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 Title: A Wilderness of Monkeys
 Author: Niven, Frederick John (1878-1944)
 Date of first publication: 1911
 Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
    London: Martin Secker, 1911
    (first edition)
 Date first posted: 30 May 2010
 Date last updated: 30 May 2010
 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #541

Copyright status of the inscription by Frederick Niven:

The Internet Archive scans used as the source for
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also included an inscription from Frederick Niven
to Daniel Rider.

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2006 online edition of A Wilderness of Monkeys
constituted its first publication.  Under the terms of
the Copyright Act, works not published by 25 July
1997 which had been created by authors who had died
more than 50 years before that date entered the
Canadian public domain on 1 January 2003.

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[Handwritten Inscription: for Daniel Rider
the most well-wishing man
in the world
from Frederick Niven
his most erratic friend.

Feb. 23. 1911.]


_A WILDERNESS
OF MONKEYS_

TUBAL: _One of them showed me a ring that he had
of your daughter for a monkey._

SHYLOCK: _Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal.
It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a
bachelor: I would not have given it for a wilderness of
monkeys._

_A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS

By FREDERICK NIVEN_

_LONDON: MARTIN SECKER

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXI_


_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_

THE LOST CABIN MINE

THE ISLAND PROVIDENCE


TO

HOLBROOK JACKSON


_My excellent friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is
very great and very famous for wisdom and power of mind; are you not
ashamed of caring so much for the making of money, and for reputation,
and for honour? Will you not care or think about wisdom, and truth,
and the perfection of your soul?_

_If any man have two loaves, let him sell one and buy of the white
narcissus; for the one is food for the body and the other is food for
the soul._

_He who hath ears to hear, let him hear._



A WILDERNESS OF MONKEYS

I


Bliss Henry took train at Euston, had his ticket punched, and then let
the world wag till he was travelling on a winding, single line far
from the network of rails at Euston, the carriage window open to the
upland air, fields of purple wavering past, with blue and grey rocks
jutting up amidst them; and corried, crannied mountains, with birds
and mists wavering athwart them, delighting him with their wildness;
and, where the moors fanned out more widely, little pools and tarns
lying like brazen shields or fallen suns. Or suddenly would come a
hissing to the ears, a flash of white to the eyes; the rattle of the
train would be lulled a moment, crossing a foaming river, and when the
rattle leapt to life again there was a new picture in his heart, of a
blue and brown river foaming into white over a linn, with a swirling
pool below, and a long, glossy smoothness above, before the leap,
where trees stood up dreamily against the afternoon sky; a quick
vision of golden flakes of sun, and green flakes of leaves, and
flakes of light and shadow under the trees that went down to a little
sweep of gleaming pebbles.

Then came the little junction town near the river's mouth (smelling
jointly of fish and agriculture), and the change of trains; and Bliss
Henry (you know whom I mean--author of _The Jewelled Snuff-Box_ and
_The Japanese Fan_) went on upon the last lap through the mellow land
to his chosen place, the place out of London in which he was to find
peace for his work.

As the landscape glowed and shone past (somewhat leisurely on that
particular line), the sinuous railway curving farther into these
recesses of peace whence the stream came sparkling, he was more than
elated at his escape from London, at his freedom: the wild roses were
to him the roses of Waller's and Ronsard's lyrics; the grass, of
Parnassus; the stream, of Helicon. For he was free--and he was going
away to write another book, the idea for which had long delightfully
possessed him. And he carried with him a cheque for 100--enormous sum
to a dreamer. He stilled his heart and looked out sanely, as well as
intensely, and saw the highland stream swirling down through the quiet
day, told himself he was going on holiday, but to work, just as surely
as though he were still sitting in his back room in Chelsea; saw the
stream bordered by waving grass, patches of nettles, patches of
bracken, with here and there tufts of heather. These wilderness
patches ceased wholly here and there, or kept very close to the
stream, giving place to patches of wheat or turnip fields. Wheat
patches and patches of wilderness went billowing, and the two
telegraph wires switchbacked irregularly past.

Bliss Henry took a long breath, gripped himself; he was losing the
intoxication of freedom that had filled him rushing out of the
glass-covered terminus in London, and tasting now, crawling to Solway
by this branch line, its calm. He saw dog-roses and clover and
bracken, and loved their names; saw flakes of mica shine in broken
parts of the black banks, and was content that it was not gold he saw.

Violet and vine, cedar of Lebanon, onyx, chalcedony indeed! Who was he
to sit artificially playing with words, making them exotic, when he
had, at hand, the real thing? To a man who said of a wood of firs that
it was like a cathedral he had once replied: "Let us keep in the open
air. The insides of cathedrals make me long for forests; they stifle
me. I am glad to get out of Saint Paul's always, and to see the
outside instead; and, if a flutter of pigeons goes up it, their wings
help me to imagine a cliff with gulls. You who see the pathos in a
'young lady' saying: 'Oh, how beautiful these roses are--they are
just like wax!' should see that"--and the friend had said: "You are
right, Don Henry."

