Twos and Threes

in a tenor voice of exceeding charm;

“And therefore I have come to seek shelter beneath your aunt’s roof; dwelling amidst so much luxury, she will surely not begrudge me my cup of cold water,” and he sipped appreciatively at the port wine.

he warbled anew. “Not that she’s ever likely to be in a cauld blast, old skinflint stick-by-the-fire!” in soft parenthesis.

Peter said no more. Bertram, reduced to sudden penury, had once before returned in this fashion, but never yet with a wife. Miss Esther did not approve of her brother-in-law. Miss Esther, bright and chirrupy from an evening’s well-bred enjoyment, was now heard in the front garden, thanking Mr. Lorrimer, an elderly widower inclined to be attentive, for his kindness in seeing her home:

“You won’t refuse to come in for a glass of something and a sandwich? Nothing prepared, you know, nothing prepared; just pleasantly informal,”—innocent of what lay in store for her of pleasant informality.

Miss Esther was extremely short-sighted, and her first impression of the three figures round the fire at the far end of the room, was of Peter and her two young friends, Merle and Stuart. Then her cordial expression froze to antagonism, as advancing towards the male outline, the blur of face shaped itself into the features of her disreputable relative. Bertram, responding to suggestion, became instantly the impudent scaramouch she had always seen in him.

“Hullo, Essie! Pleased to see me? No—you’d rather not be kissed? Just as you like. Chavvy, hither and be introduced.”

Chavvy came shrinkingly forward. Miss Esther, not daring to guess with what Bertram had here invaded the sanctity of her home, bowed stiffly; and presented Bertram to Mr. Lorrimer and Mr. Lorrimer’s daughter Myrtle:

“My brother-in-law.”

“My wife,” said Bertram, explaining Chavvy.

Resulting in a fictitious assumption throughout Thatch Lane, that Miss Worthing’s younger sister—not a bit like her to look at—had turned up unexpectedly—“and Esther doesn’t seem a bit pleased! Such an odd little thing, my dear, almost not quite a lady.”

Which rumour was to cause Miss Esther Worthing a great deal of future annoyance. At present she had only room for one supremely outraged sentiment: that it was not county etiquette to cast your second wife upon the bosom of your deceased first wife’s sister.

“Cook’s lying in a scarlet sleep under the kitchen dresser,” Peter indiscreetly announced, having been in quest of more glasses. “That’s why she didn’t open to them.”

“Oh, dear me, how very tiresome; I hope you hadn’t to wait long.” Admirably the mistress of the house rose to the occasion, to the traditions of caste, and to the height of her linen collars. “But anybody who knows anything about servants will know also what a problem it is,” this to Chavvy, by way of a suitable conversational opening. Peter, her aunt noticed with satisfaction, was for the moment concentrating attention on the Lorrimers.

Chavvy laughed with birdlike gaiety: “Why, I’ve knocked about as long as I can remember in ‘digs.’; and jolly well waited on myself, unless I could afford to tip the slavey. You mustn’t ask me about servants.”

“Are you on the stage, Mrs.—er——?” threw in Myrtle Lorrimer. “How sweet! I once took part in a Greek tableau, and wore sandals and filleted hair.”

“Sure you don’t mean filleted plaice?” interrupted her father, whom Thatch Lane had encouraged as a wit.

“Don’t be silly, father,” pettishly.

“And don’t you be pert, young lady.”

Bertram watched the pair closely and made a few mental notes on the art of being a father, an accomplishment wherein he was liable to grow rusty during his long intervals of absence from Peter. Miss Esther was still dutifully laughing at Mr. Lorrimer’s joke; and Chavvy, more at home now the talk had swung nearer her zone of comprehension, replied eagerly to Myrtle:

“Yes, just think, I played my first part when I was only nine: Wally, in ‘Two little Vagabonds.’ And I used to cry my heart out every night in the consumptive bit at the end—have you seen it?—where he says: ‘Don’t forget Wally, who was your little son for ... for a week!’”

“How sweet!” cried Myrtle Lorrimer again; “how I should love to see you act!”

“I’ll act for you now, if you like.” Accustomed to the society of touring pros, who would open the floodgates of their genius at the slightest inducement, and usually without, Chavvy placed a chair to represent Sydney Carton; and, minus all preliminary hesitations, treated the assembled company to scenes from the life of Little Mimi, her most successful rôle.

... “Oh, Mr. Carton, if only you would not drink so much——”

Bertram indifferently reached his hand for the decanter. Peter, at that moment more niece of Worthing than daughter of Kyndersley, squirmed uneasily at this embarrassing exhibition of histrionics, and wished Chavvy were a canary in a cage, that somebody might throw a cloth to quench her.

... “I fear nothing while I hold your hand. I shall fear nothing when I let it go....”

“Very nice,” said Miss Esther frigidly, “what an excellent memory,” when Chavvy had slowly and with drooping head mounted an imaginary guillotine, and thus signified the performance at an end. Myrtle clapped feebly. Her father muttered, “Ha—hum—yes, Dickens. All very well in its proper place!” which was emphatically with pages uncut upon an English gentleman’s bookshelf. And Little Mimi, aware suddenly that she was a stranger among the Philistines, fled to Bertram’s side, and, looking frightened, laid her cheek against his hand.

Peter thought, “I’m sure somebody told her once that she had eyes like a trapped fawn or a jugged hare or something of that sort.” Chavvy’s appearance gave rise to any amount of zoological speculation.

The Lorrimers rose to go. This type of entertainment was not what they expected to find at Bloemfontein, and they were quite unreasonably disappointed in Miss Worthing. With lowered prestige, that lady returned from the hall to her transfigured dining-room.

“Are you spending the night here, may I ask, Bertram?”

“We are spending many nights here, Esther,” he assured her gravely. And added in conversational tone: “If you turn us out, we shall starve.”

Where was the man’s proper pride, Miss Esther wondered disapprovingly. Well, well, she supposed it was her duty to put them up for a day or two. One couldn’t let people starve; it wasn’t done; and really, that impossible little person in the red cap looked nothing but skin and bone. Miss Esther offered to show the bride to her room. And added a silent determination to draw special attention to the cake of soap on the washstand.

“Run along, Chavvy,” quoth Chavvy’s lord and master.

She hung back and pouted. Then went slowly forward to meet hostility, awaiting her at the threshold.

“Won’t you,” she faltered, “won’t you try to love me just a little?”

Upon this she made her exit. The door closed behind the twain, leaving Miss Esther’s reply to the imagination.

Peter crossed to the fireplace, lit a cigarette, and stood looking down upon the man in the arm-chair. Noted with pity that the topmost hairs of his head were thinning considerably. Otherwise his florid good looks seemed in no danger from the years. With a certain shock of surprise, she realized how akin they were, he and she; adventurers both, play-actors both; though, lacking her burden of pride, his passage through the world was even more divinely unhampered.

