  Then he remarked in a thoughtful, less
obituary tone: 'Ten'n-sixpence.  A jolly goo' 'mbrella."



§ 8

"Frau Buchholz was a poor, lean, distressful woman of five and forty
or more, with a table littered with the documents of some obscure
litigation.  She did not altogether discourage my ambitions, but she
laid great stress on the hopelessness of attempting Kultur without a
knowledge of German, and I am inclined to think that her attitude was
determined mainly by a vague and desperate hope that I might be
induced to take lessons in German from her.

"Brother Ernest was entirely against my ambition.  He was shy and
vocally inexpressive, and he took me to the Victoria Music Hall and
spent a long evening avoiding the subject.  It was only as we drew
within five minutes of home that he spoke of it.

"'What's all this about your not being satisfied with your education,
'Arry?' he asked.  'I thought you'd had a pretty decent bit of
schooling.'

"'I don't feel I know anything,' I said.  'I don't know history or
geography or anything.  I don't even know my own grammar.'

"'You know enough,' said Ernest.  'You know enough to get a job.
Knowing more would only make you stuck-up.  We don't want any more
stuck-ups in the family, God knows.'

"I knew he referred to Fanny, but of course neither of us mentioned
her shameful name.

"'Anyhow, I suppose I'll have to chuck it,' I said bitterly.

"'That's about it, 'Arry.  I know you're a sensible chap--at bottom.
You got to be what you got to be.'

"The only encouragement I got to resist mental extinction was from
Miss Beatrice Bumpus, and after a time I found even that source of
consolation was being cut off from me.  For my mother began to
develop the most gross and improbable suspicions about Miss Bumpus.
You see I stayed sometimes as long as ten or even twelve minutes in
the drawing-room, and it was difficult for so good a woman as my
mother, trained in the most elaborate precautions of separation
between male and female, to understand that two young people of
opposite sex could have any liking for each other's company unless
some sort of gross familiarity was involved.  The good of those days,
living as they did in a state of inflamed restraint, had very
exaggerated ideas of the appetites, capacities and uncontrollable
duplicity of normal human beings.  And so my mother began to
manoeuvre in the most elaborate way to replace me by Prue as a
messenger to Miss Bumpus.  And when I was actually being talked
to--and even talking--in the drawing-room I had an increasing sense
of that poor misguided woman hovering upon the landing outside,
listening in a mood of anxious curiosity and ripening for a sudden
inrush, a disgraceful exposure, wild denunciation of Miss Bumpus, and
the rescue of the vestiges of my damaged moral nature.  I might never
have realised what was going on if it had not been for my mother's
direct questionings and warnings.  Her conception of a proper
upbringing for the young on these matters was a carefully preserved
ignorance hedged about by shames and foul terrors.  So she was at
once extremely urgent and extraordinarily vague with me.  What was I
up to--staying so long with that woman?  I wasn't to listen to
anything she told me.  I was to be precious careful what I got up to
up there.  I might find myself in more trouble than I thought.  There
were women in this world of a shamelessness it made one blush to
think of.  She'd always done her best to keep me from wickedness and
nastiness."

"But she was mad!" said Willow.

"All the countless lunatic asylums of those days wouldn't have held a
tithe of the English people who were as mad in that way as she was."

"But the whole world was mad?" said Sunray.  "_All_ those people,
except perhaps Miss Bumpus, talked about your education like insane
people!  Did none of them understand the supreme wickedness of
hindering the growth of a human mind?"

"It was a world of suppression and evasion.  You cannot understand
anything about it unless you understand that."

"But the whole world!" said Radiant.

"Most of it.  It was still a fear-haunted world.  'Submit,' said the
ancient dread, 'do nothing--lest you offend.  And from your
children--_hide_.'  What I am telling you about the upbringing of
Harry Mortimer Smith was generally true of the upbringing of the
enormous majority of the inhabitants of the earth.  It was not merely
that their minds were starved and poisoned.  Their minds were stamped
upon and mutilated.  That world was so pitiless and confused, so
dirty and diseased, because it was cowed and dared not learn of
remedies.  In Europe in those days we used to be told the most
extraordinary stories of the wickedness and cruelty of the Chinese,
and one favourite tale was that little children were made to grow up
inside great porcelain jars in order to distort their bodies to
grotesque shapes so that they could be shown at fairs or sold to rich
men.  The Chinese certainly distorted the feet of young women for
some obscure purpose, and this may have been the origin of this
horrible legend.  But our children in England were mentally distorted
in exactly the same fashion except that for porcelain jars we used
mental tin-cans and dustbins....  My dears! when I talk of this I
cease to be Sarnac!  All the rage and misery of crippled and thwarted
Harry Mortimer Smith comes back to me."

"Did you get to those classes of yours?" asked Sunray.  "I hope you
did."

"Not for a year or two--though Miss Bumpus did what she could for me.
She lent me a lot of books--in spite of much ignorant censorship on
the part of my mother--and I read voraciously.  But, I don't know if
you will understand it, my relations with Miss Bumpus were slowly
poisoned by the interpretations my mother was putting upon them.  I
think you will see how easy it was for a boy in my position to fall
in love, fall into a deep emotional worship of so bright and friendly
a young woman.  Most of us young men nowadays begin by adoring a
woman older than ourselves.  Adoring is the word rather than loving.
It's not a mate we need at first but the helpful, kindly goddess who
stoops to us.  And of course I loved her.  But I thought much more of
serving her or dying for her than of embracing her.  When I was away
from her my imagination might go so far as to dream of kissing her
hands.

"And then came my mother with this hideous obsession of hers, jealous
for something she called my purity, treating this white passion of
gratitude and humility as though it was the power that drags a
blow-fly to some heap of offal.  A deepening shame and ungraciousness
came into my relations with Miss Bumpus.  I became red-eared and
tongue-tied in her presence.  Possibilities I might never have
thought of but for my mother's suggestions grew disgustingly vivid in
my mind.  I dreamt about her grotesquely.  When presently I found
employment for my days my chances of seeing her became infrequent.
She receded as a personality and friend, and quite against my will
became a symbol of femininity.

"Among the people who called to see her a man of three or four and
thirty became frequent.  My spirit flamed into an intense and
impotent jealousy on account of this man.  He would take tea with her
and stay for two hours or more.  My mother took care to mention his
visits in my hearing at every opportunity.  She called him Miss
Bumpus' 'fancy man,' or alluded to him archly: 'A certain person
called again to-day, Prue.  When good-lookin' young men are shown in
at the door, votes flies out of the winder.'  I tried to seem
indifferent but my ears and cheeks got red and hot.  My jealousy was
edged with hate.  I avoided seeing Miss Bumpus for weeks together.  I
sought furiously for some girl, any girl, who would serve to oust her
image from my imagination."

Sarnac stopped abruptly and remained for a time staring intently into
the fire.  His expression was one of amused regret.  "How little and
childish it seems now!" he said; "and how bitter--oh! how bitter it
was at the time!"

"Poor little errand-boy!" said Sunray, stroking his hair.  "Poor
little errand-boy in love."

"What an uncomfortable distressful world it must have been for all
young things!" said Willow.

"Uncomfortable and pitiless," said Sarnac.



§ 9

"My first employment in London was as an errand-boy--'junior porter'
was the exact phrase--to a draper's shop near Victoria Station: I
packed parcels and carried them to their destinations; my next job
was to be boy in general to a chemist named Humberg in a shop beyond
Lupus Street.  A chemist then was a very different creature from the
kind of man or woman we call a chemist to-day; he was much more like
the Apothecary we find in Shakespeare's plays and such-like old
literature; he was a dealer in drugs, poisons, medicines, a few
spices, colouring matters and such-like odd commodities.  I washed
endless bottles, delivered drugs and medicines, cleared up a sort of
backyard, and did anything else that there was to be done within the
measure of my capacity.

"Of all the queer shops one found in that old-world London, the
chemists' shops were, I think, the queerest.  They had come almost
unchanged out of the Middle Ages, as we used to call them, when
Western Europe, superstitious, dirty, diseased and degenerate,
thrashed by the Arabs and Mongols and Turks, afraid to sail the ocean
or fight out of armour, cowered behind the walls of its towns and
castles, stole, poisoned, assassinated and tortured, and pretended to
be the Roman Empire still in being.  Western Europe in those days was
ashamed of its natural varieties of speech and talked bad Latin; it
dared not look a fact in the face but nosed for knowledge among
riddles and unreadable parchments; it burnt men and women alive for
laughing at the absurdities of its Faith, and it thought the stars of
Heaven were no better than a greasy pack of cards by which fortunes
were to be told.  In those days it was that the tradition of the
'Pothecary was made; you know him as he figures in _Romeo and
Juliet_; the time in which I lived this life was barely four
centuries and a half from old Shakespeare.  The 'Pothecary was in a
conspiracy of pretentiousness with the almost equally ignorant
doctors of his age, and the latter wrote and he 'made up'
prescriptions in occult phrases and symbols.  In our window there
were great glass bottles of red- and yellow- and blue-tinted water,
through which our gas-lamps within threw a mystical light on the
street pavement."

"Was there a stuffed alligator?" asked Firefly.

"No.  We were just out of the age of stuffed alligators, but below
these coloured bottles in the window we had stupendous china jars
with gilt caps mystically inscribed--let me see!  Let me think!  One
was _Sem. Coriand_.  Another was _Rad. Sarsap_.  Then--what was the
fellow in the corner?  _Marant. Ar_.  And opposite him--_C.
Cincordif_.  And behind the counter to look the customer in the face
were neat little drawers with golden and precious letters thereon;
_Pil. Rhubarb_, and _Pil. Antibil._ and many more bottles, _Ol.
Amyg._ and _Tinct. Iod._, rows and rows of bottles, mystic,
wonderful.  I do not remember ever seeing Mr. Humberg take anything,
much less sell anything, from all this array of erudite bottles and
drawers; his normal trade was done in the bright little packets of an
altogether different character that were piled all over the counter,
bright unblushing little packets that declared themselves to be
Gummidge's Fragrant and Digestive Tooth Paste, Hooper's Corn Cure,
Luxtone's Lady's Remedy, Tinker's Pills for All Occasions, and the
like.  Such things were asked for openly and loudly by customers;
they were our staple trade.  But also there were many transactions
conducted in undertones which I never fully understood.  I would be
sent off to the yard on some specious pretext whenever a customer was
discovered to be of the _sotto voce_ variety, and I can only suppose
that Mr. Humberg was accustomed at times to go beyond the limits of
his professional qualification and to deal out advice and instruction
that were legally the privileges of the qualified medical man.  You
must remember that in those days many things that we teach plainly
and simply to every one were tabooed and made to seem occult and
mysterious and very, very shameful and dirty.

"My first reaction to this chemist's shop was a violent appetite for
Latin.  I succumbed to its suggestion that Latin was the key to all
knowledge, and that indeed statements did not become knowledge until
they had passed into the Latin tongue.  For a few coppers I bought in
a second-hand bookshop an old and worn Latin _Principia_ written by a
namesake Smith; I attacked it with great determination and found this
redoubtable language far more understandable, reasonable and
straight-forward than the elusive irritable French and the trampling
coughing German I had hitherto attempted.  This Latin was a dead
language, a skeleton language plainly articulated; it never moved
about and got away from one as a living language did.  In a little
while I was able to recognize words I knew upon our bottles and
drawers and in the epitaphs upon the monuments in Westminster Abbey,
and soon I could even construe whole phrases.  I dug out Latin books
from the second-hand booksellers' boxes, and some I could read and
some I could not.  There was a war history of that first Cæsar,
Julius Cæsar, the adventurer who extinguished the last reek of the
decaying Roman republic, and there was a Latin New Testament; I got
along fairly well with both.  But there was a Latin poet, Lucretius,
I could not construe; even with an English verse translation on the
opposite page I could not construe him.  But I read that English
version with intense curiosity.  It is an extraordinary thing to
note, but that same Lucretius, an old Roman poet who lived and died
two thousand years before my time, four thousand years from now, gave
an account of the universe and of man's beginnings far truer and more
intelligible than the old Semitic legends I had been taught in my
Sunday school.

"One of the queerest aspects of those days was the mingling of ideas
belonging to different ages and phases of human development due to
the irregularity and casualness of such educational organisation as
we had.  In school and church alike, obstinate pedantry darkened the
minds of men.  Europeans in the twentieth Christian century mixed up
the theology of the Pharaohs, the cosmogony of the priest-kings of
Sumeria, with the politics of the seventeenth century and the ethics
of the cricket-field and prize-ring, and that in a world which had
got to aeroplanes and telephones.

"My own case was typical of the limitations of the time.  In that age
of ceaseless novelty there was I, trying to get back by way of Latin
to the half knowledge of the Ancients.  Presently I began to struggle
with Greek also, but I never got very far with that.  I found a
chance of going once a week on what was called early-closing night,
after my day's work was done, to some evening classes in chemistry.
And this chemistry I discovered had hardly anything in common with
the chemistry of a chemist's shop.  The story of matter and force
that it told belonged to another and a newer age.  I was fascinated
by these wider revelations of the universe I lived in, I ceased to
struggle with Greek and I no longer hunted the dingy book-boxes for
Latin classics but for modern scientific works.  Lucretius I found
was hardly less out of date than Genesis.  Among the books that
taught me much were one called _Physiography_ by a writer named
Gregory, Clodd's _Story of Creation_ and Lankester's _Science from an
Easy Chair_.  I do not know if they were exceptionally good books;
they were the ones that happened to come to my hand and awaken my
mind.  But do you realise the amazing conditions under which men were
living at that time, when a youngster had to go about as eager and
furtive as a mouse seeking food, to get even such knowledge of the
universe and himself as then existed?  I still remember how I read
first of the differences and resemblances between apes and men and
speculations arising thencefrom about the nature of the sub-men who
came before man.  It was in the shed in the yard that I sat and read.
Mr. Humberg was on the sofa in the parlour behind the shop sleeping
off his midday meal with one ear a-cock for the shop-bell, and I,
with one ear a-cock for the shop-bell and the other for any sounds of
movement in the parlour, read for the first time of the forces that
had made me what I was--when I ought to have been washing out bottles.

"At one point in the centre of the display behind the counter in the
shop was a row of particularly brave and important-looking glass jars
wearing about their bellies the gold promises of _Aqua Fortis_, _Amm.
Hyd._ and such-like names, and one day as I was sweeping the floor I
observed Mr. Humberg scrutinising these.  He held one up to the light
and shook his head at its flocculent contents.  'Harry,' he said,
'see this row of bottles?'

"'Yessir.'

"'Pour 'em all out and put in fresh water.'

"I stared, broom in hand, aghast at the waste.  'They won't blow up
if I mix 'em?' I said.

"'Blow up!' said Mr. Humberg.  'It's only stale water.  There's been
nothing else in these bottles for a score of years.  Stuff I want is
behind the dispensary partition--and it's different stuff nowadays.
Wash 'em out--and then we'll put in some water from the pump.  We
just have 'em for the look of 'em.  The old women wouldn't be happy
if we hadn't got 'em there."




PART II

The Loves and Death of Harry Mortimer Smith



CHAPTER THE FIFTH

FANNY DISCOVERS HERSELF


§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "I can draw near to the essentials of life
and tell you the sort of thing love was in that crowded, dingy,
fear-ruled world of the London fogs and the amber London sunshine.
It was a slender, wild-eyed, scared and daring emotion in a dark
forest of cruelties and repressions.  It soon grew old and crippled,
bitter-spirited and black-hearted, but as it happened, death came
early enough for me to die with a living love still in my heart...."

"To live again," said Sunray very softly.

"And love again," said Sarnac, patting her knee.  "Let me see----...."

He took a stake that had fallen from the fire and thrust it into the
bright glow at the centre and watched it burst into a sierra of
flames.

"I think that the first person I was in love with was my sister
Fanny.  When I was a boy of eleven or twelve I was really in love
with her.  But somehow about that time I was also in love with an
undraped plaster nymph who sat very bravely on a spouting dolphin in
some public gardens near the middle of Cliffstone.  She lifted her
chin and smiled and waved one hand and she had the sweetest smile and
the dearest little body imaginable.  I loved her back particularly,
and there was a point where you looked at her from behind and just
caught the soft curve of her smiling cheek and her jolly little
nose-tip and chin and the soft swell of her breast under her lifted
arm.  I would sneak round her furtively towards this particular
view-point, having been too well soaked in shame about all such
lovely things to look openly.  But I never seemed to look my fill.

"One day as I was worshipping her in this fashion, half-turned to her
and half-turned to a bed of flowers and looking at her askance, I
became aware of an oldish man with a large white face, seated on a
garden seat and leaning forward and regarding me with an expression
of oafish cunning as if he had found me out and knew my secret.  He
looked like the spirit of lewdness incarnate.  Suddenly panic
overwhelmed me and I made off--and never went near that garden again.
Angels with flaming shames prevented me.  Of a terror of again
meeting that horrible old man....

"Then with my coming to London Miss Beatrice Bumpus took control of
my imagination and was Venus and all the goddesses, and this
increased rather than diminished after she had gone away.  For she
went away and, I gather, married the young man I hated; she went away
and gave up her work for the Vote and was no doubt welcomed back by
those Warwickshire Bumpuses (who hunted) with the slaughter of a
fatted fox and every sort of rejoicing.  But her jolly frank and
boyish face was the heroine's in a thousand dreams.  I saved her life
in adventures in all parts of the world and sometimes she saved mine;
we clung together over the edges of terrific precipices until I went
to sleep, and when I was the conquering Muhammad after a battle, she
stood out among the captive women and answered back when I said I
would never love her, with two jets of cigarette smoke and the one
word, 'Liar!'

"I met no girls of my own age at all while I was errand-boy to Mr.
Humberg, my evening classes and my reading kept me away from the
facile encounters of the streets.  Sometimes, however, when I could
not fix my attention upon my books, I would slip off to Wilton Street
and Victoria Street where there was a nocturnal promenade under the
electric lamps.  There schoolgirls and little drabs and errand-boys
and soldiers prowled and accosted one another.  But though I was
attracted to some of the girlish figures that flitted by me I was
also shy and fastidious.  I was drawn by an overpowering desire for
something intense and beautiful that vanished whenever I drew near to
reality."



§ 2

"Before a year was over there were several changes in the Pimlico
boarding-house.  The poor old Moggeridges caught influenza, a
variable prevalent epidemic of the time, and succumbed to
inflammation of the lungs following the fever.  They died within
three days of each other, and my mother and Prue were the only
mourners at their dingy little funeral.  Frau Buchholz fades out of
my story; I do not remember clearly when she left the house nor who
succeeded her.  Miss Beatrice Bumpus abandoned the cause of woman's
suffrage and departed, and the second floor was taken by an extremely
intermittent couple who roused my mother's worst suspicions and led
to serious differences of opinion between her and Matilda Good.

"You see these new-comers never settled in with any grave and sober
luggage; they would come and stay for a day or so and then not
reappear for a week or more, and they rarely arrived or departed
together.  This roused my mother's moral observation, and she began
hinting that perhaps they were not properly married after all.  She
forbade Prue ever to go to the drawing-room floor, and this
precipitated a conflict with Matilda.  'What's this about Prue and
the drawing-room?' Matilda asked.  'You're putting ideas into the
girl's head.'

"'I'm trying to keep them from 'er,' said my mother.  'She's got
eyes.'

"'_And_ fingers,' said Matilda with dark allusiveness.  'What's Prue
been seeing now?'

"'Marks,' said my mother.

"'What marks?' said Matilda.

"'Marks enough,' said my mother.  '_'Is_ things are marked one name
and _'Er's_ another, and neither of them Milton, which is the name
they've given us.  And the way that woman speaks to you, as though
she felt you might notice sumpthing--friendly like and a bit afraid
of you.  And that ain't all!  By no means all!  I'm not blind and
Prue isn't blind.  There's kissing and making love going on at all
times in the day!  Directly they've got 'ere sometimes.  Hardly
waiting for one to get out of the room.  I'm not a perfect fool,
Matilda.  I been married.'

"'What's that got to do with us?  We're a lodging-'ouse, not a set of
Nosey Parkers.  If Mr. and Mrs. Milton like to have their linen
marked a hundred different names, what's that to us?  Their book's
always marked _paid in advance with thanks, Matilda Good_, and that's
married enough for me.  See?  You're an uneasy woman to have in a
lodging-house, Martha, an uneasy woman.  There's no give and take
about you.  No save your fare.  There was that trouble you made about
the boy and Miss Bumpus--ridiculous it was--and now seemingly there's
going to be more trouble about Prue and Mrs. Milton--who's a lady,
mind you, say what you like, and--what's more--a gentlewoman.  I wish
you'd mind your own business a bit more, Martha, and let Mr. and Mrs.
Milton mind theirs.  If they aren't properly married it's they've got
to answer for it in the long run, not you.  You'll get even with them
all right in the Last Great Day.  Meanwhile do they do 'arm to
anyone?  A quieter couple and less trouble to look after I've never
had in all my lodging-house days.'

"My mother made no answer.

"'Well?' challenged Matilda.

"'It's hard to be waiting on a shameless woman,' said my mother,
obstinate and white-lipped.

"'It's harder still to be called a shameless woman because you've
still got your maiden name on some of your things,' said Matilda
Good.  'Don't talk such Rubbish, Martha.'

"'I don't see why _'E_ should 'ave a maiden name too--on _'is_
pyjamas,' said my mother, rallying after a moment.

"'You don't know Anything, Martha,' said Matilda, fixing her with one
eye of extreme animosity and regarding the question in the abstract
with the other.  'I've often thought it of you and now I say it to
you.  You don't know Anything.  I'm going to keep Mr. and Mrs. Milton
as long as I can, and if you're too pernikkety to wait on them,
there's those who will.  I won't have my lodgers insulted.  I won't
have their underclothes dragged up against them.  Why!  Come to think
of it!  Of course!  He _borrowed_ those pyjamas of 'is!  Or they was
given him by a gentleman friend they didn't fit.  Or he's been left
money and had to change his name sudden like.  It often happens.
Often.  You see it in the papers.  And things get mixed in the wash.
Some laundries, they're regular Exchanges.  Mr. Plaice, he once had a
collar with _Fortescue_ on it.  Brought it back after his summer
holiday.  Fortescue!  There's evidence for you.  You aren't going to
bring up something against Mr. Plaice on account of that, Martha?
You aren't going to say he's been living a double life and isn't
properly a bachelor.  Do think a little clearer, Martha.  And don't
think so much evil.  There's a hundred ways round before you think
evil.  But you _like_ to think evil, Martha.  I've noticed it times
and oft.  You fairly wallow in it.  You haven't the beginnings of a
germ of Christian charity.'

"'One can't help seeing things,' said my mother rather shattered.

"'_You_ can't,' said Matilda Good.  'There's those who can't see an
inch beyond their noses, and yet they see too much.  And the more I
see of you the more I'm inclined to think you're one of that sort.
Anyhow, Mr. and Mrs. Milton stay here--whoever else goes.  Whoever
else goes.  That's plain, I hope, Martha.'

"My mother was stricken speechless.  She bridled and subsided and
then, except for necessary and unavoidable purposes, remained hurt
and silent for some days, speaking only when she was spoken to.
Matilda did not seem to mind.  But I noticed that when presently
Matilda sent Prue upstairs with the Miltons' tea my mother's
stiffness grew stiffer, but she made no open protest."



§ 3

"And then suddenly Fanny reappeared in my world.

"It was a mere chance that restored Fanny to me.  All our links had
been severed when we removed from Cliffstone to London.  My brother
Ernest was her herald.

"We were at supper in the basement room and supper was usually a
pleasant meal.  Matilda Good would make it attractive with potatoes
roasted in their jackets, or what she called a 'frying-pan' of
potatoes and other vegetables in dripping or such-like heartening
addition to cold bacon and bread and cheese and small beer.  And she
would read bits out of the newspaper to us and discuss them, having a
really very lively intelligence, or she would draw me out to talk of
the books I'd been reading.  She took a great interest in murders and
such-like cases, and we all became great judges of motive and
evidence under her stimulation.  'You may say it's morbid, Martha, if
you like,' she said; 'but there never was a murder yet that wasn't
brimful of humanity.  Brimful.  I doubt sometimes if we know what
anyone's capable of until they've committed a murder or two.'

"My mother rarely failed to rise to her bait.  'I can't think 'ow you
can say such things, Matilda,' she would say....

"We heard the sound of a motor-car in the street above.  Brother
Ernest descended by the area steps and my sister Prue let him in.  He
appeared in his chauffeur's uniform, cap in hand, leather jacket and
gaiters.

"'Got a night off?' asked Matilda.

"'Court Theatre at eleven,' said Ernest.  'So I thought I'd come in
for a bit of a warm and a chat.'

"'Have a snack?' said Matilda.  'Prue, get him a plate and a knife
and fork and a glass.  One glass of _this_ beer won't hurt your
driving.  Why! we haven't seen you for ages!'

"'Thank you, Miss Good,' said Ernest, who was always very polite to
her, 'I _will_ 'ave a snack.  I bin' here, there and everywhere, but
it isn't that I haven't wanted to call on you.'

"Refreshment was administered and conversation hung fire for awhile.
One or two starts were made and came to an early end.  Ernest's
manner suggested preoccupation and Matilda regarded him keenly.  'And
what have you got to tell us, Ernie?' she said suddenly.

"'We-el,' said Ernest, 'it's a curious thing you should say that,
Miss Good, for I _'ave_ got something to tell you.  Something--well,
I don't know 'ow to put it--curious like."

"Matilda refilled his glass.

"'I seen Fanny," said Ernest, coming to it with violent abruptness.

"'_No!_' gasped my mother, and for a moment no one else spoke.

"'So!' said Matilda, putting her arms on the table and billowing
forward, 'you've seen Fanny!  Pretty little Fanny that I used to
know.  And where did you see her, Ernie?'

"Ernest had some difficulty in shaping out his story.  'It was a week
last Tuesday,' he said after a pause.

"'She wasn't--not one of Them--about Victoria Station?' panted my
mother.

"'Did you see her first or did she see you?' asked Matilda.

"'A week ago last Tuesday,' my brother repeated.

"'And did you speak to her?'

"'Not at the time I didn't.  No.'

"'Did she speak to you?'

"'No.'

"'Then 'ow d'you know it was our Fanny?' asked Prue, who had been
listening intently.

"'I thought she'd gone to 'er fate in some foreign country--being so
near Boulogne,' my mother said.  'I thought them White Slave Traders
'ad the decency to carry a girl off right away from 'er 'ome....
Fanny!  On the streets of London!  Near 'ere.  I told 'er what it
would come to.  Time and again I told 'er.  Merry an 'onest man I
said, but she was greedy and 'eadstrong....  'Eadstrong and vain....
She didn't try to follow you, Ernie, to find out where we were or
anything like that?'

"My brother Ernest's face displayed his profound perplexity.  'It
wasn't at all like that, mother,' he said.  'It wasn't--that sort of
thing.  You see----'

"He began a struggle with the breast pocket of his very tightly
fitting leather jacket and at last produced a rather soiled letter.
He held it in his hand, neither attempting to read it nor offering it
to us.  But holding it in his hand seemed to crystallise his very
rudimentary narrative powers.  'I better tell you right from the
beginning,' he said.  'It isn't at all what you'd suppose.  Tuesday
week it was; last Tuesday week.'

"Matilda Good laid a restraining hand on my mother's arm.  'In the
evening I suppose?' she helped.

"'It was a dinner and fetch,' said my brother.  'Of course you
understand I 'adn't set eyes on Fanny for pretty near six years.  It
was 'er knew me.'