He bent forward closer to the open window. The wind, because of the
passage of the train, made a little fluttering and patting there; it
fanned his cheeks, and he looked out newly.

He saw a yokel leaning on a scythe, a wain soaring over a hill-crest
on a white road; he took a great breath of the magic air. He heard the
whir of a reaping machine, the brawling of the stream. He snuffed the
air, redolent of peat, of wheat, of roses--of turnips, and the train
went winding on, up stream, to Solway, where he was to find peace for
his work.




II


As you have gathered already, our author had a light heart. And he had
need of it. Like many authors he had begun to spill ink before the
public in Fleet Street; and like many ink-spillers there he had felt
that every drop of ink was a new blot on his soul. He must have felt
this deeply, for on the day that he sold his first book to a happy
publisher for the sum of 40 he gave up Fleet Street--with the
anything from 7 7s. a week to 14 14s. a week that it had brought
him.

He had no "prospects." He shut himself up in a back room in Chelsea
for nine months with that 40 and wrote another book for which he got
60 in advance of royalty, and, as by that time volume number one had
gone well, another cheque on it for 40. Hence the 100 that he had
now. But he was not going to write his next book in a top back room,
smoking in it all day and going out for a walk before bedtime to air
it; he was going to the country--like the successful authors we read
of in the literary notes in the _Daily Chronicle_.

He was so immensely happy, seeing the moors and the sky, after seeing
nothing bright except London sky-signs for so many months, that he
wrote a lyric in the train:

    "I would go back to my own loved hills
      When I am dying,
    And die to the old, old voice of rills
     Where birds are flying--
    Flying and crying over the hills."




III


Well, here was actual Solway, the place suggested for peace. Here was
the platform with the six hotel coaches backed up just outside, and
the hotel porters, with the brass names on their caps, loafing over
the barrier.

Bliss Henry ran his eye along the caps and selected a name--"The
Gamekeeper"--bookishly, I expect, thinking of Richard Jefferies as
much as of whirring grouse. Other selections were "Royal," "Smith's
Temperance," "Grand View," "Juke's Commercial"--but enough of these
meaningless things. There is one thing I am determined this book shall
not be--and that is meaningless. My intention is that it shall be--so
far from being meaningless--symbolic.

_Anti-climax:_ Our author walked to "The Gamekeeper," and his luggage
followed on a trolley, his immediate luggage that is, a suit-case and
a valise.

His cheeks tingling with the air that seemed to deify him after the
blas air of London, Bliss Henry went to bed, and to speedy, happy
slumber, at the little hotel. And next morning, over real Scots
porridge, with cream in a silver cream-jug, and fresh herrings, with
coffee in a silver pot, marmalade, he sat content, at peace, for the
time being, with all men.




IV


A good deal of Bliss Henry's success--for he had been successful for a
beginner, despite the sums I have mentioned--authorship being as much
for glory as for wealth--had been because of his "charm." Every
reviewer spoke of his charm. He would never have written a chapter
like this one I'm going to write, lest somebody might have thought it
vulgar. But it is not really vulgar--as you shall see when you have
read it; and, besides, it is the only one of its kind in the book--the
only one that, if you skipped it, instead of reading it, you might
_fancy_ was not beautiful. But it is beautiful. Just see!

"You have rooms to let?" suggested Bliss Henry, standing on the first
step of the flight of five that led up to one of the quaint old houses
at the top of High Street.

"Come in, sir," said the lady with the dazed eyes who had opened in
response to his ring. "Step this way," and she ushered him into the
front room, with no apparent scrutiny _en route_.

But just as she curtsied, preparatory to leaving him, a light woke in
the centre of her hazed eyes, shot over him--and he felt that he had
been measured. He wondered what her status in the house might be.

"I shall tell Mrs.," she said, and departed silently; the door,
silently, almost closed after her.

There was no sound of her departing in the hall; but, then, she made
no sound at all. He judged she was gone to tell "Mrs."--and then the
door uncannily closed with a tiny click.

It was almost a relief when it opened again with a more exuberant
movement and a beaming, buxom lady entered--a short, baggy woman who
slopped a bit as she walked to him. She gave him a fling up of her
head and almost a laugh in her voice as she said: "How do you do? You
want rooms?"

He agreed with a bow.

"Well--this--this is let and the back is let. The flight above is
occupied. But if you don't object to the top, ceiling's a little
low--but, then, you are nearer the fresh air--up aloft--you know----"
she laughed.

"No harm in that," he said. "And I always have open windows."

They moved into the hall as they spoke.

"Then up we go?" she asked, and laid one plump hand on the balustrade
and gathered her skirt with the other.