“Hadn’t you better tell me all about it?” she suggested.

When Bertram’s reply came, it was still tinged with borrowed reflections from Mr. Lorrimer, Parent.

“I’ve been a good deal by myself, my dear girl; you don’t seem to realize what the loss of your poor mother meant to me. And you, who might have been a solace and a companion, you preferred to live here in comfort and luxury. I was—lonely. And when this child Chavvy crept into my life, I let her remain, to fill the gap my daughter might have filled.”

Peter thought it over. “No,” she said at length, very gently, “I don’t think that will do. Try again.”

The dark upward-springing moustache was not sufficient to conceal a responsive grin on Bertram’s lips. With considerable ease, he shed his garments of hypocrisy.

“’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno exactly how it happened.”

“Who and what is Chavvy?”

Chavvy, it transpired, was one of those people who have no sober appellation, but answer to such names as Kiddy or Babe or Rags or Little Pal, according to taste. She was also alone in the world. “A weird child, yet with something strangely attractive about her,” would have been Chavvy as visualized by Chavvy. Garments, whatever their previous origin, on her looked oddly tattered. Fancifully she dwelt in a kingdom of dreams and Pierrots and red, red roses and beating-rain-against-the-window-panes,—all the paraphernalia appertaining to quaintness. Actually she dwelt in the fourth or fifth or sixth stratum below normal level of the stage profession; a tangle of veins spreading well beneath the surface; unknown territory save to those who are of it and in it and can never rise above it; underworld of touring companies; fit-up companies; pantomime, concert, and entertainment parties; sketches and repertory and pageant. Comprising intimate acquaintance with the smaller towns, the smaller theatres, the smallest halls; of what audiences will take what type of play and at what season. Underworld where each member has an infallible instinct for ‘dates,’ for ‘something to be had,’ and good-naturedly pass the word from one to the other. Where all names are familiar: “I knew him three years ago in Nottingham; we played together in ‘The Bells’”—drifting friendships, drifting memories, drifting lives; yet all inseparably woven together. London the improbable El Dorado of impossible chances. A glamourless battered underworld, yet from which none of their volition could entirely sever themselves. An occasional one of its members dropped to depths unmentioned and unquestioned; or else was incongruously pitchforked into spheres outside, as now Chavvy and Bertram.

They had met that summer at Blackpool; Chavvy playing ‘Cigarette’ in a very makeshift version of ‘Under Two Flags’; Bertram warbling sentimental ballads in the Masked Quartette of seaside singers. In need of admiration and dalliance, as a burnt child needs the fire, he found Chavvy interesting; alternately teased and pitied her; and told her the story of his life, the latter pastime a never-ending source of pleasure and fount of imagination. Her brain stuffed up with plaintive little Pierrot-poems, she found the man more than interesting; and listened wide-eyed to the story of his life, thinking the while how wonderful it was that he should so obviously be in want of her, poor, shabby....

—“In fact,” said Peter, “she called you Pierrot, and immediately you were Pierrot. There, O my father, you have inherited my very worst tendencies. How did you come to marry her?”

“Scoundrelly manager bunked, and left the whole company in the lurch, with three weeks’ salary owing. And she seemed to sort of cling to me. Masked Quartette did rotten badly. We hung on till our united loose cash was all spent, and then in extremity I bethought me of Esther. I decided it would be quite nice if Chavvy and I came to live with Esther. And I assumed the old lady would prefer us to be married.”

“On the whole,” mused Peter, “I believe you assumed correctly.”

“And so we fixed it up. And—and here we are. Going to scold me?”

“Not as long as you guarantee my stepmother will neither starve me, beat me, nor send me to gather firewood. Come along, dad, we’re supposed to keep early hours here.”

He pulled a grimace. “Can’t see myself sticking it for long. I’ll run up to town to-morrow and see if there’s anything doing in concert parties. I suppose you can lend me my fare and a bit over?”

“As broke as that?”

“You can take it from me, my daughter,” turning to face her, as they mounted the stairs, “that the prodigal would not have returned for his fatted calf while there was the least remnant of a husk left to him.”

—Miss Esther met them on the landing. “There is the spare-room, Bertram; it adjoins mine, so please do not chatter with your wife after half-past ten o’clock. I will give you a face towel and a hand towel. Do not use the bell-rope on any account. And breakfast is at nine precisely,—we are very punctual people here.”

CHAPTER III
“WE TRAVEL LIGHT”

Bertram was beginning to tire of Chavvy. Aunt Esther was beginning to tire of Bertram. And Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was quite obviously beginning to tire of Peter and her persistent lack of response to his demands for payment. Peter was just rather tired. She could not pay Mr. Lazarus; and Chavvy had conceived for her an unnecessarily clinging affection: “After all,” she was wont to remark wistfully, “we are girls together.”... Peter were not sure if it were legitimate to girl with one’s stepmother. Furthermore, her father and her aunt made her their headquarters of separate complaint. And withal at any moment might come a summons from Stuart, a letter from Stuart, a challenge from Stuart, demanding that she must be constantly and supremely on the alert. For his siege of her was carried on in the spirit of who would say: “Yield you shall—but yield if you dare!”

At present he was following up a period of furious and feverish need of her, when meeting after meeting failed to quench the thirst that was upon them, by a prolonged outburst of silence. An outburst in that it lacked all of relaxation or flatness; insisted every moment of every day that it was on both sides a silence pregnant of meaning—though whether of self-torment or of defeat or of bomb-manufacture neither could tell; a silence awaiting hourly shatterment. Peter felt once or twice that Stuart was mutely pleading with her to break it, or else allow him to break it, but now it amused her to exact mercilessly from him the quality of superman which himself had thrust her into exacting.

“I want to speak to you, my daughter.” In such ponderous fashion did Bertram one Sunday’s noon, call Peter aside into the trim quadrangle of garden. He was addicted to airing his fatherhood in front of Miss Esther and Chavvy, as though challenging them to go and do likewise if they could,—“and it isn’t easy,” disregarding a few minor facts of co-operation, “it isn’t easy to have had a splendid girl like that, all by oneself, and to have brought her up to be a credit!”

So now he laid emphasis on the appellation ‘my daughter,’ causing Miss Esther to toss her head, as she remarked: “Special afternoon Service at three o’clock, Peter, my dear, should you feel inclined to come,” signifying that she, more than Bertram, was responsible for the girl’s welfare and up-bringing.

“Do you want me too, Pierrot?” pleaded Chavvy, always alarmed at the prospect of a tête-à-tête with her husband’s sister-in-law.

“No,” snapped Pierrot; “stay where you are.”

—“I can’t make out,” he confided in Peter, as they strolled towards the garden-seat, “why those two don’t get on better; there’s a fuss every single time I run up to town.”

“You’ve been up every single day,” she reminded him gently. As, indeed, her pocket had good cause to know.

