Eva's apples

XXVII.

Returned, Eva vanished mysteriously and came back with a book and asked them to write in her album.

“All these your admirers, Eva?” Ottercove scanned the pages wearily. “Hello what’s this?

“Whoever wrote this, Eva?”

“A little schoolboy in Ireland.”

“Shame!”

“He loved me.”

“That’s something.”

Frank the while was scanning the pages of The Sunday Runner, Ottercove’s youngest and favourite offspring. “Rotten newspaper,” he said, as if to himself, but loud enough for Ottercove to hear him. “Nothing of me in it.”

“I am taking you to-night to Maxime’s. And now,” said Lord Ottercove, “I’ll jump into bed. Good-night to you.”

And, to precipitate their going, he was already removing his tie and collar.

That night at Maxime’s Eva looked exquisite. She had not, Frank felt, before now expanded her more expensive potentialities. Now she looked like really expanding them. And Lord Ottercove looked very much like encouraging her to expand them. She was a plant that suddenly flowered when put in a vase of champagne. The competition for her on the part of the three men developed into rapid fire. “Now then, Eva, why this hesitation?” Ottercove demanded. “I am a man of brains. I am a man of money. I am a man of love and a capacity to requite love once it is lavished on me tit for tat. Quid pro quo.”

“Do you love me, Rex?”

He smote the table. “With all my heart.”

“Truly?”

“I swear by my love for my newspapers or may God strike me dead!”

“And you, Ferdinand?”

“Can you ask? What of my courage? Am I not setting out all alone against all his newspapers, with possibly the other newspaper lord at the back of him—in fact, the whole of the more sinister Press of Great Britain against me!”

Lord Ottercove, gripping his knife and fork in his two fists—he was in high spirits to-night—leaned back and laughed. There was in his gesture all the self-confidence and abandon of men who had climbed to the top of the ladder. On the top of the ladder one is apt to let oneself go. (Which, by no means, applies to all ladders. One’s solicitude for one’s fate on most ladders is never so keen as on the last rung. But—let us be perfectly clear—it is a solicitude different in kind from that which is experienced by people passing under a ladder.)

“And you, Chris?” she asked. “Will you love me all your life?”

“All my life and fifty years after.”

“You might be Mr. Solberg, the Register of Copyrights at Washington,” said Frank.

“Isn’t Ferdinand beautiful?”

“As beautiful as my nose.”

Lord Ottercove was getting cheerier and cheerier, and he danced less steadily than he was wont to do. “Now, Chris, don’t you make love to Eva. Hands off! you married men! You haven’t been divorced a month. I at least am a bachelor and can marry her to-morrow if the fancy takes us. Can’t I, Eva? I’ll stop that crater mission of yours if you don’t take yourself away in time.” He looked at Eva. “I’ve got to blow him up a bit from time to time, or he gets too cocky, you know.”

“It’s me who will do it,” de Jones said.

“Do what?”

“Blow you all up.”

Lord Ottercove called the waiter and paid. While they were putting on their coats and pushing through the door into the street, de Jones and Frank lingering behind, Lord Ottercove jumped into the car after Eva, slammed the door and drove off.

XXVIII.

THE REVELATION

“Well,” said Lord de Jones, taking Frank by the arm and leading him into a similar establishment almost next door, “if they are off, we shall continue by ourselves.” And he ordered more champagne and more chicken. The hour was far advanced into the morning and the last revellers were leaving the premises. The band played on sulkily for the two new visitors and looked appealingly at the waiters. “Look here, Dickin,” de Jones said, rather thickly, “you’re a jolly good sort and I am awful fond of you.”

“I, too, I really am, very fond of you, more than I can say.”

The wine had done its noble work: they lived in a world of mutual and uncritical esteem.

“By Jove, you’re a fine fellow, Dickin, that’s what you are! A fine fellow. A fine fellow. And a damn good writer too!”