"Yes," said Henry, and nodded, thinking that she gathered her skirt as
if she had no refinement, no distinction of touch, plucking her dress
to walk upstairs just as she might have plucked a cloth to scrub it on
a washing board. He was afraid she would be antipathetic to the
turning of the exquisite phrases in his new book.

She rolled her eye on him and then toiled up stairs with a mixture of
panting and laughter, showed him the top rooms with an odd mixture of
motherliness and coquetry--a little white bedroom, to the back,
looking out over chimneys of a back street to the rolling moors; a
barish sitting-room with an "enlarged photograph" or two on the walls,
to the front.

"I shall have my things sent round from the hotel," he said.

"What hotel?" she asked.

"'The Gamekeeper,'" he said; and she rolled her eye on him. He gave up
trying to make out what she thought of "The Gamekeeper." Her eye
seemed to do nothing but roll. Perhaps she was not thinking what
manner of man it was who chose "The Gamekeeper"; perhaps she was only
thinking of her rolling eye.

"I have some other things to follow from town," he said. "When I get
settled down I'll write my address and have them forwarded."

So there he decided to settle; but he had difficulty at first, because
of the dilatoriness of those responsible in London for the forwarding
of the rest of his belongings. This was, nevertheless, not a drawback,
after all.

Gradually, as day succeeded day, he began to hear, not to discover,
for he was not an inquisitive person, who were the other occupants of
the house. A retired military officer (Solway is an _lite_ refuge for
retired officers) had the whole flat below him; below that (in the
room into which he had been ushered when first adventuring into the
house), when at home, sat, staring at the wall-paper and twiddling his
thumbs, the clerk of the gasworks.

The buxom landlady appeared not again for a week after he took up
quarters. He was attended on by the very quiet person he had first
seen, a relative whom he liked better than the landlady. She dressed
in bombazine, and had the air, he thought, of one who had lived and
loved and lost; and then again, at another time, when he was less
"romantic," he wondered if, perhaps, she drank, if there, perchance,
was the explanation for her eye and her absent manner. Anyhow, he
liked her.

One day she said gently, "Colonel very ill, sir."

"I beg your pardon?" he said.

"Colonel very ill," she repeated and, both her hands at her side in
their wonted pendent stillness, she pointed a lean finger to her toes.

"Ah," he said, "the colonel in the flat below?"

"Yes, sir; very ill. Very querulous, sir, when he's ill. Gentleman
here before you used to shuffle his feet, and it put the colonel about
when he was ill."

"Very unfortunate. Is he ill often?"

"Well, he's a lonely man, sir," she said. "But I'm interfering with
you," and she glided out.

"If the old buck is ill," thought Henry, "I'll go quiet"; so he took
off his slippers, lest they should creak, and moved in his stocking
soles, looking furtively out of the low casement down the High Street,
hands in pockets, bent, away up there in the low-ceilinged "top,"
wondering when his books would arrive, and noting how droll it was to
see people from above like this--to see chiefly the tops of their hats
and their feet protruding below.

But day succeeded day and the books did not arrive; so Bliss Henry was
able to be idle without shame. He went out much, up hill and forth on
to the moor a great deal, becoming acquainted with the roads that
wandered there. Yet till his books came he did not care to go far
afield. Perhaps after they came, after he got them unpacked and all
arranged, and his blotter and paper and pens laid out, he would
suddenly think himself oh, such an idiot to have cooped himself up in
this old-world house (in stocking soles, for the sake of a sick
"colonel" below), peering down the sunlit main street at sound of
every cart passing, and would then, having everything round him, say:
"Now--we're settled. Now let us go forth and hear the larks in the
fields and the peeweeps on the high moors!"

There was something--well, what a serial storywriter might call
"sinister" about that house. There was a curious silence about that
house. It seemed a discreet, polite silence, a silence of menials
cursing under their breaths. One felt it in the subdued hall, and on
the quiet stairs, and at the door of the colonel's room.

Beyond that, on Henry's flight, was a kind of airy quietness, a kind
of white or crystal quietness due to a little half-curtained window
that showed the sky and the crest of the hills.

But sure enough the day came, or the late evening, when the silence
was broken, and one knew it an unreal silence, a waiting silence, a
kind of silence of people from below stairs.

Of the breaking of the silence I shall tell later; but, first, of the
extreme silence:--

Dinner was always promptly served at seven, to Henry, in the hushed
front room with the outjutting window-seat which he liked. At
seven-fifteen the colonel dined. At seven-thirty the gas person on the
first floor ate--when he was not, that is, out at the "Royal" bar
drinking.

But on this historic night of silence seven came and no dinner--only
silence.

Seven-fifteen came--only silence, with the soft feet of the staid
relative padding through it--but she did not come so far as the "top."
The minutes chased the quiet minutes, the "quarters" followed each
other, and several times the soft sound of her slippers whispered on
the stairs as though she was now coming higher--then ceased. It was
almost uncanny.

Then Henry heard a bell ring wildly away in the bowels of the house.

