Eva's apples

XV.

He was wakened at his club by an attendant who brought in his morning mail and a telegram. The telegram ran:

So it was!

It was a “reply paid” telegram, and Frank scribbled back:—

Among the morning mail was a letter from Eva, bearing an Irish post mark.

Frank, who hated the idea of arriving empty-handed but, since the sudden stoppage of the Ottercove source did not dispose of the necessary sums, shrank at the thought of Eva’s extravagance. By a happy chance he heard of a draper and milliner in the Edgeware Road who was selling out her business and he went and bought up most of her remaining stock, thinking Eva would be glad to have it. The box he brought with him to Holyhead comprised a corset, eight pairs of crisp calico knickers, a number of strong cotton stockings, a skirt, and a couple of hats. He left the box containing these treasures in the room at the hotel and went out to the pier to meet the boat which, at midnight, a lighted shell out of the dark, suddenly swam up towards him; and on board, waving to him, already stood Eva.

She alighted with a portmanteau, and the boat train took them back into Holyhead Town. “I thought something was sure to happen, and you wouldn’t come,” he said.

“All the village boys,” she said, “came to see me off at the station. ‘Ah!’ they said: ‘Here’s Miss Kerr going off to London!’”

“Did they now?”

“They did.”

“I’ve brought you a present,” he said.

“Where is it?” she asked quickly.

“It’s in the room at the hotel.”

“Is it a ring?”

“No, it’s not a ring.”

“Is it—I mean—jewelry?”

“No—it’s clothes.”

“Clothes?”

“Clothes.”

“I thought you’d like to have them,” he said, opening the box at the hotel.

She took out the things one by one and laid them out on the bed. “H’m! H’m!” she said. “Of course, darling, they’re old, very old.”

“Never been worn,” Frank said, a little stiffly.

“I don’t mean that. I mean old-fashioned. Those two hats, for instance. Nobody wears such hats nowadays.”

“I am sure you’d look very well in them.”

“It’s the fashion when Mummy was a young girl or even earlier.”

“Still,” he said, “they look strong. I don’t see why you shouldn’t wear them.”

“And these stockings—cotton, you know.”

“They look very neat and strong,” he said.

“These knickers”—she held them out—“calico—they scratch.”

“Well,” he said, a little ruffled, “I only wished to please you.”

“I know. But—”

“This bodice,” he said. “I am sure it’s very nice.”

“No one wears corsets now, darling.”

“Well,” he said, evidently hurt, “I am sure I haven’t bought it for myself, and if you don’t want to wear it—”

He went away and lay sulking on his bed. “Gratitude!” he thought. “For all his trouble and expense....”

“I’ll wear them,” she said, coming up to him tenderly. “You know I’d do anything to please you, darling. Let us have no more quarrelling about these clothes, darling; they aren’t worth it.”

“Oh, aren’t they?” he said, rolling over and turning his back to her.

But she came up to him, tenderly, sauntered up to him, lovingly, on tip toe, and overtook him on the other side. “You look funny,” she said.

“Funny?”

“Kind of puzzled.”

“I’ve poured some beer into a glass containing peroxide of hydrogen.” He stood up and looked at her: “Most unusual beer.”

“Your skin, darling.”

“Yes.”

“Against my skin.”

“Is that,” he asked, “why they say that love is only skin deep?”

“Never mind what they say.”

“I don’t mind,” he said, and drew her passionately to himself.

“I like,” she said, “when you begin suddenly to breathe like that—like a steam engine.” A strange look of prepared abandonment came onto her face as she drew herself up to him and closed her eyes.

“Eva, you looked like that then ... on that hill.”

They were awed, breathless. Standing behind her, he clasped her with his sinewy arms, his hands like travelling flames. She threw her head back as his mouth pressed into the warm hollow of her shoulder, burnt her through and through.... He lifted her and carried her, with a simulation of ease, across the room. “There.... And the village boys in Ireland all mad on you. And Ferdinand has all this—and this—and this—all to himself.”

“All for you,” she said.

In the morning he woke up to a mood of warning and sat up. “Ottercove—”

“Yes, darling?”

“Has stopped all my money.”

“He hasn’t!” she cried. And also sat up.

“He has.”

“I wouldn’t have wired to you for money had I known, darling, of Ottercove’s action. He is a walking mountain of impudence!”

“But you needed it all the same for your journey.”

“No, it wasn’t the journey. It was for Charity.”

“Charity?”

“You see, I was asked to go about getting subscriptions for a life-boat saving fund or something and got all sorts of people to put down their names, but neglected to collect the money from them. About £20 in all. So I thought it would be simpler to wire you for it, don’t you see.”

“I see.”

“Couldn’t remember their addresses.”

“So you had no money for the journey?”

“A French lady called Thérèse Lapin, who lives in Dublin, gave me money to go to London with.”

“Whatever for?”

“On a tour of inspection. She has a daughter in London and Madame Lapin has heard in a round-about way that her daughter is living with a married man. So she wants me to take some eggs and butter to her daughter and report to her on my way back whether the daughter lives with a married man or whether she is straight and the rumour has been spread through malice.”

“So you want to go to London?”