"'You had to take these people to a dinner and fetch them back
again?' said Matilda.

"'Orders,' said Ernest, 'was to go to one-oh-two Brantismore Gardens
Earl's Court top flat, to pick up lady and gentleman for number to be
given in Church Row Hampstead and call there ten-thirty and take home
as directed.  Accordingly I went to Brantismore Gardens and told the
porter in the 'all--it was one of these 'ere flat places with a
porter in livery--that I was there to time waiting.  'E telephoned up
in the usual way.  After a bit, lady and gentleman came out of the
house and I went to the door of the car as I usually do and held it
open.  So far nothing out of the ornary.  He was a gentleman in
evening dress, like most gentlemen; she'd got a wrap with fur, and
her hair, you know, was done up nice for an evening party with
something that sparkled.  Quite the lady.'

"'And it was Fanny?' said Prue.

"Ernest struggled mutely with his subject for some moments.  'Not
yet, like,' he said.

"'You mean you didn't recognise her then?' said Matilda.

"'No.  But she just looked up at me and seemed kind of to start and
got in.  I saw her sort of leaning forward and looking at me as 'E
got in.  Fact is, I didn't think much of it.  I should have forgotten
all about it if it 'adn't been for afterwards.  But when I took them
back something happened.  I could see she was looking at me....  We
went first to one-oh-two Brantismore Gardens again and then he got
out and says to me, "Just wait a bit here," and then he helped her
out.  It sort of seemed as though she was 'arf-inclined to speak to
me and then she didn't.  But this time I thinks to myself: "I seen
you before, somewhere, my Lady."  Oddly enough I never thought of
Fanny then at all.  I got as near as thinking she was a bit like
'Arry 'ere.  But it never entered my 'ead it might be Fanny.
Strordinary!  They went up the steps to the door; one of these open
entrances it is to several flats, and seemed to have a moment's
confabulation under the light, looking towards me.  Then they went on
up to the flat.'

"'You didn't know her even then?' said Prue.

"''E came down the steps quarternour after perhaps, looking
thoughtful.  White wescoat, 'e 'ad, and coat over 'is arm.  Gave me
an address near Sloane Street.  Got out and produced his tip, rather
on the large side it was, and stood still kind of thoughtful.  Seemed
inclined to speak and didn't know what to say.  "I've an account at
the garage," 'e says, "you'll book the car," and then: "You're not my
usual driver," 'e says.  "What's your name?"  "Smith," I says.
"Ernest Smith?" he says.  "Yes sir," I says, and it was only as I
drove off that I asked myself 'Ow the 'Ell--I reely beg your pardon,
Miss Good.'

"'Don't mind me,' said Matilda.  'Go on.'

"'Ow the Juice d'e know that my name was Ernest?  I nearly 'it a taxi
at the corner of Sloane Square I was so took up puzzling over it.
And it was only about three o'clock in the morning, when I was lying
awake still puzzling over it, that it came into my 'ead----'

"Ernest assumed the manner of a narrator who opens out his
culminating surprise.  '--that that young lady I'd been taken out
that evening was----'

"He paused before his climax.

"'Fenny,' whispered Prue.

"'Sister Fanny,' said Matilda Good.

"'Our Fanny,' said my mother.

"'_No less a person than Fanny!_' said my brother Ernest triumphantly
and looked round for the amazement proper to such a surprise.

"'I thought it was going to be Fenny,' said Prue.

'Was she painted up at all?' asked Matilda.

"'Not nearly so much painted as most of 'em are,' said my brother
Ernest.  'Pretty nearly everyone paints nowadays.  Titled people.
Bishops' ladies.  Widows.  Everyone.  She didn't strike me--well, as
belonging to the painted sort particularly, not in the least.  Kind
of fresh and a little pale--like Fanny used to be.'

"'Was she dressed like a lady--quiet-like?'

"'Prosperous,' said Ernest.  'Reely prosperous.  But nothing what you
might call extravagant.'

"'And the house you took 'em to--noisy?  Singing and dancing and the
windows open?'

"'It was a perfectly respectable quiet sort of 'ouse.  Blinds down
and no row whatever.  A private 'ouse.  The people who came to the
door to say good night might 'ave been any gentleman and any lady.  I
see the butler.  'E came down to the car.  'E wasn't 'ired for the
evening.  'E was a _real_ butler.  The other guests had a private
limousine with an oldish, careful sort of driver.  Whadyou'd speak of
as nice people.''

"'Hardly what you might call being on the streets of London,' said
Matilda, turning to my mother.  'What was the gentleman like?'

"'I don't want to 'ear of 'im,' said my mother.

"'Dissipated sort of man about town--and a bit screwed?' asked
Matilda.

"''E was a lot soberer than most dinner fetches,' said Ernest.  'I
see that when 'e 'andled 'is money.  Lots of 'em--oh! quite
'igh-class people get--'ow shall I say it?--just a little bit funny.
'Umerous like.  Bit 'nnacurate with the door.  _'E_ wasn't.  That's
what I can't make out....  And then there's this letter.'

"Then there's this letter,' said Matilda.  'You better read it,
Martha.'

"'How did you get that letter?' asked my mother, not offering to
touch it.  'You don't mean to say she gave you a letter!'

"'It came last Thursday.  By post.  It was addressed to me, Ernest
Smith, Esq., at the Garage.  It's a curious letter--asking about us.
I can't make 'ead or tail of the whole business.  I been thinking
about it and thinking about it.  Knowing 'ow set mother was about
Fanny--I 'esitated.'

"His voice died away.

"'Somebody,' said Matilda in the pause that followed, 'had better
read that letter.'

"She looked at my mother, smiled queerly with the corners of her
mouth down, and then held out her hand to Ernest."



§ 4

"It was Matilda who read that letter; my mother's aversion for it was
all too evident.  I can still remember Matilda's large red face
thrust forward over the supper things and a little on one side so as
to bring the eye she was using into focus and get the best light from
the feeble little gas-bracket.  Beside her was Prue, with a slack
curious face and a restive glance that went ever and again to my
mother's face, as a bandsman watches the conductor's baton.  My
mother sat back with a defensive expression on her white face, and
Ernest was posed, wide and large, in a non-committal attitude,
ostentatiously unable to 'make 'ead or tail' of the affair.

"'Let's see,' said Matilda, and took a preliminary survey of the task
before her....


"'_My dear Ernie,_' she says....

"'_My dear Ernie:_

"'_It was wonderful seeing you again.  I could hardly believe it was
you even after Mr.--Mr.----  _She's written it and thought better of
it and scratched it out again, Mr. Somebody--Mr. Blank--_had asked
your name.  I was beginning to fear I'd lost you all.  Where are you
living and how are you getting on?  You know I went to France and
Italy for a holiday--lovely, lovely places--and when I came back I
slipped off at Cliffstone because I wanted to see you all again and
couldn't bear leaving you as I had done without a word._'


"'She should've thought of that before,' said my mother.


"'_She told me, Mrs. Bradley did, about poor father's accident and
death--the first I heard of it.  I went to his grave in the cemetery
and had a good cry.  I couldn't help it.  Poor old Daddy!  It was
cruel hard luck getting killed as he did.  I put a lot of flowers on
his grave and arranged with Ropes the Nurseryman about having the
grass cut regularly._'


"'And 'im,' said my mother, 'lying there!  'E'd 've rather seen 'er
lying dead at 'is feet, 'e said, than 'ave 'er the fallen woman she
was.  And she putting flowers over 'im.  'Nough to make 'im turn in
'is grave.'

"'But very likely he's come to think differently now, Martha,' said
Matilda soothingly.  'There's no knowing really, Martha.  Perhaps in
heaven they aren't so anxious to see people dead at their feet.
Perhaps they get sort of kind up there.  Let me see,--where was I?
Ah?--_grass cut regularly_.


"'_Nobody knew where mother and the rest of you were.  Nobody had an
address.  I went on to London very miserable, hating to have lost
you.  Mrs. Burch said that mother and Prue and Morty had gone to
London to friends, but where she didn't know.  And then behold! after
nearly two years, you bob up again!  It's too good to be true.  Where
are the others?  Is Morty getting educated?  Prue must be quite grown
up?  I would love to see them again and help them if I can.  Dear
Ernie, I do want you to tell mother and all of them that I am quite
safe and happy.  I am being helped by a friend.  The one you saw.
I'm not a bit fast or bad.  I lead a very quiet life.  I have my tiny
little flat here and I read a lot and get educated.  I work quite
hard.  I've passed an examination, Ernie, a university examination.
I've learnt a lot of French and Italian and some German and about
music.  I've got a pianola and I'd love to play it to you or Morty.
He was always the one for music.  Often and often I think of you.
Tell mother, show her this letter, and let me know soon about you all
and don't think unkind things of me.  'Member the good times we had,
Ernie, when we dressed up at Christmas and father didn't know us in
the shop, and how you made me a doll's house for my birthday.  Oh!
and cheese pies, Ernie!  Cheese pies!_'


"'What were cheese pies?' asked Matilda.

"'It was a sort of silly game we had--passing people.  I forget
exactly.  But it used to make us laugh--regular roll about we did.'

"'Then she gets back to you, Morty,' said Matilda,


"'_I'd love to help Morty if he still wants to be educated.  I could
now.  I could help him a lot.  I suppose he's not a boy any longer.
Perhaps he's getting educated himself.  Give him my love.  Give
mother my love and tell her not to think too badly of me.  Fanny._'


"'Fanny.  Embossed address on her notepaper.  That's all.'

"Matilda dropped the letter on the table.  'Well?' she said in a
voice that challenged my mother.  'Seems to me that the young woman
has struck one of the Right Sort--the one straight man in ten
thousand ... seems to have taken care of her almost more than an
ordinary husband might've done....  What'r you going to do about it,
Martha?'

"Matilda collected herself slowly from the table and leant back in
her chair, regarding my mother with an expression of faintly
malevolent irony."



§ 5

"I turned from Matilda's quizzical face to my mother's drawn
intentness.

"'Say what you like, Matilda, that girl is living in sin.'

"'Even that isn't absolutely proved,' said Matilda.

"'Why should 'E----?' my mother began and stopped.

"'There's such things as feats of generosity,' said Matilda.
'Still----'

"'No,' said my mother.  'We don't want 'er 'elp.  I'd be ashamed to
take it.  While she lives with that man----'

"'Apparently she doesn't.  But go on.'

"'Stainted money,' said my mother.  'It's money she 'as from 'im.
It's the money of a Kep Woman.'

"Her anger kindled.  'I'd sooner die than touch 'er money.'

"Her sense of the situation found form and expression.  'She leaves
'er 'ome.  She breaks 'er father's 'eart.  Kills 'im, she does.  'E
was never the same man after she'd gone; never the same.  She goes
off to shamelessness and luxury.  She makes 'er own brother drive 'er
about to 'er shame.'

"'Hardly--_makes_,' protested Matilda.

"'Ow was _'E_ to avoid it?  And then she writes this--this letter.
Impudent I call it.  Impudent!  Without a word of repentance--not a
single word of repentance.  Does she 'ave the decency to say she's
ashamed of 'erself?  Not a word.  Owns she's still living with a
fancy man and means to go on doing it, glories in it.  And offers us
'er kind assistance--us, what she's disgraced and shamed.  Who was it
that made us leave Cherry Gardens to 'ide our 'eads from our
neighbours in London?  _'Er_!  And now she's to come 'ere in 'er
moty-car and come dancing down these steps, all dressed up and
painted, to say a kind word to poor mother.  'Aven't we suffered
enough about 'er without 'er coming 'ere to show 'erself off at us?
It's topsy-turvy.  Why! if she come 'ere at all, which I doubt--if
she comes 'ere at all she ought to come in sackcloth and ashes and on
'er bended knees.'

"'She won't do that, Martha,' said Matilda Good.

"'Then let 'er keep away.  We don't want the disgrace of 'er.  She's
chosen 'er path and let 'er abide by it.  But _'ere_!  To come
_'ere_!  'Ow'r you going to explain it?'

"'_I'd_ explain it all right,' said Matilda unheeded.

"'Ow am _I_ going to explain it?  And here's Prue!  Here's this Mr.
Pettigrew she's met at the Week-day Evening Social and wants to bring
to tea!  'Ow's she going to explain 'er fine lady sister to 'im?  Kep
Woman!  Yes, Matilda, I say it.  It's the name for it.  That's what
she is.  A Kep Woman!  Nice thing to tell Mr. Pettigrew.  'Ere's my
sister, the Kep Woman!  'E'd be off in a jiffy.  Shocked 'e'd be out
of 'is seven senses.  'Ow would Prue ever 'ave the face to go to the
Week-day Evening Social again after a show-up like that?  And Ernie.
What's 'E going to say about it to the other chaps at the garage when
they throw it up at him that 'is sister's a Kep Woman?'

"'Don't you worry about _that_, mother,' said Ernest gently but
firmly.  'There's nobody ever throws anything up against me at the
garage anyhow--and there won't be.  Nohow.  Not unless 'E wants to
swaller 'is teeth.'

"'Well, there's 'Arry.  'E goes to 'is classes, and what if someone
gets 'old of it there?  'Is sister, a Kep Woman.  They'd 'ardly let
'im go on working after such a disgrace.'

"'Oh I'd soon----' I began, following in my brother's wake.  But
Matilda stopped me with a gesture.  Her gesture swept round and held
my mother, who was indeed drawing near the end of what she had to say.

"'I can see, Martha,' said Matilda, 'just 'ow you feel about Fanny.
I suppose it's all natural.  Of course, this letter----'

"She picked up the letter.  She pursed her great mouth and waggled
her clumsy head slowly from side to side.  'For the life of me I
can't believe the girl who wrote this is a bad-hearted girl,' she
said.  'You're bitter with her, Martha.  You're bitter.'

"'After all----' I began, but Matilda's hand stopped me again.

"'Bitter!' cried my mother.  'I _know_ 'er.  She can put on that
in'cent air just as though nothing 'ad 'appened and try and make you
feel in the wrong----'

"Matilda ceased to waggle and began to nod.  'I see,' she said.  'I
see.  But why should Fanny take the trouble to write this letter, if
she hadn't a real sort of affection for you all?  As though she need
have bothered herself about the lot of you!  You're no sort of help
to her.  There's kindness in this letter, Martha, and something more
than kindness.  Are you going to throw it back at her?  Her and her
offers of help?  Even if she doesn't crawl and repent as she ought to
do!  Won't you even answer her letter?'

"'I won't be drawn into a correspondence with 'er,' said my mother.
'No!  So long as she's a Kep Woman, she's no daughter of mine.  I
wash my 'ands of 'er.  And as for 'er 'Elp!  'Elp indeed!  It's
'Umbug!  If she'd wanted 'elp us she could have married Mr. Crosby,
as fair and honest a man as any woman could wish for.'

"'So that's _that_,' said Matilda Good conclusively.

"Abruptly she swivelled her great head round to Ernest.  'And what
are you going to do, Ernie?  Are you for turning down Fanny?  And
letting the cheese pies just drop into the mud of Oblivium, as the
saying goes, and be forgotten for ever and ever and ever?'

"Ernest sat back, put his hand in his trousers pocket and remained
thoughtful for some moments.  'It's orkward,' he said.

"Matilda offered him no assistance.

"'There's my Young Lady to consider,' said Ernest and flushed an
extreme scarlet.

"My mother turned her head sharply and looked at him.  Ernest with a
stony expression did not look at my mother.

"'O--oh!' said Matilda.  'Here's something new.  And who may your
Young Lady be, Ernie?'

"'Well, I 'adn't proposed to discuss 'er 'ere just yet.  So never
mind what 'er name is.  She's got a little millinery business.  I'll
say that for 'er.  And a cleverer, nicer girl never lived.  We met at
a little dance.  Nothing isn't fixed up yet beyond a sort of
engagement.  There's been presents.  Given 'er a ring and so forth.
But naturally I've never told 'er anything about Fanny.  I 'aven't
discussed family affairs with 'er much, not so far.  Knows we were in
business of some sort and 'ad losses and father died of an accident;
that's about all.  But Fanny--Fanny's certainly going to be orkward
to explain.  Not that I want to be 'ard on Fanny!'

"'I see,' said Matilda.  She glanced a mute interrogation at Prue and
found her answer in Prue's face.  Then she picked up the letter again
and read very distinctly: 'One hundred and two, Brantismore Gardens,
Earl's Court.'  She read this address slowly as though she wanted to
print it on her memory.  'Top flat, you said it was, Ernie? ...'

"She turned to me.  'And what are you going to do, Harry, about all
this?'

"'I want to see Fanny for myself,' I said.  'I don't believe----'

"''Arry,' said my mother, 'now--once for all--I forbid you to go near
'er.  I won't 'ave you corrupted.'

"'Don't forbid him, Martha,' said Matilda.  'It's no use forbidding
him.  _Because he will_!  Any boy with any heart and spunk in him
would go and see her after that letter.  One hundred and two,
Brantismore Gardens, Earl's Court,'--she was very clear with the
address--'it's not very far from here.'

"'I forbid you to go near 'er, 'Arry,' my mother reiterated.  And
then realising too late the full importance of Fanny's letter, she
picked it up.  'I won't 'ave this answered.  I'll burn it as it
deserves.  And forget about it.  Banish it from my mind.  There.'

"And then my mother stood up and making a curious noise in her throat
like the strangulation of a sob, she put Fanny's letter into the fire
and took the poker to thrust it into the glow and make it burn.  We
all stared in silence as the letter curled up and darkened, burst
into a swift flame and became in an instant a writhing, agonised,
crackling, black cinder.  Then she sat down again, remained still for
a moment, and then after a fierce struggle with her skirt-pocket
dragged out a poor, old, dirty pocket-handkerchief and began to
weep--at first quietly and then with a gathering passion.  The rest
of us sat aghast at this explosion.

"'You mustn't go near Fanny, 'Arry; not if mother forbids,' said
Ernest at last, gently but firmly.

"Matilda looked at me in grim enquiry.

"'I _shall_,' I said, and was in a terror lest the unmanly tears
behind my eyes should overflow.

"''Arry!' cried my mother amidst her sobs.  'You'll break--you'll
break my heart!  First Fanny!  Then you.'

"'You see!' said Ernest.

"The storm of her weeping paused as though she waited to hear my
answer.  My silly little face must have been very red by this time
and there was something wrong and uncontrollable about my voice, but
I said what I meant to say.  'I shall go to Fanny,' I said, 'and I
shall just ask her straight out whether she's leading a bad life.'

"'And suppose she is?' asked Matilda.

"'I shall reason with her,' I said.  'I shall do all I can to save
her.  Yes--even if I have to find some work that will keep her....
She's my sister....'

"I wept for a moment or so.  'I can't help it, mother,' I sobbed.  'I
got to see Fanny!'

"I recovered my composure with an effort.

"'_So,_' said Matilda, regarding me, I thought, with rather more
irony and rather less admiration than I deserved.  Then she turned to
my mother.  'I don't see that Harry can say fairer than that,' she
said.  'I think you'll have to let him see her after that.  He'll do
all he can to save her, he says.  Who knows?  He might bring her to
repentance.'

"'More likely the other way about,' said my mother, wiping her eyes,
her brief storm of tears now over.

"'I can't 'elp feeling it's a mistake,' said Ernest, 'for 'Arry to go
and see 'er.'

"'Well, anyhow don't give it up because you've forgotten the address,
Harry,' said Matilda, 'or else you are done.  Let it be your own
free-will and not forgetfulness, if you throw her over.  One hundred
and two Brantismore Gardens, Earl's Court.  You'd better write it
down.'

"'One hundred and two--Brantismore Gardens.'

"I went over to my books on the corner table to do as she advised
sternly and resolutely in a fair round hand on the fly-leaf of
Smith's _Principia Latina_."



§ 6

"My first visit to Fanny's flat was quite unlike any of the moving
scenes I acted in my mind before-hand.  I went round about half-past
eight when shop was done on the evening next but one after Ernest's
revelation.  The house seemed to me a very dignified one and I went
up a carpeted staircase to her flat.  I rang the bell and she opened
the door herself.

"It was quite evident at once that the smiling young woman in the
doorway had expected to see someone else instead of the gawky youth
who stood before her, and that for some moments she had not the
slightest idea who I was.  Her expression of radiant welcome changed
to a defensive coldness.  'What do you want, please?' she said to my
silent stare.

"She had altered very much.  She had grown, though now I was taller
than she was, and her wavy brown hair was tied by a band of black
velvet with a brooch on one side of it, adorned with clear-cut stones
of some sort that shone and twinkled.  Her face and lips had a warmer
colour than I remembered.  And she was wearing a light soft
greenish-blue robe with loose sleeves; it gave glimpses of her pretty
neck and throat and revealed her white arms.  She seemed a magically
delightful being, soft and luminous and sweet-scented and altogether
wonderful to a young barbarian out of the London streets.  Her
delicacy overawed me.  I cleared my throat.  'Fanny!' I said
hoarsely, 'don't you know me?'

"She knitted her pretty brows and then came her old delightful smile.
'Why!  It's Harry!' she cried and drew me into the little hall and
hugged and kissed me.  'My little brother Harry, grown as big as I
am!  How wonderful!'

"Then she went by me and shut the door and looked at me doubtfully.
'But why didn't you write to me first to say you were coming?  Here
am I dying for a talk with you and here's a visitor who's coming to
see me.  May come in at any moment.  Now what am I to do?  Let me
see!'

"The little hall in which we stood was bright with white paint and
pretty Japanese pictures.  It had cupboards to hide away coats and
hats and an old oak chest.  Several doors opened into it and two were
ajar.  Through one I had a glimpse of a sofa and things set out for
coffee, and through the other I saw a long mirror and a
chintz-covered armchair.  She seemed to hesitate between these two
rooms and then pushed me into the former one and shut the door behind
us.

"'You should have written to tell me you were coming,' she said.
'I'm dying to talk to you and here's someone coming who's dying to
talk to me.  But never mind! let's talk all we can.  How are you?
_Well_--I can see that.  But are you getting educated?  And mother,
how's mother?  What's happened to Prue?  And is Ernest as
hot-tempered as ever?'

"I attempted to tell her.  I tried to give her an impression of
Matilda Good and to hint not too harshly at my mother's white
implacability.  I began to tell her of my chemist's shop and how much
Latin and Chemistry I knew, and in the midst of it she darted away
from me and stood listening.

"It was the sound of a latch-key at the door.

"'My other visitor,' she said, hesitated a moment and was out of the
room, leaving me to study her furniture and the coffee machine that
bubbled on the table.  She had left the door a little ajar and I
heard all too plainly the sound of a kiss and then a man's voice.  I
thought it was rather a jolly voice.

'I'm tired, little Fanny; oh! I'm tired to death.  This new paper is
the devil.  We've started all wrong.  But I shall pull it off.  Gods!
if I hadn't this sweet pool of rest to plunge into, I'd go off my
head!  I'd have nothing left to me but headlines.  Take my coat;
there's a dear.  I smell coffee.'

"I heard a movement as though Fanny had checked her visitor almost at
the door of the room I was in.  I heard her say something very
quickly about a brother.

"'Oh, _Damn_!' said the man very heartily.  'Not another of 'em!  How
many brothers have you got, Fanny?  Send him away.  I've only got an
hour altogether, my dear----'

"Then the door closed sharply--Fanny must have discovered it was
ajar--and the rest of the talk was inaudible.

"Fanny reappeared, a little flushed and bright-eyed and withal
demure.  She had evidently been kissed again.

"'Harry,' she said, 'I hate to ask you to go and come again, but that
other visitor--I'd promised him first.  Do you mind, Harry?  I'm
longing for a good time with you, a good long talk.  You get your
Sundays, Harry?  Well, why not come here at three on Sunday when I'll
be quite alone and we'll have a regular good old tea?  Do you mind,
Harry?'

"I said I didn't.  In that flat ethical values seemed quite different
to what they were outside.

"'After all, you did ought to have written first,' said Fanny,
'instead of just jumping out on me out of the dark.'

"There was no one in the hall when she showed me out and not even a
hat or coat visible.  'Give me a kiss, Harry,' she said and I kissed
her very readily.  'Quite sure you don't mind?' she said at her door.

"'Not a bit,' I said.  'I ought to have written.'

"'Sunday at three,' she said, as I went down the carpeted staircase.

"'Sunday at three,' I replied at the bend of the stairs.

"Downstairs there was a sort of entrance hall to all the flats with a
fire burning in a fire-place and a man ready to call a cab or taxi
for anyone who wanted one.  The prosperity and comfort of it all
impressed me greatly, and I was quite proud to be walking out of such
a fine place.  It was only when I had gone some way along the street
that I began to realise how widely my plans for the evening had
miscarried.

"I had not asked her whether she was living a bad life or not and I
had reasoned with her not at all.  The scenes I had rehearsed in my
mind beforehand, of a strong and simple and resolute younger brother
saving his frail but lovable sister from terrible degradations, had
indeed vanished altogether from my mind when her door had opened and
she had appeared.  And here I was with the evening all before me and
nothing to report to my family but the profound difference that lies
between romance and reality.  I decided not to report to my family at
all yet, but to go for a very long walk and think this Fanny business
over thoroughly, returning home when it would be too late for my
mother to cross-examine me and 'draw me out' at any length.

"I made for the Thames Embankment, for that afforded uncrowded
pavements and the solemnity and incidental beauty appropriate to a
meditative promenade.

"It is curious to recall now the phases of my mind that night.  At
first the bright realities I came from dominated me: Fanny pretty and
prosperous, kindly and self-assured, in her well-lit, well-furnished
flat, and the friendly and confident voice I had heard speaking in
the hall, asserted themselves as facts to be accepted and respected.
It was delightful after more than two years of ugly imaginations to
have the glimpse of my dear sister again so undefeated and loved and
cared for and to look forward to a long time with her on Sunday and a
long confabulation upon all I had done in the meantime and all I
meant to do.  Very probably these two people were married after all,
but unable for some obscure reason to reveal the fact to the world.
Perhaps Fanny would tell me as much in the strictest confidence on
Sunday and I could go home and astonish and quell my mother with the
whispered secret.  And even as I developed and cuddled this idea it
grew clear and cold and important in my mind that they were not
married at all, and the shades of a long-accumulated disapproval
dimmed that first bright impression of Fanny's little nest.  I felt a
growing dissatisfaction with the part I had played in our encounter.
I had let myself be handled and thrust out as though I had been a
mere boy instead of a brother full of help and moral superiority.
Surely I ought to have said something, however brief, to indicate our
relative moral positions!  I ought to have faced that man too, the
Bad Man, lurking no doubt in the room with the mirror and the
chintz-covered chair.  He had avoided seeing me--because he could not
face me!  And from these new aspects of the case I began to develop a
whole new dream of reproach and rescue.  What should I have said to
the Bad Man?  'And so, Sir, at last we meet----'

"Something like that.

"My imagination began to leap and bound and soar with me.  I pictured
the Bad Man, dressed in that 'immaculate evening dress' which my
novels told me marked the deeper and colder depths of male depravity,
cowering under my stream of simple eloquence.  'You took her,' I
would say, 'from our homely but pure and simple home.  You broke her
father's heart'--yes, I imagined myself saying that!--'And what have
you made of her?' I asked.  'Your doll, your plaything! to be
pampered while the whim lasts and then to be cast aside!'
Or--'tossed aside'?

"I decided 'tossed aside' was better.

"I found myself walking along the Embankment, gesticulating and
uttering such things as that."

"But you knew better?" said Firefly.  "Even then."

"I knew better.  But that was the way our minds worked in the ancient
days."