"Ah," he thought, "the colonel dines after me, and he has lost
patience first. Perhaps they'll respect him more."

Then came the soft pad on the stairs again--and ceased.

Henry, for a fact, had no bell; he went out and downstairs a little
way, and called; but no answer, not a sound. He went down farther,
beyond the colonel's door, and saw the light bubbling in the hall
chandelier and its reflection quaking in the varnished wall and on the
dead knobs and protuberances of the hat-rack.

Then he went up again and, passing the colonel's door, heard a sound
as of a quiet rumpus there, heavy snorting, struggling--and then a
bell pealed frantically in the basement.

It did not sound to Henry as if there were no one in. You know the
sound of a bell in an untenanted house; I don't mean a vacant,
unfurnished house, but in a house that has no one in it. No--he felt
that someone stood with a pallid face and fingers locked, looking at
that bell swaying, wagging, leaping.

The clatter of it died down and Henry passed on upstairs; but, ere he
gained his door, the bell again leapt, and rang again--then tinkled
slower, slower, the ringer having a rest; but it stopped not for long,
the sound leapt to life yet again--then thinned off.

Henry sat down--and laughed. He had pictured the hot, red colonel
swearing over the bell handle.

Then on the flat below he heard: "No, sir, she is not in; no one is
in."

At that a very high, mellifluous voice, a voice he liked, said, quite
evenly and calmly, without any excited rise: "Well, it is damned
nearly nine o'clock, and I should like to know when the ---- I am
going to get my dinner."

There was a murmur of an answer.

Then the colonel's voice, again absolutely even:

"Yes; well, if I had been told early that I could not get my ----
dinner I should have gone out to an hotel"; and then in a very sweet,
absolutely charming, deep, soft voice: "I suppose you understand that
an episode of this kind is damnably annoying?"

Bliss Henry heard the "Yes, sir," spoken in a voice he might almost
have called affectionate.

But he did not attempt to get in touch with the relative.

Something was wrong evidently; so he went out, rather mystified, for
something to eat at an hotel, seeing no one as he went down; and when
he returned the house was just as he had left it. He entered with his
latch-key and found the gas gleaming in the varnish in its wonted
way--and silence! He went upstairs and found a cold supper--a glass of
milk with a soda syphon near by, a salad, cut bread and butter, and
cold chicken. And never another sound that night.

The relative said nothing in the morning. His hot water came as usual;
his breakfast; and the relative curtsied just as usual, gave him one
look, departed. He asked no questions. He said nothing--asked no
explanation, and none was offered. But he noticed that in about two
days' time the relative wore a relieved look; and then he became
conscious that she had worn a look of suspense during these two days.
He did not make her think she had too early thought need for suspense
was over--asked no questions. The affair of the extreme silence was
forgotten.

And then came the other thing.

The lonely relative continued to attend to Henry so quietly that he
wondered sometimes if she went in stocking soles; and at the end of
each week "Mrs." herself came up to see him, fondling his linen,
tapped, entered, gave him her friendly, buxom, stoutly coquettish
glance and "How do you like Solway?" made some kind of vague
conversation, laid down the clothes, and said:

"All aired--I see to that myself. I like to take care of everybody.
I've a weak chest--just the chest--not the lungs--you know what I
mean--a sensitive chest--I believe in airing clothes. My last
husband--bless him!--he used to notice my bosoms--so sensitive, you
know--I often wish in cold weather I had a stronger skin; I wish I had
a skin as hard as--as hard as--that fender--or"--for this was one of
the, as it were, "standing pieces" for every visit, only varied
according to what met her eye that seemed vastly more rugged than her
epidermis--"as stiff and strong as the crust of that loaf." So at
least it was once, and Henry remembered the phrase; it recurred
horribly to mind when he was eating the loaf in question, and he felt
then something like a rather sick cannibal.

Ah! Would that he had on his walls his proof of Helleu's dry-point of
_Lady Looking at the Watteaus at the Louvre_--the delicacy of its
treatment would have helped him then--but it was in a box somewhere
between Carter Paterson's dispatching office and the Solway station.
He could only remember it. Would that the print of Whistler's _Fur
Jacket_ were here. Would that he had Wharton's _Sappho_, if only to
handle and feel the beauty of the book; or Vernon Lee's _Hortus Vit_.
This preposterous, baggy landlady made him wish to go and bawl on the
housetops that she was not a woman at all, but a kind of erect cow.
Why should she be so stolid with it all, so self-complacent?

It relieved him on his next walk on the moor, when, seeing the far
blue distance, there came to his head:

    "His dreams are far among the silent hills;
      His vague voice calls him from the darkened plain
    With winds at night; strange recognition thrills
      His lonely heart with piercing love and pain;
    He knows his sweet mirth in the mountain rills,
      His weary tears that touch him with the rain."