“Darling, I must, for I wouldn’t know what to do with the eggs and butter. They’re in the portmanteau.”

The sun now looked into the room, and Eva, sitting up in bed, delicately sipped her chocolate. “And all the time while I was away in Ireland I talked about you to my little cousin Baby, and I said, every time there was a noise outside, that it must be you arriving, and Baby ran out to look and there was no one there. And on Sunday mornings I would say to her: ‘Now if you come to church with me you will see him, for he is surely there, sitting in his pew.’ And, together, we’d tear off to church, talking all the way of your sitting there already, and Baby’s cheeks—she is only twelve, you know—glowing with excitement. ‘Now,’ I’d say to her, ‘you are going to see him.’ And we would both get so excited that I’d forget myself that I was only teasing her.”

“What is your cousin Baby like? Is she nice?”

“She’s like me, only her hair isn’t a bit curly, but quite straight, and she has brown eyes instead of violet ones.”

In the afternoon they sat not far from the sea, and Frank was beginning to snooze. Eva had got him to buy picture postcards and stamps and, sitting beside him, scribbled innumerable postcards.

“To whom all this, Eva?”

“Village friends.”

“Let me see.” Nearly all recipients were men, addressed as “Esquires.” One was a “Mr.” “Hello,” he said, “why is this one a ‘Mr.’ while all the others are ‘Esquires’?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s good enough for him.”

“It isn’t fair, you know; it’s vulgar to discriminate in these things.”

“But if I write ‘Esquire’ to him he’ll go round showing it to all the people in the village, and Daddy might find out I am in Holyhead with you. You don’t know the frightful danger I am in. I must be so very careful, darling, on account of Daddy and his people in Ireland, who are very strict on morals and things. It is a village, and everything, you know, goes round like wild fire. And I only told them I was going down to Dublin to see Aunt Jane and would be back the same day.”

“What awful busybodies!”

“And on board there was a register for anyone who cared to sign his name in it. And I couldn’t help myself, you know, and I signed my name: Miss Eva Kerr. Destination: London, viâ Holyhead.”

“Whatever did you do that for?”

“I couldn’t help myself, darling. Because the register is reprinted in all the local Irish newspapers, you see, and I thought it would be so nice to have all the old fogeys in the village, don’t you see, read it in their evening papers: ‘Ah,’ they’d say: ‘Here is Miss Eva Kerr off to London viâ Holyhead.’ Rather nice, you know, if you know what I mean.”

“Well, here we are in Holyhead. And aren’t we pleased! Or what is your idea of perfect bliss?”

“I like to eat chocolates and as I eat them to think of you, Ferdinand.”

“‘But I feel,’ said Byron,—‘and I feel it bitterly—that a man should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom of a woman, and a stranger; that even the recompense, and it is much, is not enough, and that this Cicisbean existence is to be condemned.’”

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t know. Don’t feel very well. But you are a nurse; you ought to be able to tell me what is the matter.”

Eva looked very enigmatic. “H’m.... Yes, yes.”

And then, hard up for an answer, she kissed him. She kissed him again and again and, it seemed, would not stop.

To kiss and to be conscious of conferring a favour, to feel ashamed of it, and to wonder when, where, your satisfaction came in—was now his melancholy lot. She was, he felt, shy of him, had always been, fundamentally, shy of him. Only in the taxi on their long drive back to the hotel she let herself go. She wanted that love which he could only feel when he had lost her. Women want it there and then, and men cannot give it till it is too late....

The railway porter, carrying her box of clothes to the London train next morning, looked as though he did not think much of them, anyhow. Frank bought himself a copy of The Nation & Athenaeum, and Eva, asked what she wanted to read, said, with some hesitation: “Buy me ... Home Chat.” It gave him a pang—a twist of the heart.

She read it stealthily and looked up at him. All the way to London Eva attracted everyone’s attention on account of her unusual hat and dowdy skirt coming down nearly to her heels and keeping off, Frank thought, possible lewd glances at her legs.

Arrived in London, she went straight away to the Dublin lady’s daughter. She had a rattling good time with them, went off for the week-end with them in motor-cars to picnics, races, shows and theatres, attracting great attention by her extraordinary new clothes and the enormous plumed and fruit-clad hats (the married man who shared a flat with Mlle. Lapin visibly seduced by Eva’s charms), and, on passing home through Dublin, she reported nothing to the mother; only said she had forgotten to deliver the eggs and butter, but otherwise had had a rattling good time.

Lord de Jones, whom she had met in London, had given her money to go on a learned errand for him to Edinborough University in connection with their forthcoming mission to the continent. But, after lunching with her lover, she decided she had better spend the day with him.

The day was bright. The shops beckoned invitingly.

“Buy me—”

“You know Lord Ottercove has stopped all my money.”

“Buy me all the same a little book of poetry.”

“What poetry?”

“Any poetry. A little book—to read in bed. It mustn’t be heavy, you know.”

“Well—yes.”

“I saw a nice little book in blue leather in a shop window the other day. I am sure it’s poetry. Buy me that.”

“Anything else?”

“Chocolates. To read in bed and eat and think of you, Ferdinand.”

“Yes.”

“And do send me roses for my birthday.”