Bertram, misliking her accents of reproof, remembered his original intention in calling her aside:

“The—ah—young gentleman who seemed to occupy a great deal of your attention, Peter; I’ve been making enquiries, and he appears to be in a fairly sound position. He hasn’t called here lately, I’ve noticed; I hope,” with tender concern, “that he isn’t making a fool of my little girl?”

Peter gazed helplessly at the speaker; then bubbled over with joyous laughter.

“What would you do if that were the case, daddy, dear?”

Bertram ignored both the question and the laughter. “I should like to know,” he persisted, “what his intentions may be?”

“As strictly dishonourable as even you could wish—Pierrot!” mocked his undutiful child.

“Oh, damn!—Sorry, Peter; but do I look like a Pierrot?”

“More like an organ-grinder; you’re disgracefully shabby.”

“I know,” ruefully; “and my dress-suit is much too tight, supposing I wore it in the mornings.”

“I don’t think that Aunt Esther would approve of that.”

“Well, I’ll run in to Lazarus to-morrow, and see if he’ll rig me up a suit on spec.”

“Mr. Lazarus,” murmured Peter, “has just got out a summons against me. I wouldn’t go to Mr. Lazarus, if I were you.”

“Lord!” Bertram exclaimed in genuine sympathy. “I’m awfully sorry, Peter, old girl; I was just going to ask you to lend me a fiver. I wonder if I could borrow a ten-pound-note from anyone, and lend you a fiver to pay Lazarus; then he might make me that suit without pressing for payment, and I’d be five pounds to the good.” He brightened considerably at the prospect of five pounds to the good, and, jingling the imaginary coins in his pocket, evidently considered that he had now solved the financial problem with as much ease as he had previously disposed of his daughter’s love affairs. He turned to his own matrimonial aspects: “Chavvy will be perfectly happy with you and Esther, I suppose. The tour will only be for the rest of the season.”

“What tour?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m booked with the ‘Troubadours’ from the first of July; next Monday. A month at Maidenhead, then a fortnight of Hastings, wind up at Bournemouth. Got it through young Tommy Weekes; he has cancer of the throat, and mayn’t sing in the open,—or anywhere else, I should imagine, poor Tom, except in the heavenly choir—and for that he don’t sing the right kind of song. Being able to strum on the mandoline settled it for me, and jolly thankful I was, too.” He spoke quickly, feeling the impending disapproval.

“You’re leaving Chavvy here?”

“Yes,” defiantly.

“It’s hardly fair, dad; she’ll be miserable. ’Tisn’t her sphere.”

“I’m not going to tour with a wife,” muttered Bertram. “Where’s the fun, Peter? And she hangs round me—oh, you’ve seen!”

True that Chavvy was of an ivy-like disposition. And even a Pierrot will turn if sufficiently Pierretted upon.

“I couldn’t have stood this infernal tidiness a day longer,” continued Bertram gaily, his momentary depression lifted at the prospect of freedom. “’Pon my word, Peter, I dunno how you’ve put up with it all these years. I’d lift you out, if I could; take you along with me. I wonder—perhaps you could hold a tambourine, or something,” doubtfully.

“Thanks,” said Peter, really grateful; “but I don’t think I’ll do that, it’s too difficult. Besides, the tidiness is only surface, and doesn’t worry me much. But it’s a shame to leave Chavvy planted in the midst of it.”

“My dear, to her it’s the height of luxury, after all the hardships she’s undergone; clean towels every week, a bath every night, nice society, what more can she want?” Bertram had not the faintest idea of being illogical. And try as she would, Peter was unable to detach herself from his point of view. It was, after all, merely a repetition of Stuart’s creed, to cease sucking when the orange was dry. But then, spoke justice, one must not marry the orange.

A puff of wind which had been toying with some odd scraps of paper on the lawn, now lifted the largest of these and deposited it at Peter’s feet. She recognized a fragment of the plaintive storyettes which Chavvy was in the habit of scribbling, and afterwards, in the pride of her heart, showing to Peter. So the girl felt no present scruples in reading:

... “Who wear the white-and-black Moon Livery, must sooner or later go forth to look for new loves. So Pierrot went ... and Pierrette was very lonely—oh, very lonely! Harlequin came to passionately woo her, and many other suitors, but she sent them all away from her quaint Little Red House, thinking that Pierrot would return.... Pierrot did not return. The crimson rose that he had dropped at her feet in leaving, withered, but still she found sweetness in its Crushed Perfume.

“Autumn came and Autumn went....

“And Winter....

“Night after night Pierrette crouched in front of the fire, waiting for the footsteps that never came; dreaming into the ruddy hollows of the coals all her sad little memories of the sunshine and carnival that Had Been.

“... One evening when the rain and hail and wind shook the windows, Pierrette saw the petals of her rose drop one by one to the ground, and gathering them into her hand she cried impatiently that she too wouldn’t wait any longer, and ran to cast the faded token of a faded love on to the Rubbish-heap at the end of her little garden of lilies.

“... Hark! a sound of sobbing through the darkness. Across the Rubbish-heap lay a glimmer of white! ... ragged, wet, tired, Pierrot had crept home.... And, forgiving all, she crouched down beside him, drew his head into her lap.... ‘Pierrot,’ she whispered, ‘I knew you would come back.’...”

Thus far Peter was able to read. The author’s style was well imbued with the Pierrot-germ just then rampant in the air; yet here was sufficient at least to show that Chavvy did not expect fidelity from her husband, was preparing herself to be forlornly patient through the long days of waiting. Peter chided herself as a brute for the involuntary wish that Chavvy could go and do it all somewhere else.

Suddenly she saw Bertram and his wife as ludicrous caricatures of herself and Stuart; he in his desire to cut free whenever he pleased; and she—no, at all events she would not wait for Stuart to come back to her through wind and rain. Thirteen days now his silence had endured; Peter cast an anxious look towards the rubbish-heap round the corner of the house—and at the same moment the gate clicked, and Stuart sauntered towards them across the lawn; his appearance so eminently matter-of-fact and prosperous as at once to relieve her of alarm.

“Hullo, Peter. Come for a tramp?”

She departed to don thick boots. A ‘tramp’ with Stuart, she knew from previous experience, meant that whatever stood in their direct line of march, must simply and without question be ignored. One did not go backwards or roundabout or half-way. One went through and on. If a mountain blocked the path, one went over it; if a rushing torrent, then into it; if a board with “trespassers will be prosecuted”—well, of course, that was as good as an invitation; one had to consider if it were not mere self-indulgence to follow the call. Time ceased to exist; climatic conditions were just accepted; ultimate destination remained a negligible quantity until one established an ultimate destination by arriving there; and safety of limb was not for an instant weighed in the balance against the possibility of surmounting an eight-foot barrier interlaced with barbed wire, and an enraged bull waiting on the further side. These little country strolls with Stuart gave Peter an insight into his religion of ignoring life itself in favour of life’s lightest moment.