§ 7

"But," said Sarnac, "my second visit to Fanny, like my first, was
full of unexpected experiences and unrehearsed effects.  The carpet
on the pleasant staircase seemed to deaden down my moral tramplings,
and when the door opened and I saw my dear Fanny again, friendly and
glad, I forgot altogether the stern interrogations with which that
second interview was to have opened.  She pulled my hair and kissed
me, took my hat and coat, said I had grown tremendously and measured
herself against me, pushed me into her bright little sitting-room,
where she had prepared such a tea as I had never seen before, little
ham sandwiches, sandwiches of a delightful stuff called Gentleman's
Relish, strawberry jam, two sorts of cake, and little biscuits to
fill in any odd corners.  'You are a dear to come and see me, Harry.
But I had a sort of feeling that whatever happened you would come
along.'

"'We two always sort of hung together,' I said.

"'Always,' she agreed.  'I think mother and Ernie might have written
me a line.  Perhaps they will later.  Ever seen an electric kettle,
Harry?  This is one.  And you put that plug in there.'

"'I know,' I said, and did as I was told.  'There's resistances
embedded in the coating.  I've been doing some electricity and
chemistry.  Council classes.  Six'r seven subjects altogether.  And
there's a shop-window in Tothill Street full of such things.'

"'I expect you know all about them,' she said.  'I expect you've
learnt all sorts of sciences,' and so we came to the great topic of
what I was learning and what I was going to do.

"It was delightful to talk to someone who really understood the
thirst for knowledge that possessed me.  I talked of myself and my
dreams and ambitions, and meanwhile, being a growing youth, my arm
swept like a swarm of locusts over Fanny's wonderful tea.  Fanny
watched me with a smile on her face and steered me with questions
towards the things she most wanted to know.  And when we had talked
enough for a time she showed me how to play her pianola and I got a
roll of Schumann that Mr. Plaice had long ago made familiar to me and
had the exquisite delight of playing it over for myself.  These
pianolas were quite easy things to manage, I found; in a little while
I was already playing with conscious expression.

"Fanny praised me for my quickness, cleared her tea-things away while
I played, and then came and sat beside me and listened and talked and
we found we had learnt quite a lot about music since our parting.  We
both thought great things of Bach,--whom I found I was calling quite
incorrectly Batch--and Mozart, who also had to be pronounced a little
differently.  And then Fanny began to question me about the work I
wanted to do in the world.  'You mustn't stay with that old chemist
much longer,' she declared.  How would I like to do some sort of work
that had to do with books, bookselling or helping in a library or
printing and publishing books and magazines?  'You've never thought
of writing things?' asked Fanny.  'People do.'

"'I made some verses once or twice,' I confessed, 'and wrote a letter
to the _Daily News_ about temperance.  But they didn't put it in.'

"'Have you ever wanted to write?'

"'What, books?  Like Arnold Bennett?  Rather!'

"'But you didn't quite know how to set about it.'

"'It's difficult to begin,' I said, as though that was the only
barrier.

"'You ought to leave that old chemist's shop,' she repeated.  'If I
were to ask people I know and found out some better sort of job for
you, Harry, would you take it?'

"'_Rather!_' said I."

"Why not altogether?" interrupted Firefly.

"Oh! we used to say _Rather_," said Sarnac.  "It was artistic
understatement.  But you realise how dreadfully I lapsed from all my
preconceived notions about Fanny and myself.  We talked the whole
evening away.  We had a delightful cold picnic supper in a pretty
little dining-room with a dresser, and Fanny showed me how to make a
wonderful salad with onions very finely chopped and white wine and
sugar in the dressing.  And afterwards came some more of that marvel,
the pianola, and then very reluctantly I took my leave.  And when I
found myself in the streets again I had once more my former sense of
having dropped abruptly from one world into another, colder, bleaker,
harder, and with entirely different moral values.  Again I felt the
same reluctance to go straight home and have my evening dimmed and
destroyed by a score of pitiless questions.  And when at last I did
go home I told a lie.  'Fanny's got a pretty place and she's as happy
as can be,' I said.  'I'm not quite sure, but from what she said, I
believe that man's going to marry her before very long.'

"My cheeks and ears grew hot under my mother's hostile stare.

"'Did she tell you that?'

"'Practically,' I lied.  'I kind of got it out of her.'

"'But 'e's married already!' said my mother.

"'I believe there is something,' I said.

"'_Something!_' said my mother scornfully.  'She's stolen another
woman's man.  'E belongs to 'er--for ever.  No matter what there is
against 'er.  "Whomsoever God Hath Joined, Let No Man Put
Asunder!"--that's what I was taught and what I believe.  'E may be
older; 'e may have led her astray, but while she and 'e harbour
together the sin is 'ers smutch as 'is.  Did you see 'im?'

"'He wasn't there.'

"''Adn't the face.  That's so much to their credit.  And are you
going there again?'

"'I've kind of promised----'

"'It's against my wishes, 'Arry.  Every time you go near Fanny,
'Arry, you disobey me.  Mark that.  Let's be plain about that, once
and for all.'

"I felt mulish.  'She's my sister,' I said.

"'And I'm your mother.  Though nowadays mothers are no more than dirt
under their children's feet.  Marry 'er indeed!  Why should 'e?
Likely.  'E'll marry the next one.  Come, Prue, take that bit of coal
off the fire and we'll go up to bed."



§ 8

"And now," said Sarnac, "I must tell you of the queer business
organisation of Thunderstone House and the great firm of Crane &
Newberry, for whom, at Fanny's instance, I abandoned Mr. Humberg and
his gold-labelled bottles of nothingness.  Crane & Newberry were
publishers of newspapers, magazines and books, and Thunderstone House
was a sort of fountain of printed paper, spouting an unending wash of
reading matter into the lives of the English people.

"I am talking of the world two thousand years ago," said Sarnac.  "No
doubt you have all been good children and have read your histories
duly, but at this distance in time things appear very much
foreshortened, and changes that occupied lifetimes and went on amidst
dense clouds of doubt, misunderstanding and opposition seem to be the
easiest and most natural of transitions.  We were all taught that the
scientific method came into human affairs first of all in the world
of material things, and later on in the matters of psychology and
human relationship, so that the large-scale handling of steel, and
railways, automobiles, telegraphs, flying machines and all the broad
material foundations of the new age were in existence two or three
generations before social, political and educational ideas and
methods were modified in correspondence with the new necessities
these things had created.  There was a great unanticipated increase
in the trade and population of the world and much confusion and
conflict, violent social stresses and revolutions and great wars,
before even the need of a scientific adjustment of human
relationships was recognised.  It is easy enough to learn of such
things in general terms but hard to explain just what these processes
of blind readjustment meant in anxiety, suffering and distress to the
countless millions who found themselves born into the swirl of this
phase of change.  As I look back to that time in which I lived my
other life I am reminded of a crowd of people in one of my old
Pimlico fogs.  No one had any vision of things as a whole; everybody
was feeling his way slowly and clumsily from one just perceptible
thing to another.  And nearly everybody was uneasy and disposed to be
angry.

"It is clear beyond question to us now, that the days of illiterate
drudges were already past in the distant nineteenth century, for
power-machinery had superseded them.  The new world, so much more
complicated and dangerous, so much richer and ampler, was a world
insisting upon an educated population, educated intellectually and
morally.  But in those days these things were not at all clear, and
it was grudgingly and insufficiently that access to knowledge and
enlightenment was given by the learned and prosperous classes to the
rapidly accumulating masses of the population.  They insisted that it
should be done by special channels and in a new and different class
of school.  I have told you of what passed for my education, reading
and writing, rudimentary computations, 'jogfry' and so forth.  That
sort of process, truncated by employment at thirteen or fourteen,
when curiosity and interest were just beginning to awaken, was as far
as education had gone for the bulk of the common men and women in the
opening years of the twentieth century.  It had produced a vast
multitude of people, just able to read, credulous and uncritical and
pitifully curious to learn about life and things, pitifully wanting
to see and know.  As a whole the community did nothing to satisfy the
vague aspirations of those half-awakened swarms; it was left to
'private enterprise' to find what profits it could in their dim
desires.  A number of great publishing businesses arose to trade upon
the new reading public that this 'elementary' education, as we called
it, had accumulated.

"In all ages people have wanted stories about life.  The young have
always wanted to be told about the stage on which they are beginning
to play their parts, to be shown the chances and possibilities of
existence, vividly and dramatically, so that they may imagine and
anticipate their own reactions.  And even those who are no longer
youthful have always been eager to supplement their experiences and
widen their judgment by tales and histories and discussions.  There
has been literature since there has been writing, since indeed there
was enough language for story-telling and reciting.  And always
literature has told people what their minds were prepared to receive,
searching for what it should tell rather in the mind and expectation
of the hearer or reader--who was the person who paid--than in the
unendowed wildernesses of reality.  So that the greater part of the
literature of every age has been a vulgar and ephemeral thing
interesting only to the historian and psychologist of later times
because of the light it threw upon the desires and imaginative
limitations of its generation.  But the popular literature of the age
in which Harry Mortimer Smith was living was more abundant, more
cynically insincere, lazy, cheap and empty than anything that the
world had ever seen before.

"You would accuse me of burlesque if I were to tell you the stories
of the various people who built up immense fortunes by catering for
the vague needs of the new reading crowds that filled the
hypertrophied cities of the Atlantic world.  There was a certain
Newnes of whom legend related that one day after reading aloud some
item of interest to his family he remarked, 'I call that a regular
tit-bit.'  From that feat of nomenclature he went on to the idea of a
weekly periodical full of scraps of interest, cuttings from books and
newspapers and the like.  A hungry multitude, eager and curious, was
ready to feed greedily on such _hors d'oeuvre_.  So _Tit-Bits_ came
into existence, whittled from a thousand sources by an industrious
and not too expensive staff, and Newnes became a man of wealth and a
baronet.  His first experiment upon the new public encouraged him to
make a number of others.  He gave it a monthly magazine full of short
stories drawn from foreign sources.  At first its success was
uncertain, and then a certain Dr. Conan Doyle rose to fame in it and
carried it to success with stories about crime and the detection of
crime.  Every intelligent person in those days, everyone indeed
intelligent or not, was curious about the murders and such-like
crimes which still abounded.  Indeed, there could have been no more
fascinating and desirable subject for us; properly treated such cases
illuminated the problems of law, training and control in our social
welter as nothing else could have done.  The poorest people bought at
least a weekly paper in order to quicken their wits over murder
mysteries and divorces, driven by an almost instinctive need to probe
motives and judge restraints.  But Conan Doyle's stories had little
of psychology in them; he tangled a skein of clues in order to
disentangle it again, and his readers forgot the interest of the
problem in the interest of the puzzle.

"Hard upon the heels of Newnes came a host of other competitors,
among others a certain Arthur Pearson and a group of brothers
Harmsworth who rose to great power and wealth from the beginning of a
small weekly paper called _Answers_, inspired originally by the
notion that people liked to read other people's letters.  You will
find in the histories how two of these Harmsworths, men of great
thrust and energy, became Lords of England and prominent figures in
politics, but I have to tell of them now simply to tell you of the
multitude of papers and magazines they created to win the
errand-boy's guffaw, the heart of the factory girl, the respect of
the aristocracy and the confidence of the _nouveau riche_.  It was a
roaring factory of hasty printing.  Our own firm at Thunderstone
House was of an older standing than these Newnes, Pearson, Harmsworth
concerns.  As early as the eighteenth century the hunger for
knowledge had been apparent, and a certain footman turned publisher,
named Dodsley, had produced a book of wisdom called the _Young Man's
Companion._  Our founder, Crane, had done the same sort of thing in
Early Victorian times.  He had won his way to considerable success
with a _Home Teacher_ in monthly parts and with Crane's _Circle of
the Sciences_ and a weekly magazine and so forth.  His chief rivals
had been two firms called Cassell's and Routledge's, and for years,
though he worked upon a smaller capital, he kept well abreast of
them.  For a time the onrush of the newer popular publishers had
thrust Crane and his contemporaries into the background and then,
reconstructed and reinvigorated by a certain Sir Peter Newberry, the
old business had won its way back to prosperity, publishing a shoal
of novelette magazines and cheap domestic newspapers for women, young
girls and children, reviving the _Home Teacher_ on modern lines with
a memory training system and a _Guide to Success_ by Sir Peter
Newberry thrown in, and even launching out into scientific handbooks
of a not too onerous sort.

"It is difficult for you to realise," said Sarnac, "what a frightful
lot of printed stuff there was in that old world.  It was choked with
printed rubbish just as it was choked with human rubbish and a
rubbish of furniture and clothing and every sort of rubbish; there
was too much of the inferior grades of everything.  And good things
incredibly rare!  You cannot imagine how delightful it is for me to
sit here again, naked and simple, talking plainly and nakedly in a
clear and beautiful room.  The sense of escape, of being cleansed of
unnecessary adhesions of any sort, is exquisite.  We read a book now
and then and talk and make love naturally and honestly and do our
work and thought and research with well-aired, well-fed brains, and
we live with all our senses and abilities taking a firm and easy grip
upon life.  But stress was in the air of the twentieth century.
Those who had enough courage fought hard for knowledge and existence,
and to them we sold our not very lucid or helpful _Home Teacher_ and
our entirely base _Guide to Success_; but great multitudes relaxed
their hold upon life in a way that is known now only to our morbid
psychologists.  They averted their attention from reality and gave
themselves up to reverie.  They went about the world distraught in a
day-dream, a day-dream that they were not really themselves, but
beings far nobler and more romantic, or that presently things would
change about them into a dramatic scene centring about themselves.
These novelette magazines and popular novels that supplied the chief
part of the income of Crane & Newberry, were really helps to
reverie--mental drugs.  Sunray, have you ever read any
twentieth-century novelettes?"

"One or two," said Sunray.  "It's as you say.  I suppose I have a
dozen or so.  Some day you shall see my little collection."

"Very likely _ours_--half of them,--Crane & Newberry's I mean.  It
will be amusing to see them again.  The great bulk of this reverie
material was written for Crane & Newberry by girls and women and by a
type of slack imaginative men.  These 'authors,' as we called them,
lived scattered about London or in houses on the country-side, and
they sent their writings by post to Thunderstone House, where we
edited them in various ways and put the stuff into our magazines and
books.  Thunderstone House was a great rambling warren of a place
opening out of Tottenham Court Road, with a yard into which huge
lorries brought rolls of paper and from which vans departed with our
finished products.  It was all a-quiver with the roar and thudding of
the printing machinery.  I remember very vividly to this day how I
went there first, down a narrow roadway out of the main thoroughfare,
past a dingy public-house and the stage door of a theatre."

"What were you going to do--pack up books?  Or run errands?" asked
Radiant.

"I was to do what I could.  Very soon I was on the general editorial
staff."

"Editing popular knowledge?"

"Yes."

"But why did they want an illiterate youngster like yourself at
Thunderstone House?" asked Radiant.  "I can understand that this work
of instructing and answering the first crude questions of the new
reading classes was necessarily a wholesale improvised affair, but
surely there were enough learned men at the ancient universities to
do all the editing and instructing that was needed!"

Sarnac shook his head.  "The amazing thing is that there weren't," he
said.  "They produced men enough of a sort but they weren't the right
sort."

His auditors looked puzzled.

"The rank-and-file of the men they sent out labelled M.A. and so
forth from Oxford and Cambridge were exactly like those gilt-lettered
jars in Mr. Humberg's shop, that had nothing in them but stale water.
The pseudo-educated man of the older order couldn't teach, couldn't
write, couldn't explain.  He was pompous and patronising and prosy;
timid and indistinct in statement, with no sense of the common need
or the common quality.  The promoted office-boy, these new magazine
and newspaper people discovered, was brighter and better at the job,
comparatively modest and industrious, eager to know things and impart
things.  The editors of our periodicals, the managers of our part
publications and so forth were nearly all of the office-boy class,
hardly any of them, in the academic sense, educated.  But many of
them had a sort of educational enthusiasm and all of them a boldness
that the men of the old learning lacked...."

Sarnac reflected.  "In Britain at the time I am speaking about--and
in America also--there were practically two educational worlds and
two traditions of intellectual culture side by side.  There was all
this vast fermenting hullabaloo of the new publishing, the new press,
the cinema theatres and so forth, a crude mental uproar arising out
of the new elementary schools of the nineteenth century, and there
was the old aristocratic education of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, which had picked up its tradition from the Augustan age of
Rome.  They didn't mix.  On the one hand were these office-boy
fellows with the intellectual courage and vigour--oh! of Aristotle
and Plato, whatever the quality of their intellectual equipment might
be; on the other the academic man, affectedly Grecian, like the
bought and sold learned man of the days of Roman slavery.  He had the
gentility of the household slave; he had the same abject respect for
patron, prince and patrician; he had the same meticulous care in
minor matters, and the same fear of uncharted reality.  He criticised
like a slave, sneering and hinting, he quarrelled like a slave,
despised all he dared despise with the eagerness of a slave.  He was
incapable of serving the multitude.  The new reading-crowd, the
working masses, the 'democracy' as we used to call it, had to get its
knowledge and its wisdom without him.

"Crane, our founder, had had in his day some inkling of the
educational function such businesses as his were bound to serve in
the world, but Sir Peter Newberry had been a hard tradesman, intent
only on recovering the prosperity that the newer popular publishers
had filched away from our firm.  He was a hard-driving man; he drove
hard, he paid in niggardly fashion and he succeeded.  He had been
dead now for some years and the chief shareholder and director of the
firm was his son Richard.  He was nicknamed the Sun; I think because
someone had quoted Shakespeare about the winter of our discontent
being made summer by this Sun of York.  He was by contrast a very
genial and warming person.  He was acutely alive to the moral
responsibility that lay behind the practical irresponsibility of a
popular publisher.  If anything, he drove harder than his father, but
he paid generously; he tried to keep a little ahead of the new public
instead of a little behind; the times moved in his favour and he
succeeded even more than his father had done.  I had been employed by
Crane & Newberry for many weeks before I saw him, but in the first
office I entered in Thunderstone House I saw the evidences of his
personality in certain notices upon the wall.  They were printed in
clear black letters on cards and hung up.  It was his device for
giving the house a tone of its own.

"I remember 'We lead; the others imitate,' and 'If you are in any
doubt about its being too good put it in.'  A third was: 'If a man
doesn't know what you know that's no reason for writing as if he was
an all-round fool.  Rest assured there is something he knows better
than you do.'"



§ 9

"It took me some time to get from the yard of Thunderstone House to
the office in which these inscriptions were displayed.  Fanny had
told me to ask for Mr. Cheeseman, and when I had discovered and
entered the doorway up a flight of steps, which had at first been
masked by two large vans, I made this demand of an extremely small
young lady enclosed in a kind of glass cage.  She had a round face
and a bright red button of a nose.  She was engaged, I realised
slowly, in removing a foreign stamp from a fragment of envelope by
licking the back of the paper.  She did not desist from this
occupation but mutely asked my business with her eyes.

"'Oran-amoiment?' she asked, still licking.

"'Pardon?'

"'Oran-amoiment?'

"'I'm sorry,' I said, 'I don't get it quite.'

"'Mus' be deaf,' she said, putting down the stamp and taking a
sufficient breath for slow loud speech.  ''Ave you
_gottonappointment_?'

"'Oh!' I said.  'Yes.  I was told to come here to-day and see Mr.
Cheeseman between ten and twelve.'

She resumed her struggle with the stamp for a time.  'S'pose you
don't c'lect stamps?' she asked.  ''Sintresting 'obby.  Mr.
Cheeseman's written a little 'andbook about it.  Looking for a job, I
suppose?  May 'ave to wait a bit.  Will you fill up that bit of paper
there?  Formality we 'ave to insist on.  Pencil....'

"The paper demanded my name and my business and I wrote that the
latter was 'literary employment.'

"'Lordy,' said the young lady when she read it.  'I thought you was
in for the ware'ouse.  I say, Florence,' she said to another
considerably larger girl who had appeared on the staircase, 'look at
'im.  'E's after litry emplyment.'

"'Cheek!' said the second young lady after one glance at me, and sat
down inside the glass box with a piece of chewing gum and a novelette
just published by the firm.  The young lady with the button nose
resumed her stamp damping.  They kept me ten minutes before the
smaller one remarked: 'Spose I better take this up to Mr. Cheeseman,
Flo,' and departed with my form.

"She returned after five minutes or so.  'Mr. Cheeseman says 'E can
see you now for one minute,' she said, and led the way up a staircase
and along a passage that looked with glass windows into a printer's
shop and down a staircase and along a dark passage to a small
apartment with an office table, one or two chairs, and bookshelves
covered with paper-covered publications.  Out of this opened another
room, and the door was open.  'You better sit down here,' said the
young lady with the button nose.

"'That Smith?' asked a voice.  'Come right in.'

"I went in, and the young lady with the button nose vanished from my
world.

"I discovered a gentleman sunken deeply in an arm-chair before a
writing-table, and lost in contemplation of a row of vivid drawings
which were standing up on a shelf against the wall of the room.  He
had an intensely earnest, frowning, red face, a large broad mouth
intensely compressed, and stiff black hair that stood out from his
head in many directions.  His head was slightly on one side and he
was chewing the end of a lead-pencil.  'Don't see it,' he whispered.
'Don't see it.'  I stood awaiting his attention.  'Smith,' he
murmured, still not looking at me, 'Harry Mortimer Smith.  Smith,
were you by any chance educated at a Board School?'

"'Yessir,' I said.

"'I hear you have literary tastes.'

"'Yessir.'

"'Then come here and stand by me and look at these damned pictures
there.  Did you ever see such stuff?'

"I stood by his side but remained judiciously silent.  The drawings I
now perceived were designs for a magazine cover.  Upon all of them
appeared the words 'The New World' in very conspicuous lettering.
One design was all flying machines and steamships and automobiles;
two others insisted upon a flying machine; one showed a kneeling
loin-clothed man saluting the rising sun--which however rose behind
him.  Another showed a planet earth half illuminated, and another was
simply a workman going to his work in the dawn.

"'Smith,' said Mr. Cheeseman, 'it's you've got to buy this magazine,
not me.  Which of these covers do you prefer?  It's your decision.
_Fiat experimentum in corpore vili_.'

"'Meaning me, Sir?' I said brightly.

"His bristle eyebrows displayed a momentary surprise.  'I suppose
we're all fitted with the same tags nowadays,' he remarked.  'Which
do you find most attractive?'

"'Those aeroplane things, Sir, seem to me to be shoving it a bit too
hard,' I said.

"'H'm,' said Mr. Cheeseman.  'That's what the Sun says.  You wouldn't
buy on that?'

"'I don't think so, Sir.  It's been done too much.'

"'How about that globe?'

"'Too like an Atlas, Sir.'

"'Aren't geography and travel interesting?'

"'They are, Sir, but somehow they aren't attractive.'

"'Interesting but not attractive.  H'm.  Out of the mouths of babes
and sucklings....  So it's going to be that labour chap there in the
dawn.  You'd buy that, eh?'

"'Is this going to be a magazine about inventions and discoveries and
progress, Sir?'

"'Exactly.'

"'Well, the Dawn's good, Sir, but I don't think that sort of Labour
Day Cartoon man is going to be very attractive.  Looks rheumatic and
heavy, Sir.  Why not cut him out and keep the dawn?'

"'Bit too like a slice of ham, Smith--thin pink streaks.'

"I was struck by an idea.  'Suppose, Sir, you kept that dawn scene
and made it a bit earlier in the year.  Buds on the trees, Sir.  And
perhaps snowy mountains, rather cold and far off.  And then you put a
hand right across it--just a big hand--pointing, Sir.'

"'Pointing up?' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'No, Sir, pointing forward and just a little up.  It would sort of
make one curious.'

"'It would.  A woman's hand.'

"'Just a hand I think, Sir.'

"'You'd buy that?'

"'I'd jump at it, Sir, if I had the money.'

"Mr. Cheeseman reflected for some moments, chewing his pencil
serenely.  Then he spat out small bits of pencil over his desk and
spoke.  'What you say, Smith, is exactly what I've been thinking.
Exactly.  It's very curious.'  He pressed a bell-push on his desk and
a messenger girl appeared.  'Ask Mr. Prelude to come here....  So you
think you'd like to come into Thunderstone House, Smith.  I'm told
you know a little about science already.  Learn more.  Our public's
moving up to science.  I've got some books over there I want you to
read and pick out anything you find interesting.'

"'You'll be able to find me a job, Sir?' I said.

"'I've got to find you a job all right.  Orders is orders.  You'll be
able to sit in that room there....'

"We were interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Prelude.  He was a tall,
thin, cadaverous man with a melancholy expression.

"'Mr. Prelude,' said Mr. Cheeseman, waving his arm at the cover
sketches, 'this stuff won't do.  It's--it's too banal.  We want
something fresher, something with a touch of imagination.  What I
want to see on the cover is--well, say a dawn--a very calm and simple
scene, mostly colour, mountain range far away just flushed with
sunrise, valley blue and still, high streamer clouds touched with
pink.  See?  Trees perhaps in the foreground--just budding--spring
_motif_ and morning _motif_.  See?  All a little faint and
backgroundy.  Then a big hand and wrist across the page pointing at
something, something high and far away.  See?'

"He surveyed Mr. Prelude with the glow of creative enthusiasm on his
face.  Mr. Prelude looked disapproval.  'The Sun will like that,' he
said.

"'It's the goods,' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Why not those flying machines?'

"'Why not midges?' asked Mr. Cheeseman.

"Mr. Prelude shrugged his shoulders.  'I've got no use for a magazine
on progress without a flying machine or a Zeppelin,' he said.
'Still--it's your affair.'

"Mr. Cheeseman looked a little dashed by his colleague's doubt, but
he held to his idea.  'We'll get a sketch made,' he said.  'How about
Wilkinson?'

"They discussed some unknown Wilkinson as a possible cover designer.
Then Mr. Cheeseman turned to me.  'By the by, here's a youngster
we've got to make use of, Prelude.  We don't know what he can do, but
he seems intelligent.  I thought we'd use him to sift some of those
scientific books.  What he likes, _they'll_ like.  _I_ can't read
that stuff.  I'm too busy.'

"Mr. Prelude surveyed me.  'You never know what you can do till you
try,' he said.  'Do you know anything of science?'

"'Not very much,' I said.  'But I've done some physiography and
chemistry and a little geology.  And read a lot.'

"'You don't want to know very much,' said Mr. Prelude.  'You're
better without it here.  Makes you High-Brow.  High-Brow goes to tens
of thousands, but Crane & Newberry go to hundreds of thousands.  Not
that our brows aren't rising some in this establishment.  Educational
and improving, we're going to be.  So far as is consistent with our
profits.  See that notice,--_We lead_?  All the same, Cheeseman,'
said Mr. Prelude, 'the thing that has sold, the thing that sells and
the thing that's going to sell, is the magazine with a pretty girl on
the cover--and the less costume the better.  Consistent with decency.
Now here--what's your name?'

"'Smith, Sir.'

"'Smith.  And here's all these covers on the book-stall.  And then I
produce _this_.  Which does he buy?'

"_This_ was the cover of the summer number of Newberry's Story
Magazine, on which two young ladies in skin-tight bathing dresses
disported themselves on a sandy beach.

"'Smith goes for this,' said Mr. Prelude triumphantly.

"I shook my head.

"'You mean to say that isn't attractive?' said Mr. Cheeseman, turning
in his chair and pointing with his well-chewed pencil.

"I reflected.

"'There's never anything about them inside,' I said.

"'Got you there, Prelude!' said Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Not a bit.  He bought six or seven before he found that out.  And
most of 'em forgot about it when they read inside.'"