“Yes. The fifteenth of this month. I won’t forget.”

She saw him off at the station, but left before the train went to meet de Jones, who had telephoned for her that morning.

“Remember: roses. All other flowers, Pilling says, are vulgar.”

She waved to him at the corner, and was gone.

XVI.

THE FAREWELL

But she was not there at eleven. She was not there at twelve. As he paced up and down he was conscious that all the porters and the waiting taxi-cab drivers looked at him with interest. Shameless flag vendors buttonholed him with pertinacity. He paced on, angry and exhausted, his thick heavy overcoat on his arm, and a small fly flew straight into his ear; and pacing up and down vehemently he stepped again onto some slippery nastiness on the pavement. “Must tell Ottercove,” he made a mental note of it. “Have this scandal ventilated in the House.” At one o’clock he went into the station bar and drank a glass of beer on an empty stomach, and suddenly he took courage, ceased to be concerned about the formidable mass opinion of the porters on the subject of himself, saw them as mere independent, ignorant at that, individuals. The movement of the traffic, the sight of a girl stepping into a coach and revealing a ripening, silk-stockinged leg—such sights and sounds began to work on him, till his mind, with the beer and the oxygen inhaled, hummed like music, and saw God.

“Well—!” he said; and then again: “Well—!”

“Why, darling, what has happened?”

The presence of John emphasised her crime and irritated him unspeakably. “You ask me; you—you—you ask me—” He could not continue. He cast an accusing look at the brother, who giggled bashfully.

“Zita said I must take John about with me and show him London for he is so shy and it’s his last day, you know. To-morrow he is going on a farm in Ireland. ‘And,’ says she, ‘you’ve only one young brother.’”

“And what of her? It’s our last day together.”

“Exactly! But she wants to be alone with Pilling all the time. How she loves Pilling!”

“And why aren’t you wearing the nice new clothes I gave you?”

“Child: it won’t do.”

“It won’t do?”

“No, child.”

While John was looking into a shop window, Frank pleaded with her whether they could not really spend this last day alone.

“I will telephone to her,” said Eva, as if struck by a brain-wave, “and see what she says.”

She vanished in a telephone box, and Frank and John watched her mute lips through the glass door assiduously explaining into the telephone what looked a difficult, and at the other end an uncongenial, proposition.

“No,” she said, emerging from the box, “she says John must come with us, because he is so shy and would lose himself alone in London. ‘You have only one little brother,’ she said.”

“This is damnable,” thought Frank. “At any rate let us go and have lunch somewhere,” he said aloud, “and think it over.”

They lunched in embarrassed silence, broken here and there by an embarrassed question. “You crossed over when?”

“Tuesday. Arrived in London very late, so went to a hotel. Travelled with nine Catholic priests,” she said, “so all went to the same hotel, and to the Cinema together, and we all held hands.”

“Nine Catholic priests, and you in the middle?”

“No, at one end. Father Michael and I holding hands, and all the other eight, too, in a chain. Very intriguing.”

“Must have been.”

After lunch, as they were sauntering along, an idea occurred to Frank. “John,” he said, “would you like to go to a theatre—by yourself?”

“Fancy! all by yourself like a grown-up man!” said Eva.

John giggled nervously.

“To a show of Maskelyne and Devant?”

“Fancy!” said Eva. “Acrobats, John! Acrobats and things. Eh? John?”

“I don’t mind,” said John.

They jumped into a taxi, and Frank bought a stall ticket, and John, accepting it with a kind of nervous misgiving, was ushered into the darkness (the performance having already begun), the attendant like a gaoler on his heels. “Tell him, tell him to look after John, who is so shy!” Eva cried. But John and his gaoler had vanished in the dark.

Freedom at last! They were free, free, free; free of all but the exigence of their freedom. He avoided the shops with her, but she must have a bottle of scent and let him buy all that the saleswoman insinuated. She gave in completely to the saleswoman’s idea of what was the proper thing for her. The saleswoman seemed to have no doubt, and appreciating Frank’s secret loathing of her and her sex, made it a point of honour for him to comply with Eva’s tutored wishes.

“And I just want to look at these gowns.”

“Better come out and look at Nature. A lovely day!”

“I’d like that gown.”

“No doubt. I’d like a new suit.”

“Must have another gown to go about with de Jones, you know. In Paris and Rome.”

“I got old Ottercove to stop his payments too soon, it would seem. Too soon, too damned soon!”

“Couldn’t you borrow, perhaps?”

“Couldn’t I!... Women will sell their bodies and souls for a vivid rag,” he said bitterly.

He looked at her and read her thought. With a melancholy twinge, she reflected that she had evidently sold hers without any such extenuating material compensation. “You are an awful old miser,” she said.

He suffered hell. Damn it all, she seemed to have no idea about the value of money! She did not know that the number of pounds in his pocket-book was strictly limited.

Through the Park they drifted into Kensington Gardens and walked across the grass towards the Serpentine. Eva wouldn’t let him take her arm.

“Bad form,” she explained.

They hired a boat, and as he rowed he watched her steer. She steered intently but very badly, zig-zagging needlessly all the way, while he puffed and sweated at the oars; which provoked him into biting sarcasm.