Therefore she donned thick boots and an unquestioning spirit, wondering the while whether the first might not be regarded as rather a contradiction to the second.

Meanwhile, left to entertain Stuart in the garden, Bertram borrowed his ten pounds.

“Pax?” said Peter tentatively, as they swung up the road towards the Weald.

“Certainly pax, or I shouldn’t have come.”

“You gave in first.”

“I did,” with quiet triumph; “you’d never have given in, Peter; you’re a bit of a coward that way.”

“I’m a coward because I’d never have given in?” cried the girl, who in the thirteen days’ interim had almost forgotten how to tread in looking-glass land.

“Of course. I suddenly had enough of the fray, wanted to see you, chucked over the entire edifice of silence, and came. You’d have stuck to your guns, not dared abandon them. Coward!”

She dashed back: “So you simply abstain from indulgence as long as abstinence itself is the indulgence. I always thought your asceticism was a distorted form of vice.”

He laughed across the broad sun-slashed road, to where she plodded in solitary anger.

“Won’t you join me in my ditch, Peter?” seductively; “it’s a very nice ditch.”

No reply.

“Peter. I did have to come. That’s rather a triumph for you, isn’t it? I couldn’t keep away any longer.”

She stamped her foot: “I won’t have my sword returned to me in that fashion. And you know perfectly well it wasn’t cowardice; that I can’t call you back, ever, in case you might be gone for good.”

“Do you mean to say,” in blank astonishment, “that if it were for good, you’d have let me walk out in that casual fashion?”

“‘According to the letter of the bond,’” she quoted.

He kicked the sodden leaves with his heel; picked up a stick and swished it at the air; burst forth at length: “Hang it, Peter! I showed you the exit-door once, and you’ve kept your eye glued to it ever since. Forget it, can’t you?”

“It was an insult ever to point it out. Because there was no need for it. I wouldn’t have tugged.”

“I know that—now,” his accents were almost humble; “but you see, Peter, there have been other she-encounters, and ... and they didn’t know about the door. So I suppose I grew mistrustful.”

“Worse than that. You grew careful.”

“Yes. I’m sorry. Please, Peter, join me in my ditch.”

So she laughed, and crossed the road to his side. And a little further up the hill, they found a tinker in the ditch, and tried to make him talk like the tinkers of J. M. Synge and Jeffrey Farnol and Borrow and Hilaire Belloc, and other welkinistic writers. But this was Just a tinker; a man of no conversation and apparently no philosophy. So in disgust they left him; and, climbing a stile, struck out across the Weald, sweet with the hot sweet smell of trodden fern; before them in the East a threatening pall of cloud hung low and grey over the landscape; and behind them, where they could not see it, the sun flooded the same landscape in slanting gold, which gave a curiously sinister effect to the whole. Then a steep descent plunged them head foremost into a labyrinth of bushes; netted undergrowth, which they were compelled to butt through darkly, with snapping of twigs and branches to mark each outward step; till at last, scratched and torn and out of breath, they stood in the lane on the further side.

Stuart swung himself over a formidable gate which barred the further end of the lane, and waited for Peter to follow. After one or two attempts, she saw it was beyond her accomplishment.

“I give it up, Stuart,—no, I’m hanged if I do!” impetuously, meeting his quizzical look.... Then drew back: “I’m not so afraid of you but that I can own to being beaten,” she said.

He had remounted the gate in order to assist her, and now paused to deliberate, a leg on either side the topmost bar: “I wonder if I ought to make you do it, after that.”

Gravely Peter waited, while he hovered on the verge of a blunder.

“No!” and dropping to her side, he quietly raised the wooden latch, and stood aside for her to pass through.

“If I’d noticed that it opened!” she laughed. “Stuart, I’ve found your tombstone epitaph at last.”

“Which is?”

“‘He took the line of most resistance.’”

Stuart dwelt on her with a slow warm look, more of man in it than he was wont to show. His hand rested lightly upon her shoulder:

“Tired?”

She had never yet answered ‘yes’ to this query, and wondered what mood it would arouse in him should she do so. Supposing she were tired? tired of the pilgrimage, of conflict, of the rain beating fresh and cold upon her face....

A few yards ahead stood a little group, consisting of a man, a woman, a perambulator, and two children. The man wore a bowler hat, and the woman a fussy dress of bright blue cloth, obviously reserved for Sunday wear; one child was distinguished from the other by a tippet of dirty imitation ermine. Otherwise they both had sticky mouths, and both were complaining loudly. The man lifted them in turn from the perambulator, and dandled them: “Shall daddy wheel the pram then?” and loud crows of assent.

Seen thus, the man in the bowler had the appearance of one fettered to the texture of a dream, a dream whence all the radiance had been soaked. In the wide spaces of sky and land and rain, the whole turn-out had an inexpressibly dingy look, that caused Stuart and Peter, with an upward rush of spirits, to feel like Hermes and Artemis walking the earth. He dropped his hand from her shoulder, and side by side, untouching, they flashed past the man and the woman and the two children and the perambulator. And Stuart said again: “Tired, Peter?” no longer wishing, as in the first instance, that her answer might be ‘yes.’ “No,” she rang back at him; and they smiled at one another, and swung on.

Towards evening, an unexpected bend of the road brought them home. It was Stuart’s habit to leave Peter at the gate, without jarring by extraneous chatter what they had found of magic in their day. But Miss Esther, anxiously watching for them from beneath a large umbrella, willed otherwise; insisted that Stuart should not depart without his tea, “And you run straight upstairs and get into some dry clothes, Peter, my dear; Mr. Heron will excuse you.”

Rather glumly, Stuart followed his hostess into the dining-room, where tea was informally spread upon the big table. The prevailing atmosphere struck in him the same note of drabness as had the incident of the perambulator. Among these people he was regarded as Peter’s ‘young man,’—well, not quite as bad as that; Peter’s ‘admirer,’ who came to visit her on Sundays, and took her for a walk, and brought her home to tea, and——

“Milk and sugar, Mr. Heron?”

“We used to sometimes squeeze lemon into tea, a Russian boy and I,” volunteered Chavvy, who was bravely hiding a heart that ached, Bertram having that afternoon confessed his plans; “he had such melancholy eyes, and his father was a convict,” attempting by this recital to rouse her Pierrot to some sort of jealousy. “They call it sayonara,” she added, in somewhat incorrect explanation of the tea.

Miss Esther said that she had no patience with heathen habits, and that everybody knew they were only imitations of honest English tea-drinking, which was quite good enough for her, thank you, without squeezing ‘sayonara’ into her cup. “Though I daresay you’ll call me narrow-minded, Mr. Heron,” drawing Stuart into the conversation, that he might not feel shy.

Animated by an Encyclopædic spirit very foreign to his nature, Stuart explained drily the difference between ‘samovar’ and ‘sayonara’—“which happens to be Japanese for ‘farewell.’”

“That’s just as bad,” pronounced Miss Esther. While Chavvy murmured in timid apology for her error: “I was thinking of Port Arthur,” and subsided altogether.