It relieved him to remember that a woman had written that. He went
back feeling life stately and clean and exquisite, joyous and sane,
and beautiful as an old framed miniature.

Henry appeared interested, as a rule, in his landlady's
"bosoms"--appearing so for civility's sake, not considering that by
being civil, which is good, one may sometimes fail to be something
else, which is better; there being civility and civility, and to be
courteous to some people is rather to be a hypocrite than a saint. But
Bliss Henry did not think of that then.

There he stood bowing and listening when rather would he have said,
"Oh, damn your bosoms, madam."

Once she brought him (because of his sympathetic interest) a hideous
old engraving, garishly framed, an engraving of a picture of a lady
who seemed to Henry to be deformed both as to torso and forehead, a
deformed lady, in short, in undress uniform, brought it to this
admirer of Helleu's _Lady Looking at the Watteaus_!

"He gave me that because he said it was so beautiful. It reminded
him," she said, with a little coquettish giggle," of my . . . .

She sighed and simpered and went on again: "A delightful man he
was--not like----" and her finger pointed down through the floor,
plumply pointed clearly away down below the old colonel and the
gasworks person. Henry understood its significance. He had not seen
"Mr." her "second"; but he pictured him then as an ogre in
shirt-sleeves with a clay pipe in his mouth, something like that
terror that looked in at the window in Poe's _Rue Morgue_ story,
pictured him sitting away down there hideously, below the street
level, beside a pint of ale.

Once Henry simply lay back and roared. It had come into his head that
she was not a woman at all, but a perambulating Phallic sign!

"What's taken you?" she said.

He roared again.

I think she thought he was slightly crazy, for she laughed a little in
sympathy, and then backed out and closed the door. Yet in course of
time he got quite to like the lady. He began to see the funny side;
his books had not yet arrived, and, when all was said and done, the
woman was interesting.

After she had gone one day he lay back and remarked to himself:
"Character? Why, she's not a character at all! She's a blessed
symbol," and he chortled.

She returned suddenly. At her quick tap he sobered his countenance.

"Come in!" he said.

"_The Daily Mail_," she said. "I forgot that was what I came up with.
I get so interested talking."

"Thanks," he said, and began to turn it over, marked the pictures--a
photograph of the underside of an electric car with a cross marked on
it--"The cross shows the part that hit the little boy." Another: "Lily
Lily in her thrill costume that has been censored."

The landlady departed. Then there caught his eye--it had been put in
evidently to fill up a space that no "news," or photograph, or
advertisement of pills would fit--the four lines:

    "When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
    And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
    And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
    Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep."

Then came that night of sound in the house of silence.

Dinner had just been served, and Henry noticed that the relative
seemed distraught. He thought she was nervous--and perhaps had been
taking some stimulant to help her.

Suddenly far in the bowels of the earth was a cry; then another
cry--up a little; then higher still. The crying out came higher and
higher, till it reached the hall.

And this was the house in which the author of _The Jewelled
Snuff-box_ and _The Japanese Fan_ was to write his new, charming
romance, a romance of which the reviewers would say, heading their
special reviews very probably with such phrases as "_Dolce far
Niente_" or "A Bowl of Roses": "An exquisite romance told with his
wonted charm, a charm that defies analysis. There are Italian wines
with the sunlight in them, not great of body, but no ordinary wines.
There are also the idyllic romances of Bliss Henry, charming, dainty,
elegiac. They are of modern life of men and women of to-day, but their
women have the charm one feels in thinking of the lost ladies of old
years, of their lavender and roses. He makes the present as charming
as the past, as charming and unreal and delightful."

The outcrying below mounted higher, and now the words were audible. It
was the voice of the lady that Bliss Henry, sitting there waiting for
his books, heard first:

"You would hit me, I suppose, would you?"

Then a gruff voice said:

"I don't suggest hitting you."

"You had better not!"

Henry heard that cry of the buxom lady, and for a moment thought of
flying to succour her--the female in distress; but the man's voice was
very calm, and it is perhaps wrong--effeminate--to be guided at all
by such "somehows"--but _somehow_ the man's voice seemed as if he were
in the right!

"You're only trying to tantalise me," Henry heard him exclaim. "I
never raised a hand to you in my life. I'm only----" the man began.

"You raised a hand! Oh, you wretch!" cried the woman.

"Gently, gently. I'm only speaking for your good."

"Ah! The one before you, _he_ was kindness and goodness----" cried the
woman; the rest was lost; and then Henry heard a strangling cry of
"bosoms."

"For my good! Why, you----"

"You're hysterical--that's the kindest word I can use," said the man.

"_You_ use a kind word! _You_ use a kind word!"

After that the tumult descended step by step. Then:

"Ah! You're running away down when I come up where men can hear how
you treat me and come to my aid."

There was no answer audible from the man; but the lady's voice came
again, from farther off:

"Yes, I'm coming down--of course I'm coming down. Do you think I'm
afraid of your threats--with _men_ in the house?"