Frank remembered through his dim but blissful state that de Jones could never be persuaded to read a book of any sort, let alone Frank’s novels, but now this fact did not detract, but rather added value to the sincerity of the noble lord’s appreciation. And, when, with swelling heart, Frank answered, “And I feel, de Jones, you’re first among contemporary scientists!” he really felt it. As the waiter opened a new bottle of champagne, Lord de Jones lapsed into reminiscence. “Why do I love that girl? Traits of her mother? As a young man I did not care for women, and they did not care for me. You see what I look like. A Frenchwoman once described my appearance as ‘ignoble’! But that one when I saw her first in Russia! Now, of course, she is nothing much to look at. But at that time she was extraordinarily good looking—better than her daughters. I was constrained by her husband and was half blind to her suggestive looks. I wouldn’t listen. Till one day as I was leaving her she fell before me on the floor. That somehow got hold of my senses. Raymond dates back to that incident, I believe. The vision of her prostrate on the floor haunted me always. It made me come back to her. I always went back. And now’s she’s too old.... I am drunk or I wouldn’t be telling you this.”

He was silent a while. “Eva, Dickin,” he said. “He abducted her, but we two can go on loving her more than he will ever understand....”

Dickin’s eyes filled. “We love her,” he said. “We all love her. Perhaps Ottercove too loves her. Why can’t we all love her and love one another?”

“Don’t I know my excellent uncle Lord O.! Have you seen him sign himself ‘O.’? A tremendous O. Nevertheless, the numerical symbol.”

“You are hard on the baron.”

“Am I? I like his boyishness, his prodigious vitality. He is a Hannibal playing quoits with the world. Not, I regret to say, because he loves the world, but because he loves playing quoits. But a rather lovable enfant terrible all the same. He could have helped me. But he would back out of it next day. He has no large plan of action; but he conceals this very cleverly by dramatising every little situation on the spur of the moment, improvising campaigns at the turn of an effective phrase, and making you think that his least bit of whim is the component part of a large premeditated whole.”

“I know. A sort of second inspiration known to dramatists, more clever but more freakish than the main idea.”

“Exactly. But he has no main idea, unless it be a certain feeling for caution, which, coupled with his second inspiration in which he is a virtuoso, determines his success. He may turn into a great peacemaker to-morrow, and the day after find himself uttering: ‘It is not peace I have brought, but a sword,’ and side with the forces of war; and, in turn, prove successful in each. I am bitter because I cannot get him to help me in my mission without resorting to subterfuge, which maddens me. This idiotic crop-growing scheme! He was quick enough to seize it for his own journalistic ends without bothering to probe the scientific aspect. If I could make him understand my real motive I might fire his imagination for a day; but he would sleep on it (he always sleeps on all important questions and telephones his decision in the morning), sleep on it and ring me up at dawn: ‘Look here, Chris. It is a brilliant idea. But I advise you against it. Why? It would not do you any good. Good-bye to you,’ and hang up the receiver. ‘Do you no good.’ Not him, no! No advertising possibilities. Actors and audience simultaneously reduced to smithereens!

“Why should we regret it? Schopenhauer could not understand how it was that man, in the teeth of all this pain and hell of life, had not the sense and pluck to end it. Wherever I look, in every moment there is pain. The pain of memory, the pain of anxiety, the pain of sheer dullness, the pain of regret. You cannot think either backward or forward for ten minutes without a pang of pain. Then why should we be sorry to quit it, to take ourselves away to where pain cannot reach us?

“It’s a poor life, Dickin. The more successful, the more multifarious and sensitive, the more painful. We are, with our birth, caught in a vice and cannot away. You don’t believe in the devil. But I do. The brain is the devil. A malignant cancerous growth. It’s a mockery from start to finish. We are simply made to chase after our own tail, and Satan stands by and laughs: ‘Let us see whether they have sense and pluck enough to end it.’ The mundane life is a blind avenue we have strayed into while nobody was looking. We must get out. There is no other course. We do not belong here. Do not the eyes of humans and beasts alike tell you that we do not belong here? We must quit en masse, get away.