Stuart looked up, relieved, at Peter’s entrance—then bit his lip in annoyance. She had changed into a thin crêpe frock; he felt sure it was her ‘best,’ donned for his benefit. As a matter of fact, Peter’s garments had been soaked through, and this particular dress was quickest and easiest for her to fasten unaided; but, thoroughly jarred by his surroundings, he chose to see her too tainted by Suburbanism.

Miss Esther filled and refilled cups; sent Peter for more hot water; maintained a flow of lofty but gracious chatter, thinking privately the while that not often had she to entertain so leaden a tea-party; why, the Lorrimers’ Saturday tea-and-tennis institution held a hundred times as much of innocent mirth. But, then, Mr. Lorrimer himself was sufficient of a humorist to make any party ‘go.’

Stuart she considered ‘difficult.’ All young men were more or less so, but she had a method of taming their barbarism never known to fail: on their second introduction to Bloemfontein she would say carelessly: “Now please remember that you can smoke all over the house here—no forbidden ground,” and having found the key to their mysterious masculinity, would watch them in grateful enjoyment of their privilege: “They appreciate it, poor fellows; of course at home they’re never allowed it”—and: “You spoil them, Esther,” usually the conclusion of these remarks.

But Stuart failed to respond to treatment. Notwithstanding he had smoked a horrid black pipe up and down the stairs and in Miss Esther’s own sitting-room—yet here he sat morose and glum as any stranger, not a patch in manners on that nice Mr. St. Quentin who sometimes came.

Indeed, it was curious to observe how Miss Worthing’s personality, the least arresting of any present, reduced every other member to a polite and stricken level of uncommunicativeness. Miss Esther, in her own setting, and all her convictions securely buttoned in waterproof, dominated Stuart and Bertram, Peter and Chavvy, to the entire extinction of their own turbulence; so that presently the two men were exchanging decorous views on the political situation, while Peter and Chavvy, like acolytes, supported Miss Esther with seed-cake and bread-and-butter.

“If you have finished, Peter, you can take Mr. Heron into the drawing-room. I told them to light a fire, although this is the end of June, but then I always say be warm when you are cold and never mind the time of year.”

The drawing-room fire was the outcome of a brief skirmish which had once occurred between Peter and her aunt, when the former had carelessly announced her intention of taking Stuart up to her attic for the viewing of some book.

“My dear, with your bed in it!”

“Oh, I’ll lead him very carefully past the bed,” laughed Peter. “After all, it’s my den, as well as bedroom.”

Miss Esther stiffened: “Out of the question, Peter. Even if you placed a screen around it——” doubtfully.

Peter declared that the screen around the bed would add the same suggestion of immorality that Venus acquired by her fan.

So now Miss Esther emphasized warningly the drawing-room fire.

Stuart pushed back his chair, and sauntered from the room in Peter’s wake. He felt Chavvy’s eyes upon them, dark and wistful—“you two will be together when I shall be, oh, so alone,” the unspoken comment; and he believed Bertram to be smiling complacently upon the back of his son-in-law-to-be. And there he wronged Bertram, who muttered: “I don’t like the fellow; too damned superior!” and this in spite of the ten pounds.

Standing with his elbow on the drawing-room mantelpiece, Stuart surveyed Peter moodily; she looked content enough, content with the hideous prim room, with the fire, the cushions at her back, the approval floating up like incense from the dining-room below. And he was seeing her in contact with homely familiar things; had marked her press the bell for the maid to bring hot water; heard her answer Miss Esther’s enquiries about their walk—“Yes, thanks, very nice; where? oh, just roundabout——” Artemis linked to the trivial details of everyday; Artemis at Bloemfontein; she seemed leagues of distance away from him.

“What’s up?” queried Peter, lazily thrusting at the silence between them. She too was secretly irritated: why couldn’t he be restful, after their long wet tramp? why always that atmosphere of tautness? Merle had once said “Stuart has no firelight mood.”... For the first time since their quarrel, Peter regretted Merle; would gladly have had her there in place of Stuart, “Just to volupp,” thinking of the cottage at Carn Trewoofa, the rainfall, that last long dozing talk, broken by the entrance of the two letters....

It was a pity, and rather absurd too, that she should not have been able to keep Stuart and Merle.

—“What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’m going, that’s all.”

She raised her eyebrows in delicate scorn, but made no further comment. Nor did she move when she heard the door close behind him.

“He needn’t have been afraid,” with a finer appreciation of his mood than he had given her credit for.

Miss Esther looked up sharply from her knitting, at the rush of feet on the stairs outside, a slammed door, a gate swinging wide on its hinges.

“It’s Mr. Heron. And he has gone. How very strange, without saying good-bye. And what is Peter about, not to see him off? Dear me, foolish young people, they must have quarrelled.”

“He will come back,” murmured Chavvy, in concordance with her leitmotif.

Not yet, reflected Stuart rebelliously, as the train bore him from Thatch Lane. Barely six weeks since that night in Cornwall,—surely the shears need not yet be employed. But having started at such extreme tension, it was utterly impossible that their love should be of long endurance. He had felt the first slackening this evening; the first desire to be quit of her presence; the first distaste at any of her actions. He must disengage her from the background of orderly respectability; search in his mind for the scene wherein he would most desire to place her image; could not visualize any sort of setting ... merely a scamper of wind, and a voice—his own voice—saying authoritatively to someone: “Get her out of irons, you ass! you must get a way on before you turn her at the bank....”

That was it—exactly it! they had got their boat into irons, he and Peter; must get a way on before they rushed ahead or—turned at the bank. In either case, get a way on.

He would take her sailing.

And casting about for a means of accomplishing his wish in accordance with the conventions—Stuart was not in favour of that ‘splendid unconventionality’ usually ending in a muddle, whereof Young Bohemia delights to prate—he bethought him of Nigger Strachey. Nigger had a wife, which just now would come in handy, though Stuart had hitherto rather resented her entrapping of his friend. It brought home to him strongly the lurking danger that besets all men. Strachey had been as sturdily opposed to marriage as Stuart himself; and then, queerly, it had befallen him. So Stuart walked warily, mistrustful of the crafty huntress who hid in the dark, and then pounced. His fear of marriage was the most unsubtle of all his qualities; an elementary fear, of the kind that offers food for music-hall comedians, and inspired Bernard Shaw to the writing of “Man and Superman.” Peter knew of his fear, and hated it as she might hate a gaoler, because it checked her from spontaneously revealing all that she felt for him.

The idea of taking Peter sailing utterly possessed Stuart; and he went straight from Euston to Strachey’s rooms in Chelsea.

“Look here, Nigger, have you still got that bungalow at Potter Heigham?”

“The one you gave me for a wedding-present? Yes. Most unpractical gift I had. Looked to you for a nice bit of Dresden, or at least a plated tea-service.”