“Crooked again!”

“Why don’t you put it straight with the oars?”

“Can’t you see me,” he said, puffing, “otherwise employed?”

“Now don’t get ratty, darling, or you will feel sorry afterwards.”

“Why sorry?”

“When you think of it—remember, I mean.”

By the time they had rowed back, it was time, she judged, to go and fetch John from the matinée. “If we are not there, he won’t know where to turn to: he is so shy,” she said. “And Zita said to me, ‘Take care of John; you won’t always have your little brother with you.’”

This solicitude on behalf of John angered him. “Damn it all, we thought nothing of leaving him alone at the inn.”

“What inn, darling?”

“On the top of the Patscherkofl mountain in the Tyrol. Don’t you remember?”

Her eyes darkened and lightened again. “I remember, darling, I remember.”

“And it’s our last day together.”

“I am thinking—”

“What?”

“I have no real travelling costume for my Continental trip.”

“I have no proper overcoat, damn you.” Oh, why were there no girls as beautiful as Frances Doble and as intelligent as Henry James!

“Well, John, did you enjoy the performance?”

“Great fun,” stammered John.

“Tell us all about it, John.”

“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring and another man on the ring—”

“That will do, John. Wait till we are settled down in the café,” she said.

“Now then, John.”

“There was a ring and a man held on to the ring and a girl held on to the man and—”

“Wait, John. I was just thinking, if Zita asks me all about the performance I must tell the same story as John.”

“All the more reason why John should be allowed to disclose his impressions,” said Frank.

“Yes. Go on, John.”

“There was a man,” said John, “and a ring—”

“What will you have, John,” she asked, “tea or chocolate?”

On the way home, John talked of the performance. “There was a man,” he would say, “with a ring, and a girl held on to the man.”

“Shut up, John. That will do.”

She went in with John, and Frank said he would wait for her in Kensington Gardens to take her out to dinner. He was tired and glad to be alone. He sat down on a bench, and a nasty little girl of ten or so disengaged herself from a group of urchins and sat down between him and an old lady and began to tease him, pointing at him with her dirty forefinger. “You funny-looking bloke, you. Now why don’t you smile?” and all the other urchins crowded round and giggled at him. “Come on! Let’s see a smile!” the girl went on, encouraged.

The old lady at his side saw fit to intervene. “Behave yourself,” she said, “or go away and leave the gentleman alone.”

“It’s ‘im I’m torking to, not yer; you ‘old yer tongue.”

“Disgraceful girl!” said the old lady. But the little girl went on at Frank:

“Come, show us you can smile. Now then!”

“Shut up, will you!” suddenly Frank roared at her.

The girl went red and shrivelled up on the bench. “It’s ‘er,” she said tearfully, pointing at the old lady, “not me. None of ‘er bloomin’ business.”

One of those nasty winter fogs was descending on to London when Eva, late by an hour, appeared at the gate.

“Is sweet’eart!” jeered the girl, and all the urchins giggled with her.

“Well,” he said, rising, “I have had a time, waiting for you.”

“Zita and Pilling kept me back with their nonsense about my getting de Jones to talk to Ottercove about Pilling’s dancing place. I told them I’d be late and keep you waiting, but Pilling said: ‘Ferdinand will wait.’”

They were rattling along in a taxi, and he was telling her all about the cheeky girl in Kensington Gardens.

“Darling, I am not interested.”

“In anything that happens to me.”

“That isn’t true, darling. When I am away from you I always talk about you. This evening, for example, while you were waiting for me, I asked them if they thought you were very beautiful, but Pilling said: ‘I shouldn’t say he was beautiful to look at, but he is very clever. I wish I had his brains.’”

To Frank, who for years had been regarded as the fool of the family, this universal discovery of his brains was stimulating and refreshing.

At dinner Eva was crotchety because he would not take her out to the Savoy to dance. “It isn’t really at all expensive, darling. It really isn’t. I only want to go so as to tell Zita how you don’t mind throwing away money on me. Because Pilling is so careful, and she hates it so. Only to be able to tell her, you see.”

“Well, tell her.”

“What?”

“Anything you like.”

“H’m. That’s an idea. I never thought of that.”

“Tell her we dined with their Majesties.”

“Zita,” she confided to him, “doesn’t seem to like you much. She said, ‘The one good thing about him is that he has pots of money.’”

“Pots! Barrels full! Brains and money. Beauty, too! Oh, what a lucky man am I! But why is it that I feel I’d like to go and blow my brains out?”

“If you don’t stop quarrelling,” she said, “I will leave immediately, and you will be sorry all your life.”

“Then we shall leave together.”

On their way back he stopped the taxi-cab a few doors away from Pilling’s house and walked on with her into a more deserted lane. They walked in silence. Suddenly it came to him that he might be seeing her for the last time. And what was it that she resented? That he had so far omitted to say the fateful word? He guided her to a sort of blind door in the masonry of a house, and took her in his arms. But a policeman hove in sight and said, “Move on, please. You’re not allowed to stand here.”