§ 10

"I found my introduction to Thunderstone House far less terrifying
than I had anticipated.  It was gratifying to have come so near to
what Mr. Cheeseman had thought about the magazine cover, and there
were presently other very reassuring coincidences of the same sort.
I was immediately interested in the editorial and publishing work
that was going on about me, and my mind took one of those forward
strides that are characteristic of adolescence.  I was still a boy
when I left Mr. Humberg; I had not been with Crane & Newberry six
weeks before I perceived that I was a capable and responsible young
man.  I began to form opinions rapidly, to write with confidence;
even my handwriting suddenly grew up from a careless or over-careful
boyish scrawl to a consistent and characteristic script.  I began to
think about the clothes I was wearing and of the impression I made
upon other people.

"In quite a little time I was writing short contributions to some of
our minor weeklies and monthlies and suggesting articles and
'features' as we called them to Mr. Cheeseman.  The eighteen
shillings a week at which I started went up in a series of jerks to
three pounds, which was quite a big salary in those days for a
youngster not yet eighteen.  Fanny took the keenest interest in my
work and displayed an extraordinary understanding of its conditions.
She seemed to know all about Mr. Cheeseman and Mr. Prelude and the
rest of my colleagues directly I mentioned them.

"One day I was working in the room next to Mr. Cheeseman's with
another youngster called Wilkins at a rather odd little job.  One of
the authors our firm employed had written a long story for the _Story
Reader's Paradise_, and it had been set up by the printers and passed
for press before it was discovered that in a careless moment she had
given her chief villain the name of a very prominent lawyer who
unhappily also had a country house in a village almost identical in
name with the corresponding village in the story.  The prominent
lawyer might see fit to consider this use of his name as libellous
and make trouble for us.  So Wilkins and I were going through two
sets of proofs, one to check the other, and we were changing the name
of the prominent lawyer to an entirely different one whenever it
occurred.  To brighten the task we had made a game of it.  Each one
raced down his galley proof and called the name of 'Reginald Flake'
whenever he found it and scored a point for every name he called
first.  I was some points up when I heard a voice in the passage that
seemed oddly familiar to me.  'They're all spread out on my desk,
sir, if you like to come into my room,' I heard Mr. Cheeseman say.

"'Fay-nits,' said Wilkins.  'It's the Sun.'

"I turned round as the door opened and saw Mr. Cheeseman holding the
door open for a good-looking youngish man, with rather handsome
regular features and a sort of bang of brown hair over his forehead.
He wore a pair of very round large spectacles with glasses tinted a
faint yellow colour.  He met my eyes and an expression of partial
recognition came into his and faded again.  Either he recognised me
or he recognised a resemblance in me.  He followed Mr. Cheeseman
across the room.  Then he turned sharply.

"'Of course,' he said smiling and returning a step or two towards me.
'You must be young Smith.  How are you getting on here?'

"'I'm working for Mr. Cheeseman mostly,' I said standing up.

"He turned to Mr. Cheeseman.

"'Very satisfactory, sir.  Quick, interested; he'll do well here.'

"'I'm glad to hear it--very glad.  Everyone has a chance here and
there's no favours.  No favours.  The best man does the job.  Glad to
see you among the directors whenever you care to come up to us,
Smith.'

"'I'll do my best, Sir.'

"He hesitated, smiled again in a very friendly way and went into Mr.
Cheeseman's room....

"'Where are we?' I said.  'Middle of galley 32?  Score, 22-29.'

"'How d'you know _'im_?' asked Wilkins in a fierce undertone.

"'I don't know him,' I said, suddenly hot and flushed.  'I've never
seen him before.'

"'Well, he knew you.'

"'He's heard about me.'

"'Who from?'

"'How the deuce should _I_ know?' I asked with needless heat.

"'Oh!' said Wilkins and reflected.  'But----'

"He glanced at my troubled face and said no more.

"But at the game of 'Reginald Flake' he overhauled me and beat me at
the end of the book, 67-42."



§ 11

"I concealed altogether from my mother the share that Fanny had had
in getting me my new job and all the opportunities it carried with it
in Thunderstone House, and so it was possible for her to find some
pride and satisfaction in my increasing prosperity.  I was presently
able to double and then still further to increase my contribution to
the household expenses, and I exchanged my attic, which was handed
over to Prue for her very own, for the room which had once sheltered
the old Moggeridges.  It was rearranged as a bed-sitting room for me,
and soon I had first one and then several shelves full of books and a
writing-desk of my own.

"And also I concealed from my mother, for there was no use in
distressing her, the frequency of my visits to Fanny.  We began to
make little excursions together, for Fanny, I discovered, was often
very lonely.  Newberry was a very busy man, and often he could not
come near her for ten days or a fortnight, and although she had some
women friends, and classes and lectures, there were gaps often of
several days when she would have had no one to speak to but the
servant who came in daily to her, if it had not been for me.  But all
this companioning of Fanny I tried to hide from my mother, though now
and then her suspicions stabbed my falsehoods.  Ernie and Prue,
however, were able to follow the calls of love unhampered by the
family shame, and presently they were both engaged and his young lady
and her young man were brought to a Sunday tea-party in the
drawing-room--through the kind permission of Mr. and Mrs. Milton who
were, as usual, 'away.'  Ernie's Young Lady--I've completely
forgotten her name--proved to be a well-dressed, self-possessed young
woman with a vast knowledge of people in what we used to call
'society'; she talked freely and fashionably, taking the larger share
of the conversation, of Ascot and Monte Carlo and the Court.  Prue's
Mr. Pettigrew was of a more serious quality, and of the things he
said I remember now only that he expressed a firm conviction that
Messages from the Dead were Bound to Come in a few years' time.  He
was a chiropodist and very well thought of in chiropodological
circles."

"Stop!" cried Radiant.  "What is this?  You are talking nonsense,
Sarnac.  What is chiropodological--hand--foot--scientific?"

"I thought you'd ask me that," said Sarnac, smiling.  "Chiropody
was--corn-cutting."

"Corn-cutting--harvesting," said Starlight.  "But where do the hands
and feet come in?  There were machines then, were there not?"

"No, this was a different sort of corn.  Mr. Humberg's shop was full
of corn-salves and corn-cures.  Corns were painful and tiresome
callosities produced on people's feet by the pressure of ill-fitting
boots.  We don't know of such things nowadays, but they darkened
scores of lives in Pimlico."

"But why did they wear ill-fitting boots?" demanded Radiant.
"Oh!--never mind.  Never mind.  I know.  A mad world which made boots
at hazard without looking at the feet that had to wear them!  And
wore boots that hurt it when no sane people would dream of wearing
boots!  Go on with your story."

"Let me see," said Sarnac.  "I was talking of a tea-party, a family
tea-party in the drawing-room--in which we talked of everything in
the world but my sister Fanny.  And quite a little while after that
tea-party my mother fell ill and died.

"It was a swift and sudden illness.  She caught a cold and would not
go to bed.  When she did go to bed, she got up after one day of it,
because she couldn't bear to think of all that Prue might be doing or
not doing in the house-work downstairs.  And her cold turned to
pneumonia, the same sort of inflammation that had carried off the
Moggeridges, and she died in three days.

"Now when the fever came upon her she changed suddenly from something
white and hard and unapproachable to something flushed and pitiful.
Her face grew smaller and younger looking, her eyes bright, and
something came into them that reminded me of Fanny when Fanny was
distressed.  And all my habit of sullen resistance to my mother
melted when I saw her struggling for breath on her tumbled pillow and
realised that she might be near the end of all her hates and
drudgeries.  Matilda Good became again the old friend who had known
her since she was a young woman, and they called each other 'Tilda'
and 'Marty' instead of Matilda and Martha.  Matilda for all her
varicose veins was up and down stairs fifty times a day; and there
was much sending out for expensive things, the more expensive the
better, that Matilda thought my mother might 'fancy.'  They stood
appealingly untouched upon the table by her bedside.  Once or twice
towards the end my mother asked for me, and when I came in the
evening and bent over her she whispered hoarsely, ''Arry boy--promise
me! ... Promise me! ...'

"I sat down and took the hand she held out to me, and so holding to
me, she dozed.

"What she wanted me to promise she never said; and whether it was
some last vow she wanted to extract from me that would separate me
from Fanny for ever, or whether her thoughts about Fanny had changed
under the shadow of death and she had some new message for her, I
cannot imagine to this day.  Perhaps she herself did not know what I
had to promise; a dying desire for predominance moved her.  Will
stirred in her and faded again to nothing.  'Promise me!'  Fanny she
never mentioned by name and we did not dare to bring my sister in to
her.  Ernest came and kissed her and knelt down by the bedside and
suddenly, dreadfully wept aloud like the child he was and set us all
weeping; he was her firstborn and her dearest, he had known her
before her final embitterment, he had always been a dutiful son to
her.

"Presently she was lying there very straight and still, as hushed and
still as my father's shop on Sundays, and the traffics and struggles
and angers of life had done with her for ever.  Her face was now
neither young nor old, a marble face of peace.  All her peevish
resentment was smoothed and wiped away.  It had never occurred to me
before that she had or had not good looks, but now I saw that Fanny's
fine regularity of feature came from her.  She was like Fanny, like
an immobile, unhumorous Fanny.

"I stood beside her still body oppressed by a grief too wide and deep
for tears, an immense grief that was not so much for her as for all
that distress of life she had embodied.  For now I saw that there was
not and there never had been anything hateful in her; I saw for the
first time the devotion of her, the misguided passion for right, the
mute, blundering, tormented and tormenting love in her heart.  Even
her love of Fanny was a love capsized and inverted; her fallen
daughter had been to her a detested changeling for the pretty clever
little girl who was to have been a paragon of feminine virtue.
Except for Ernest how bitterly and repeatedly had we children
offended her rigid and implacable standards, Fanny and I openly and
rebelliously and Prue by discovery!  For Prue--I will not tell you
the details of Matilda's exposure--pilfered.

"Long before we children began to thwart my mother there must have
been a still more monstrous disappointment for her.  What sort of
dreams of manly piety and decorum had she wrapped about my poor,
maundering, ramshackle, loose-limbed father when he and she walked
out together in their Sunday clothes, making the best and more than
the best of themselves?  He must have been a tall, good-looking,
young man then, and reassuringly apt with pious reflections.  What
shocks had he, gross, clumsy, wayward, ignorant and incompetent as
the dear man was, inflicted upon her set and limited expectations?

"And then think of my Uncle John Julip again, that wonderful and
adored elder brother with the manners of a sporting baronet, who had
slowly shrivelled down to the figure of a drunken thief!  Everything
had shrivelled for her,--poor soul!  In our streets in those old days
men were permitted to sell brightly coloured distended bladders to
children, the most apt instruments for acute disappointment you can
imagine; and the life God had given my mother was very like one of
these bladders.  It had burst and shrivelled down to a limp and empty
residue that nothing could ever restore.  She had faced her declining
days, prematurely wrinkled, weary, laborious and unloved except by
one dutiful son....

"Yes, the thought of Ernest was a consolation to me.  Surely his
loyalty had meant happiness for her."

Sarnac paused.  "I find it impossible," he said, "to disentangle my
thoughts as I stood by my mother's death-bed from a thousand things
that have come to me since about her.  I have had to tell of her as
an antagonist, as a hard, uncharitable soul.  That was her rôle in my
story.  But she was indeed just the creature and victim of that
disordered age which had turned her natural tenacity to a blind
intolerance and wasted her moral passion upon ugly and barren ends.
If Fanny and Ernest and I had shown any stoutness against the
disadvantages of our start in life, if we had won for ourselves any
knowledge or respect, we inherited that much steadfastness from her;
such honesty as we had was hers.  If her moral harshness had
overshadowed and embittered our adolescence, her passionate mothering
had sheltered our childhood.  Our father would have loved us,
wondered at us and left us about.  But early in her life, that fear,
that terror-stricken hatred of sex that overshadowed the Christian
centuries, that frantic resort to the suppressions, subjugations and
disciplines of a stereotyped marriage in its harshest form, a
marriage as easy to step into and as hard to leave as a steel trap
with its teeth hidden by the most elaborate secrecies and
misrepresentations, had set its pitiless grip upon my mother's
imagination and blackened all the happier impulses in life for her.
She was ready, if necessary, to pass all her children through the
fires of that Moloch, if by so doing their souls might be saved.  She
did it the more bitterly because she was doing it against the deeper
undeveloped things in her own nature.

"Such things, more dimly appreciated perhaps, passed through the mind
of Harry Mortimer Smith, my former self, as he stood beside his dead
mother.  He was torn--I was torn--by a sense of irrational separation
and by the haunting persuasion of lost opportunities.  There were
things I felt that I might have said, propitious moments I might have
seized to make things better between us.  I had differed from her so
harshly; I might have been so much kinder to her and still have held
my way.  She lay there a feeble, little, old woman, thin, worn and
prematurely aged.  How often had I struck at her with all my rebel
strength, blind to the fact that I could wound her as only a child
can wound the mother who bore it.  She had been darkened and I also
had been darkened, and now--now it was all too late.  The door had
closed between us.  And was closed for ever.  For ever...."



§ 12

"The year and a half that intervened between my mother's death and
the beginning of the First World War--the War that came before the
Poison Gas War and the Great Desolation--were years of rapid growth
for me, mental and physical alike.  I remained with Matilda Good
because I had come to love that clumsy, wise, friendly creature
almost as if she was my second mother, but now I was prosperous
enough to occupy the whole of the second floor and to have a
sitting-room separate from my bedroom.  I still came down to the
underground breakfast-room for breakfast or supper or high tea
because I liked talking with Matilda.  Prue had married Mr. Pettigrew
by that time, and in her stead two grey and sedulous women came
in--they were sisters, one a spinster and the other the wife of a
broken-down prize-fighter--to do the drudgeries Prue and my mother
had done.

"My chief companion in those days was my sister Fanny.  Our
childhood's alliance was renewed and strengthened.  We had a need for
each other; we were able to help each other as no one else could help
us.  I found out very soon that Fanny's life was divided into two
very unequal parts; that she had hours and sometimes days of
excitement and happiness with Newberry, who loved her greatly and
gave her all the time he could steal away for her and introduced her
to such friends as he could trust to respect her and keep their
secret, and also she had long stretches of uneventful solitude in
which she was terribly left to herself.  My sister Fanny was plucky
and loyal and devoted, but before we two got together again I think
she found those grey intervals of suspended animation dreary and
dangerous and sometimes almost intolerable.  Often she had nothing to
live for at all, nothing bright and vital, but the almost daily note,
a hasty word or so he scribbled to her.  And the better he was, the
worse it was for her.  The fact that he was pleasant and delightful
and deeply in love with her, the very brightness of being with him,
made those great intervals seem darker and duller."

"Hadn't she work?" asked Sunray.

"And fellow workers, and other women?" asked Firefly.

"Not in her position.  Not as an unmarried woman--of lowly
origins--with a lover."

"But there were others in the same position?  Surely there were many!"

"A scattered class, a class made to be ashamed of itself.  Newberry
and Fanny were lovers, such lovers as we are to-day; they got through
with it and at last, I believe, they married according to the custom
of the time.  But they were the exceptional ones, they knew what they
wanted and had stout hearts.  Most of these irregular unions
succumbed to the boredom in between and to the temptations of
separation.  Forgetfulness and jealousy played havoc with these
insecure couples.  The girls in their phases of loneliness picked up
with other men and the first lover suspected their infidelities and
strayed away.  I have a lot to tell you yet about jealousy in the old
world; it was not regarded as an ugly thing but as a rather
high-spirited thing.  People let it go and were proud of it.  And the
majority of these irregular unions were not even love unions in the
first place, they were vice unions, dishonest on either side.  Drugs
and drink crept very easily into lives divided between
over-excitement and tedium and darkened by a general disapproval.
The defiant pose was the easiest pose.  The unmarried lover was made
a social outcast and driven towards other sorts of social outcasts,
more evil and unhappy....  You see perhaps now why my sister Fanny
was rather alone and aloof, for all that she belonged to a numerous
class.

"I suppose," said Sarnac, "that the object of that rigid legal
marriage of the old world was to keep lovers together.  In countless
cases it kept the wrong people together and lovers apart.  But then
you must remember that in those days children were supposed to be
providential accidents; they were indeed accidents of cohabitation
and that altered all the conditions of the question.  There were no
proper schools for children, no sort of refuge if the parents parted
and tore the home asunder.  We are so secure; it is hard to imagine
now the chancy insecurity of the ancient days.  It is hard to imagine
the dangers that hung about an unprotected child.  In our world
nowadays we all seem to get paired; sooner or later each finds a mate
and marriage is a natural and necessary relationship instead of a
compulsory device.  All the priests of all the religions that have
ever been in the world could not bind me to Sunray more firmly than I
am bound to-day.  Does one get a book and an altar to marry the axe
to its handle? ...

"None of which does in the least degree affect the fact that my
sister Fanny suffered dreadfully from loneliness before she
rediscovered me.

"She was full of curiosities and enterprise, and she took possession
of my leisure to explore all sorts of shows and resorts in and about
old London, museums, picture-galleries, parks, gardens and heaths,
that I should otherwise never have visited.  Indeed she might not
have visited them either if I had not been available as her escort,
because in that world of crazy suppressions, most of these places
were haunted by furtive love-hunters and feeble-minded folk who might
have been irritating and tiresome to a solitary girl so pretty as
Fanny.  They would have followed her about and accosted her when they
got her alone, and thrust their disagreeable cravings between her and
the beauty and sunshine.

"But together we went gaily to all sorts of interesting things.  This
old London I am describing to you had a large share of parks and
gardens; there was a pleasing quaintness about all of them and much
unpremeditated loveliness.  There was a certain Richmond Park, to
which we often resorted, with many fine old trees and grassy spaces
and wildernesses of bracken, that got very yellow and gay in autumn,
and a quantity of deer.  You might have been transported from this
age to Richmond Park two thousand years ago, and still fancied
yourself in the northland parks of to-day.  The great trees, like
nearly all trees in those days, were, it is true, infested with
fungus and partly decayed, but Fanny and I never noticed that.  They
seemed great healthy trees to us.  And there was a view from a
hill-crest of the winding Thames, a very delightful view.  And then
there were the oddest old gardens and flower spaces at Kew.  I
remember a quite good rock-garden and glass-houses of flowers; the
brightest flowers the old world imagined possible.  And there were
paths through a jungle of rhododendra, primitive small rhododendra,
but bright coloured and a great delight to Fanny and me.  There was a
place where we had tea at little tables in the open air.  In that
frowsty old germ-saturated world with its dread of draughts and colds
and coughs it gave one a bright sense of adventure to eat food in the
open air.

"We went to museums and picture-galleries and talked about what the
pictures meant and we talked of a thousand things together.  There
comes back to me one conversation we had at a place called Hampton
Court, a queer, old, red-brick palace with a great grape-vine under
glass and an ancient garden beside the Thames.  There were
flower-beds full of half-wild herbaceous flowers, and we walked
beside them under trees until we came to a low wall that looked upon
the river, and we sat down on a seat and there, after a silence,
suddenly Fanny, like one who has been pent up beyond endurance, began
talking of love.

"She began by asking questions about the girls I had met and the
girls at Thunderstone House.  I described one or two of them to her.
My chief friend among them was Milly Kimpton from the counting-house;
we had got to the pitch of taking teas together and such-like
friendly acts.  'That's not love,' said Fanny the wise, 'lending each
other books.  You don't begin to know what love is yet, Harry.

"'But you will, Harry--you will.

"'Don't you be too late about it, Harry.  There's nothing in life
like loving someone, Harry.  People don't talk to you about it and
lots of people don't know what they are missing.  It's all the
difference between being nothing or something.  It's all the
difference between being dead or alive.  When you are really loving
someone you're all right and nothing can harm you.  And when you
aren't, nothing is right, everything is wrong.  But love is a queer
thing, Harry, and about as dreadful as it is dear.  It gets wrong.
Sometimes it all goes wrong and it's awful; it slips from you
somehow; it goes and you're left mean and little--ever so mean!--and
you can't get back and it seems you hardly want to get back.  You're
dead and you're damned and done for, and then again it all comes back
again like the sunrise--like being born afresh.'

"And then with a desperate shamelessness she began to talk of
Newberry and how much she loved him.  She told little irrelevant
things about his 'ways.'  'He comes to me whenever he can,' she said,
and repeated this presently.  'He's all my life,' she said.  'You
don't know what he is to me....'

"Then her constant dread of a separation crept up to the surface of
her thoughts.

"'Perhaps,' she said, 'it will always go on like this....  I don't
care if it does, I don't care if I never marry him.  I wouldn't
care--not if at last I'm thrown aside.  I'd go through it all again
and count myself lucky even if I knew for certain I was to be dropped
and cast aside.'

"Queer Fanny!  Her face was flushed and her eyes shining with tears.
I asked myself what had been happening.

"'He'll never throw me aside, Harry.  He'll never throw me aside.  He
can't.  He can't.  He's half as old again as I am and yet he comes to
me in his trouble.  Once----  Once he cried to me.  Men, all of you,
are so strong and yet so helpless....

"'You've got to have a woman to come to....

"'Just a little while ago----  Well----  He was ill.  He was very
ill.  He has pain in his eyes and sometimes he's afraid about them.
This time, suddenly, he had frightful pains.  And he thought he
couldn't see.  He came straight to me, Harry.  He called a cab and
came to me, and he came feeling his way upstairs to me and fumbling
at the door; and I nursed him in my darkened room until the pain had
gone.  He didn't go home, Harry, where there were servants and nurses
to be got and attendants and everything; he came to me.  It was me he
came to.  Me!  He's my man.  He knows I'd give my life for him.  I
would, Harry.  I'd cut my body to pieces bit by bit, if it would make
him happy.

"'It wasn't so much the pain he had, Harry, as the fear.  He's not
the one to mind a bit of pain or be afraid of many things.  But he
was afraid and scared.  He'd never been afraid before, but he was
afraid of going blind--he was too afraid to go to the specialist.  It
was like a little child, Harry, and him so big and strong--afraid of
the dark.  He thought they'd get hold of him so that perhaps he'd not
be able to come to me.  He thought he wouldn't be able to see his
beloved magazines and papers any more.  And the pain just turned the
screw on him.  He clung to me.

"'It was me made him go.  I took him there.  He wouldn't have gone if
it hadn't been for me.  He'd have just let things drift on and not a
soul in the world, for all his money and power, to mother him.  And
then he might really have gone blind if it hadn't been taken in time.
I pretended to be his secretary and I took him and waited in the
waiting-room for him.  I dreaded they'd hurt him.  I was listening
for something to happen all the time.  I had to look at their old
_Graphics_ as if I didn't care a rap what they were doing to him.
And then he came out smiling with a green shade on and I had to stand
up stiff and cool and wait to hear what he had to say.  I was scared
by that shade, Harry.  Scared!  I held my breath.  I thought it had
come.  "It isn't so bad as we fancied, Miss Smith," he says--offhand
like.  "You kept the taxi?  You'll have to take my arm I'm afraid."
"Certainly sir," I said, mimpsy-like.  I was careful to be kind of
awkward taking his arm.  There were people there in the waiting-room
and you never know.  Acted respectful.  Me!--that has had him in my
arms a thousand times.

"'But when we were in the taxi and safe he pushed up the shade and
took me into his arms and he hugged me and he cried--he cried wet
tears.  And held me.  Because he'd got me still and his sight still
and the work he loves to do.  Things would have to be done to his
eyes but he'd keep his sight--and he has.  There's been no trouble
now.  Not for months.'

"She sat looking away from me over the shining river.

"'How could he ever leave me?' she said.  'After a time like that?'

"Stoutly she spoke, but even to my youthful eyes she seemed little
and lonely, sitting there on the old red wall.

"I thought of the busy bustling man with the big tortoise-shell
glasses away from her, and of one or two things I had heard whispered
about him.  It seemed to me then that no men were good enough for the
women in the world.

"'When he's tired or in trouble,' said Fanny, sure and still, 'he'll
always come back to me.'"




CHAPTER THE SIXTH

MARRIAGE IN WAR TIME


§ 1

"And now," said Sarnac, "comes a change of costume.  You have been
thinking of me, I suppose, as a gawky youth of seventeen or eighteen,
dressed in those ill-fitting wholesale clothes we used to call
'ready-mades.'  That youth wore a white collar round his neck and a
black jacket and dark grey trousers of a confused furtive patterning
and his hat was a black hemisphere with a little brim, called a
Bowler.  Now he changes into another sort of 'ready-mades,' even more
ill-fitting,--the khaki uniform of a young British soldier in the
Great World War against Germany.  In 1914 Anno Domini, a magic wand,
the wand of political catastrophe, waved to and fro over Europe, and
the aspect of that world changed, accumulation gave place to
destruction and all the generation of young men I have described as
being put together from such shops as those one saw in Cheapside,
presently went into khaki and fell into ranks and tramped off to the
lines of ditches and desolation that had extended themselves across
Europe.  It was a war of holes and barbed wire and bombs and big guns
like no war that had ever happened before.  It was a change of phase
in the world muddle.  It was like some liquid which has been growing
hotter and hotter, suddenly beginning to boil and very swiftly
boiling over.  Or it was like a toboggan track in the mountains, when
after a long easy, almost level run, one comes to a swift drop and a
wild zig-zag of downward curves.  It was the same old downward run at
a dramatic point.

"Change of costume there was and change of atmosphere.  I can still
recall the scared excitements of the August days when the war began
and how incredulous we English were when we heard that our own little
army was being driven back before the German hosts like a spluttering
kitten pushed by a broom, and that the French lines were collapsing.
Then came the rally of September.  At the beginning we British
youngsters had been excited spectators, but as the tale of our army's
efforts and losses came home to us we crowded to the recruiting
offices, by thousands and scores of thousands, until at last our
volunteers could be counted by the million.  I went with the crowd.

"It may seem a curious thing to you that I lived through all the
Great World War against Germany, that I was a soldier in it and
fought and was wounded and went back and took part in the final
offensive, that my brother Ernest became a sergeant and won a medal
for gallantry and was killed within a few weeks of the concluding
Armistice, that all the circumstances of my life were revolutionised
by the war and that nevertheless it does not come into the story of
my life as a thing of importance in itself to that story.  As I think
of it now, I think of the Great World War as a sort of geographical
or atmospheric fact, like living ten miles from your working place or
being married in an April shower.  One would have to travel the ten
miles every day or put up an umbrella as one came out of church, but
it wouldn't touch what one was intimately or alter in any essential
the living substance of one's life.  Of course the World War killed
and tortured millions of us, impoverished us all and dislocated the
whole world.  But that only meant that so many millions went out of
life and that there was a fractional increase in everyone's anxiety
and disorder; it didn't change the nature and passions, the
ignorances and bad habits of thought of the millions who remained.
The World War arose out of these ignorances and misconceptions and it
did nothing to alter them.  After it was all over the world was a
good deal rattled and much shabbier than before, but it was still the
same old mean and haphazard world, acquisitive, divided, cantingly
patriotic, idiotically prolific, dirty, diseased, spiteful and
conceited.  It has taken two-score centuries of research and
teaching, training, thought and work to make any great alteration in
that.