“I want you and your wife to invite me up for a week’s sailing; day after to-morrow; and bring whom I like.”

“Do,” grunted Nigger; “delighted. Need we be there?”

“Yes.”

“Um!” Strachey removed the pipe from his mouth and expressed his disturbance by a long and doubtful whistle. “My wife——” he began ponderously.

“Oh, that’s all right.... What do you take me for?”

“My mistake,” said Nigger, slowly masticating the new aspect. Oliver Strachey’s mind matched his face, in that it presented a great dark bulk occasionally illuminated by a flash of white. His quick grin was as unexpected as the rare streaks he displayed of wit or humour; and his cumbersome: “I don’t quite follow your meaning, Heron,” a great pleasure to his young comrade, who liked to watch Nigger’s massive and reliable mentality at work upon his own twisted acrobatics. The two men were never confidential; never gave mutual good advice; were ignorant each of the other’s troubles; disagreed on all abstract topics; and had thrice in company faced death by wave and wind. All of which made for entirely satisfactory comradeship. So that now Oliver asked no questions about the proposed visit to Norfolk, and merely commented:

“Got stacks of work on hand. Still, I could do it in Norfolk as well as here. What I’m wondering is if my wife will care to go?”

“Hang your wife,” Stuart was about to say; then recollected in time that men are absurdly prone to touchiness on the subject of their domestic partners. Especially when as doggedly in love as Oliver. It was just as well to have restrained himself, as Aureole Strachey just then came into the room. She walked swayingly up to Stuart, and remarked in a heavy-lidded voice:

“I dreamt that your uncle was dead. Is he?”

As an entrance, quite effective.

“I don’t think so,” said Stuart, surprised. “Which? Baldwin?” hopefully.

Aureole did not know. But she was insistent about the death. So to settle the matter one way or another, Stuart telephoned home:

“Hullo ... that you, Mater?... Any of the uncles dead?... No, you needn’t scream, darling—I haven’t heard anything; just a passing curiosity.... Morbid? well, perhaps!... You saw them at dinner. All quite healthy?... Good!” He rang off, and reassured Aureole: “They’re not dead, any of them.”

Aureole remained unconvinced. The soft full curves of her mouth, resemblance of which she was vainly trying to coax from a Greuze to a Rossetti, drooped sulkily at the corners. She had no acquaintance with Stuart Heron, save from her wedding-day, when she had not much liked him. “He—gives me nothing,” she had complained to her husband; “he—means nothing.” And Nigger had made no reply, save by one of his dazzlingly incongruous smiles, which all Aureole’s provoked questionings could not compel him to explain.

But to-night there seemed a possibility that Stuart would give her more. He scrutinized her intently for a moment, from her copper hair, carelessly caught up with a single jade hairpin, down to her temperamental feet; and, inspired by these, shot out at her a sudden:

“The pavements are stifling you. You should be walking among reeds—always among reeds!”

Nigger had quitted the room in quest of tobacco; so Aureole was able to blossom forth emotions which, inexplicably to herself, she pruned when her husband was by.

“Sand,” she breathed. “Miles and miles of shining sand. Desert sand. I always adored walking on sand at Broadstairs. Stretches of yellow sand as far as the horizon. I’m a Pagan, you know!”

Stuart knew. He had gathered as much from her first entrance. But sand was no good to him. He wanted to arouse an all-consuming interest in reeds.... There were a great many reeds in Norfolk. For the next ten minutes he plied her Paganism with such consummate skill that she met her husband on his return to the room, with the frantic request to be taken the very next day to their bungalow on the Broads, or she would assuredly perish—of paving-stones.

“I—just want to go. I can’t tell you why. Something is calling me—something with a swish in it. I—just want to go.”

So the expedition was definitely arranged for the ensuing Tuesday; suspecting the ‘something with a swish in it’ to have been Stuart, Oliver was yet somewhat amazed that his capricious lady should choose to quit town before the season’s shutters had closed down. However, relations between them had been a little strained during the past few weeks, owing to the effect on her of a belated reading of the “Doll’s House,” in conjunction with an occult acquaintance who had informed her that she was the Empress Faustina reincarnated, and must not be thwarted in aught she did, since she was in this phase working out Karma. Not keen on Karma, Oliver now hoped, manlike, that the fresh air would make all the difference in the world towards restoring marital harmony.

“The ‘Tyke’ in decent repair?”

“Believe so. I haven’t sailed since I’m married.”

Stuart’s grunt was expressive of many things.

“The ‘Tyke’?” cried Aureole. “What a horrid name! It shows how much imagination you men have, left to yourselves,” in languid disdain.

Stuart promised her that she should re-christen the boat. And after fixing the final arrangements, took his leave.

“Even chances on ‘Tiger Queen’ or ‘Serpent o’ the Nile,’ I should imagine.” Thus he speculated on the re-naming of the ‘Tyke,’ as he walked towards Grosvenor Square.

But Aureole decided that night on ‘Faustina,’ in deference to her own pleasingly lurid, though unfortunately forgotten past.

He wrote to Peter: “Meet me Tuesday, Liverpool Street, ten-fourteen. We’re out for a week’s sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Never mind about the moralities; I’ve arranged for those. Throw overboard other people’s objections—and your own. Don’t wonder if you ought to indulge me by giving in; we’ll have no battle here,—you’ve just to come, and leave the rest to me. Bring as little luggage as possible—we travel light.”

She replied briefly.

“All right”; and then in a postscript: “Were you being symbolical about the luggage?”

To which his answer:

“You—dear! No, of course not. Damn symbolism! I was thinking of porters.”

CHAPTER IV
WILD DUCK

“Garden-party weather,” grumbled Stuart. “S’pose they think they’re doing us a favour; one doesn’t want a breeze for sailing,—oh, no! Strawberries and cream and a band on the lawn, that’s all the day’s fit for.”

Oliver lumbered indoors to work: “Call me when the wind gets up.” And Peter announced her intention of going out in the dinghy.

“Shall I come with you?” queried Stuart lazily, from where he stretched on the grass at Aureole’s side.

“No.”

Instantly he sprang to his feet and followed her down to the bank, fell determination in his countenance.

“Go back, Stuart,” she whispered; “you can’t leave Aureole alone; she’s our hostess.”

He protested: “Hang it! I gave her the bungalow.”

“Untie the rope!” Without heeding his complaints, she sprang into the dinghy, where it floated beside ‘Faustina,’ née ‘Tyke’; and stood upright, scull in hand, looking up at her comrade on the bank, with the coolly indifferent air of being perfectly well able to dispense with his companionship. Her white flannel shirt, flung open to show the tanned throat; the clean line where her hair sprang upwards from the neck; the alert poise of her figure, seemed all to have gathered up and expressed the personality of the background: water quivering in the sunlight, dazzling white canvas of sails, short bright green grass of the banks, masts and ropes slicing and interslicing against a china-blue sky. Peter resembled an adventurer setting forth in silence to find the beginning of the world. Aureole, exotically reclining with hands clasped behind her head, had more the appearance of one who had found the end of the world and was prepared to talk about it. Stuart flung her a discontented look over his shoulder.