Then lower still:

"_Men_, I say, in the house. _My___ house! Not your house! I pay the
rent! I pay everything! You----" the voice went lower, "are a----"
(Henry lost it), "yes, that's what you are! Ah----" There was a yell.

Henry could stand no more. This place was of no use to him. He was not
writing serials for the ---- ----. It caught him on the raw--not in
his literary part. It was of no use to him, and he knew so little of
this world into which he had been plunged, that, though for the sake
of humanity he felt he should do something, he did not know what to
do. He was as well-meaning and exquisite and useless as one of his own
beloved heroes. He had thought that the lady was to blame; but at that
cry he feared that her "second" must have lost his calm control and
stabbed her. She emitted such a terrible yell. He leapt to his feet,
ran to the door and halfway down his own flight; and then he bethought
him that when people are killed they can't yell like that.

He went slowly back again, and then silence fell.

Next day, when he came home from a visit to the station to enquire if
his boxes had yet arrived, putting his key in the lock, and swinging
open the door, as it were, all in one glad gesture--for the boxes had
arrived and would be delivered next day--he beheld my lady and a
gentleman standing embracing each other in the hall!

The atmosphere in that hall-way was not helpful for Bliss Henry. It
was an atmosphere that an alert, self-preservative instinct made him
desire to dodge, even before he had time to argue about the instinct
in his mind, in his fashion of a transcendentalist, and discover the
source of his aversion: a quick hunger gnawed him for a high and holy
place, a high, free place of contemplative air, above the elbowings
and jostlings of passions and materialism.

The gust of wind from the door told the lascivious embracers of the
presence of the author, and they untwined. The man looked half
sheepish, half oxish. The lady looked--well, just fat and nothing
else. Then she emitted a thick, foolish laugh, and ogled Bliss Henry
and said, "Good evening."

"Good evening," he said politely.

Under cover of his wife's good evening the man scuttled into a shadow
in the rear of the hall. She called him, and he reappeared.

"My husband," she said. "I don't think you've met him before. Very
handy man he is."

"How do you do?" said Henry, gave him a quick look, bowed into space,
and moved on upstairs, fixing his eyes on the steps.

But hardly had he settled in his room, in the chair by the open
window, when the handy man entered on a peremptory, military tap, to
enquire "if there was anything I could do for you, sir, any boots to
repair, any little odd job--just come to me, sir--I'm a handy
man--only too pleased," and as Henry thanked him civilly the handy man
explained that he had been a soldier, and in quick, jerky stages,
before Henry was well aware, had begun a story of the Indian Mutiny
which only a discourteous man could possibly have stemmed after the
first three sentences.

As Henry said, when the story seemed really finished, to judge by the
soldier's staring, expectant eyes, "That's very interesting," he told
it again.

It was a story, Henry gathered on the second telling, of how the handy
man's brains had been complimented by the colonel.

"He evidently--er--saw you were a clever man," Henry suggested,
thinking if he said something the old soldier would say "Thank you"
and go.

So the handy man wiped the sweat from his brow with a large red
handkerchief and told his tale again.

It took a long time; and then, at last, the lady came up, tapped, and
entered on the middle of the story--at least it sounded like the
middle.

"You're getting enough of my old man now, I should think," said "Mrs."
"Come away, my pet."

The old worthy servant of his country and maintainer of empire waved
his red handkerchief.

"I've just been telling him about the colonel of ours and the dispatch
box," explained the pet.

"Oh!"

Thereupon the pet began to tell the tale again to both, Henry sitting
broken, staring; "Mrs." standing looking at her handy man fondly. Then
she got a little tired and sat down. It was late afternoon. Henry
cleared his throat and mopped his brow.

"By the way," he said, "I shall be leaving you."

The husband rose abruptly, dropped his wet handkerchief, picked it up,
and stared at his wife.

"Mrs." rose heavily, as heavily as she had sat down.

"Anything wrong?" they both asked simultaneously, looking to each
other and then at Henry.

"Oh, no," said Henry. "I'm going back to the hotel. I'm--well, I'm
going back to-night--I--eh--well--you see, one gets some company
there----"

"I told you," said "Mrs.," turning to the colonel's indispensable
worthy, "that the gentleman was bound to be lonely, and you should
come up and see if you couldn't entertain him of an evening with your
tales about the Mutiny."

Her husband slunk from the room and shuffled downstairs.

"I mean--eh----" stammered Henry, "when I said--eh--one gets company
there--I meant one can get quiet there."

"Mrs." stared at him and backed oddly to the door.

"I shall pay you a week in lieu of notice, and go at once, if you will
be so good as to send up a note of my bill."

She backed out, staring at the lunatic; and half an hour later he
departed, leaving his valise and suit-case in the hall to be called
for by the hotel porter.