They went on and turned into another lane. She hurried him, saying that Pilling and Zita were surely anxious that she was not yet home. It angered him, and at the thought of the last inadequate hours together, full of bickerings and vexations, tears flooded his eyes as he suddenly kissed her good-bye. He stood in the darkness, watching her as she walked to the end of the lane and, without turning to him, disappeared behind the corner.

He walked away at an accelerated pace. He said: “No. Never again. It’s finished as if it had never been! I am glad, and nothing that may come will wipe out the memory of my saying here, deliberately, immediately on parting, that I am glad I did not say the word.” He walked the length of Bayswater-road into Oxford-street and all the way to his club, and on entering his room pulled out his diary and wrote:

XVII.

It was thus that soon after Eva’s departure with the mystical de Jones, Frank found himself one afternoon strolling vacantly down Oxford-street. A crowd of people. Bustling, frolicking folk. Women, gay, charming, so beautiful, so tender, whose arms, if they could guess, might open for the kiss—and who passed him without a look! Flitting by on what was the latest in footwear, thin ankles, swelling into glossy silken calves—oh, rapture! oh, seduction! How lonely one could be in a crowd. For it wasn’t—he reflected—that there was any one cohesive and receptive sensibility in that crowd, which frolicked and enjoyed life while he suffered, into which he could have merged with any profit. Groups of laughing young voices.... Why could he not talk to them without causing them to feel they had been slighted, or landing himself at Marlborough-street Police Station? Why could he not join them without very soon being bored? There they were, groups on the face of it, but really solitary, yearning, suffering souls like himself. There was no sort of one central well in all this diffused accidentally accumulated hilarity from which one could draw. All came out to look at the feast—and all looked without being filled.

He saw rich men in furs and motor-cars, and wished them joy of it; he read the New Year’s Honours list, and sensed no pang; he watched old colleagues overtake him on the road to fame, and felt no jealousy; he had seen his father’s fortune blown to smithereens, without a blink: but that every woman whom he looked at twice did not immediately yield herself to him was something he found hard to bear, harder to forgive. To possess all the comely women in the world, the female portion of the universe, in a sort of cumulative, consummative kiss—it was his dream. For—indisputably—one woman was not like another; and how? how enjoy them all? While lying, as he thought appeased, in one woman’s arms, the thought that there must be another in some particular different from his own would at once renew his restlessness and send him searching, searching round the globe. Content at last, content and happy at Port Said, the thought of what he must be missing in Calcutta was sufficient to uproot him and send him on his onward quest over plain and mountain, dune and sea, continent and ocean, till, with ever greater frequency, he would rebound in London, in Piccadilly Circus, the reputed centre of the world, with his heart still burning, with hot tears in his parched throat. “I can’t bear it,” he said, looking with a kind of stupor at the fountain he had seen before. “I will kill myself....”

A practical man inessentially, Frank was impractical in essentials. He had a kind of vague idea that the whole universe and all that it held could, under favourable conditions, be embraced in a woman’s kiss, the consummation, das Welt-Alles! The all-in-all. There was a critic just then who wrote copiously in the Adelphi about the One and the Many. Yes, perhaps the One was to be realised most clearly in one of the many. “Very likely,” he said, “very likely.” Was he already beginning to regret his Eva’s absence? No, he had weighed her kisses in the balance and had found them wanting. Except for that first virgin kiss upon the mountain-top when she came up close, close to him, took a long breath and closed her eyes....

He turned into Piccadilly, steadied his thoughts, and continued in a Tolstoyan mood of honest self-analysis: “Then what am I to do? Renounce the flesh and turn saint? Difficult. Difficult and uncongenial. Essentially the world is good and one ought to know how to be happy. But happiness is a strange thing: it is in two parts and is conditioned by an inner equilibrium. On the surface I oscillate in a kind of twilight, through black night into the dawn and back: but within, my soul sings like a lark and it is morning. And all is well and beyond implication. I knew it long ago. Yet I cannot sit down in the cool quiet of a pillared cathedral as I would by choice, with all my passions and lusts raging in me, raging in me! Essentially all is well. Certainly. Certainly. But that does not do away with the surface things being all wrong. Mere pinpricks. Perhaps. But the skin is a sensitive tissue.”

Tired out, he sat down on a bench in the Green Park and pulled out his Times. How it assumed that all was well and orderly in the world. With what propriety it examined and relegated to the requisite sections and columns the haphazard irrelevance of life. But how sane, how quiet and dignified and, withal, informed. Under a rubric headed “Science,” he read:

“ ...In the course of the year Jeans has explored the problem further, and has reached conclusions of immense significance in our conceptions of the universe. These are, in short, that the chemical elements of which we have knowledge are only one end of an indefinite series and that end a degeneration from an indefinitely more complex set of atoms in the distant stars and nebulæ. The conditions in which life is possible are an extreme case, possibly unique, and came about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time. The primary physical process of the universe is the conversion of matter into radiation, a process not even suspected until 1904. The primary matter of the universe consists of highly complex atoms, dissociated and incapable of association inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.”

He stopped reading and pondered. “Dissociated and incapable of association.” Significant.... Significant and suggestive. “The primary matter of the universe ... consists of atoms incapable of association ... inasmuch as they change their make-up millions of times in a second.... Like me,” he thought. And came to the conclusion that he was, his salvation lay, in the primary matter of the universe.