“Is this a morning to waste with an amateur cocotte telling me she’s a Pagan?” he demanded, still holding in the dinghy.

Peter merely laughed, and, with an adroit movement, pushed away into midstream.

As Stuart walked slowly back to his hostess, he knew there was nothing he wanted so much as to be alone with Peter on the Broads. Certainly he had gone to a vast deal of trouble in bringing hither Mr. and Mrs. Strachey, for the sake of the proprieties. He was prepared to go to an equal amount of trouble in ridding himself of them. Nor would the charge of inconsistency have disturbed him a whit.

Meanwhile, Aureole had been deriving a quantity of fresh ideas from the contemplation of Stuart and Peter, and their treatment one of the other. She had never before seen love in conflict, and it struck her as attractive. An attempt to engage Oliver in a similarly slippery and perplexing wrestle of wills merely sufficed to augment his loving consideration; when Aureole was capricious, then Aureole had to be humoured, was the burden of his thoughts. From considering him a tyrant, a bully, and a gaoler, which was her last attitude but one, she veered round to the belief that she had married a poor-spirited creature. The germ within her, born of Nora Helmer’s rebellion, was feeding nicely and growing healthily plump, the past three days in Norfolk.

Aureole broke silence with a sudden: “Mr. Heron, do you think I’m happy?”

“No,” replied Stuart guardedly. And waited for more.

“She is!” Aureole let her eyes follow the disappearing craft that contained Peter. Then: “A man takes you for granted when you are once married to him. He pampers your body and neglects your soul.”

Stuart said: “You mean he pampers your soul as well as your body. A soul needs no pampering; it wants fresh air, and an occasional touch of the whip.” And he added musingly: “I’m a Pagan, you see!”

She made bitter reply: “Oliver is—just a man. That’s the difference.”

She had a way of half dropping her eyelids, and, after a pregnant silence, shooting forth an unexpected audacity, calculated to shatter the well-bred restraints of convention to a thousand fragments. Stuart had caught the trick, and found himself unable to refrain from using it upon her now:

“Why not ... leave him?”

And for a while no sound but the scream and plash of a water-fowl on the opposite bank.

“Have you read Ibsen?” queried Stuart with disconcerting acuteness—considering that he had seen her for three days past with the “Doll’s House” in her hand.

Aureole murmured: “She went out to find herself and to earn his respect....” No need of a superfluity of words when talking to this man; his grasp at her meanings was almost uncanny. And she thought with distaste of Oliver’s “I—don’t—quite—follow,” whenever she let fall a subtlety. Nor did it ever occur to her that Nigger Strachey, who had taken a first at Oxford, was perfectly capable of following her to any lengths that were worth his while, and merely made her explain her special type of profundity in the faint hope that thus she would attain to a sense of what it lacked.

Aureole’s soft lips were mysteriously smiling; but she merely said in light tones: “You are a bad counsellor, Mr. Heron. Why don’t you persuade me to obey my husband and be content with my lot?”

“Not much fun in that, is there?” he replied; and would have enlarged further on the stuntorian point of view which lay in breaking away from a husband because he refused to contradict you. But remembering Aureole lived three twists further down the corkscrew than himself, he substituted a reflective: “I wouldn’t mind being present at the scene when you came together again.”

Her eyes, large and velvety brown as pansies, began to sparkle. “So you anticipate a stormy reconciliation, do you?”

Stuart said with a graveness that rebuked her flippancy: “Do you love him so little as to remain always apart?”

She drooped her head; truth to say, she was exceedingly fond of her stolid square-backed husband. “If I returned to him——”

“You’d have achieved your purpose then. Nigger needs a volcanic eruption before he would realize anything, least of all you. But once the knowledge came to him, he’d need an earthquake to dislodge it again. His mind isn’t elastic, you see. It’s for you to provide the eruption. If you don’t——” Stuart paused to extract matches and cigarette from his pocket.

“If I don’t?——”

“Oh, well, if you don’t, I’ve no doubt your husband will continue faithful and attached——”

“Oh!” Aureole dug her shapely heel—too high for sailing purposes—deep into the grass.

“And will keep you nicely sheltered from draughts”—he had struck his match; the flame wavered and went out. Again he attempted the process, with the same result.

“Thank the Lord!” with sudden buoyancy.

“What is it?”

“Wind!” And loudly summoning Oliver from the house, Stuart strode towards the boat.

Aureole could have wished the wind to have waited. She was preparing to announce in her most irrelevant manner: “Do you know ... when I touch a kitten, I suddenly feel as if I must kill it. Crush it to death. Just because it’s small and soft, and I love it.” This could not fail to be productive of interesting discussion about primitive feelings; and how we are really all savages at heart; and the things that cause us separately to feel most savage at heart. But you cannot shout forth statements of this description to a man who is climbing to the masthead, unfurling sails, swearing at ropes, and generally disporting himself in a thoroughly joyous and normal fashion.

The three set sail, and picked up Peter swishing her dinghy between armies of tall reeds. She came aboard, and under Stuart’s curt directions, sailed ‘Faustina’ in a light breeze, as far as the bridge. The feel of the tiller she had thoroughly grasped by now, but was still dependent on superior orders for manipulation of the mainsail. She resented the necessity for blind obedience; resented the inexperience standing between her and initiative; wished passionately to be master of that insolent canvas which now swelled adoring response to the lordship of wind.

At first, the Broads had merely impressed her with their utter absence of fuss. Wide waters, and blue skies pulled down to meet their edges; here and there an upspringing windmill; landscape dropping flatly away below the water level; a merry impression, arising from the frequent bends and twists of the stream, that ships can go a-sailing across field and meadow; racing clouds and racing shadows; music of bottles that rolled and clinked in the locker; sound of rushes whispering uneasily; scurry and plunge of a water-rat; an overwhelming interest developed in the wind, its character and vagaries, to the exclusion of all intellectual pursuits; the urgent necessity to use strong language, and to wear as little as possible, and drink yellow ale stabbed by the sunshine, and sleep anywhere, and eat everywhere,—these then were the essentials of Sailing. These; and concealed within and beyond these, the hidden gift, which Peter knew could not be hers until she had torn away the veils of ignorance that kept her from mastery of that exasperating expanse of white canvas. Except the necessary technicalities, Stuart had told her nothing. She must grope until she found. Meanwhile, she steered them into the putty....

“What the Hell are you doing?” with a lusty roar, Stuart leapt Aureole, shoved Peter to one side, seized tiller and sheet, and just saved the keel from running aground. Then sunnily, and with no recollection of the expletive that had passed his lips, he relinquished his post, and asked for cigarettes.

“There’s nothing I admire more,” murmured Peter, intensely amused; “than a truly manly man.”