“The cruelty and pain of this world. The pain and cruelty. Donkeys and mules goaded with a stick; the resigned suffering in their eyes. The Arabs cut their donkeys and then prod the wound: ‘Go on, damn you.’ And, in the same way, we are all goaded. On the raw, or we won’t move. Goaded by desire, remorse, love, hope, despair.... Hourly, minute by minute.

“This is not an age that believes in the coming of a new Messiah. It believes, foolishly, in what it can touch and see. What will you say, Dickin, when I tell you that already as a youth I had intimations of a mission, of being a—don’t laugh—a new Messiah, clad not in fine raiment, nor born in a manger, but in the fashion of the age scientifically equipped! Christ showed the way, but lacked the mechanical means. He said this visible world had to be completely and utterly destroyed: He waited for the miracle: but none came. Christ had love, but no dynamite.

“But not for ever will mankind be mocked. My friends, the hour of deliverance is at hand. How is it?: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ The Resurrection and the Life.” Suddenly his eyes were moist. He wept.

As they walked back it was light and the birds were twittering in the square.

XXIX.

When Frank knocked at Eva’s door there was no answer. As he flung himself into bed the sun already pressed itself through the curtain.

The glowing earth swam in a silver sky. It swam and swam. And a shark came out and followed it wanting to devour it. The poor earth had but two fins and swam helplessly out of the reach of de Jones’s jaws. There she was with all her cities and towns labouring to get away, panting dreadfully; how hard he pushed her and how ineffectively. That was because he was a passenger upon her and helpless as a man endeavouring to accelerate the motion of a train. In his office on the top of the roof, from the captain’s bridge, Ottercove shouted orders through a megaphone: “Faster! faster! faster!” he cried. And the capitalists whipped up the slaves and made them row faster. But a Trade Union strike was just on and the miners and rowing men quitted their tools. And the Prime Minister, as he urged the policemen to hearten them up with their bayonet points, appealed to the galley slaves’ sense of duty and patriotism and called on them “by a supreme effort, their loyalty and solidarity in the cause of Humanity to save this planet, our Mother Earth, the common heritage of all our race, from the treacherous jaws of that monster,” while Ottercove from the bridge, whence there opened a limitless view of the world, including Ludgate-hill and St. Paul’s, shouted at them through the megaphone: “Faster, damn you! Still faster!” Already de Jones’s huge lower jaw dropped and took water as he swam up very close, and Frank’s heart stopped beating. The shark’s jaws opened quite wide about to swallow the earth with London and Paris and Vienna and all, and the men in the fields and the women and animals and the suffering; and Ottercove from his bridge (pushing aside the Prime Minister) encouraged the rowing men with a long, big stick, as de Jones’s sharp teeth fastened upon the green flanks of the earth—an enormous stick like the trunk of a tree: Bang! bang! bang! The knocking grew louder.

Frank opened his eyes. “Come in,” he said.

The door opened admitting Gilbert’s tremulous frame. “Sorry to waken you, sir, but his lordship asks if you will take breakfast with him in his bedroom.”

He threw on his dressing-gown and followed the valet into his master’s apartment, where he found the baron in bed, which was littered with newspapers. “Well,” said Lord Ottercove genially, “I’ve got away with the goods.” The balcony door was wide open. The blue Mediterranean stretched out its paws and basked in the sun.

De Jones came in, and at the same time Eva in her pink dressing-gown and red-heeled slippers sidled in from the adjoining room. “Gilbert,” she said, “please wrap these up for me.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Let me introduce you to my wife,” said Ottercove.

“Your wife—?”

“We went and got married last night,” she explained.

“A brain wave,” said Ottercove. “I get such brain waves sometimes.”

“A happy thought,” said Eva.

“The second inspiration,” de Jones looked at Frank.