Calmed down, appeased by a distant hope of merging into the primary matter of the universe and finding peace in changing his make-up with it millions of times in a second with more inward profit than heretofore and more pleasure than he found in his already frequent reboundings in London, he strolled on across the Park and called in to see Lord Ottercove.

Lord Ottercove, as he saw him, looked as though he had no wish to change his make-up millions of times in a second, but was indeed perfectly content with his make-up such as it was and, moreover, dissociated himself from the primary matter of the universe, being content to dwell and act within that end of the indefinite series of chemical elements come about by a destruction of matter through countless aeons of time and described by the paragraph in The Times as an extreme, possibly unique, case in which life (and journalistic activity) was possible.

“Forgive me for not rising,” he said. “But all these things will fall off my lap if I do.”

“What need for me to forgive you,” thought Frank, “since you have already forgiven yourself?”

There was an air about Lord Ottercove as though he knew what a rich and splendid type he was for the imaginative novelist—and he was always ready to help the young and striving artist—but could scarcely comprehend the established novelists’ blindness to the riches lying at their feet. Now that he knew Frank had conceived him as the hero of his new novel he not only proved a willing sitter, but lent his own imagination towards bettering Frank’s plot. And this he did in a way that tended to enhance the prestige and lovableness of the hero by placing him in more favourable situations than those envisaged by the author. Frank, in relating the plot of his new novel, might say: “And here the scientist gets the better of the hero by an ingenious use of the latter’s newspapers to an end the hero cannot at this stage envisage.”

“Quite,” Lord Ottercove would say. “But by pretending not to see the scientist’s game the newspaper proprietor outwits him in the following chapter.”

Frank was grateful to Lord Ottercove for the privilege of seeing him in all his multifarious attitudes from every angle and aspect: in his beautifully fitting tailcoats (there were several of them in the office and in every one of his several town and country houses); in his silk pyjamas; in the heroic act of jumping out of bed; sitting on the edge of it in pensive mood with his bare feet dangling meditatively; in dishabille; in dressing-gown and en pantoufles; or shaving in his vest and pants: in all attitudes and from all aspects Lord Ottercove, Frank could but remark, was unequivocally, indubitably great. It seemed as if Lord Ottercove in his unfailing thoughtfulness provided him with these opportunities to study him at all hours and in all attitudes. If Frank had not, as yet, had the opportunity of studying his lordship au naturel, it was because such study, both for descriptive purposes in a work of fiction and as a practical opportunity, was, he willingly recognised, in advance of current customs and usages.

“Well, how are you?” said Lord Ottercove. “How are your sales?”

In the first week of January, and having run through some twenty issues of one of Ottercove’s newspapers, Pale Primroses by Frank Septimus Dickin appeared, in a pale jacket liberally sprinkled with flowers of the title, on the bookstalls; yet enjoyed but a melancholy sale which, with rumours of a new European imbroglio, dropped like the jaw of a man astonished. “Completely and utterly stopped,” said Frank.

“Look here,” said Lord Ottercove, “you should get married.”

“Gladly. But who will marry me with my sales stopped? My publisher’s wife’s great aunt died the other day, and he said to me over the telephone: ‘I think it only right to close down the office for a week to commemorate our respect for the dead woman.’”

Lord Ottercove thought deeply, and said:

“You should get married.”

“To whom?”

“I’ll introduce you. A peach of a girl. Beautiful. A wonderful face. I can look at it for hours at a stretch without getting bored. The trouble with her is that she’s got ... too much money.”

“But will she marry me?”

“She would if I gave you ... gave you The Evening Ensign.”

There was a pause. “It’s a pity,” said Frank, “that I don’t know her.”

“I will introduce you.”

“When?”

“Come and dine with me to-morrow night at my house.”

XVIII.

THE COTTAGE

Not unnaturally, cottagers are apt to dream of palaces, while it is well known that princes eat their hearts out for being denied the joy of dwelling in a cottage. “The Cottage,” situated in a shrubby garden high up in the Finchley-road, was Lord Ottercove’s unofficial home, and whither he retired whenever he felt like swinging a loose leg. Owning a great house in the West End of London, and several castles and country houses, he preferred to dwell in the seclusion of “The Cottage” in the Finchley-road. The ground floor had but two rooms: a dining and a sitting room, and here at the after-theatre hour he was that night dispensing supper to a bevy of chorus girls escorted by a number of young lords.

Lord Ottercove was a success. Whatever he touched, flowered: whatever he left, withered—and died of its own rottenness. He stood in the doorway now, in his exquisite tailcoat, one hand thrust in his trouser-pocket, indolently tapping his heel and looking on with that intelligent bright look which seemed to say: “I have long since reached my goal in life without much effort: what could I possibly do next?”

“Come in, Freddie, come in, now don’t be shy!” he cried to a young actor hesitating on the threshold. “My love, my sweetheart, my honeysuckle, how are you?”—to a bevy of beauties, as they sidled in, twitching their nude shoulders.

“Freezing, darling Rex,” they twittered.

“Rita,” to a leading lady, “do you love me?”