"I admit the outbreak of the World War had a really tremendous air of
being an end and a beginning.  There were great days in it at first,
and for us British as much as for any people.  We apprehended the
thing in splendid terms.  We thought quite honestly--I speak of the
common people--that the Imperialisms of Central Europe were wholly
wrong and that we were wholly right; hundreds of thousands of us gave
ourselves gladly in the sincere belief that a new world was to be won
by victory.  That spirit was not confined to Britain, nor to either
side in this war.  I am convinced that the years 1914, 1915 and 1916
saw finer crops of brave and generous deeds and noble sacrifices, of
heroic toil and heroic patience, than any years that ever came before
in the whole history of mankind or than any of the years that
followed for many centuries.  The young people were wonderful; death
and honour reaped gloriously among them.  And then the inherent
unsoundness of the issue began to wear through and that false dawn
faded out of men's hearts.  By the end of 1917 the whole world was a
disillusioned world, with but one hope left, the idealism of the
United States of America and the still untested greatness of
President Wilson.  But of that and what it came to, you read about in
the history books and I will not talk about it now.  A God in that
man's position might have unified the world in the twentieth century
and saved it centuries of tragic struggle.  President Wilson was not
a God....

"And I do not think I need tell you very much of the war itself as I
saw it.  It was a strange phase in human experience and it was
described and painted and photographed and put on record very
completely.  Most of us have read quite a lot about it--except of
course Firefly.  You know how human life concentrated for four whole
years upon the trenches that stretched across Europe on either front
of Germany.  You know how thousands of miles of land were turned into
wildernesses of mud-holes and wire.  Nowadays of course nobody reads
the books of the generals and admirals and politicians of that time,
and all the official war histories sleep the eternal sleep in the
vaults of the great libraries, but probably you have all read one or
two such human books as Enid Bagnold's _Diary without Dates_ or
Cogswell's _Ermytage and the Curate_ or Barbusse's _Le Feu_ or Arthur
Green's _Story of a Prisoner of War_ or that curious anthology, _The
War Stories of Private Thomas Atkins_, and probably you have seen
photographs and films and also pictures painted by such men as
Nevinson and Orpen and Muirhead Bone and Will Rothenstein.  All of
them, I can certify now, are very true books and pictures.  They tell
of desolation passing like the shadow of an eclipse across the human
scene.

"But the mind has the power of reducing and effacing every sort of
impression that drags pain with it.  I spent great parts out of two
years in that noxious, gun-pocked land of haste and hiding, and that
time now seems less than many days of my peace-time life.  I killed
two men with the bayonet in a trench, and it remains as though it was
done by someone else and had no significance for me at all.  I
remember much more clearly that I felt very sick when afterwards I
found my sleeve saturated with blood and blood on my hand, and how I
tried to get it off by rubbing my arm in the sand because there was
no water to be got.  In the trenches life was hideously uncomfortable
and tedious and while it lasted I was, I know, interminably bored by
the drag of the hours, but all those hours are concentrated now into
a record of the fact.  I remember the shock of the first shell that
burst near me and how slowly the smoke and dust unfolded, and how
there was a redness in the smoke and how for a time it blotted out
the light.  That shell burst in a field of yellow-flowering weeds and
stubble against the sun, but I do not recall what preceded it nor
what followed it; shell-bursts rattled me more and more as the war
went on, but they left weaker and weaker pictures.

"One of my most vivid memories of that time is the excitement of my
first leave from the front, and how my party arrived at Victoria
Station and were guided in a clattering throng to a sort of transport
drain called the Underground Railway by elderly volunteers wearing
brassards.  I was still muddy from the trenches; there had been no
time for a wash and a brush-up, and I was carrying my rifle and other
gear; we crowded into a brightly lit first-class carriage in which
were a number of people in evening dress who were going out to dinner
and to the theatre.  There could not have been a more vivid contrast
if I had seen Firefly there in all her loveliness.  There was one
young man not much older than myself between two gorgeously dressed
women.  He had a little white bow under his pink chin and a silk
neck-wrap, he had a black cloak with a cape and an opera hat.  I
suppose he was an invalid but he looked as fit as I.  I felt a
momentary impulse to say something humiliating to him.  I don't think
I did.  I do not remember that I did.  But I looked at him and then
at the brown stain on my sleeve and the wonder of life possessed me.

"No--I said nothing.  I was in a state of intense exhilaration.  The
other fellows were gay and inclined to be noisy, one or two were a
little drunk, but I was quietly exalted.  I seemed to be hearing and
seeing and perceiving with such an acuteness as I had never known
before.  Fanny I should see on the morrow, but that evening I hoped
to see Hetty Marcus with whom I was in love.  I was in love with her
with an intensity that only soldier-boys who had been living in the
mud of Flanders for half a year could understand."



§ 2

"How," asked Sarnac, "can I make you see Hetty Marcus, dark-eyed,
warm-skinned, wayward and fragile, who brought me to love and death
two thousand years ago?

"In a way, she was like Sunray here.  She was of her type.  She had
the same darkness in her eyes, the same still bearing.  She was like
Sunray's hungry sister.  With a touch of fire in her blood.

"Yes--and she had those same stumpy little fingers....  _Look_ at
them!

"I met her on those very Downs I used to walk over with my father
when I was a boy, to steal the produce from Lord Bramble's gardens.
I had a short leave before I was drafted to France and I did not
spend it in London with Matilda Good and Fanny as you may think I
should have done, but I went with three other youngsters who had
enough money to do so, to Cliffstone.  I don't know whether I can
make it clear to you why I went to Cliffstone.  I was excited at the
thought of going into the actual warfare, I meant to do brave and
wonderful things over there, but also I was terribly overshadowed by
the thought that I might be killed.  I did not think of wounds or
suffering, I do not think I feared those things at all, but I had a
profound dread and hatred of extinction before ever I had fully
lived, before I had ever tasted many of the most alluring things in
life.  I had always promised myself love and great adventures with
women, and I was passionately distressed at the possibility of being
cheated of those intensities.  All of us young innocents were in the
same case.  It was I who had thought of Cliffstone, near to our
training camp, with its band and promenade and its flitting glancing
girls.  There if anywhere, it seemed to me, we must snatch something
from life before the great shells splashed us to pieces and the clay
of Flanders devoured us.  We sneaked off from our families with those
fires of protesting romance in our brains and veins.

"You cannot imagine how many millions of lads there were in Europe
then, pitifully eager not to miss altogether the secret and magic
experiences of love before they died.  I cannot tell you of the
pothouses and prostitutes that lay in wait for us or of the gaunt
moonlight on the beach.  I cannot tell you of temptation and
ignorance and disease.  It is too ugly to tell you; such things are
passed and done with, and men suffer them no more.  We groped in
darkness where now men walk in the light.  One of my mates had an
ugly misadventure; all had ugly experiences and I escaped by chance
rather than any merit of my own from those slovenly snares.  I was
for a moment fastidious and I recoiled.  And I had not drunken as the
others had, because some streak of pride in me had made me habitually
wary with drink.

"But I was in a storm of excitements and distresses.  I was slipping
into the pit though I hated it, and to escape it I set myself to
revive my memories of the days when I was a boy.  I went to Cherry
Gardens to see the old home and then to my father's grave--it was
neat and pretty with Fanny's money--and then I determined to walk
over the Downs to recall, if I could, something of the wonder that I
had felt when first I went over them to Chessing Hanger.  And also,
if you understand me, I felt love and romance would be there.  I
hadn't abandoned the quest that had brought me to Cliffstone; I had
only jumped a foul ditch on my way.  When I was a child I had
supposed Heaven was over the Downs, and certainly the golden summer
sunsets were.  It seemed natural to turn my back on Cliffstone and go
up into the only really lovely country I had ever known, if I wanted
to find romance.

"And I found it.

"I was thrilled but not a bit surprised when I saw Hetty appear over
the sky-line of the hill and come right over the brow and stand with
her hands behind her back and the sun shining on her hair, looking
out across the woods and cornfields to Blythe and the distant marches
and the sea.  She had taken her hat off and was holding it behind
her.  She wore an ivory-coloured silk blouse very open at the neck
and it was just as though you could see her body through the flimsy
stuff.

"She dropped into a sitting position, now looking at her world and
now plucking at the little dwarfish flowers in the Downland turf.

"I stood for a time agape at her.  Then my whole being was filled
with a tremulous resolve to talk to her.  My path curved up the slope
and carried me over the shoulder of the hill not very far from her.
I followed it, stopping ever and again as if to look at the land and
sea below, until it brought me as near to her as it could, and then I
left it and with a clumsy affectation of carelessness strolled up to
the summit until I stood beside her and about six yards away.  I
pretended not to observe her.  I clenched my hands to keep my
self-control.  She had become aware of me and she was quite
motionless now, sitting up and looking at me, but she did not seem in
the least dismayed.  Your fine face she had, Sunray, and your dark
eyes, and I have never known anyone, not even you, who could keep a
face so still.  Not rigid or hard or staring it was, but quietly,
profoundly, still, like a face in some beautiful picture.

"I was all a-tremble, my heart was beating fast but I kept my wits
about me.

"'Was there ever a lovelier view?' I said.  'I suppose that bit of
blue there that looks like a raft where the water shines, I suppose
that is Denge Ness?'

"She did not answer for what seemed a long time.  She surveyed me
with an unfathomable expression.  Then she spoke and as she spoke she
smiled.  'You know that is Denge Ness as well as I do.'

"I smiled at her smile.  Shy pretences were not for her.  I came a
step or so nearer with a conversational air.  'I have known this
view,' I said, 'since I was a boy of ten.  But I did not know anyone
else set any value upon it.'

"'Nor I,' she said.  'I came to look at it perhaps for the last
time,' she vouchsafed.  'I'm going away.'

"'I'm going away too.'

"'Over there?' she asked, and nodded her head to where the land of
France hung like a cloud in the sky.

"'In a week or so.'

"'I'll get to France too.  But not so soon as a week or two.  But I
am going into the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps and I know I shall get
over there at last.  I join up to-morrow.  How can one stay at home
with all you boys out there, getting----'

"She was going to say getting '_killed_.'  But she caught the word
back and finished it with, 'Getting into all sorts of danger and
trouble.'

"'One has to go,' I said.

"She looked at me with her head a little on one side.  'Tell me,' she
said.  'Do you _want_ to go?'

"'Not a bit.  I hate the whole monstrous business.  But there's no
way out.  The Germans have put it on us and we have to go through
with it.'

"That was how we all saw it in England during the War.  But I won't
stop now to argue what really caused a war that ended two thousand
years ago.  'The Germans put it on us.  I hate going.  I wanted to go
on with the work I was doing.  Now everything is upset.'

"'Everything,' she said and thought for some moments.  'I hate going
too,' she said.

"'It drags on week after week, month after month,' I complained.
'The boredom of it!  The drills, the salutes, the silly little
officers!  If only they would take us and raffle us and kill us and
have done with it so that we could either die or go home and do
something sensible!  My life is being wasted.  I have been in the
machine a year--and I've only got thus far on my way to France!  When
I see a German soldier at last I shall want to kiss him I shall be so
glad.  But either I shall kill him or he will kill me--and that will
be the end of the story.'

"'And yet one can't keep out of it,' she said.

"'And there is something tremendous about it,' she went on.  'Once or
twice I have been up here when there were air-raids.  I live quite
close here.  These air-raids get more and more frequent nowadays.  I
don't know what they are coming to.  You see the searchlights now,
every night, waving about like the arms of a drunken man.  All over
the sky.  But before that you hear the pheasants in the woods,
clucking and crying.  They always hear it first.  Other birds take it
up.  They cry and twitter.  And then far away the guns begin
rumbling.  At first a little sound--"_pud-pud_," then like the whoof
of a hoarse dog.  And then one gun after another picks it up as the
raid comes nearer.  Sometimes you can catch the whirr of the engines
of the Gothas.  There's a great gun behind the farm-house away there
and you wait for that and when it fires it hits you on the chest.
Hardly anything is to be seen except the searchlights.  There's a
little flicker in the sky--and star shells.  But the guns--riot.
It's mad but it's immense.  It takes you.  Either you are wild with
fright or you are wild with excitement.  I can't sleep.  I walk about
my room and long to be out.  Twice I've gone out into the night, into
the moonlight--with everything a-quiver.  Gone for long walks.  Once
shrapnel fell in our orchard with a hiss like rain.  It ripped the
bark of the apple trees and tore off twigs and branches and killed a
hedge-hog.  I found the little wretch in the morning, nearly cut in
two.  Death hap-hazard!  I don't mind the death and the danger so
much.  But it's the quiver in the world I can't endure.  Even in the
daytime sometimes, you can't quite hear them, but you can _feel_ the
guns, over beyond there....

"'Our old servant,' she said, 'believes it is the end of the world.'

"'For us it may be,' I said.

"She made no answer.

"I looked at her face and my imagination rioted.

"I began to talk with a bare simplicity such as we rarely attained in
that shy and entangled age.  But my heart was beating fast.  'For
years,' I said, 'I have dreamt of the love of a girl.  It was to have
been the crown of life.  I have saved myself up for it.  I have had a
friend or so, but it wasn't love.  And now I am near to going.  Out
there.  It is only a few days before I go over there--to whatever is
waiting for me.  And when it seems beyond hope I come upon
someone....  Don't think me mad, please.  Don't think I'm lying.  I
am in love with you.  Indeed I am.  You seem altogether beautiful to
me.  Your voice, your eyes--everything.  I could worship you....'

"I couldn't say a word more for a moment or so.  I rolled over on the
turf and looked her in the face.  'I'm sorry,' I said.  'I'm a silly
young Tommy suddenly in love--oh! desperately in love.'

"Her grave face regarded me.  She did not look frightened or
disconcerted.  Perhaps her heart beat faster than I thought.  But her
voice when she spoke was constrained.

"'Why are you talking like that?  You've just met me....  How can you
love me?  It isn't possible people should love like this.'

"'I've seen you long enough----'

"I could not talk.  I met her eyes.  Hers dropped before mine.  The
warm colour mounted to her cheeks.  She bit her lips.

"'You,' she said in a low voice, 'are just in love with love.'

"'Anyhow, I am in love,' I said.

"She plucked a spray of minute flowers and forgot it in her hand.

"'This is your last day?' she asked, and made my heart beat faster.

"'It may be my last altogether for this sort of thing.  Who can tell?
... For a long time anyhow.  Why should it hurt you to let me love
you to-day?  Why shouldn't you be kind to me?  Civil to me--anyhow.
I don't ask for so very much.  If--suppose--we went for a walk
together?  Just a long walk.  If we spent most of the day together?
Somewhere we might get something to eat....'

"She sat considering me gravely.

"'Suppose I did,' she said as if to herself.  'Suppose I did.'

"'What harm could it do you?'

"'What harm could it do?' she repeated with her eyes on mine.

"If I had been older and more experienced I might have known from her
warm flushed face and her dark eyes that she too was in love with
love that day, and that our encounter was as exciting for her as for
me.  Suddenly she smiled; she showed herself for an instant as ready
as myself.  Her constraint had vanished.

"'I'll come,' she decided, and rose with an effortless ease to her
feet, and then at my eager movement as I sprang up before her: 'But
you'll have to be good, you know.  It's just a walk--and a talk....
Why shouldn't we? ... If we keep away from the village.'"



§ 3

"It would seem the queerest story in the world if I told you how we
two youngsters spent that day, we who were such strangers that we did
not know each other's names and yet who were already drawn so closely
together.  It was a day of kindly beauty and warmth and we rambled
westward until we came to a ridge that dropped steeply to a silvery,
tree-bordered canal, and along that ridge we went until we reached a
village and a friendly inn, where there were biscuits and cheese and
some apples to make a lunch upon.  For a time a mood of shyness
followed our first avowals, then Hetty talked of her home and of her
place in the world.  It was only after we had eaten together that we
became easy and familiar with each other.  It was only as the sun was
sinking in the west and our day drew to its golden end that we
embraced suddenly as we sat together on a felled tree in a wood, and
that I learnt from her what a sweet and wonderful delight the kiss of
love may be."



§ 4

Sarnac paused.

"It happened two thousand years ago but it seems to me that it
happened just six years from now.  Once more I am back in that wood
among the long warm shadows of the evening and all my dreams and
imaginations awake to reality with Hetty's body in my arms and her
lips to mine.  I have been able to tell you my story hitherto with a
sort of wonder and detachment, as though I showed it you through a
telescope.  But I have been telling you overmuch perhaps of Fanny and
Matilda Good because I have had a sort of reluctance about Hetty.
She is still so fresh in my mind that she seems as I name her to come
even here and to be living still, a perplexity between Sunray, who is
so like her and so unlike her, and myself.  I love her again and hate
her again as though I was still that assistant editor, that writer of
rubbish, in lost and forgotten Thunderstone House in dead old
London....

"And I can't describe things now," said Sarnac, "as I have described
them up to this.  I seem no longer to look back into past things.  My
memories are living and suffering; they inflame and hurt.  I loved
Hetty; she was all the delight of love to me.  I married her, I
divorced her, I repented of the divorce and I was killed for her sake.

"And it seems as if I was killed not a day ago....

"I married while I was in England before I was passed for active
service again after my wound.  I was wounded in the arm----"

Sarnac stopped and felt his arm.  Sunray looked sharply at it and ran
her hand down it from shoulder to elbow as if to reassure herself.
The others burst into laughter at her manifest anxiety and her
expression of relief, the guest-master being particularly delighted.

"I was wounded nevertheless.  I was a sitting-up case in the
ambulance.  I could tell you stories about the nurses and the
hospital and how we had a panic about a submarine as we crossed to
England....  I married Hetty before I went back because we were now
altogether lovers and it was just possible she might have a child.
And moreover there was a business about allowances if I got killed
that was an added inducement to marry.  In those days of haphazard
death for the young there was a world-wide fever of love-making and
countless such snatched marriages.

"She had never got to France as she had said she hoped to do.  For
most of the time she was driving a car for the Ministry of Supplies
in London.  We spent two days of wild endearment, the only honeymoon
we could get, at her mother's farm at Payton Links, a little hamlet
near Chessing Hanger.  (I do not think I have told you that she was
the only daughter of a farmer and that Mrs. Marcus, her mother, was a
widow.)  Hetty had been a clever girl, an elementary school teacher
and bookish and enterprising for a country place.  She had never
mentioned me to her mother until she had written to tell of her
approaching marriage.

"When her mother had driven us from the station to the farm and I had
helped her to put away the pony, the old lady's non-committal manner
relaxed and she said, 'Well, it might have been worse.  You've looks
and fairish shoulders for one who's town-bred.  You can kiss me, my
boy, though Smith is a poor exchange for Marcus, and I can't see how
anyone can ever expect to get a living for man and wife at a fancy
trade like publishing.  I'd hoped at first she meant a publican.  But
publishing she says it is.  Whether you're properly old enough for
Hetty, Time will show.'

"Time did show very rapidly that I was not properly old enough for
Hetty, though I resisted the demonstration with passionate vigour.

"In this world of ours we are by comparison very simple and direct.
In that old world we should have seemed shockingly simple and direct.
It's not only that they wrapped up and hid their bodies in all sorts
of queer garments and wrappings but also that they wrapped up and
distorted and hid their minds.  And while we to-day have the same
simple and clean ideas all over the world about sexual restraints and
sexual freedoms, people in those days had the most various and
complicated codes, half-hidden and half-confessed.  And not merely
half-hidden but imperfectly realised, subconscious rather than
thought out and settled.  Few of these codes respected the freedom of
other people or set any bounds to the most extravagant developments
of jealousy.  And while Hetty's thoughts about love and marriage had
been nourished on a diet of country-side folk and then of novels and
poetry devoured with avidity and had had tremendous releases in the
lax atmosphere of war-time London, I, in spite of my love for and
faith in Fanny, had almost unwittingly adopted the rigid standards of
my mother.  As we used to say in those days, Hetty's was a much more
artistic temperament than mine.  For my part I did not so much think
as assume that the worship of a man for a woman gave place to mastery
as soon as her love was won, that the problem of absolute fidelity
for both lovers was to be facilitated on his side by an absolute
submissiveness on hers.  And about her, wherever she went, invisible
but real, there had to be a sort of cloistered quality.  It was
implicit, moreover, that she had never thought of love before she met
her predestined and triumphant lover.  Ridiculous and impossible you
will say!  But Sunray here has read the old novels and she can
witness that that was the code."

Sunray nodded.  "That is the spirit of them," she said.

"Well, in fact, Hetty was not only half a year older than I but ages
beyond me in the business of love.  She was my teacher.  While I had
been reading about atoms and Darwin and exploration and socialism,
she had been sucking the honey of sensuous passion from hints and
half-hints in old romances and poems from Shakespeare and the old
playwrights.  And not only, I realise now, from books.  She took me
as one captures and tames an animal and made my senses and my
imagination hers.  Our honeymoon was magical and wonderful.  She
delighted in me and made me drunken with delights.  And then we
parted wonderfully with the taste of her salt tears on my lips, and I
went off to the last five months of the War.

"I can see her now, slender as a tall boy in her khaki breeches and
driver's uniform, waving to my train as it drew out of Chessing
Hanger station.

"She wrote adorable and whimsical love-letters that made me ache to
be with her again, and just when we were forcing the great German
barrier of the Hindenberg line, came one to tell me we were to have a
child.  She had not told me of it before, she said, because she had
not been quite sure of it.  Now she was sure.  Would I love her
still, now that she would be no longer slim and gracious?  Love her
still!  I was filled with monstrous pride.

"I wrote back to tell her how my job at Thunderstone House was being
saved for me, how we would certainly get a little house, a 'dear
little house,' in some London suburb, how I would worship and cherish
her.  Her answer was at once tender and unusual.  She said I was too
good to her, far too good; she repeated with extraordinary passion
that she loved me, had never loved and could never love anyone but
me, that she hated my absence more than she could tell, and that I
was to do everything I could, move heaven and earth to get my
discharge and come home to her and be with her and never, never,
never leave her again.  She had never wanted my arms about her as she
wanted them now.  I read nothing between the lines of that outbreak.
It seemed just a new mood amidst the variety of her moods.

"Thunderstone House wanted me back as soon as possible, and the War
had done much to increase the power and influence of all magazine
publishers and newspaper proprietors.  I got out of the army within
three months of the Armistice and came back to a very soft and tender
and submissive Hetty, a new Hetty more wonderful even than the old.
She was evidently more passionately in love with me than ever.  We
took some furnished rooms in a part of London called Richmond, near
the Thames and a great park, and we sought vainly for that bright
little house in which our child was to be born.  But there were no
bright little houses available.

"And slowly a dark shadow fell across the first brightness of our
reunion.  The seasonable days passed but Hetty's child was not born.
It was not born indeed until it was nearly two months too late for it
to be my child."



§ 5

"We are trained from earliest childhood in the world to be tolerant
and understanding of others and to be wary and disciplined with our
own wayward impulses, we are given from the first a clear knowledge
of our entangled nature.  It will be hard for you to understand how
harsh and how disingenuous the old world was.  You live in a world
that is as we used to say 'better bred.'  You will find it difficult
to imagine the sudden storm of temptation and excitement and
forgetfulness in Hetty's newly aroused being that had betrayed her
into disloyalty, and still more difficult will you find the tangle of
fear and desperate dishonesty that held her silent from any plain
speech with me after my return.  But had she spoken instead of
leaving it to me to suspect, discover and accuse, I doubt if she
would have found any more mercy in me for her pitiful and abominable
lapse.

"I see now that from the day I returned to Hetty she was trying to
tell me of her disaster and failing to find a possible way of doing
so.  But the vague intimations in her words and manner dropped like
seeds into my mind and germinated there.  She was passionately
excited and made happy by my coming back; our first week together was
the happiest week of my old-world life.  Fanny came to see us once
and we went and had a dinner at her flat, and something had happened
to her too, I knew not what, to make her very happy.  Fanny liked
Hetty.  When she kissed me good night after her dinner, she held me
and whispered: 'She's a dear.  I thought I'd be jealous of your wife,
Harry, but I love her.'

"Yes, we were very happy for that week.  We walked along together
back to our rooms instead of taking a taxi, for it was better for
Hetty to walk.  A happy week it was that stretched almost to a happy
fortnight.  And then the shadows of suspicion gathered and deepened.

"It was in bed in the darkness of the night that I was at last moved
to speak plainly to Hetty.  I woke up and lay awake for a long time,
very still and staring at my bleak realisation of what had happened
to us.  Then I turned over, sat up in bed and said, 'Hetty.  This
child is not mine.'

"She answered at once.  It was plain she too had been awake.  She
answered in a muffled voice as though her face lay against the
pillow.  'No.'

"'You said, no?'

"She stirred, and her voice came clearer.

"'I said no.  Oh Husbind-boy I wish I was dead!  I wish to God I was
dead.'

"I sat still and she said no more.  We remained like two
fear-stricken creatures in the jungle, motionless, in an immense
silence and darkness.

"At last she moved.  Her hand crept out towards me, seeking me, and
at that advance I recoiled.  I seemed to hang for a moment between
two courses of action, and then I gave myself over to rage.  'You'd
touch me!' I cried, and got out of bed and began to walk about the
room.

"'I knew it!' I shouted.  'I knew it!  I felt it!  And I have loved
you!  You cheat!  You foul thing!  You lying cheat!'"



§ 6

"I think I described to you earlier in the story how my family
behaved when Fanny left us, how we all seemed to be acting and
keeping up a noise of indignation as if we were afraid of some
different and disturbing realisations coming through to us should
that barrage of make-believe morality fail.  And just as my father
and my mother behaved in that downstairs kitchen in Cherry Gardens so
now I behaved in that desolating crisis between myself and Hetty.  I
stormed about the room, I hurled insults at her.  I would not let the
facts that she was a beaten and weeping thing, that she certainly
loved me, and that her pain tortured me, prevail against my hard duty
to my outraged pride.

"I lit the gas, I don't remember when, and the scene went on in that
watery Victorian light.  I began dressing, for never more was I to
lie in bed with Hetty.  I meant to dress and, having said my say, to
go out of the house.  So I had to be scornful and loudly indignant,
but also I had to find my various garments, pull my shirt over my
head and lace up my boots.  So that there were interludes in the
storm, when Hetty could say something that I had to hear.

"'It all happened in an evening,' she said.  'It isn't as though I
had planned to betray you.  It was his last day before he left and he
was wretched.  It was the thought of you made me go with him.  It was
just kindness.  There were two of our girls going to have dinner with
their boys and they asked me to come and that was how I met him.
Officers they were all three, and schoolfellows.  Londoners.  Three
boys who were going over--just as you were.  It seemed rotten not to
make a party for them.'

"I was struggling with my collar and stud but I tried to achieve
sarcasm.  'I see,' I said, 'under the circumstances mere politeness
dictated--what you did....  Oh, my God!'

"'Listen how it happened, Harry.  Don't shout at me again for a
minute.  Afterwards he asked me to come to his rooms.  He said the
others were coming on.  He seemed such a harmless sort!'

"'Very!'

"'He seemed the sort who'd surely get killed.  And I was sorry for
him.  He was fair like you.  Fairer.  And it seemed all different
that night.  And then he got hold of me and kissed me and I
struggled, but I didn't seem to have the strength to resist.  I
didn't realise somehow.'

"'That's pretty evident.  That I can believe.'

"'You've got no pity, Harry.  Perhaps it's just.  I suppose I ought
to have seen the risk.  But we aren't all strong like you.  Some of
us are pulled this way and that.  Some of us do the thing we hate.  I
did what I could.  It was like waking-up to realise what had
happened.  He wanted me to stay with him.  I ran out from his rooms.
I've never seen him since.  He's written but I haven't answered.'

"'He knew you were a soldier's wife.'

"'He's rotten.  He knew it.  He planned it while we were at dinner.
He prayed and promised and lied.  He said he wanted just a kiss, just
one kiss for kindness.  He began with that kiss.  I'd been drinking
wine, and I'm not used to wine.  Oh, Harry!  Husbind-boy, if I could
have died!  But I'd kissed and played about with boys before I met
you.  It seemed so little--until it was too late.'