“Anyway I got the better of you two there,” said Ottercove uncertainly.

“You did,” said Eva. “It never occurred to them to do it. And I am sure I gave you plenty of opportunities, Ferdinand.” Her tone was meek and propitiating. “So it’s not my fault.”

“No, of course not. Still, it is a blow. One is never so keen on a thing as when one has just lost it.”

Lord Ottercove smiled pleasantly. The assertion seemed to rehabilitate his doubting judgment as to whether he had acted wisely overnight. “Of course,” he said, “she’s a nice girl and wanted encouraging with marriage to a man of brains and money who can do something with her. I felt all along it would have been sheer waste throwing her away on either of you. Casting pearls before swine, though I don’t, of course, mean anything personal. Will you both lunch with us?”

At lunch Lord Ottercove was subdued. All competition had suddenly ceased with his acclaim as the winner; yet he did not look at all as though he had won the Derby. He looked as he must have felt: as if he had rolled head over heels in his best trousers and torn a hole in the seat, and that instead of everyone laughing and clapping they merely said to him, “Go and change.” In passing things during lunch and helping himself he looked a little shame-faced, and the three men were all glad when the meal was over and they could go for a drive. Each wanted to be sure that Eva took the ukulele with her to help them slide over the blank minutes. Frank enjoyed riding about with Lord Ottercove in powerful motor-cars, rapidly, rapidly, with a purposeful air, to no particular destination. It was somehow, he felt, symbolical of Ottercove’s whole person. “Now, Chris, shut up and let us hear what Dickin has to say.” And after listening to Frank, “Now, Dickin, shut up. You’ve said enough. Chris, let’s hear you.” Then: “Well, neither of you seem to have anything very illuminating to say. I had better think it out myself.”

“You’re a genius,” said Frank. “A genius of God-knows-what; but a genius!”

“Yes,” concurred de Jones, “there is no doubt at all about your greatness; there may be some doubt about the quality of your greatness, but no doubt about the greatness.”

“Yes, when you are without your spectacles, Rex, you look a genius,” said Eva. “But the moment you put them on you look like a doctor or a harassed business man, or a clergyman who says, ‘How are we this morning?’”

“My heart,” said Lord Ottercove, “very jumpy to-day.”

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Eva.

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Ottercove gravely, but reassured.

“I think so,” said Frank. “Complete stoppage of the bowels.”

“Better go back and telephone for the doctor,” said Eva.

Lord Ottercove was touched if you chanced to ask about his health, and now at Eva’s solicitude his eyes brimmed with tears. He took her hand and stroked it. He was so moved by her attitude that he could not speak, and only swallowed several times, and looked away. His health was not too good. His boiler would suddenly demur in the midst of festivities and pursue a mood of its own, and looking at the baron now as he reclined hatless in the depth of the limousine, Dickin wondered if the centre of his lordship’s mind was not—his expression suggested it—superintending the issues fought within him.

“No wonder,” Eva said, “your nose is red and shiny with all this whizzing up and down in motor-cars and not a moment’s quietness.”

He stroked her hand and went to sleep.

Frank looked a long time at Eva, reproachfully, before he asked in a whisper: “Why, why did you marry him? Why?”

“I thought it would please Pilling.”

“And I am forgotten! It didn’t take long.”

“But you are married yourself.”

“True. I’d forgotten.”