“You are Christ to me!”

And then, panting slightly (by the end of the night Frank loved her panting, and by the end of the month he hated it), in sauntered a, Frank perceived, very strikingly good-looking girl in red, and by his host’s eager look and introduction: “This is Mr. Dickin. Miss Cynthia Wellington,” Frank understood that she indeed must be his proffered prize.

If so, she didn’t seem to appreciate her mission. She was certainly beautiful and, as Ottercove had said, her face could be beheld for hours at a stretch, with cumulative pleasure. She had been seated at Frank’s side and she was mildly interested in what he could contrive to tell her. But supper over, and the host having taken her aside for a few moments, she came back another woman, and Frank found he had no difficulty now in keeping her at his side. The other guests, numbering a princess of the blood, a starving Russian diplomat, exquisitely arrayed, and the cream of the West End Theatreland, sustained a strenuously “Bohemian” conversation of unmeaning levity till it was late enough for all to go without pronouncing the party a failure. Lord Ottercove’s attitude—Frank read the question in his look—was:

“Amusing dogs—or are they not amusing? Have you been used to something more amusing?”

The dogs were not amusing.

He kept Frank and Cynthia back till all the other guests had gone, and then told the butler to wake up his chauffeur, and despatched them home in the winged chariot.

Frank had not been long in the car with her when he discovered that Cynthia was physically desirable. As the chariot, taking a good, long run down the Finchley-road, suddenly took wing and Cynthia panted, he grasped her hand as if to reassure her, and having grasped her hand (good old Ottercove to provide him with this opportunity) he did not let go again. When Cynthia panted again, it was a different kind of panting.

The view that all women are alike seemed to Frank, as a piece of thinking, to err on the inadequate side. They were indeed all different. But in one particular all women were alike, and that was in their uniform desire to be different; and in their cheap fear of seeming cheap. Seized by the idea of making her his wife and eager to anticipate the marriage ceremony, he was prepared to hear her say that no doubt he thought her just like any other woman and replied that, on the contrary, she seemed to him peculiarly, uniquely different from them all; after which assurance she behaved like all the other women, and then said:

“Now, I wonder what you’ll think of me after that.”

He had not thought anything of her to begin with and did not think any the worse of her now.

“Now, darling,” he said, “we simply must get married.”

The winged chariot and his thoughts, descending from the air at a slope, touched ground at the same time. The car ran forward. His thoughts ran on. “The day after to-morrow.”

“I suppose we might,” Cynthia said quietly. “Are you rich enough?”

The darling! She was really sweet! Didn’t want to hurt his feelings, evidently, and let him think he was the breadwinner. Evidently a girl of sensibility. Welcome. Very welcome. Thinks, no doubt, he may resent her money, and keeps quiet about it. Sensible girl. Good girl. Beautiful girl. Nice to look at. Voluptuous. In every way adequate. Are you rich enough, indeed! He had ten pounds in his breast-pocket; and beyond that he may yet have something in his trouser-pocket. He didn’t know how much. But probably a shilling piece. And perhaps more.

“You needn’t chaff about it. I’ve more than you think, darling. Ottercove has promised me, in case of marriage with you, The Evening Ensign as a wedding present.”

At that she sat up. “Very nice.”

Before the car pulled up at her door, she said:

“Come and have tea with me to-morrow.”

“I will have tea with you to-morrow—Sunday,—and marry you on Monday.”

He gave Lord Ottercove’s flying chauffeur ten pounds and undressing for bed emptied his trouser-pocket of the shilling.

XIX.

Out of the shilling he purchased next day a ticket on the metropolitan railway and rang at the bell of Cynthia’s door; in Half-Moon-street. When the door yielded under his vehement onslaught he strode like a fighting-cock past the door porter, for he was burning with love. But the door porter, an elderly man, called him back and said:

“Kindly wipe your feet, sir, on that mat outside: this is an expensive carpet and belongs to the first floor people.”

“But isn’t Miss Wellington on the first floor?”

“No, sir, she lives in the attic.”

He crawled upstairs, up innumerable flights of stairs, and the higher he climbed the lower his spirits descended. Strange, he reflected, that a girl whose trouble Ottercove had said was too much money should live in an attic. But there it was! Millionaires had fancies and did for pleasure what other folks were paid to do. Wasn’t the late Emperor of All the Russia’s favourite recreation chopping wood in the palace yard?

A maid responded to his summons and he stepped into a neatly-appointed apartment. He had scarcely had time to smile at Cynthia, when the maid announced:

“Mr. Mortimer Pilling.”

And the delicate room held the strong, wiry man with the crisp, curly black hair. “’Pon my word! Dickin, of all people! Had no idea you knew him, Cynthia. You never let on.”

“How could I? I only know him since last night.”

“Oh, really?” Pilling looked enquiringly at Frank.

“It seems as if I had known you all my life and even earlier in a pre-terrestrial existence. But, in point of fact, we only met last night. Where was it? Ah, yes, at Ottercove’s, wasn’t it?” said Frank.

“A man,” said Pilling, “I always wished to meet. A most delightful man, by all accounts, and one who could be useful to me in a thousand ways and particularly in a little enterprise I have in mind.”