"'And here we are!' said I.

"I came and sat down on the bed and stared at Hetty's dishevelled
distress.  She was suddenly pitiful and pretty.  'I suppose I ought
to go and kill this swine,' I said.  'I feel more like killing you.'

"'Kill me,' she said.  'I wish you would.'

"'What's his name?  Where is he now?'

"'_He_ doesn't matter a rap,' said Hetty.  'You may hang for me if
you like, but you shan't hang for a thing like that.  I tell you he
doesn't matter.  He's a dirty accident.  He happened.'

"'You're shielding him.'

"'_Him!_' she said.  'I'm shielding you.'

"I stared at her.  Again came a moment when I seemed to hang
undecided at the parting of two courses, and again I decided to
explode into rage.  'My _God_!' I cried, and then louder and standing
up, 'My _God_!'  Then I ranted at her.  'I suppose I've only got
myself to blame for all this.  What did I know of what you were
before I met you?  I guess I wasn't the first and I guess _he_ won't
be the last.  What do names matter?  I guess you thanked Heaven for a
green dud when you met me.'  And so on.  I paced about the room as I
raved.

"She sat up on the bed, her hair disordered and her eyes tearful,
regarding me with a still and mournful face.  'Oh, Harry!' she would
say ever and again, or 'Oh, Boy!' while I let my clumsy fancy rove
through a wilderness of coarse reproaches.  Ever and again I would
come up to her and stand over her.  'Tell me his name,' I would shout
and she would shake her head.

"At last I was dressed.  I looked at my watch.  'Five.'

"'What are you going to do?' she asked.

"'I don't know.  Go, I suppose.  I can't stay here.  I should be
sick.  I shall get most of my things together and go.  I'll find a
lodging somewhere.  It's nearly dawn.  I'll go before you need get
up.  Meanwhile I'll sit in the other room.  I can lie on the sofa for
a bit.'

"'But the fire's not lit!' she said, 'and it's cold.  It's not even
laid.  And you'll need some coffee!'

"She stared at me with eyes full of solicitude.

"And forthwith she shuffled out of bed and slipped her feet into her
bedroom slippers and put on a gay dressing-gown that had been a great
delight to us--ten days ago.  She went meekly by me, moving her poor
heavy body rather wearily, and found some fire-lighters in a cupboard
and knelt by the fireplace and began to rake out the ashes of the
overnight fire.  I made no movement to prevent her.  I began to
collect together various books and small possessions I intended to
take with me.

"She was only apprehending the situation very slowly.  She turned to
me in the middle of her fire-lighting.  'I suppose you'll leave me a
little money to go on with?' she said.

"That gave me a base opportunity.  'I'll leave you money all right,'
I sneered.  'I suppose I've got to keep you until we're free.  Then
it will be his job.  Or the next man's.'

"She occupied herself with the fire.  She filled a kettle and put it
ready.  Then she sat down in an arm-chair by the hearth.  Her face
was white and drawn but she shed no tears.  I went to the window and
pulled up the blind and stared at the street outside with its street
lamps still alight; everything was gaunt and bleak in the colourless
cold horror of the earliest dawn.

"'I shall go to mother,' she said, shivering and pulling her
dressing-gown about her shoulders.  'It will be dreadful for her to
know what has happened.  But she's kind.  She'll be kinder than
anyone....  I shall go to her.'

"'You can do what you like,' I said.

"'Harry!' she said.  'I've never loved any man but you.  If I could
kill this child----  If it would please you if I killed this
child----'

"She spoke with white lips.  'Yes.  I tried all I knew.  Some things
I couldn't bring myself to do.  And now it's a thing that's alive....'

"We stared at one another in silence for some moments.

"'No!' I said at last.  'I can't stand it.  I can't endure it.
Nothing can alter it now.  You tell a tale.  How do I know?  You've
cheated once and you can cheat again.  You gave yourself to that
swine.  If I live to a hundred I'll never forgive that.  You gave
yourself.  How do I know you didn't tempt him?  You gave.  You can
go.  Go where you gave yourself!  They're things no decent man can
forgive.  Things that are dirty to forgive.  He stole you and you let
him steal you and he can have you.  I wish----  If you'd had the
beginnings of a sense of honour you'd never have let me come back to
you.  To think of these last days here.  And you--you with this
secret next your heart!  The filthiness of it!  You--you, whom I've
loved.'

"I was weeping."

Sarnac paused and stared into the fire.  "Yes," he said, "I was
weeping.  And the tears I shed--it is wonderful--the tears I shed
were tears of the purest self-pity.

"And all the time I saw the thing from my own standpoint alone, blind
to the answering tragedy in Hetty's heart.  And the most grotesque
thing is that all the time she was getting me coffee and that when it
was ready I drank her coffee!  At the end she wanted to kiss me, to
kiss me 'good-bye,' she said, and I rebuffed her and struck her when
she came near me.  I meant only to thrust her back but my hand
clenched at the opportunity.  '_Harry!_' she whispered.  She stood
like a stunned thing watching me go, and then turned suddenly and
swiftly and ran back to the bedroom.

"I slammed the outer door and went downstairs into the empty morning
Richmond streets; altogether empty of traffic they were, under the
flush of dawn.

"I carried my bag towards the railway station that would take me to
London; my bag was heavy with the things I had brought away, and it
dragged upon my arms, and I felt myself a tragically ill-used but
honourably self-vindicated young man."



§ 7

"Oh, poor little things!" cried Starlight.  "Oh! poor, little,
pitiful pitiless creatures!  This story hurts me.  I couldn't endure
it, if it were anything more than a dream.  Why were they all so hard
upon each other and so deaf to the sorrow in each other?"

"We knew no better.  This world now has a tempered air.  In this
world we breathe mercy with our first fluttering gasp.  We are so
taught and trained to think of others that their pain is ours.  But
two thousand years ago men and women were half-way back to crude
Nature.  Our motives took us unawares.  We breathed infections.  Our
food was poisoned.  Our passions were fevers.  We were only beginning
to learn the art of being human."

"But didn't Fanny----?" began Firefly.

"Yes," said Willow; "didn't Fanny, who was naturally so wise about
love, didn't she take you in hand and send you back to forgive and
help your wretched Hetty?"

"Fanny heard my version of our story first," said Sarnac.  "She never
realised the true values of the business until it was too late to
stop the divorce.  When I told her that Hetty had lived a life of
depravity in London while I was in the trenches, she heard me with
amazement but never doubted my word.

"'And she seemed such a dear,' said Fanny.  'She seemed so in love
with you.  It's wonderful how different women are!  There's women who
seem to change into something else directly they get out of sight of
you round a corner.  I _liked_ your Hetty, Harry.  There was
something sweet about her, be what she may.  I never dreamt she'd
deceive you and let you down.  Fancy!--going about London picking up
men!  It's just as though she'd done it to me.

"Matilda Good too was wonderfully sympathetic.  'No woman goes wrong
only just once,' said Matilda.  'You're right to end it.'  The
Miltons were giving up her drawing-room floor, I could have it, if I
cared to take it.  I was only too glad to take it and return to my
old home.

"Hetty, I suppose, packed up her own belongings as well as she could.
She went down from Richmond to her mother's farm at Payton Links, and
there it was her child was born.

"Now I want to tell you," said Sarnac, "what is, I believe, the most
remarkable thing in all this story I am telling you.  I do not
remember in all that time right up to and including our divorce, that
I felt any impulse of pity or kindliness, much less of love, towards
Hetty.  And yet in my dream I was very much the same sort of man as I
am to-day.  I was a man of the same type.  But I was driven by a
storm of amazed and outraged pride and sexual jealousy of the most
frantic sort towards acts of spite that are almost inconceivable here
and now.  I was doing all I could to divorce Hetty in such a way as
to force her into marriage with Sumner--for that was the man's
name--because I had learnt that he was a hopelessly bad character and
because I believed he would make her miserable and mar her life
altogether.  I wanted to do that to punish her, to fill her with
bitter regrets for her treatment of me.  But at the same time it
drove me to the verge of madness to think that he should ever possess
her again.  If my wishes could have been given creative force, Hetty
would have gone to Sumner disfigured and diseased.  They would have
come together again amidst circumstances of horrible cruelty!"

"Sarnac!" cried Sunray, "that you should even _dream_ such things!"

"Dream!  It is as men were.  It is as they are, except for the
education and the free happiness that release us.  For we are not
fourscore generations from the Age of Confusion, and that was but a
few thousands more from the hairy ape-men who bayed the moon in the
primeval forests of Europe.  Then it was the Old Man in lust and
anger ruled his herd of women and children and begot us all.  And in
the Age of Confusion after the Great Wars man was, and he still is,
the child of that hairy Old Ape-Man.  Don't I shave myself daily?
And don't we educate and legislate with our utmost skill and science
to keep the old beast within bounds?  But our schools in the days of
Harry Mortimer Smith were still half-way back to the cave; our
science was only beginning.  We had no sexual education at all, only
concealments and repressions.  Our code was still the code of
jealousy--thinly disguised.  The pride and self-respect of a man was
still bound up with the animal possession of women--the pride and
self-respect of most women was by a sort of reflection bound up with
the animal possession of a man.  We felt that this possession was the
keystone of life.  Any failure in this central business involved a
monstrous abasement, and against that our poor souls sought blindly
for the most extravagant consolations.  We hid things, we perverted
and misrepresented things, we evaded the issue.  Man is a creature
which under nearly every sort of stress releases hate and malign
action, and we were then still subjected to the extremest stresses.

"But I will not go on apologising for Harry Mortimer Smith.  He was
what the world made him and so are we.  And in my dream I went about
that old world, doing my work, controlling my outward behaviour and
spending all the force of my wounded love for Hetty in scheming for
her misery.

"And one thing in particular was of immense importance to my
tormented being.  It was that I should get another lover quickly,
that I should dispel the magic of Hetty's embraces, lay the haunting
ghost of my desire for her.  I had to persuade myself that I had
never really loved her and replace her in my heart by someone I could
persuade myself was my own true love.

"So I sought the company of Milly Kimpton again.  We had been close
companions before the War, and it was not difficult to persuade
myself that I had always been a little in love with her.  Always she
had been more than a little in love with me.  I told her my story of
my marriage and she was hurt for my sake and indignant beyond means
with the Hetty I presented to her.

"She married me within a week of the completion of my divorce."



§ 8

"Milly was faithful and Milly was kind; she was a cooling refuge from
the heat and distresses of my passion.  She had a broad, candid face
that never looked either angry or miserable; she held her countenance
high, smiling towards heaven with a pleasant confidence and
self-satisfaction; she was very fair and she was broad-shouldered for
a woman.  She was tender but not passionate; she was intelligently
interested in things but without much whim or humour.  She was nearly
a year and a half older than I.  She had, as people used to say,
'taken a great fancy' to me when first I came into the firm, a crude
and inexperienced youngster.  She had seen me rise very rapidly to
Mr. Cheeseman's position on the editorial staff--he had been
transferred to the printing side--and at times she had helped me
greatly.  We were both popular in Thunderstone House, and when we
married there was a farewell dinner to Milly, who gave up her
position then in the counting-house; there were speeches and a
wonderful wedding-present of dinner-knives and silver forks and
spoons in a brass-bound chest of oak with a flattering inscription on
a silver plate.  There had been a good deal of sympathy with Milly in
Thunderstone House, especially among the girls, and a good deal of
indignation at me when my first marriage occurred, and my belated
recognition of my true destiny was considered a very romantic and
satisfactory end to the story.

"We secured a convenient little house in a row of stucco houses all
built together to have one architectural effect, called Chester
Terrace, close to one of the inner parks of London known as Regent's
Park.  Milly, I discovered, had a little fortune of nearly two
thousand pounds, and so she was able to furnish this house very
prettily according to current taste, and in this house in due course
she bore me a son.  I rejoiced very greatly and conspicuously over
this youngster's arrival.  I think you will understand how essential
it was to my obsession for defeating and obliterating Hetty that
Milly should bear me a child.

"I worked very hard during that first year of married life and on the
whole I was happy.  But it was not a very rich nor a very deep sort
of happiness.  It was a happiness made up of rather hard and rather
superficial satisfactions.  In a sense I loved Milly very dearly; her
value was above rubies, she was honest and sweet and complaisant.
She liked me enormously, she was made happy by my attentions; she
helped me, watched for my comfort, rejoiced at the freshness and
vigour of my work.  Yet we did not talk very freely and easily
together.  I could not let my mind run on before her; I had to shape
what I said to her feelings and standards, and they were very
different feelings and standards from my own.  She was everything a
wife should be except in one matter; she was not for me that
particular dear companion for whom the heart of every human being
craves, that dear companion with whom you are happy and free and
safe.  That dear companionship I had met--and I had thrust it from
me.  Does it come twice in a life to anyone?"

"How should I know?" said Sunray.

"We know better than to reject it," said Radiant.

"Perhaps after many years," said Willow, answering Sarnac's question,
"after one has healed and grown and changed."

"Milly and I were close friends indeed, but we were never dear
companions.  I had told Hetty about my sister Fanny on the evening of
our first day together when we walked over the hills, she was
instantly sure that she would love Fanny, Fanny had seemed very brave
and romantic to Hetty's imagination; but I did not tell Milly of
Fanny until close upon our marriage.  You will say that it was not
Milly's fault that I was shy with her on Fanny's account, but
assuredly it was a fault in our relationship.  And it was clear that
Milly accepted Fanny on my account and refrained from too searching a
commentary because of me.  Milly believed profoundly in the
institution of marriage and in the obligation of an unlimited
chastity upon women.  'It is a pity she cannot marry this man,' said
Milly, anticipating perplexities.  'It must make everything so
inconvenient for her--and everyone who knows her.  It must be so
difficult to introduce her to people.'

"'You needn't do that,' I said.

"'My people are old-fashioned.'

"'They needn't know,' I said.

"'That would be the easier way for me, Harry.'

"I found my own declarations of affection for Fanny considerably
chilled by the effort Milly made to be generous in the matter.

"I found it still more difficult to tell her that Fanny's lover was
Newberry.

"'Then is that how you got into Thunderstone House?' asked Milly when
at last I got to that revelation.

"'It's how I got my chance there,' I admitted.

"'I didn't think it was like that.  I thought you'd made your way in.'

"'I've made my way up.  I've never been favoured.'

"'Yes--but----  Do you think people know, Harry?  They'd say all
sorts of things.'

"You perceive that Milly was not a very clever woman and also that
she was very jealous of my honour.  'I don't think anyone knows who
matters,' I said.  'Neither I nor Fanny advertise.'

"But it was clear Milly did not like the situation.  She would have
much preferred a world without sister Fanny.  She had no curiosity to
see this sister that I loved so dearly or to find any good in her.
On various small but quite valid scores she put off going to see her
for a whole week.  And always I had to remind her of Fanny and speak
of Fanny first before Fanny could be talked about.  In all other
matters Milly was charming and delightful to me, but as far as she
could contrive it she banished Fanny from our world.  She could not
see how much of my affection went also into banishment.

"Their meeting when at last it came about was bright rather than
warm.  An invisible athermanous screen had fallen not only between
Milly and Fanny but between Fanny and myself.  Milly had come,
resolved to be generous and agreeable in spite of Fanny's
disadvantageous status, and I think she was a little disconcerted by
Fanny's dress and furniture, for Milly was always very sensitive to
furniture and her sensitiveness had been enhanced by our own efforts
to equip a delightful home on a sufficient but not too extravagant
expenditure.  I had always thought Fanny's furnishings very pretty,
but it had never occurred to me that they were, as Milly put it,
'dreadfully good.'  But there was a red lacquer cabinet that Milly
said afterwards might be worth as much as a hundred pounds, and she
added one of those sentences that came upon one like an unexpected
thread of gossamer upon the face: 'It doesn't seem right somehow.'

"Fanny's simple dress I gathered was far too good also.  Simple
dresses were the costliest in those days of abundant material and
insufficient skill.

"But these were subsequent revelations, and at the time I did not
understand why there should be an obscure undertone of resentment in
Milly's manner, nor why Fanny was displaying a sort of stiff
sweetness quite foreign to my impression of her.

"'It's wonderful to meet you at last,' said Fanny.  'He's talked
about you for years.  I can remember once long before--long before
the War--and everything--at Hampton Court.  I can remember sitting on
those seats by the river and his talking about you.'

"'I remember that,' I said, though it wasn't the part about Milly
that had stuck in my memory.

"'We used to go about together no end in those days,' said Fanny.
'He was the dearest of brothers.'

"'I hope he'll still be,' said Milly very kindly.

"'A son's a son till he gets a wife,' said Fanny, quoting an
old-woman's proverb.

"'You mustn't say that,' said Milly.  'I hope you'll come to see
us--quite often.'

"'I'd love to come,' said Fanny.  'You're lucky to get a house so
easily, these days.'

"'It isn't quite ready yet,' said Milly.  'But as soon as ever it is
we must find some day when you are free.'

"'I'm often free,' said Fanny.

"'We'll fix a day,' said Milly, obviously quite resolute to ensure
that we had no unexpected calls from Fanny when other people might be
about.

"'It's nice you have been in the counting-house and understanding all
about his work,' said Fanny.

"'My people didn't like my going into business at all,' said Milly.
'But it's lucky I did.'

"'Lucky for Harry,' said Fanny.  'Are your--people London people?'

"'Dorset,' said Milly.  'They didn't like my coming to London.
They're just a little bit churchy and old-fashioned, you know.  But
it's college or business, I said, and you don't find me staying at
home to dust and put out the flowers.  One has to take a firm line
with one's people at times.  Didn't you find that so?  There was a
convenient aunt in Bedford Park to secure the proprieties and head
off the otherwise inevitable latch-key, and it was business instead
of college because my best uncle, Uncle Hereward--he's the Vicar of
Peddlebourne--objects to the higher education of women.  And there
was also a question of finance.'

"'It must be interesting for Harry to meet your people,' said Fanny.

"'He's completely conquered Aunt Rachel,' said Milly.  'Though she
started hostile.  Naturally, as I'm about the only Kimpton of three
generations they pitched their expectations high.  They'd like me to
have a husband with a pedigree a yard long.'

"I felt Milly was rather over-emphasising the county family side of
the Kimptons--her father was a veterinary surgeon near Wimborne--but
I did not appreciate the qualities in Fanny's bearing and furniture
that were putting Milly into this self-assertive mood.

"They went on to talk with a certain flavour of unreality of the
hygienic and social advantages of Regent's Park.  'It's easy to get
to for one's friends,' said Milly.  'And quite a lot of interesting
people, actors and critics and writers and all that sort of people,
live round and about there.  Of course Harry will want to know more
and more of the artistic and literary world now.  I expect we'll have
to have a Day for them and give them tea and sandwiches.  It's a
bore, but it's necessary, you know.  Harry's got to know people.'

"She smiled at me between pride and patronage.

"'Harry's going up in the world,' said my sister.

"'That's what makes it all so wonderful,' said Milly.  'He's a
wonderful brother for you.'

"She began to praise the beauty of Fanny's flat, and Fanny offered to
show her all over it.  They were away some time and I went to the
window, wishing stupidly after the manner of a man that they could
somehow contrive to be a little different and a little warmer with
each other.  Didn't they both love me and shouldn't that be a bond of
sisterhood between them?

"Then came tea, one of Fanny's wonderful teas, but I was no longer
the indiscriminate devourer of teas that I had been.  Milly praised
it all like a visiting duchess.

"'Well,' said Milly at last with the air of one who has many
appointments, 'it's time to go I'm afraid....'

"I had been watching Fanny very closely throughout this visit and
contrasting her guarded and polished civilities with the natural
warmth of her reception of Hetty, half a year before.  I felt I could
not wait for another occasion before I had a word or two with her.
So I kissed her good-bye--even her kiss had changed--and she and
Milly hesitated and kissed, and I went down past the landing with
Milly and heard the door close above.  'I've left my gloves,' I said
suddenly.  'You go on down.  I won't be a moment.'  And I darted back
upstairs.

"Fanny did not come to the door immediately.

"'What is it, Harry?' she said, when she appeared.

"'Gloves!' said I.  'No!  Here they are in my pocket.  Silly of me!
... You _do_ like her, Fanny?  You think she's all right, don't you?
She's a little shy with you, but she's a dear.'

"Fanny looked at me.  I thought her eyes were hard.  'She's all
right,' she said.  'Quite all right.  You'll never have to divorce
_her_, Harry.'

"'I didn't know.  I want you to--like her.  I thought--you didn't
seem quite warm.'

"'Silly old Harry!' said Fanny, with a sudden return to her old
manner.  And she took me and kissed me like a loving sister again.

"I went down two steps from the door and turned.

"'I'd hate it,' I said, 'if you didn't think she was all right.'

"'She's all right,' said Fanny.  'And it's Good Luck to you, Harry.
It's----  You see it's about Good-Bye for me.  I shan't be seeing
very much of you now with that clever wife of yours to take you
about.  Who's so _well_-connected.  But Good Luck, old Brudder!  Oh!
_always_ Good Luck!'

"Her eyes were brimming with tears.

"'God send you are happy, Harry dear--after your fashion.  It's--it's
different....'

"She stopped short.  She was weeping.

"She banged her door upon me, and I stood puzzled for a moment and
then went down to Milly."




CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

LOVE AND DEATH


§ 1

"In the two years that followed I learnt to love and trust my
stiff-spirited wife more and more.  She was very brave in a conscious
and deliberate way, very clear-headed, very honest.  I saw her fight,
and it was not an easy fight, to bring our son into the world, and
that sort of crisis was a seal between man and woman in those days
even as it is to-day.  If she never got to any just intuitions about
my thoughts and feelings I did presently arrive at a fairly clear
sense of hers.  I could feel for her ambitions and humiliations.  She
worked hard to make our home bright and efficient.  She had a taste
for sound and 'solid' things and temperate harmonies.  In that old
world, encumbered with possessions and with an extreme household
autonomy, servants were a very important matter indeed and she
managed ours with just that measured kindliness and just that
avoidance of intimacy that was needed by the social traditions of the
time.  She had always been intelligently interested in the internal
politics of Thunderstone House and she showed the keenest desire for
my success there.  'I'll see you a director before ten years,' she
said.  And I worked very hard indeed and not merely for ambition's
sake.  I really understood and believed in the educational importance
of that great slovenly business.  Newberry came to recognise in me a
response to his own ideas.  He would consult me about new schemes and
the modification of old procedure.  He relied on me more and more and
talked with me more and more frequently.  And it is a queer thing to
recall that by a sort of convention between us we never mentioned or
alluded to my sister Fanny in any of our discussions.

"I changed a good deal during my first two and a half years of
married life.  I matured and hardened.  I became a man of the world.
I was put up for and elected a member of a good club and developed my
gift for talk.  I met a widening variety of people, and some of them
were quite distinguished people, and I found they did not overawe me.
I possessed a gift for caustic commentary that gained me some
reputation as a wit, and I felt a growing interest in the showy and
sterile game of party politics.  My ambitions grew.  I was active; I
was self-satisfied.  I had largely forgotten my intense sexual
humiliation.  But I was not a very happy man.  My life was like a
handsome, well-appointed room with a north light; the bowls were full
of cut-flowers but the sunlight never came in."



§ 2

"For two years and a half I saw nothing of Hetty and it was not my
fault that I ever saw her again.  I did everything I could to
eradicate her from my existence.  I destroyed her photographs and
every little vestige of her that might distress me by its memories.
If I caught myself in a reverie in which she figured I forced my
attention to other things.  Sometimes when I made a new success I had
a flash of desire that she should witness it.  Ugly, I agree, but is
it not what we still are--except for civilisation?  She came back
sometimes in dreams, but they were anger-soaked dreams.  And I
cultivated my pride and love for Milly.  With increasing prosperity
Milly's skill in dressing herself developed; she became a very
handsome, effective woman; she gave herself to me with a smiling
sense of temperate and acceptable giving.

"In those days we had not learnt to analyse our motives.  We were
much less observant of ourselves than men and women are to-day.  I
had set my mind upon loving Milly and I did not realise that the
essential thing in loving is a thing beyond our wills.  Fanny and
Hetty I loved by nature and necessity, but my days were now far too
completely apportioned between work and Milly for much companionship
with Fanny to survive, and Hetty in my heart was like one of those
poor shrivelled corpses of offending monks they walled up in the
monasteries during the Age of Christendom in Europe.  But I found now
a curious liveliness in my interest in women in general.  I did not
ask what these wanderings of attention signified; I was ashamed of
them but I gave way to them.  Even when I was in Milly's company I
would look at other women and find a vague excitement if the intent
of my glances was returned.

"And I began to read novels in a new spirit, though I did not know
why I was taking to novels; I was reading them, I see now, for the
sake of the women I found in them.  I do not know, Sunray, whether
you realise how much the novels and plays of those days served to
give men and women love-phantoms with whom they made imaginative
excursions.  We successful and respectable ones went our dignified
and satisfied ways, assuaging the thin protests of our starved
possibilities with such unsubstantial refreshment.

"But it was because of that wandering eye for women that I
encountered Hetty again.  It was in the springtime that I came upon
her, either in March or very early April, in some public gardens
quite near to Chester Terrace.  These gardens were not in my direct
way from the underground railway station, which took me to and fro
between home and business and my house, but I was in no hurry for
Milly's tea-party and the warmth and sunlight drew me to this place
of blossom and budding green.  They were what we should call spring
gardens nowadays, small but cleverly laid out for display with an
abundant use of daffodil, narcissus, hyacinth, almond-blossom and the
like, with hard paths and seats placed to command happy patches of
colour.  On one of these seats a woman was sitting alone with her
back to me looking at a patch of scyllas.  I was struck by the
loveliness of her careless pose.  Such discoveries of the dear beauty
that hides in the world would stir me like a challenge and then stab
me with pain.  She was dressed very poorly and simply, but her dingy
clothing was no mor than the smoked glass, one uses to see the
brightness of the sun.

"I slackened my pace as I went past and glanced back to see her face.
And I saw the still face of Hetty, very grave and sorrowful, Hetty,
no longer a girl but a woman, looking at the flowers and quite
unheedful of my regard.

"Something greater than pride or jealousy seized me then.  I went a
few steps farther and stopped and turned, as though no other thing
was possible.

"At that she became aware of me.  She looked up, doubted, and
recognised me.

"She watched me with that motionless face of hers as I came and sat
down beside her.  I spoke in a voice of astonishment on the edge of a
storm of emotion.  'Hetty,' I said, 'I couldn't go past you!'

"She did not answer immediately.  'Are you---?' she began and
stopped.  'I suppose we were bound to meet again,' she said, 'sooner
or later.  You look as if you had grown, Harry.  You look well and
prosperous.'

"'Do you live in this part of London?' I asked.

"'Camden Town just now,' she said.  'We move about.'

"'You married--Sumner?'

"'What did you expect me to do?  What else was there to do?  I've
drunk my cup to the dregs, Harry.'

"'But----  You had the child?'

"'It died--it died all right.  Poor little mite.  And my mother died
a year ago.'

"'Well, you've got Sumner.'

"'I've got Sumner.'

"At any time before that meeting I should have exulted over the death
of Sumner's child, but in the presence of Hetty's misery that old
hatred would not come back for its gratification.  I was looking at
her face which was so familiar and so changed, and it was as if I
woke up again to love for her after two years and a half of
insensibility.  What a beaten and unhappy thing she was--she whom I
had loved and hated so bitterly.

"'It seems a long way back now to Kent, Harry--and mother's farm,'
she said.

"'You've parted with it?'