“Rex telegraphed last night after we had got married for Mummy and Zita and Pilling and Raymond and all to come out. ‘Let ’em all come out, the whole bag o’ tricks of them!’ he said. And we were married by a funny-looking parson; Rex had to pull him out of bed to marry us. He gave him five minutes to slip into some clothes, and a hundred pounds of money, and he married us in the sitting room without any trouble; said it would be all right. I was so pleased it was definite. But Rex looked puzzled and worried and talked to himself all the time, and when we were back in the car he said he must have walked upstairs to the clergyman’s flat in his sleep and wondered whether what he had just done could not be undone perhaps by the Pope if he said he was a sleep-walker. But I said the law was sacred and definite for better or worse. And when we were all alone in the car and I began kissing him because he was my husband and expected him to behave like a bridegroom, he was so scared and looked through the window as though he wanted to jump out. And I held him back and tried to calm him down, and he kept saying: ‘My God! My God!’ And he asked me what had happened on the hill then? And I said, ‘Read Ferdinand’s serial.’ And he said, ‘Did it happen as in the serial?’ I said, ‘Read the serial and never mind what happened.’ And so he looked as though he’d gone and paid a huge price for something he’d bought at a shop and then got home and found it was quite rotten.”

“You may be his wife, Eva,” de Jones said, “but first and foremost you are my secretary. And you shall remain with me for the duration of my mission.”

“Yes, I will do my best, Chris, to help you grow wheat.”

He laughed. “They will believe anything—anything. But if ever you conceive something really terrible, nobody will hinder you but they will let you blow them up into smithereens with the sympathetic assistance of the Ottercoves and such who will believe the first cock-and-bull story that you choose to tell them.”

Lord Ottercove opened one eye and glared with it at de Jones, then closed it.

“Let us change the conversation,” Eva said.

Pointing at a pillared villa, “I like that pillared thing,” Frank said. “It asserts itself on the surrounding landscape. It’s a yea-saying to life! None of your snivelling English houses looking like half-built factories of red brick, hiding their faces as if ashamed of themselves.”

“Buy it, Rex, just for the two of us,” said Eva.

“I’ll buy it,” said the baron.

They got out and bought it, and then motored back to Nice in time for tea.

After tea, de Jones took Frank by the arm and marched him up and down the deserted, wind-swept Promenade des Anglais. “Why did he marry that girl, Dickin? He had no notion of it when he left us at Maxime’s last night. Just to be able to say to us in the morning: ‘I’ve got away with the goods.’ For the love of the phrase. And mind you, he didn’t seduce her—no fun in that, no advertisement! altogether too ordinary—but he married her to do something more striking that may arouse comment. He just felt that he owed it to himself and his brains and his money and all to afford a real piece of folly.”

“No, de Jones, it is we who are the fools for not having married her. His second inspiration has not failed him. It never does. He has enriched the rest of his life. Her sheer livingness is inexhaustible and—I can see it in your eyes, hear it in your voice—you love her as I do, more and more, to my dismay. All art is the translation of the subjective into an object. Thus I prefer Eva to earnest women who can talk of Pessimism and Buddhism but have no living and spontaneous form themselves. When an object like Eva shows no visible sign of containing a subject but appeals beyond all analysis, it may be taken that the divine spirit has found in her a happy home. She is God’s art, perfect like a flower.”

“You are right, Dickin. The soul wants fresh food, just the same as the body. And what some please to call the divided soul is the taste of a spiritual epicure whose crime and curse is that he does not care for preserved food. My excellent uncle Lord O. must always have everything of the best.”

“Oh, the memory of that first kiss! How she came into my arms, pliable like a young plant. The hot sun, the menace of our end, and the longing not to die unmarried. De Jones, I can’t believe that I have lost her. She will have all his houses and horses and servants to play with.”

“But not all the King’s horses, not all the King’s men, can put Humpty-Dumpty together again.”

When in the evening Frank returned to his rooms, he found a gold watch on his table. The watch was studded with large diamonds and inside was the engraved inscription:

When he entered the Ottercove’s suite and lingered in the drawing-room he was startled by the animated conversation which reached him from the adjoining bedroom. “Now don’t you think,” said a grieved, perhaps somewhat sarcastic voice, unmistakably the baron’s, “you should have taken me into your counsels instead of first disposing of the watch and then sending the jeweller to me for the money?”