The silent relative held the door open. "Mrs." stood back a little
beyond the stairs. The short-winded, retired sergeant's head showed at
top of the shadowy steps that led down to the catacombs.

Henry went down the five steps into the street with a feeling of
having escaped from a madhouse, and, turning, gave one furtive look at
the silent relative in bombazine, standing expressionless at the door,
holding it wide open till he should have gained the street. It was
there that he turned and gave the farewell nod. The lay figure
curtsied. He marched away.

The door softly shut.




V


It was good to be _installed_, as he was three days later.

He had gone from that, to him, distressful house, to the hotel,
purchasing on the way a bottle of Condy's Fluid and a cake of carbolic
soap, ordered a hot bath, sent the "boots" to the station to inform
the station-master that a new address would be supplied in a day or
two for the delivery of the crates of books, they to be stored
meantime. After his bath he sent the returned "boots" out into Solway
to beat up the booksellers, with a slip of paper on which he had
written "Matthew Arnold's Poems." An hour later the "boots" returned a
little quiet.

"I've been to every bookshop in Solway," he said, standing twisting
his cap and beaming his naive smile, "and I can't get it." He shook
his head and grinned and looked apologetic. It was droll enough to him
that a gentleman should want anything to read except a halfpenny
paper, but he felt a certain respect for a gentleman who wanted an
unprocurable book. "There isn't one in Solway. Beg pardon, sir--you're
sure it's Matthew was the Christian name?"

"Eh? Certainly--not Edwin."

"Ah! That's all right, sir." He had a new respect for this
gentleman--evidently the gentleman knew his subject. He wondered if
the gentleman was as acute on the subject of racing; if the "gent"
knew about horses like this, perhaps later, when they knew each other
better, one might get the tip to spot a winner. "One shop they had a
book by someone name of Edwin--as you say, sir--and I thought it might
do as well."

"No; it would not have done as well," said Bliss Henry. "Thanks all
the same."

"Then you wouldn't have it, even being unable to get this here
Matthew's? Gent in the shop says they're relatives, sir."

"The relationship is, I fear, purely accidental, then," Henry said
solemnly, but the corners of mouth and eyes smiled.

"It wouldn't serve like at a pinch? Very happy, sir, to go again,"
said the boots, and looked with pleasure on the "gent's" puckering
smile.

"Thank you, boots, you're a good boy--but to have sought for Matthew
and not found him is better than having found Edwin. Good night."

"Good night, sir, and thank you."

Three days later he had new "rooms," his books sent thither, and the
unpacking operation was over. The last wisp of packing-straw out of
the seven cases of books and framed things had been removed. The
sitting-room of his new abode was swept and garnished; and the elderly
person who was to be honoured by his occupancy had departed.

He stood in his room turning slowly about, like a chimney-top in a day
of faint wind, surveying his walls: looking on the books on the
mantelpiece; books in the little toy-like hanging bookcase; books in
the little toy-like revolving one (not his, but his landlady's, won in
a raffle); and books along the back of the sideboard.

He had his prints up now: Helleu's _Cigarette, No. 1_, and _Lady
Looking at the Watteaus at the Louvre_, which he was going to discard,
or, rather, just move away from, for a reason which will be stated; a
Whistler that was going to come nearer to him--of a shop with a
hanging tapestry in the window, a child on the three steps leading up
to its door, a poetic mystery in its glimpsed recesses, sunlight--and
the butterfly on its wall; a scaffolded building by Muirhead Bone; two
photographs. I am sorry to thrust in on this selection from his
decorations with the financial details--but his removal thither, the
processes between leaving London and settling here in the quiet place
where he was to work better by pretending to himself that he was on
holiday, had left him with 70 out of the 100. Still--even that can
serve a dreamer.

"At any rate," thought he, "I am now anchored again. I am
here--incontestably here. I did not feel here at all in that queer
house--felt here at the hotel a little bit--but now--now I _am_ here."

He walked to the window for another look at the view which he hoped
would get on well with him; yes, he found it friendly, it being an
open view of fields with a twist of far-off river showing steel among
the purple and green, and blue hills beyond. So far satisfied, he went
forth to select a stationer's shop for the purchase of the utensils of
his trade. Three blank weeks he had been in Solway; even that had not
been done, he desiring only, so far, to gain a sense of having his
castle round him. Lacking that sense, it were in vain to lay in pen
and paper. He could only tramp each day on the moors above the town
and ask each day on every separate return: "My boxes come yet?" not
but what I believe that even the delay of the books was not an unmixed
evil. To tramp the moor roads was really an eternal matter. And later,
when he found Solway not at all interested in Eternity, he would know
where to go for the peace that Solway could not give. For of course
you knew, knowing that peace is an affair not of a place but of the
heart, knew from the very beginning that this idea of going to Solway
for peace was all fudge.