"'Farm and furniture--and mostly it's gone.  Sumner bets.  He's
betted most of it away.  It's hard, you see, to find a job but easy
to fancy a winner.  Which doesn't win....'

"'My father used to do that,' I said.  'I'd like to shoot every
race-horse in England.'

"'I hated selling the farm,' she said.  'I sold the farm and came
into this dingy old London.  Sumner dragged me here and he's dragging
me down.  It's not his fault; it's how he's made.  But when a spring
day comes like this----!  I think of Kent and the winds on the Downs
and the blackthorn in the hedges and the little yellow noses of the
primroses and the first elder leaves coming out, until I want to cry
and scream.  But there's no getting out of it.  Here I am.  I've come
to look at these flowers here.  What's the good?  They just hurt me.'

"She stared at the flowers.

"'My God!' I said, 'but this hurts me too.  I didn't expect----'

"'What did you expect?' she asked, and turned that still face of hers
to me and silenced me.

"'I don't see that it should hurt you,' she said.  'I brought it on
myself.  You didn't do it.  It happened to me.  It was my fault.
Though why God made me love beautiful things--and then set a trap for
me and made me fool enough to fall into it----!'

"Silence fell between us.

"'Meeting you like this,' I began presently, 'makes me see things--so
differently.  You see--in those old days--in some ways you seemed so
much stronger than I was.  I didn't understand....  I see----  This
makes me feel----  I ought to have taken better care of you."

"'Or shown me mercy.  I was dirty and shameful--yes.  All that.  But
you were merciless, Harry.  Men are merciless to women.  I did--all
through--I loved you, Harry.  In a way I've always loved you and I
love you now.  When I looked up and saw it was you coming back to
me----  For a minute you were just like the old Harry.  For a
moment----  It was like Spring coming real....  But it's no good
talking like that now, Harry.  It's too late.'

"'Yes,' I agreed.  'Too late....'

"She watched my face through a long pause.  I weighed my words when I
spoke.  'Up to now,' I said, 'I've never forgiven.  Now----  Now I
see you here I wish--I wish to God--I had forgiven you.  And made a
fight for it with you.  We might----  Suppose, Hetty, suppose I had
forgiven you----?'

"'Harry dear,' she said softly, 'you don't want to be seen here
making a woman cry.  We won't talk of that.  Tell me about yourself.
I've heard you married again.  A beautiful woman.  Sumner saw that I
heard of that.  Are you happy, Harry?  You look prosperous, and
everyone isn't prosperous these post-war times.'

"'That's all so-and-so, Hetty.  I work hard.  I've got ambitions.
I'm still a publisher's assistant at the old place but I'm near to
being a director.  I'm high up.  My wife----  She's a dear and a
great help to me....  Somehow meeting you ... My God!  Hetty, what a
mess we made of things!  It's all very well, but the second time of
marrying isn't like the first.  You and I----  I'm a sort of blood
brother to you and nothing can change it.  The wood--that little wood
where you kissed me!  Why did we smash it up, Hetty?  Why did we do
it?  Two fools who'd got so precious a thing!  That's all past.  But
hate is dead between us.  That's past too.  If there was anything I
could do for you now I would do it.'

"A gleam of the old humour came, 'If you could kill Sumner,' she
said, 'and smash the world and destroy the memories of three years
... It's no good, Harry.  I ought to have kept myself clean.  And
you--you might have been gentler with me.'

"'I couldn't, Hetty.'

"'I knew you couldn't.  And I couldn't foresee that my blood would
betray me one evening.  And here we are!  Like meeting after we are
dead.  Spring comes now but it comes for other people.  All these
little crocus trumpets--like a brass band it is--they are trumpeting
up the next lot of lovers.  Better luck to them!'

"We sat still for a time.  In the background of my mind Milly and her
assembled tea-cups became evident as a faint urgency.  'You're late,'
she'd say.

"'Where are you living, Hetty?' I asked.  'What is your address?'

"She shook her head after a moment's thought.  'Better you shouldn't
know.'

"'But somehow I might help.'

"'It would only disturb us all.  I've got my cup--of dirty water--to
drink.  I've got to stand what I'm in for.  What could you do to help
me?'

"'Well,' said I, 'my address anyhow is easy to keep in mind.  It's
just what it was when we----  In the days when we lived----
Thunderstone House it is.  Some day there might be something----'

"'It's good of you.'

"We stood up face to face, and as we stood there a thousand
circumstances vanished and nothing remained but our hurt and injured
selves.  'Good-bye, Hetty,' I said.  'Good luck.'

"Our hands met.  'Good luck to you, Harry.  It's no good, but I'm
glad we met like this.  And to find you forgive me a little at last.'"



§ 3

"That meeting had a profound effect upon me.  It banished much
aimless reverie from my mind; it unlocked the prison in which a whole
multitude of forbidden thoughts had been confined.  I thought
enormously of Hetty.  They were vague and impossible thoughts; they
came in the night, on the way to business, even during slack moments
in business hours; rehearsals of dramatised encounters, explanations,
magic turns of circumstances that suddenly restored our lost world to
us.  I tried to suppress these cloudy imaginations but with little
avail; they overspread my mental skies in spite of me.  I can't tell
you how many times I walked through those gardens in Regent's Park;
that detour became my normal route from the station to my home.  And
I would even go out of my customary way along some side-path because
I had caught a glimpse far off, between the tree-branches and the
flower-beds, of a solitary woman.  But Hetty never came back there.

"In my brooding over Hetty a jealousy and hatred of Sumner developed
steadily.  I do not think I had any desire for Hetty myself but I
wanted intensely to get her away from him.  This hostility to Sumner
was the ugly undertow of my remorse and re-awakened love of Hetty.
He was the evil thing that had deprived me of Hetty.  I did not
reflect for a moment that it was I with my relentless insistence upon
divorce that had forced her back to him.

"And all this dreaming and brooding and futile planning, all this
body of desire for something more to happen between Hetty and myself,
went on without my breathing a word of it to any living soul.  It was
on my conscience that it was disloyal to Milly, and I even made a
half-hearted attempt to tell Milly that I had met Hetty and been
shocked at her poverty and unhappiness.  I wanted to bring her into
my own state of mind and have her feel as I did.  I threw out a
remark one day--we had gone to Hampstead Heath for a walk one
afternoon--that I had once walked along that ridge by the Round Pond
with Hetty during my last leave.  'I wonder how she is living now,' I
said.

"Milly did not answer immediately, and when I looked at her her face
was flushed and hard.  'I hoped you had forgotten her,' she said in a
suffocated voice.

"'This brought it back to me.'

"'I try never to think of her.  You don't know what that woman meant
to me--the humiliation.

"'It was not only for myself,' she added.  'It was for you.'

"She said no more but it was manifest how terribly the mere name of
Hetty had disturbed her."

"Poor little things!" cried Firefly.  "How insanely jealous you all
were!"

"And I did not go to Fanny and tell her about Hetty for a time.  I
had misrepresented Hetty to her as a figure of common depravity and I
found it difficult to put that right.  Nowadays I did not see so much
of Fanny as I had formerly done.  She was living half-way across
London from me.  Her relations with Newberry were now much more
public than they had been and she had developed a circle of
acquaintances who cared for her.  But this publicity made Milly more
stiff towards her because she feared that a scandal would be made
about Fanny in relation to my position in the firm of Crane &
Newberry.  Near Pangbourne, Newberry had taken a bungalow and there
Fanny would spend whole weeks at a time, quite out of our range.

"But presently a situation developed which sent me post-haste to
Fanny for help and advice."



§ 4

"Suddenly in July, when I was beginning to think I should never hear
from her again, Hetty appealed to me for help.  Would I meet her one
evening, she asked, by the fountain in the park near the Zoological
Gardens, and then we could get chairs and she would tell me what she
had in mind.  She did not want me to write her a letter, Sumner had
become very jealous of her, and so would I put an advertisement in
the _Daily Express_ with the letters A B C D and giving the hour and
date.  I made an appointment for the earliest possible evening.

"Instead of the despondent and spiritless Hetty I had met in the
spring I found a Hetty high strung and excited.  'I want some place
where we shan't be seen,' she said as I came up to her.  She took my
arm to turn me about, and led the way towards two green chairs
standing apart a little away from the main walk that here traversed
the park.  I noted that she was still wearing the same shabby dress
she had had on our previous encounter.  Her manner with me was quite
different from the manner of our former meeting.  There was something
familiar and confident about her as though in between she had met me
in imagination a multitude of times--as no doubt she had.

"'You meant all you said, Harry, when we talked before?' she began.

"'Everything.'

"'You will help me if you can?'

"'Everything I can.'

"'Suppose I asked you for some money?'

"'Naturally.'

"'I want to get away from Sumner.  I have a chance.  I could do it.'

"'Tell me about it, Hetty.  All I can do, I will.'

"'Things have changed, Harry, since that day we met.  I'd got into a
sort of despairing state.  I took whatever came.  Seeing you changed
me.  I don't know why but it did.  Perhaps I was going to change
anyhow.  But I can't stand being with Sumner any longer.  And there's
a chance now.  I shall want a lot of money--sixty or seventy pounds.'

"I thought.  'That's quite possible, Hetty.  If you can wait a week
or so.  Ten days say.'

"'You see I have a friend, a girl who married a Canadian.  She stayed
here to have her child when he went home and now she goes out to him.
She's been ill; she's not very strong and she doesn't want to face
the voyage alone.  It would be easy for me to get out there with her
as her cousin and companion.  If I had an outfit----  We've discussed
it all.  She knows someone who could manage about a passport for me.
In my maiden name.  That's the scheme.  I could have my outfit sent
to her place.  I could slip away.'

"'You'd take another name?  Begin again over there?'

"'Yes....'

"I sat considering this project.  It pleased me.  'There need be no
trouble about the money,' I said.

"'I can't go on living with Sumner.  You never saw him.  You don't
know what he's like.'

"'I've heard he was good looking.'

"'Don't I know that face--flushed and weak!  He's a liar and a cheat.
He has a conceit he can best everyone.  And he's begun drinking.  God
knows why I married him.  It seemed the natural thing somehow since
you had divorced me.  The child had to have a father....  But he
disgusts me, Harry.  He disgusts me.  I can't go on.  I can't endure
it.  You can't imagine it--in those little lodgings--in the hot
weather.  To keep a maudlin drunken man away from one....  If I
hadn't seen this way out something worse might have happened.'

"'Can't you come away from him at once?' I asked.  'Why should you
ever go back to him?'

"'No.  I must get clear away or there will be mischief.  And you
mustn't be in it.  He'd think of you at once.  If he had a hint it
was you.  That's what you have to do about the money and everything,
letters or anything--get it to me without your being mixed up with
it.  You must get me money, not cheques.  We mustn't be seen to meet.
Even about here it's risky.  He's got into a gang.  He's been getting
deeper and deeper into a rotten set.  They blackmail the bookies.
They go about with revolvers.  They pass on things to one another.
It grew out of betting and now they call it getting a bit of their
own back....  If they spot you in it, they'll come for you.'

"'Trench warfare in London.  I'll risk it.'

"'You needn't risk anything--if we are discreet.  If there was some
one I could see--who'd hand things on.'

"I thought at once of my sister Fanny.

"'That would be safe,' said Hetty.  'As safe as could be.  And I'd
love to see her again.  I loved her when I met her....  But all this
is awful good of you, Harry.  I don't deserve a moment's kindness.

"'Nonsense!  I pushed you into the dirt, Hetty.'

"'I jumped into it.'

"'Fell into it.  It's nothing very much, Hetty, to give you a hand to
get out of it again.'"



§ 5

"I went the next day to my sister Fanny to prepare her for Hetty's
call.  Fanny sat in an arm-chair and listened and watched my face as
I told my story, confessed how I had exaggerated Hetty's offence and
asked for help.  'I ought to have seen her, Harry, before I took your
word for it,' she said.  'Of course, even now, I can't imagine how a
girl who loves one man could ever stand the kiss of another as she
did, but then, as you say, she'd been drinking.  We women aren't all
made alike.  There's all sorts make a world.  Some girls--the
backbone goes out of them when they feel a man's kisses.  You and me,
Harry, we aren't made like that.  I've been thinking while you sat
talking there, how like we both are to poor mother really--for all
she quarrelled with me.  We'll grow hard presently if we aren't
careful.  And your Hetty was young and she didn't know.  Only once it
was.  And all her life's been spoilt by it! ... I didn't know it was
like that, Harry.'

"And my sister Fanny began to recall her impressions of Hetty.  She
recalled her fine animation and the living interest of her talk.
'When she left I said to myself, she's got wit; that's the first
witty woman I've ever met.  She's got poetry in her.  Everything she
says comes out a little different from the things most people say.
She says things that come like flowers in a hedgerow.  So she did.
Does she still?"

"'I never thought of it like that before,' I said.  'I suppose she
has a sort of poetry.  Only the other day--when I met her first.
What was it she said?  Something.'

"'It's no good quoting, Harry.  Witty things should bloom where they
grow.  They're no good as cut-flowers.  But you and I are fairly
quick and fairly clever, Harry, but we've never had any of that.'

"'I've always loved her talk,' I said.

"I began to explain the situation to Fanny more fully and to show how
she could help in it.  I was not to see Hetty again; Fanny was to see
her, pay her the hundred pounds we could put together for her,
communicate with the friends she was to accompany and get her away.
Fanny listened gravely and agreed.

"Then she reflected.

"'Why don't you take her to Canada yourself, Harry?' she asked
abruptly."



§ 6

"I did not answer Fanny for some moments.  Then I said, 'I don't want
to.'

"'I can see you love Hetty still.'

"'Love.  But I don't want that.'

"'You don't want to be with her?'

"'It's out of the question.  Why ask a painful thing like that?  All
that is dead.'

"'Isn't a resurrection possible?  Why is it out of the question?
Pride?'

"'No.'

"'Why then?'

"'Milly.'

"'You don't love Milly.'

"'I won't have you discuss that, Fanny.  I do love her.'

"'Not as you love Hetty.'

"'Quite differently.  But Milly trusts me.  She keeps faith with me.
I'd as soon steal money--from a child's money-box--as go back on
Milly.'

"'It's wonderful how fine men can be to the wives they don't love,'
said Fanny bitterly.

"'Newberry's different,' I said.  'I've got my little son.  I've got
my work.  And though you will never have it, I love Milly.'

"'In a way.  Is she company for you?  Is she fun?'

"'I trust and love her.  And as for Hetty, you don't understand about
Hetty.  I love her.  I love her enormously.  But it's like two ghosts
meeting by moonlight.  We two are dead to each other and--sorrowful.
It isn't as though it was anything like your case over again.  I see
Hetty in hell and I'd do nearly anything in life to get her out.  I
don't even want to meet her.  I want to get her away out of this
filth and stupidity to where she can begin again.  That's all I want
and that's all she wants.  How could she and I ever come together
again?  How could we kiss again as lovers kiss?  Poor defiled things
we are!  And all my cruelty.  You're thinking of something else,
Fanny.  You're not thinking of Hetty and me.'

"'Maybe I am,' said Fanny.  'Yes, I think I am.  And so she is to go
to Canada and begin again--till her health comes back and her courage
comes back.  It isn't natural for a woman of her temperament to live
without a man to love her, Harry.'

"'Let her live and love,' said I.  'She'll have changed her name.
Her friends will stand by her.  They won't give her away.  Let her
forget.  Let her begin again.'

"'With another man?'

"'It may be.'

"'You don't mind the thought of that?'

"I was stung but I kept my temper.  'Have I any right to mind the
thought of that now?'

"'But you will.  And you will go on living with this wife you trust
and respect.  Who's dull spirited--dull as ditchwater.'

"'No.  Who's my son's mother.  Who is trustworthy.  Whom I'm pledged
to.  And I've got my work.  It may seem nothing to you.  It's good
enough for me to give myself to it.  Can't I love Hetty, can't I help
her out of the net she's in, and yet not want to go back to
impossible things?'

"'Grey Monday mornings,' said Fanny.

"'As if all life wasn't grey,' I said.

"And then," said Sarnac, "I remember that I made a prophecy.  I made
it--when did I make it?  Two thousand years ago?  Or two weeks ago?
I sat in Fanny's little sitting-room, an old-world creature amidst
her old-world furnishings, and I said that men and women would not
always suffer as we were suffering then.  I said that we were still
poor savages, living only in the bleak dawn of civilisation, and that
we suffered because we were under-bred, under-trained and darkly
ignorant of ourselves, that the mere fact that we knew our own
unhappiness was the promise of better things and that a day would
come when charity and understanding would light the world so that men
and women would no longer hurt themselves and one another as they
were doing now everywhere, universally, in law and in restriction and
in jealousy and in hate, all round and about the earth.

"'It is still too dark for us,' I said, 'to see clearly where we are
going, and everyone of us blunders and stumbles and does wrong.
Everyone.  It is idle for me to ask now what is the right thing for
me to do?  Whatever I do now will be wrong.  I ought to go with Hetty
and be her lover again--easily I could do that and why should I deny
it?--and I ought to stick to Milly and the work I have found in the
world.  Right road or left road, both lead to sorrow and remorse, but
there is scarcely a soul in all this dark world, Fanny, who has not
had to make or who will not presently have to make a choice as hard.
I will not pull the skies down upon Milly, I _cannot_ because she has
put her faith in me.  You are my dear sister Fanny and I love you and
we have loved each other.  Do you remember how you used to take me
round to school and hold my hand at the crossings?  Don't make things
too hard for me now.  Just help me to help Hetty.  Don't tear me to
pieces.  She is still alive and young and--Hetty.  Out there--she at
least can begin again.'"



§ 7

"Nevertheless, I did see Hetty again before she left England.  There
came a letter for me at Thunderstone House in which she proposed a
meeting.

"'You have been so kind to me,' she wrote.  'It is the next best
thing to your never having left me.  You have been a generous dear.
You've given back happiness to me.  I feel excited already at the
thought of the great liner and the ocean and full of hope.  We've got
a sort of picture of the ship; it is like a great hotel; with our
cabin marked in it exactly where it is.  Canada will be wonderful;
Our Lady of the Snows; and we are going by way of New York, New York,
like nothing else on earth, cliffs and crags of windows, towering up
to the sky.  And it's wonderful to have new things again.  I sneak
off to Fanny's just to finger them over.  I'm excited--yes, and
grateful--yes, and full of hope--yes.  And Harry, Harry, my heart
aches and aches.  I want to see you again.  I don't deserve to but I
want to see you again.  We began with a walk and why shouldn't we end
with a walk?  Thursday and Friday all the gang will be at Leeds.  I
could get away the whole day either day and it would be a miracle if
anyone knew.  I wish we could have that same old walk again.  I
suppose it's too far and impossible.  We'll save that, Harry, until
we're both quite dead and then we'll be two little swirls of breeze
in the grass or two bits of thistledown going side by side.  But
there was that other walk we had when we went to Shere and right over
the North Downs to Leatherhead.  We looked across the Weald and saw
our own South Downs far, far away.  Pinewood and heather there was;
hills beyond hills.  And the smoke of rubbish-burning.'

"I was to write to Fanny's address.

"Of course we had that walk, we two half-resuscitated lovers.  We did
not make love at all though we kissed when we met and meant to kiss
when we parted.  We talked as I suppose dead souls might talk of the
world that had once been real.  We talked of a hundred different
things--even of Sumner.  Now that she was so near escape from him her
dread and hatred had evaporated.  She said Sumner had a passionate
desire for her and a real need of her and that it was not fair to him
and very bad for him that she despised him.  It wounded his
self-respect.  It made him violent and defiant.  A woman who cared
for him, who would take the pains to watch him and care for him as a
woman should do for a man, might have made something of him.  'But
I've never cared for him, Harry; though I've tried.  But I can see
where things hurt him.  I can see they hurt him frightfully at times.
It doesn't hurt him any the less because he does ugly things.'  He
was vain, too, and ashamed of his incapacity to get a sufficient
living.  He was drifting very rapidly to a criminal life and she had
no power over him to hold him back.

"I can still see Hetty and hear her voice, as we walked along a broad
bridle-path between great rhododendron bushes, and she talked, grave
and balanced and kind she was, of this rogue who had cheated her and
outraged her and beaten her.  It was a new aspect of Hetty and yet at
the same time it was the old dear Hetty I had loved and wasted and
lost, clear-minded and swift, with an understanding better than her
will.

"We sat for a long time on the crest of the Downs above Shere where
the view was at its widest and best, and we recalled the old days of
happiness in Kent and talked of the distances before us and of
crossing the sea and of France and so of the whole wide world.  'I
feel,' she said, 'as I used to when I was a child, at the end of the
school quarter.  I'm going away to new things.  Put on your frock,
put on your hat; the big ship is waiting.  I am a little frightened
about it and rather happy....  I wish----  But never mind that.'

"'You wish----?'

"'What else could I wish?'

"'You mean----?'

"'It's no good wishing."

"'I've got to stick to the job I've taken.  I've got to see it
through.  But if you care to know it, Hetty, I wish so too.  My
God!--if wishes could release one!'

"'You've got your job here.  I wouldn't take you away, Harry, if I
could.  Sturdy you are, Harry, and you'll go through with it and do
the work you're made to do--and I'll take what comes to me.  Over
there I guess I'll forget a lot about Sumner and the things that have
happened in between--and think a lot about you and the South Downs
and this--how we sat side by side here.

"'Perhaps,' said Hetty, 'heaven is a place like this.  A great
hillside to which you come at last, after all the tugging and pushing
and the hoping and the disappointments and the spurring and the
hungers and the cruel jealousies are done with and finished for ever.
Then here you sit down and rest.  And you aren't alone.  Your lover
is here and he sits beside you and you just touch shoulder to
shoulder, very close and very still, and your sins are forgiven you;
your blunders and misunderstandings they matter no longer; and the
beauty takes you and you dissolve into it, you dissolve into it side
by side and together you forget and fade until at last nothing
remains of all the distresses and anger and sorrow, nothing remains
of you at all but the breeze upon the great hillside and sunshine and
everlasting peace....

"'All of which,' said Hetty, rising abruptly to her feet and standing
over me, 'is just empty nothingness.  Oh Harry!  Harry!  One feels
things and when one tries to say them it is just words and nonsense.
We've hardly started on our way to Leatherhead and you'll have to be
back by seven.  So get up, old Harry.  Get up and come on.  You are
the dearest person alive and it has been sweet of you to come with me
to-day.  I was half-afraid you'd think it wasn't wise....'

"In the late afternoon we got to a place called Little Bookham and
there we had tea.  About a mile farther on was a railway station and
we found a train for London; it came in as we got on to the platform.

"Everything had gone well so far and then came the first gleam of
disaster.  At Leatherhead we sat looking out on the station platform
and a little ruddy man came trotting along to get into the
compartment next to us, a little common fellow like an ostler with a
cigar under his Hebrew nose, and as he was about to get in he glanced
up at us.  Doubt and then recognition came into his eyes and at the
sight of him Hetty recoiled.

"'Get in,' said the guard, blowing his whistle, and the little man
was hustled out of sight.

"Hetty was very white.  'I know that man,' she said, 'and he knows
me.  He's named Barnado.  What shall I do?'

"'Nothing.  Does he know you very well?'

"'He's been to our rooms--three or four times.'

"'He may not have been sure it was you.'

"'I think he was.  Suppose he were to come to the window at the next
station to make certain.  Could I pretend not to be myself?  Refuse
to recognise him or answer to my name?'

"'But if he was convinced it was you in spite of your bluff that
would instantly make him suspicious and off he'd go to your husband!
If on the other hand you took it all quite casually--said I was your
cousin or your brother-in-law--he might think nothing of it and never
even mention it to Sumner.  But making him suspicious would send him
off to Sumner right away.  Anyhow, you go to Liverpool to-morrow.  I
don't see that his recognition of you matters.'

"'I'm thinking of you,' she said.

"'But he doesn't know who I am.  So far as I know none of that lot
has seen me....'

"The train slowed down at the next station.  Mr. Barnado appeared,
cigar and all, bright-eyed and curious.

"'Blest if I didn't say to myself that's Hetty Sumner!' said Mr.
Barnado.  'Wonderful 'ow one meets people!'

"'My brother-in-law, Mr. Dyson,' said Hetty, introducing me.  'We've
been down to see his little daughter.'

"'I didn't know you 'ad a sister, Mrs. Sumner.'

"'I haven't,' said Hetty, with a note of pain in her voice.  'Mr.
Dyson is a widower.'

"'Sorry,' said Mr. Barnado.  'Stupid of me.  And what age might the
little girl be, Mr. Dyson?'

"I found myself under the necessity of creating, explaining and
discussing an orphan daughter.  Mr. Barnado had three and was
uncomfortably expert about children and their phases of development.
He was evidently a model father.  I did as well as I could, I drew
out Mr. Barnado's family pride rather than indulged my own, but I was
immensely relieved when Mr. Barnado exclaimed, 'Gawd!  'Ere's Epsom
already!  Glad to 'ave met you, Mr.----'

"'Damn!' I said to myself.  I had forgotten.

"'Dixon,' said Hetty hastily, and Mr. Barnado, after effusive
farewells, proceeded to remove himself from the carriage.

"'Thank Heaven!' said Hetty, 'he didn't come on to London.  You're
the poorest liar, Harry, I've ever known.  As it is--no harm's been
done.'

"'No harm's been done,' said I, but two or three times before we
reached the London station where we were to part for ever, we
recurred to the encounter and repeated the reassuring formula that no
harm had been done.

"We parted at Victoria Station with very little emotion.  Mr. Barnado
had brought us back, as it were, to an everyday and incidental
atmosphere.  We did not kiss each other again.  The world about us
had become full now of observant eyes.  My last words to Hetty were
'Everything's all right!' in a business-like, reassuring tone, and
the next day she slipped off to join her friends at Liverpool and
passed out of my life for ever."



§ 8

"For three or four days I did not feel this second separation from
Hetty very greatly.  My mind was still busy with the details of her
departure.  On the third day she sent me a wireless message, as we
used to call it, to Thunderstone House.  'Well away,' she said.
'Fine weather.  Endless love and gratitude.'  Then slowly as the days
passed my sense of loss grew upon me, the intimations of an immense
loneliness gathered and spread until they became a cloud that
darkened all my mental sky.  I was persuaded now that there was no
human being who could make me altogether happy but Hetty, and that
for the second time I was rejecting the possibility of companionship
with her.  I had wanted love, I perceived, without sacrifice, and in
that old world, it seems to me now, love was only possible at an
exorbitant price, sacrifice of honour, sacrifice of one's proper work
in the world, humiliations and distresses.  I had shirked the price
of Hetty and she was going from me, taking out of my life for ever
all those sweet untellable things that were the essence of love, the
little names, the trivial careless caresses, the exquisite gestures
of mind and body, the moments of laughter and pride and perfect
understanding.  Day by day love went westward from me.  Day and night
I was haunted by a more and more vivid realisation of a great
steamship, throbbing and heaving its way across the crests and
swelling waves of the Atlantic welter.  The rolling black coal-smoke
from its towering funnels poured before the wind.  Now I would see
that big ocean-going fabric in the daylight; now lit brightly from
stem to stern, under the stars.

"I was full of unappeasable regret, I indulged in endless reveries of
a flight across the Atlantic in pursuit of Hetty, of a sudden
dramatic appearance before her;--'Hetty, I can't stand it.  I've
come'--and all the time I stuck steadfastly to the course I had
chosen.  I worked hard and late at Thunderstone House; I did my best
to shunt my imagination into new channels by planning two new
quasi-educational publications, and I set myself to take Milly out to
restaurants to dinner and to the theatre and to interesting shows.
And in the midst of some picture-show perhaps I would find my rebel
mind speculating what sort of thing Hetty would have said of it, had
she been there.  There was a little show of landscapes at the Alpine
Gallery and several were pictures of Downland scenery and one showed
a sunlit hillside under drowsy white clouds.  It was almost like
seeing Hetty.