“But you haven’t seen it!” the baroness rejoined impatiently. “It’s not at all expensive for what it is; it’s all in diamonds. What’s the use of your saying anything when you haven’t seen it?”

“Just so. Don’t you think I should have seen it, in view of your youth and inexperience, instead of laying yourself out to be swindled?”

“It’s nothing to you even to be swindled, so why make any bones about it?”

This seemed to disarm the other for a space. “Why do you do these things?” he then asked sadly.

“I wanted to please him.”

“But you could have waited a little, or asked.”

“You are an awful old miser,” she said, “and I am sorry I ever married you.”

“I see that I shall have to engage a governess to go about with you and chaperone you for a bit.”

“You are a walking mountain of impudence!” said the baroness, “and I don’t know what God was about when he made you!”

XXX.

Eva’s comment was not lost on Lord Ottercove. When next morning they drove to the Beau-Site in Cannes, Lord Ottercove wore a more becoming pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

“Just gone and settled their affairs,” he said, coming out on to the sunny terrace, where Eva’s relatives awaited him against the background of an ornamental garden and tennis courts on which rich Americans and English exercised their limbs all day.

“Very charming and touching,” said Mrs. Kerr. “But you should not have put yourself out, Lord Ottercove. Raymond would have settled my bill, I am sure. He is his mother’s boy.”

“Mummy, you are too silly for words!” Zita flared up. “Where does Raymond get his money?”

“From Eleonor of course.”

“And Eleonor?”

“From her uncle.”

“Well?”

“But I give it all to Chris.”

“Mummy is so stupid. She always draws wrong conclusions from everything. There she goes about with that ‘Please trample on me’ look, smoking cigarettes all day, agreeing with everybody. She takes Italian lessons at five shillings an hour, and in order to make up for it gives golfing lessons at five shillings an hour, and then takes her pupils out to tea, and spends ten shillings; or has her portrait done in the café; always invites everybody, stands drinks and cigarettes all round, pays for everybody; speaks to everybody in the restaurants—Italians, Germans, Scandinavians.”

“She is a white woman,” muttered Lord Ottercove.

“You know what I’ll tell you, Lord Ottercove! I am disappointed in Fyodor Ferdinandovitch. I knew nothing—nothing about it, till I read it in Pale Primroses. Naturally I asked the girls, and it all came out.”

“I know.”

“But both! Both!”

“He didn’t wish to leave either out, for fear of offending the other, I guess.”

“Mrs. Kerr,” said Frank, “I appeal to your idealism and good sense. In the severity of your indignation, you did not sufficiently allow for the circumstances in which, if I may put it thus, the drama was played. Picture the scene. All around us, an epic panorama, and I alone with two girls ... lovely girls ... the mountain spring ... certain death—and Shakespeare’s immortal lines—

“These loyal girls!” He placed a hand on either sister’s shoulder, and drew them to him. “These splendid girls!”

“Whom you have dishonoured!”

“Tut-tut, Mummy!” said Zita. “You mustn’t blurt these things out! Morty will murder Frank if he knows.”

“Well,” said Lord Ottercove, “I have made an honest woman of one of them at any rate—sorry, can’t do it to both.”

“I do not understand you, Lord Ottercove.”

“I have made an honest woman of Eva.”

“Explain it to me, please. I don’t understand.”

“I have married her.”

There was a pause. Mrs. Kerr looked round at them all, and satisfied herself that the statement was a bona-fide one.

“Well—I am very pleased. I must say that you have chosen well and wisely. She will make a good wife to you. I congratulate you both.”

“I hope, Mrs. Kerr,” Frank said, “that your grudge against me is over. I trust that you will rejoice in your daughter’s happiness, and will ever remember that the assignation of unworthy motives never helps but weakens an argument.”

“Dickin talks rot, but always with conviction. He would make a good lawyer,” said Ottercove.

“Yes, or a great priest,” said Frank, obviously pleased with himself. “I like to practise my oratorical gift.”