Stuart did not hear. His major portion was inside the locker. But Aureole did. And she thought she had rarely witnessed aught so fine as this virile comradeship between man and girl.

“Nigger! cigarettes!”

A mere voice from before the mast, where he squatted and smoked with the imperturbability of a Buddha, Oliver replied: “In the locker.”

“Where d’you think I’ve been the last ten minutes? There’s nothing in the locker but matches.”

“That’s right,” acquiesced the voice. “Heard a legend that people who sail always forget matches. Destroyed the legend.”

“You have, with forty-eight boxes of wax vestas, and not a single tin of Gold-Flake among ’em. You’ve got your pipe all right, I suppose?” with fine sarcasm.

“Thanks. Yes.”

“I say, Mrs. Strachey, do you mind feeling for a cigarette-tin under your feet, along the lee-scuppers?”

After long and obliging search, Aureole produced the pressed-beef, whereof Stuart, resigning himself to circumstances, proceeded heartily to eat.

“What is to be, must be. Not so close to the wind, Peter; that’s better, that’s a jolly useful luff”; the result of a lucky guess on the part of the pilot. “All the same, you’d better resign the helm to Nigger; lot of shallows just about here.”

They were drawing near the spreading waterways of the Sounds. Oliver took Peter’s place. The wind was still exasperatingly light, needing experience to extract from it all the possible pace. Oliver seemed uneasy. Presently he suggested anchoring for lunch.

Peter enquired: “Do we sail over the edge or into the hayfield?” the latter extending low on their right, so that it really seemed as if they could sail straight on and in among the haycocks; while on their other side sky and water closed sharply together, with beyond them a drop over the very edge of the world.

They chose the hayfield, as being more homely and conducive to good appetite; moored the ‘Faustina’ fore and aft; and recalled Aureole from her rapt contemplations of nature: “‘And O! That greener green, that bluer blue!’”

Her brown eyes were very dewy, and her throat was infinitely whiter than Peter’s; she was all sinuous curves and melting harmonies of tint. And very good to look at, Stuart reflected,—if only she wouldn’t describe the scenery!

“By the way, Nigger, are you aware that you’ve been sailing on the wrong jibe?”

“Didn’t want to knock out my wife’s brains.”

Aureole looked up sharply: “You could have told me to move, couldn’t you?”

“You looked very comfortable, my dear.”

A hot spurt of anger flushed Aureole’s creaminess. “If Peter had been in the way of a jibe,” she said in a carefully controlled voice, “Mr. Heron would have—sworn at her. He has sworn at her twice to-day.”

“Heron’s not a gentleman,” decreed his friend, with unusual promptness of speech.

“Perhaps not, but he’s at least a man.”

Stuart looked embarrassed. And Oliver became dimly aware that his wife was really enraged with him.

“Diddums, spitfire?” tentatively.

She burst forth: “You can’t treat me in the spirit of equality, of give-and-take. No! I’m a petted little soft thing, who mustn’t be inconvenienced or she’ll cry; so you’re chivalrous, and sail on the wrong jibe, and—and think yourself a fine fellow. You don’t understand, do you, that there’s nothing, no, nothing on earth I want so much as to be properly sworn at!”

“I’m sorry,” he apologized for not having sufficiently damned her. As a result of a moment’s consideration, he remarked placidly: “Blast you, Aureole, pass the mustard,” with an air of having thus fulfilled all that was required of him.

Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones eloquent of suppressed meaning: “You will discover that it is not always wise to play the fool, mon ami!”... and an echo from a far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound of the sail flapping against restraint.

“Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?” demanded Stuart, scattering her preoccupation.

If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.

“Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck.”

“‘Crosse and Blackwell’s Wild Duck,’” Stuart read from the tin in passing it. “It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black eye——”

Stuart was talking hectically; there was a look in Aureole’s soft brown eye, meditating upon the nebulous-tinted mess smeared upon her bread, that positively alarmed him. “I don’t mind symbolism as a rule; but when it comes to symbolism in potted paste——”

Aureole smiled all the way home; a smile beside which Mona Lisa’s celebrated grimace paled to inanity. But the two men, beating in a foul wind and against the tide, had no time to spare from ‘Faustina,’ who was certainly behaving a great deal more like a Tyke than a lady.

On arrival at the bungalow, Aureole announced that she had run short of stores, and must walk down to the village before she could provide them with supper.

“I’ll go with you, dear.”

“I prefer to go alone.”

Oliver shrugged his shoulders, and without further ado, sat down to write letters.

After a couple of hours’ labour, he looked at the time. Then he called aloud his wife’s name. Then he searched the bungalow. Finally, he strode to the foot of the lawn; in the well of the boat, a curve of obstinate back denoted that Stuart, since their return home, had been absorbed by a trifling defect of leakage, while Peter reluctantly held a candle to him.

“Can I speak to you, Heron?”

“One moment,” in smothered tones.

Oliver waited ten, patiently. Then Peter said, “Come up, Stuart!” and blew out the candle. Whereat, dirty and tousled, he arose from the depths, and was exceeding wrathful.

“What did you want to do that for?”

“Your pal asked to speak to you.”

“My wife’s gone,” explained Oliver in bewildered tones.

And Stuart sat down suddenly and exclaimed: “Good Lord! Wild Duck!”

“I—don’t—quite—follow,” uttered in Oliver’s most phlegmatic manner. Stuart’s reception of his tidings struck him as neither respectful nor efficient.

“How long has she been gone?” queried Peter practically. “She went down to the village, I thought.”

“Yes. Village seven minutes’ distance. She went at twenty to six. Now it’s past eight. I don’t suppose for an instant,” continued Oliver, “that she proposes to stop away longer than a few hours, for the purpose of annoying me; I believe I wasn’t in favour,” with a slight smile. “She has played this kind of trick before. High spirits, that’s all. But it’s getting dark, and I wondered whether we hadn’t better go out with lanterns.”

“Lanterns, indeed! I tell you, Strachey, it’s the Wild Duck. Don’t look at me in that—that bovine fashion. Has she taken your pistols?”

“Why should she?” helplessly.

“Wild Duck!” chanted Stuart with monotonous reiteration.

The sun had long since been blotted greyly from the west. Pennons of ragged mist fluttered wraithlike about the fading banks; waved and drifted and dissolved in streamers over the colourless tracts of water. The blasphemous mumblings of an ancient and invisible fisherman rose and fell in cadences upon the uncanny silence. An hour before, and the reeds had still been tipped with the sun’s gold. An hour later, and blackness would be warm and velvety, interrupted by chirps and rustlings, stir among the rushes, and the brush of unseen wings. But at this between-hour, phantoms were abroad; and melancholy stole over the souls of Peter and Oliver; melancholy deepened by Stuart’s strange repetition of ‘Wild Duck! Wild Duck!’ term which now held a gloom and menace it had altogether lacked at lunch that afternoon.