“You must meet him, Mortimer,” said Cynthia, while the bell rang at the front door.

There was a sigh of exhaustion in the hall, and when Cynthia came back she was followed by a new guest.

“Mr. Mortimer Pilling. Lord Ottercove.”

Lord Ottercove gave Pilling one searching, long look with his penetrating grey eye and shook hands. Mortimer Pilling looked as though his day had arrived. But Lord Ottercove turned to Frank: “Well, how did you enjoy yourself last night?”

“By all accounts,” said Pilling, following Lord Ottercove round the room, “he enjoyed himself very much. Ha! ha! ha!”

“It was dull,” said Ottercove to Frank and not looking at Pilling.

“You need Mrs. Kerr,” said Pilling, looking from Frank to Ottercove, “to brighten up a party. You remember, Dickin, our tea-party together last month?”

“Yes,” said Frank, “I remember.”

Lord Ottercove sat down heavily in a big chair and never once looked up at Pilling. Never did Frank Dickin see him so impressive. The Grand Duke of Fleet Street had surreptitiously climbed up eight flights of steps (he who said he suffered from his heart) and now sat still in a great armchair and wouldn’t look at Pilling. Never, Frank reflected, is a great man more a great man than in a low-ceilinged attic, at the side of a Pilling. For, but for the Pillings, no one might know that Lord Ottercove was a great man.

“How are de Jones and Eva?” Frank enquired.

“Very well,” said Ottercove.

“I am very fond of Eva,” put in Pilling.

“Nearly done with Paris and going on to Rome. I am off myself to join them at Nice at the end of the month. Will you come with me?”

“Well,” said Frank, looking anxiously at Cynthia, who returned a look which he interpreted as a sign not to reveal to Ottercove the secret of their forthcoming wedding.

“Have you seen the papers?” Lord Ottercove asked, confining his enquiry to Frank and Cynthia, while Pilling quickly said: “About the General Election?”

“How old Joe’s already shouting,” Ottercove continued, oblivious of Pilling’s question, “about the bursting granaries that would be ours if we back the Liberals to put an end to international bickerings and jealousies and push on with the Lord de Jones scheme. And his Hackney speech! Lord Ottercove assumed the pose of a public speaker. ‘And we shall ask, by what right, whether human or divine, some men’s tummies digest more bread and butter in one hour of their sleep than you, O Toiling Masses, can earn by the sweat of your brow in a week?’

“‘’Ear, ‘ear! Good old Joe!’

“But he silences them with a gesture; his hand again shoots out: ‘And we shall ask’—Grand fellow!”

“A great orator,” exclaimed Pilling.

Lord Ottercove’s eyes dimmed. “Joe,” he said, “is a giant.”

“He is,” said Pilling, looking from Lord Ottercove to Frank.

Lord Ottercove did not look at him. “And the news that de Jones has been received with acclamation by the Paris mob. Good sign that. Cheaper bread for the common people! And old Joe knows how to give it the right ring. Grand fellow! We will beat the Conservatives at the poll this time, you’ll see. It’ll do them good to be beaten.”

“Why?”

“Conservatism is a subversive habit to conserve what was won by the Liberals of the past. If Conservatism is to live to-morrow, let Liberals have their way to-day.” He rose and, turning to Frank, said:

“Come and see me to-morrow at five.”

Frank looked significantly at Cynthia. “Can’t at five:—six.”

Pilling left soon after Lord Ottercove.

Frank and Cynthia left a considerable time after Pilling.

XX.

When Frank called on Lord Ottercove at six o’clock on Monday, Lord Ottercove was standing at a window in his office, gazing pensively at the dissolving outlines of St. Paul’s gradually devoured by the dusk. Lord Ottercove’s pose reminded Frank of Napoleon looking at burning Moscow, and of Kerenski, in imitation of Napoleon, gazing from a window in the Winter Palace at the burning theatre “Bouffe”, and Frank felt that the situation called for a fitting and pregnant remark on the man of action by the man of letters: “A man of letters puts into letters what he cannot put into action.” But Lord Ottercove, who, having soared above mean human endeavour and now only pondered upon it, considered himself a man of meditation, and did not look pleased.

“I was thinking,” he said, “of youth and the glory of struggle. How I envy you young men. The future belongs to you.”

“Why envy us, since the present belongs to you? The future is but a deferred present.”

“All the good the present is to us is that it helps us to forget that we have no future.”

“Mankind has not yet learnt,” said Frank, “to live in and for each moment. That is the meaning of life. And that is why I have just gone and got married: as a most effective means of living in the present.”

“Got married?” said Lord Ottercove, knitting his brows. “To whom?”

“To Cynthia Wellington!”

Lord Ottercove walked up and down several times. “Incredible,” he said. “It amazes me. Why, she’ll be the ruin of you. An extravagant girl like that, and you have no money.”

“But she has, hasn’t she?”

“Too much! Too damned much, one might think by the way she goes about it. That’s the trouble with her. Tends to give the impression of having what she hasn’t got.”

“But you said so.”

“Ironically. You should study the inflection when I speak; it is all-important. As important as punctuation. Ever heard of King Charles?”

“Yes.”