“Now let’s make a night of it!” proposed Mrs. Kerr.

Lord Ottercove did not reply. Lord Ottercove hated to act on other people’s suggestions and as a rule “advised them against it,” and if pressed for his reasons, produced arguments so cynically free from plausibility that he seemed himself amused by their bewildering effect on his opponent. If he approved of a suggestion, he said nothing; then, a few moments later, made it himself.

“I am taking you out to-night, all of you,” he said.

Pilling took Frank by the arm and marched him ahead, while the others followed behind at a distance.

“Glad you done it,” he said. “I thought it was me. My conscience sort of worried me. It’s a dirty thing to do. Glad you done it.”

“Damn it all, Pilling! It was a hill. Spring! Sunshine! You know those lines from Shakespeare?

“Shut up, Dickin!”

“You don’t realise the situation. We thought it was the end for us.”

“I realise. Force majeure. That white-washes it a bit. Otherwise, you know, I doubt whether you would be eligible for the best clubs.”

“Still, I am disappointed in Ferdinand Fyodorovitch,” said Mrs. Kerr, coming up from behind.

“I appeal to your idealism,” said Frank automatically. “As I said, the sun, the mountain spring—and those immortal lines—‘O Proserpina!...’”

They would not let him go on. Strange: the moment he began to quote those lovely lines, they would look sullen and angry, and ask him to “shut up.” It seemed as if they regarded his appeals to Shakespeare as in bad taste; till he would lose his temper. “It would really seem that my great crime consisted in getting saved!”

Eleonor, after some consultation with Raymond, came up to her uncle and took him aside. “It’s all very well,” she said, “Chris having adopted Raymond. But suppose Chris marries again and has a child of his own?”

“Then we must get him married at once.”

“Married! That is just what we are anxious to prevent, for fear it might result in a male child.”

“Married, of course, to somebody who is beyond hope of begetting children,” said Ottercove.

“But who?”

“To his old love, of course—Mrs. Kerr.”

“But how do you know she can’t have a child?”

“Her doctor told me in confidence.”

“But he will refuse!”

“We must bring pressure to bear on him.”

“How?”

“Chris is ruined, and he’s used to spending money. He knows I won’t give him a penny, and, in fact, he won’t have it from me. He likes to feel independent towards me. But of course, it’s only natural that Raymond, married to my niece who draws on my account to an unlimited extent, can’t help, good and loving son that he is, helping his mother. And Chris, married to her, will be all right.”

“Raymond and I want to marry next week in Paris,” said Eleonor.

Lord Ottercove’s lips moved almost silently. “Why not marry here? I know a chap—a parson—most obliging. Pulled him out of bed the other night to marry us. Read the marriage ceremony unruffled.”

“Yes, most obliging,” Eva concurred.

“And you, Chris? And you, Mrs. Kerr?”

“What’s that?”

“Why don’t you get married?”

“I don’t know that it’s very safe to attach me to her with the tape of a spent passion.”

“Look here, I’ve got hold of a fellow—a pastor of some obscure denomination. Very accommodating. He will remarry you all. What d’you think of it?”

“I am very glad, Chris, to be of use. You are a genius—”

“Of the untried,” said Ottercove.

“A real genius in science. And I want to help you in your discoveries. Yes, I do. Take the case of the Curies.”

“You mean Monsieur and Madame Curie?”

“Yes, I do. You will instruct me in your science and we will make new discoveries together, you and I, Christopher!”

“Help us!” Turning to Frank, he whispered: “They think they have got the better of me there. But the boot is on the other foot! What do I care whether I am blown up—single or married?”

“So in the end, all are satisfied,” said Ottercove.

“Except my poor ancestors,” murmured de Jones.

“Who are dead.”

“Who are dead.”

Pilling seemed pleased and impressed. “Lord Ottercove,” he remarked, as if out of the baron’s hearing, but loud enough for the baron to hear, “is a man of wide sympathies.”