"It was exactly a week after Hetty's landing in New York that I first
encountered Sumner.  It was my usual time of arrival and I was just
turning out of Tottenham Court Road into the side street that led to
the yard of Thunderstone House.  There was a small public-house in
this byway and two men were standing outside it in attitudes of
expectation.  One of them stepped out to accost me.  He was a little
flushed Jewish man, and for the moment I did not recognise him at all.

"'Mr. Smith?' said he, and scrutinised me queerly.

"'At your service,' said I.

"'Not by any chance Mr. Dyson or Dixon, eh?' he asked with a leer.

"'Barnado!' cried my memory and placed him.  My instant recognition
must have betrayed itself in my face.  Our eyes met and there were no
secrets between them.  'No, Mr. Barnado,' I said with incredible
stupidity; 'my name's just plain Smith.'

"'Don't mention it, Mr. Smith, don't mention it,' said Mr. Barnado
with extreme politeness.  'I had a sort of fancy I might have met you
before.'  And turning to his companion and raising his voice a
little, he said, 'That's him all right, Sumner--sure as eggs are
eggs.'

"Sumner!  I glanced at this man who had given my life so disastrous a
turn.  He was very much my own height and build, fair with a blotched
complexion and wearing a checked grey suit and an experienced-looking
grey felt hat.  He might have been my unsuccessful half-brother.  Our
eyes met in curiosity and antagonism.  'I'm afraid I'm not the man
you want,' I said to Barnado and went on my way.  I didn't see any
advantage in an immediate discussion in that place.  I perceived that
an encounter was inevitable, but I meant it to happen amidst
circumstances of my own choice and after I had had time to consider
the situation properly.  I heard something happen behind me and
Barnado said: 'Shut up, you fool!  You've found out what you want to
know.'  I went through the passages and rooms of Thunderstone House
to my office and there, when I was alone, I sat down in my arm-chair
and swore very heartily.  Every day since the departure of Hetty I
had been feeling more and more sure that this at least was not going
to happen.  I had thought that Sumner was very easily and safely and
completely out of the story.

"I took my writing-pad and began to sketch out the situation.  '_Ends
to be secured,_' I wrote.

"'_No. 1.  Hetty must not be traced._

"'_No. 2.  Milly must hear nothing of this._

"'_No. 3.  No blackmailing._'

"I considered.  '_But if a lump payment,_' I began.  This I scratched
out again.

"I had to scheme out the essential facts.  '_What does S. know?  What
evidence exists?  Of what?  No clue to lead to Fanny?  There is
nothing but that journey in the train.  He will have a moral
certainty but will it convince anyone else?_'

"I wrote a new heading: '_How to handle them?_'

"I began to sketch grotesques and arabesques over my paper as I
plotted.  Finally I tore it up into very small fragments and dropped
it into my wastepaper basket.  A messenger-girl rapped and came in
with a paper slip, bearing the names of Fred Sumner and Arthur
Barnado.

"'They've not put the business they want to talk about,' I remarked.

"'They said you'd know, Sir.'

"'No excuse.  I want everybody to fill in that,' I said.  'Just say
I'm too busy to see strangers who don't state their business.  And
ask them to complete the form.'

"Back came the form: 'Enquiry about Mr. Sumner's missing wife.'

"I considered it calmly.  'I don't believe we ever had the
manuscript.  Say I'm engaged up to half-past twelve.  Then I could
have a talk of ten minutes with Mr. Sumner alone.  Make that clear.
I don't see where Mr. Barnado comes in.  Make it clear it's a
privilege to see me.'

"My messenger did not reappear.  I resumed my meditations on the
situation.  There was time for a lot of aggressive energy to
evaporate before half-past twelve.  Probably both of the men had come
in from the outskirts and would have nowhere to wait but the streets
or a public-house.  Mr. Barnado might want to be back upon his own
business at Epsom.  He'd played his part in identifying me.  Anyhow,
I didn't intend to have any talk with Sumner before a witness.  If he
reappeared with Barnado I should refuse to see them.  For Barnado
alone I had a plan and for Sumner I had a plan, but not for the two
of them together.

"My delaying policy was a good one.  At half-past twelve Sumner came
alone and was shown up to me.

"'Sit down there,' I said abruptly and leant back in my chair and
stared at his face and waited in silence for him to begin.

"For some moments he did not speak.  He had evidently expected me to
open with some sort of question and he had come ready loaded with a
reply.  To be plumped into a chair and looked at, put him off his
game.  He tried to glare at me and I looked at his face as if I was
looking at a map.  As I did so I found my hatred for him shrinking
and changing.  It wasn't a case for hatred.  He had such a poor,
mean, silly face, a weak arrangement of plausibly handsome features.
Every now and then it was convulsed by a nervous twitch.  His
straw-coloured moustache was clipped back more on one side than the
other, and his rather frayed necktie had slipped down to display his
collar stud and the grubbiness of his collar.  He had pulled his
mouth a little askew and thrust his face forward in an attempt at
fierceness, and his rather watery blue eyes were as open and as
protruded as he could manage.

"'Where's my wife, Smith?' he said at last.

"'Out of my reach, Mr. Sumner, and out of yours.'

"'Where've you hid her?'

"'She's gone,' I said.  'It's no work of mine.'

"'She's come back to you.'

"I shook my head.

"'You know where she is?'

"'She's gone clear, Sumner.  You let her go.'

"'Let her go!  _You_ let her go, but I'm not going to.  I'm not that
sort.  Here's this girl you marry and mess about with and when she
comes across a man who's a bit more of a man than you are and handles
her as a woman ought to be handled, you go and chuck her out and
divorce her, divorce her with her child coming, and then start
planning and plotting to get her away from the man she's given her
love to----'

"He stopped for want of words or breath.  He wanted to exasperate me
and start a shouting match.  I said nothing.

"'I want Hetty back,' he said.  'She's my wife and I want her back.
She's mine and the sooner this foolery stops the better.'

"I sat up to the desk and put my elbows on it.

"'You won't get her back,' I said very quietly.  'What are you going
to do about it?'

"'By God!  I'll have her back--if I swing for it.'

"'Exactly.  And what are you going to do?'

"'What can't I do?  I'm her husband.'

"'Well?'

"'You've got her.'

"'Not a scrap of her.'

"'She's missing.  I can go to the police.'

"'Go to them.  What will they do?'

"'I can put them on to you.'

"'Not a bit of it.  They won't bother about me.  If your wife's
missing and you go to the police, they'll clear up all your gang with
their enquiries.  They'll be only too glad of the chance.  Trouble
me!  They'll dig up the cellars in your house and in your previous
house to find the body.  They'll search you and ransack you.  And
what they don't do to you, your pals will.'

"Sumner leaned forward and grimaced like a gargoyle to give his words
greater emphasis.  '_Yew_ were the last man seen with her,' he said.

"'Not a scrap of evidence.'

"Sumner cursed vigorously.  'He saw you.'

"'I can deny that absolutely.  Frowsty little witness your friend
Barnado.  Don't be too sure he'll stick it.  Nasty business if a
woman disappears and you find yourself trying to fix something that
won't hold water on to someone her husband dislikes.  If I were you,
Sumner, I wouldn't take that line.  Even if he backs you up, what
does it prove?  You know of nobody else who pretends to have seen me
with Hetty.  You won't be able to find anybody....'

"Mr. Sumner extended his hand towards my table.  He was too far away
to bang it properly so he pulled his chair up closer.  The bang when
it came was ineffective.  'Look 'ere,' he said and moistened his
lips.  'I want my Hetty back and I'm going to have her back.  You're
precious cool and cucumberish and all that just now, but by God!
I'll warm you up before I've done with you.  You think you can get
her away and bluff me off.  Never made such a mistake in your life.
Suppose I don't go to the police.  Suppose I go for direct action.
Suppose I come round to your place, and make a fuss with your wife."

"'That will be a nuisance,' I said.

"He followed up his advantage.  'A masterpiece of a nuisance.'

"I considered the forced fierceness of his face.

"'I shall say I know nothing about your wife's disappearance and that
you are a blackmailing liar.  People will believe me.  My wife will
certainly believe me.  She'd make herself do so if your story was ten
times as possible.  Your friend Barnado and you will make a pretty
couple of accusers.  I shall say you are a crazy jealous fool, and if
you keep the game up I shall have you run in.  I'd not be altogether
sorry to have you run in.  There's one or two little things I don't
like you for.  I'd not be so very sorry to get quits.'

"I had the better of him.  He was baffled and angry but I saw now
plainly that he had no real fight in him.

"'And you know where she is?' he said.

"I was too full of the spirit of conflict now to be discreet.  'I
know where she is.  And you don't get her--whatever you do.  And as I
said before, What can you do about it?'

"'My God!' he said.  'My own wife.'

"I leant back with the air of a man who had finished an interview.  I
looked at my wrist-watch.

"He stood up.

"I looked up at him brightly.  'Well?' I said.

"'Look here!' he spluttered.  'I don't stand this.  By God!  I tell
you I want Hetty.  I want her.  I want her and I'll do what I like
with her.  D'you think I'll take this?  Me?  She's mine, you dirty
thief!'

"I took up a drawing for an illustration and held it in my hand,
regarding him with an expression of mild patience that maddened him.

"'Didn't I marry her--when I needn't have?  If you wanted her, why
the devil didn't you keep her when you had her?  I tell you I won't
stand it.'

"'My dear Sumner, as I said before, What can you do about it?'

"He leant over the desk, shook a finger as though it was a pistol
barrel in my face.  'I'll let daylight through you,' he said.  'I'll
let daylight through you.'

"'I'll take my chance of that,' I said.

"He expressed his opinion of me for a bit.

"'I won't argue your points,' I said.  'I guess we're about through
with this interview.  Don't shock my clerk, please, when she comes
in.'  And I rang the bell on my desk.

"His parting shot was feeble.  'You've not heard the last of me.  I
mean what I told you.'

"'Mind the step,' said I.

"The door closed and left me strung up and trembling with excitement
but triumphant.  I felt I had beaten him and that I could go on
beating him.  It might be he would shoot.  He'd probably got a
revolver.  But it was ten to one he'd take the trouble to get a fair
chance at me and screw himself up to shooting pitch.  And with his
loose twitching face and shaky hand it was ten to one against his
hitting me.  He'd aim anyhow.  He'd shoot too soon.  And if he shot
me it was ten to one he only wounded me slightly.  Then I'd carry
through my story against him.  Milly might be shaken for a time, but
I'd get the thing right again with her.

"I sat for a long time turning over the possibilities of the case.
The more I considered it the more satisfied I was with my position.
It was two o'clock and long past my usual lunch time when I went off
to my club.  I treated myself to the unusual luxury of a half-bottle
of champagne."



§ 9

"I never believed Sumner would shoot me until I was actually shot.

"He waylaid me in the passage-way to the yard of Thunderstone House
as I was returning from lunch just a week after our first encounter
and when I was beginning to hope he had accepted his defeat.  He had
been drinking, and as soon as I saw his flushed face, half-angry and
half-scared, I had an intimation of what might befall.  I remember
that I thought then that if anything happened he must get away
because otherwise he might be left to tell his tale after I was dead.
But I didn't really believe he was man enough to shoot and even now I
do not believe that.  He fired through sheer lack of nervous and
muscular co-ordination.

"He did not produce his pistol until I was close up to him.  'Now
then,' said he, 'you're for it.  Where's my wife?' and out came the
pistol a yard from me.

"I forget my answer.  I probably said, 'Put that away' or something
of that sort.  And then I may have seemed about to snatch it.  The
report of the pistol, which sounded very loud to me, came at once,
and a feeling as though I'd been kicked in the small of the back.
The pistol was one of those that go on firing automatically as long
as the trigger is gripped.  It fired two other shots, and one got my
knee and smashed it.  'Damn the thing!' he screamed and threw it down
as though it had stung him.  'Get out, you fool.  Run!' I said as I
lurched towards him, and then as I fell I came within a foot of his
terrified face as he dashed past me towards the main thoroughfare.
He thrust me back with his hand as I reeled upon him.

"I think I rolled over on to my back into a sitting position after I
fell, because I have a clear impression of him vanishing like the
tail of a bolting rabbit into Tottenham Court Road.  I saw a van and
an omnibus pass across the space at the end of the street, heedless
altogether of the pistol shots that had sounded so terrible in my
ears.  A girl and a man passed with equal indifference.  He was
clear.  Poor little beast!  I'd stolen his Hetty.  And now----

"I was very clear-headed.  A little numbed where I had been hit but
not in pain.  I was chiefly aware of my smashed knee, which looked
very silly with its mixture of torn trouser and red stuff and a
little splintered pink thing that I supposed was an end of bone.

"People from nowhere were standing about me and saying things to me.
They had come out of the yard or from the public-house.  I made a
swift decision.  'Pistol went off in my hand,' I said, and shut my
eyes.

"Then a fear of a hospital came upon me.  'My home quite handy,' I
said.  'Eight Chester Terrace, Regent's Park.  Get me there, please.'

"I heard them repeating the address and I recognised the voice of
Crane & Newberry's door porter.  'That's right,' he was saying.
'It's Mr. Mortimer Smith.  Anything I can do for you, Mr. Smith?'

"I do not remember much of the details of what followed.  When they
moved me there was pain.  I seem to have been holding on to what I
meant to say and do, and my memory does not seem to have recorded
anything else properly.  I may have fainted once or twice.  Newberry
was in it somehow.  I think he took me home in his car.  'How did it
happen?' he asked.  That I remember quite clearly.

"'The thing went off in my hand,' I said.

"One thing I was very certain about.  Whatever happened they were not
going to hang that poor, silly, hunted cheat, Sumner.  Whatever
happened, the story of Hetty must not come out.  If it did, Milly
would think only one thing: that I had been unfaithful to her and
that Sumner had killed me on that account.  Hetty was all right now.
I needn't bother about Hetty any more.  I had to think of Milly--and
Sumner.  It is queer, but I seem to have known I was mortally wounded
from the very instant I was shot.

"Milly appeared, full of solicitude.

"'Accident,' I said to her with all my strength.  'Went off in my
hand.'

"My own bed.

"Clothes being cut away.  Round my knee the cloth had stuck.  The new
grey suit which I'd meant should last the whole summer.

"Then two strangers became conspicuous, doctors, I suppose,
whispering, and one of them had his sleeves up and showed a pair of
fat pink arms.  Sponges and a tinkle of water dripping into a basin.
They prodded me about.  Damn!  That hurt!  Then stinging stuff.  What
was the good of it?  I was in the body they were prodding, and I knew
all about it and I was sure that I was a dead man.

"Milly again.

"'My dear,' I whispered.  'Dear!' and her poor, tearful face beamed
love upon me.

"Valiant Milly!  Things had never been fair to her.

"Fanny?  Had Newberry gone to fetch her?  Anyhow he had vanished.

"She'd say nothing about Hetty.  She was as safe as--safe as
what?--what did one say?--any thing--safe.

"Poor dears!  What a fuss they were all in.  It seemed almost
shameful of me to be glad that I was going out of it all.  But I was
glad.  This pistol shot had come like the smashing of a window in a
stuffy room.  My chief desire was to leave kind and comforting
impressions on those poor survivors who might still have to stay on
in the world of muddle for years and years.  Life!  What a muddle and
a blundering it had been!  I'd never have to grow old now anyhow....

"There was an irruption.  People coming in from the dressing-room.
One was a police inspector in uniform.  The other showed policeman
through his plain clothes.  Now was the time for it!  I was quite
clear-headed--quite.  I must be careful what I said.  If I didn't
want to say anything I could just close my eyes.

"'Bleeding internally,' said someone.

"Then the police inspector sat down on the bed.  What a whale he
was!--and asked me questions.  I wondered if anyone had caught a
glimpse of Sumner.  Sumner, bolting like a rabbit.  I must risk that.

"'It went off in my hand,' I said.

"'What was he saying?  How long had I had that revolver?

"'Bought it this lunch time,' I said.

"Did he ask why?  He did.  'Keep up my shooting.'

"Where?  He wanted to know where.  'Highbury.'

"'What part of Highbury?'  They wanted to trace the pistol.  That
wouldn't do.  Give Mr. Inspector a paper chase.  '_Near_ Highbury.'

"'Not in Highbury?'

"I decided to be faint and stupid.  'That way,' I said faintly.

"'A pawnshop?'

"Best not to answer.  Then as if by an effort, 'Lil' shop.'

"'Unredeemed pledges?'

"I said nothing to that.  I was thinking of another touch to the
picture I was painting.

"I spoke with weak indignation.  'I didn't think it was loaded.  How
was I to know it was loaded?  It ought not to have been sold--loaded
like that.  I was just looking at it--

"I stopped short and shammed exhaustion.  Then I felt that I was not
shamming exhaustion.  I was exhausted.  Gods! but the stuffing was
out of me!  I was sinking, sinking, out of the bedroom, out from
among this group of people.  They were getting little and faint and
flimsy.  Was there anything more to say?  Too late if there was.  I
was falling asleep, falling into a sleep, so profound, so
fathomless....

"Far away now was the little roomful of people, and infinitely small.

"'He's going!' somebody said in a minute voice.

"I seemed to come back for an instant.

"I heard the rustle of Milly's dress as she came across the room to
me....

"And then, then I heard Hetty's voice again and opened my eyes and
saw Hetty bending down over me--in that lovely place upon this
mountain-side.  Only Hetty had become my dear Sunray who is mistress
of my life.  And the sunshine was on us and on her face, and I
stretched because my back was a little stiff and one of my knees was
twisted."

"'Wake up! I said,'" said Sunray.  "'Wake up,' and I shook you."

"And then we came and laughed at you," said Radiant.  "Firefly and I."

"And you said, 'then there is another life,'" said Firefly.  "And the
tale is only a dream!  It has been a good tale, Sarnac, and somehow
you have made me think it was true."

"As it is," said Sarnac.  "For I am as certain I was Henry Mortimer
Smith yesterday as I am that I am Sarnac here and now."




CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

THE EPILOGUE


§ 1

The guest-master poked the sinking fire into a last effort.  "So am
I," he said, and then with profound conviction, "_That tale is true._"

"But how could it be true?" asked Willow.

"I should be readier to believe it true if Sarnac had not brought in
Sunray as Hetty," said Radiant.  "It was very dreamlike, the way
Hetty grew more and more like his dear lady and at last dissolved
altogether into her."

"But if Smith was a sort of anticipation of Sarnac," said Starlight,
"then it was natural for him to choose as his love a sort of
anticipation of Sunray."

"But are there any other anticipations in the story?" asked Willow.
"Did you recognise any other people who are intimate with you both?
Is there a Fanny in this world?  Is there a Matilda Good or a brother
Ernest?  Was Sarnac's mother like Martha Smith?"

"That tale," said the guest-master, stoutly, "was no dream.  It was a
memory floating up out of the deep darkness of forgotten things into
a kindred brain."

Sarnac thought, "What is a personality but a memory?  If the memory
of Harry Mortimer Smith is in my brain, then I am Smith.  I feel as
sure that I was Smith two thousand years ago as that I was Sarnac
this morning.  Sometimes before this in my dreams I have had a
feeling that I lived again forgotten lives.  Have none of you felt
that?"

"I dreamt the other day," said Radiant, "that I was a panther that
haunted a village of huts in which lived naked children and some very
toothsome dogs.  And how I was hunted for three years and shot at
five times before I was killed.  I can remember how I killed an old
woman gathering sticks and hid part of her body under the roots of a
tree to finish it on the morrow.  It was a very vivid dream.  And as
I dreamt it it was by no means horrible.  But it was not a clear and
continuous dream like yours.  A panther's mind is not clear and
continuous, but passes from flashes of interest to interludes of
apathy and utter forgetfulness.

"When children have dreams of terror, of being in the wild with
prowling beasts, of long pursuits and hairbreadth escapes, perhaps it
is the memory of some dead creature that lives again in them?" asked
Starlight.  "What do we know of the stuff of memory that lies on the
other side of matter?  What do we know of the relations of
consciousness to matter and energy?  For four thousand years men have
speculated about these things, and we know no more to-day than they
did in Athens when Plato taught and Aristotle studied.  Science
increases and the power of man grows but only inside the limits of
life's conditions.  We may conquer space and time, but we shall never
conquer the mystery of what we are, and why we can be matter that
feels and wills.  My brother and I have much to do with animals and
more and more do I perceive that what they are I am.  They are
instruments with twenty strings while we have ten thousand, but they
are instruments like ourselves; what plays upon them plays upon us,
and what kills them kills us.  Life and death alike are within the
crystal sphere that limits us for ever.  Life cannot penetrate and
death will not penetrate that limitation.  What memories are we
cannot tell.  If I choose to believe that they float away like
gossamer nets when we die, and that they float I know not where, and
that they can come back presently into touch with other such gossamer
nets, who can contradict me?  Maybe life from its very beginning has
been spinning threads and webs of memories.  Not a thing in the past,
it may be, that has not left its memories about us.  Some day we may
learn to gather in that forgotten gossamer, we may learn to weave its
strands together again, until the whole past is restored to us and
life becomes one.  Then perhaps the crystal sphere will break.  And
however that may be, and however these things may be explained, I can
well believe without any miracles that Sarnac has touched down to the
real memory of a human life that lived and suffered two thousand
years ago.  And I believe that, because of the reality of the story
he told.  I have felt all along that whatever interrupting question
we chose to ask, had we asked what buttons he wore on his jacket or
how deep the gutters were at the pavement edge or what was the price
he had paid for his cigarettes, he would have been ready with an
answer, more exact and sure than any historian could have given."

"And I too believe that," said Sunray.  "I have no memory of being
Hetty, but in everything he said and did, even in his harshest and
hardest acts, Smith and Sarnac were one character.  I do not question
for a moment that Sarnac lived that life."



§ 2

"But the hardness of it!" cried Firefly; "the cruelty!  The universal
heartache!"

"It could have been only a dream," persisted Willow.

"It is not the barbarism I think of," said Firefly; "not the wars and
diseases, the shortened, crippled lives, the ugly towns, the narrow
countryside, but worse than that the sorrow of the heart, the
universal unkindness, the universal failure to understand or care for
the thwarted desires and needs of others.  As I think of Sarnac's
story I cannot think of any one creature in it who was happy--as we
are happy.  It is all a story of love crossed, imaginations like
flies that have fallen into gum, things withheld and things
forbidden.  And all for nothing.  All for pride and spite.  Not all
that world had a giver who gave with both hands....  Poor Milly!  Do
you think she did not know how coldly you loved her, Sarnac?  Do you
think her jealousy was not born of a certainty and a fear? ... A
lifetime, a whole young man's lifetime, a quarter of a century, and
this poor Harry Smith never once met a happy soul and came only once
within sight of happiness!  And he was just one of scores and
hundreds of millions!  They went heavily and clumsily and painfully,
oppressing and obstructing each other, from the cradle to the grave."

This was too much for the guest-master, who almost wailed aloud.
"But surely there was happiness!  Surely there were moods and phases
of happiness!"

"In gleams and flashes," said Sarnac.  "But I verily believe that
what Firefly says is true.  In all my world there were no happy
lives."

"Not even children?"

"Lives, I said, not parts of lives.  Children would laugh and dance
for a while if they were born in Hell."

"And out of that darkness," said Radiant; "in twenty short centuries
our race has come to the light and tolerance, the sweet freedoms and
charities of our lives to-day."

"Which is no sort of comfort to me," said Firefly, "when I think of
the lives that _have_ been."

"Unless this is the solution," the guest-master cried, "that everyone
is presently to dream back the lives that have gone.  Unless the poor
memory-ghosts of all those sad lives that have been are to be brought
into the consolation of our happiness.  Here, poor souls, for your
comfort is the land of heart's desire and all your hopes come true.
Here you live again in your ampler selves.  Here lovers are not
parted for loving and your loves are not your torment....  Now I see
why men must be immortal, for otherwise the story of man's martyrdom
is too pitiful to tell.  Many good men there were like me, jolly men
with a certain plumpness, men with an excellent taste for wine and
cookery, who loved men almost as much as they loved the food and
drink that made men, and they could not do the jolly work I do and
make comfort and happiness every day for fresh couples of holiday
friends.  Surely presently I shall find the memories of the poor
licensed innkeeper I was in those ancient days, the poor, overruled,
ill-paid publican, handing out bad stuff in wrath and shame, I shall
find all his troubles welling up again in me.  Consoled in this good
inn.  If it was I who suffered in those days, I am content, but if it
was some other good fellow who died and never came to this, then
there is no justice in the heart of God.  So I swear by immortality
now and henceforth--not for greed of the future but in the name of
the wasted dead.

"Look!" the guest-master continued.  "Morning comes and the cracks at
the edge of the door-curtain grow brighter than the light within.  Go
all of you and watch the mountain glow.  I will mix you a warm bowl
of drink and then we will sleep for an hour or so before you
breakfast and go your way."



§ 3

"It was a life," said Sarnac, "and it was a dream, a dream within
this life; and this life too is a dream.  Dreams within dreams,
dreams containing dreams, until we come at last, maybe, to the
Dreamer of all dreams, the Being who is all beings.  Nothing is too
wonderful for life and nothing is too beautiful."

He got up and thrust back the great curtain of the guest-house room.
"All night we have been talking and living in the dark Ages of
Confusion and now the sunrise is close at hand."

He went out upon the portico of the guest-house and stood still,
surveying the great mountains that rose out of cloud and haze, dark
blue and mysterious in their recesses and soaring up at last into the
flush of dawn.

He stood quite still and all the world seemed still, except that, far
away and far below, a mist of sounds beneath the mountain mists, a
confusion of birds was singing.




¶ Mr. Wells has also written the following novels:

  THE WHEELS OF CHANCE
  LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM
  KIPPS
  TONO-BUNGAY
  ANN VERONICA
  MR. POLLY
  THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
  MARRIAGE
  THE PASSIONATE FRIENDS
  THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
  BEALBY
  THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
  MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH
  THE SOUL OF A BISHOP
  JOAN AND PETER
  THE UNDYING FIRE
  THE SECRET PLACES OF THE HEART


¶ The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

  THE TIME MACHINE
  THE WONDERFUL VISIT
  THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU
  THE INVISIBLE MAN
  THE WAR OF THE WORLDS
  THE SLEEPER AWAKES
  THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON
  THE SEA LADY
  THE FOOD OF THE GODS
  IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET
  THE WAR IN THE AIR
  THE WORLD SET FREE
  MEN LIKE GODS


¶ Numerous short stories collected under the following titles:

  THE STOLEN BACILLUS
  THE PLATTNER STORY
  TALES OF SPACE AND TIME
  TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM


¶ The same short stories will also be found in three volumes:

  TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED
  TALES OF LIFE AND ADVENTURE
  TALES OF WONDER


¶ A Series of books on social, religious and political questions:

  ANTICIPATIONS (1900)
  A MODERN UTOPIA
  THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
  NEW WORLDS FOR OLD
  FIRST AND LAST THINGS
  GOD THE INVISIBLE KING
  THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
  RUSSIA IN THE SHADOWS
  THE SALVAGING OF CIVILISATION
  WASHINGTON AND THE HOPE OF PEACE
  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
  THE STORY OF A GREAT SCHOOLMASTER


¶ And two little books about children's play, called:

  FLOOR GAMES and LITTLE WARS



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