“He is a live wire,” from de Jones.

That night, dashing off to Monte Carlo, where Lord Ottercove was entertaining them, Pilling was seen to step into the baron’s car, who not only did not seem to resent this intrusion, but actually welcomed him with a smile. “I have, as you say, wide sympathies. When I see a man struggling to get out of the water, I can’t resist helping him. It is my nature,” he was heard to say, stepping out of the car.

And, stepping again into the car with Pilling close on his heels, on the way back to Nice, he was heard to say: “I have an interest in a number of hotels which brings me in—er—about—er—three hundred thousand pounds a year, and I’ll finance you in your undertaking,” and slam the door behind him.

Next day, Mrs. Kerr, who always liked to show off herself and hers, called her new husband into the bathroom while John was shaving. “Look, look!” she said. “What a big sponge John has!” But Christopher looked as though he wished the sponge had been smaller, and the dowry larger.

The same day Frank picked up, in the lounge of the hotel, a newspaper, which informed him:

“Among the new arrivals at the Hotel Mauresco are Lord and Lady Ottercove, Viscount and Viscountess de Jones, Mr. Frank Dickin, the novelist, and the Honourable and Mrs. Raymond Mosquito.”

XXXI.

Since the wedding had taken place in Nice, the bride and bridegroom felt that they had to “get away” for their honeymoon, and elected a voyage by yacht. “I have got away with the goods,” said Lord Ottercove, “and I must get away with them.”

“I must leave at once,” said de Jones.

“I agree,” from Ottercove.

But as de Jones would not part with his secretary, and the new Lady de Jones would not part with her husband, they all left together, Frank as a supernumerary.

Perhaps, as a result of his marriage to Mrs. Kerr, Lord de Jones found delight in concentrating on his missionary work, dictating for hours and hours to Eva, who complained of “her poor brains.” He dictated to her, and made her read aloud her shorthand, and every time it seemed to him a mystery and a miracle. He did not really believe anyone capable of deciphering those puzzled and bewildered little signs they made.

He was beautifully in love with her, and every word she typed seemed to him a romance. He scanned the typescript, and suddenly perceived a letter she had erased with her own darling fingers so as to insert the right one: his heart filled with tears.

Frank conceived it his duty to warn her. “Be careful of him. This dictating is all very well, but it’s not the end of the business. It’s unwholesome to be alone with that man. He can—he can—”

“He can do nothing.”

“He can seduce you.”

“You have.”

“True. I’d forgotten.”

She looked at him quizzically.

“You don’t know that Chris—yes, I might as well say it plainly—well, you know as well as I do about Chris and your mother.”

“They are married.”

“Now they are. They haven’t before. Raymond is a living indictment of their relations.”

“Yes—Raymond—he somehow never cared for his father. But I don’t mind Chris loving me, because he is a friend of Mummy’s.”

“I have nothing further to say.”

“Thank goodness for that!”

But he would return at once with more to say.

“You shouldn’t make yourself so cheap, Eva!”

“Why shouldn’t I? He is so lonely, and never had a nice girl to love him.”

“Eva!”

“It gives him so much pleasure, and it’s so little trouble to me.”

“You leave my girl wife alone!” said Ottercove, coming upon Chris and Eva suddenly in the seclusion of the Captain’s bridge. “Why don’t you leave the girl alone?”

De Jones blinked at him. “There is a divinity,” he said, “that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we may.”

“You’ve got your wife, Chris. What do you want with mine?”

“She reminds me of her mother,” said de Jones.

“Ha! Not so bad!”

“She’s more like her mother was than her mother is.”

“But I’ve got away with the goods!” He strolled up and down several times, and then stopped, peering at the horizon. “Oh, my heart!”

“I think it’s the stomach,” said Chris.

“Yes, I think it’s the stomach,” said Ottercove.

“Poor darling!” from Eva.

At that, tears came to his eyes, and he turned away to hide his emotion.

XXXII.