Every day found him tramping on the high moor that stretches, more or
less, from a little south of Glasgow to a little north of Leeds--a
happy thought that gives a sense of space to him who considers it,
tramping in the heather. At first, at the beginning of each walk, in
the blazing sun, he went often with puckered eyes downcast to the
road; so he saw its beauty, the road itself a whity-grey, and the
Macadamised rock here and there, where it had been lately repaired,
glinting blue. Then would come a part where one could walk on the
grass by the roadside, the bushes being thinned away, and he would go
stepping there as on velvet. On either hand the moors spread with
their rolls and hollows, and now and then a moor bird rose fluttering
a little way, lazily, through the effulgent summer.

A sip at a wayside spring, that had to be come at over a slightly
squelchy, boggy space of moss and drenched grass, was a sip to be
remembered through life. A rest by the stream's side, near a beloved
linn, while legs tingled with a pleasurable and healthful
exhaustion--oh, these rests! They were different from the rests in his
top-back in Chelsea after journeys home through the fiery streets of
midsummer London. There even the rests were like pain. Here even the
tirednesses were like pleasure.

Now he must get down to work. Now he must go forth and buy pen, ink,
and paper. And he went out into a new Solway now, that afternoon.

What I want to know is: Was it his factitious Solway, or the actual
Solway, that he went into now; was he finding the real Solway or the
real self?




VI


Mrs. Sturge, the landlady, was clearing away the breakfast dishes and
chattering. The clamour of the church bells broke out, ricochetting
through the little town, and, as she came and went, that lady with the
eyes of slumbering furies and superstitions, looked through the
window, paused with full hands. Bliss Henry, glancing up at her, saw
her scrutinising the church-goers.

"There's our ex-mayor," she said. "Our ex-mayor," she repeated.

He rose for courtesy (I fancy that before we get through with him we
shall find that Bliss Henry had to devise some way of protecting his
courtesy; as Emerson says, even love has to protect itself!), and as
he rose he suggested to himself that an author should know all things,
and thus disabuse idiots of the idea that an author is a mere
"literary man," whatever that may mean. He should even know about
ex-mayors.

So he rose and saw the ex-mayor, had him pointed out, perceived him,
took note of him.

"Fond of dogs, I should think," he murmured, "and of old port; a
trifle arrogant; sometimes gets drunk."

"Oh! You've heard about him?" suggested Mrs. Sturge, and looked round,
admiring her new lodger's swiftness in culling local gossip, and
expectant of its rehearsal.

"Not I," said Henry, shaking his head, and his gaze suddenly leaving
the mayor to follow with quick joy the recurring--recurring--again
quick recurring flight of a martin round the eaves. "I'm only
guessing."

Mrs. Sturge admired what she conceived to be the discretion of her
lodger, and said: "That's right, Mr. Henry; I think we should speak
ill of no one--though I could tell you some queer stories of this
town, if it's stories you want. I take you, begging your pardon, I'm
an honest woman, and don't hold by hypocrisy . . ." but Henry was
thinking about the martin scudding round the eaves, and he was
singing, with the unheard melody, to himself, Gautier's--

    "Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!
    Comme dans le chant de Ruckert,
    Pour voler la-bas avec elles
    Au soleil d'or, au printemps vert!"

His landlady's voice was going on: ". . . and seeing your pens and
papers lying about, I took you for a writer of some kind, and when I
mentioned your name--not talking about you, but just by accident, as
it were--to somebody--I forget who--they said they believed you were a
friction author. They had seen the name somewhere, and I thought of
the pens and paper--not that I said any more about my suspicions. I
wouldn't discuss my gentlemen." She drew up with her grand air. "Ah!
That's Mrs. Montague, and her daughter, Miss Montague." Bliss Henry
looked and saw them. He said nothing. But he wondered if what he
thought then was exact as what he thought of the ex-mayor seemed to
have been.

"They are the wealthiest people in the town," said Mrs. Sturge.
"There's a young lady now to suit you--a fine lady-like young lady,"
and she gave him a succulent old sticky smile with a kind of edge on
it.

"Might I have a little more coal, Mrs. Sturge?" Henry suggested.

"Yes, Mr. Henry; I'll tell May," and Mrs. Sturge departed with a
certain precipitancy, and Henry was aware that though there was
precipitancy she had a spine, though that had no more effect on him
than to cause a plaintive smile to drift over his face. The last
impression she left was, distinctly, that she had stiffened. Henry
stretched and sighed--and relaxed, filled his pipe slowly and blew a
column of smoke. He looked at the blue whorls drifting leisurely and
gracefully upward and enjoyed them. And, of course, again he had his
bit of appropriate literature--from a pipe rondeau by Henley:

    ". . ., our perfumed reverie,
    A mild-eyed and mysterious ecstasy,
    In purple whorls and delicate spires ascending
    Like hope materialised, inquiringly
    Towards the unknown Infinite is wending."

If Bliss Henry had had to hunt for other men's expressions of his
passing thoughts and finer emotions he would have been more aged and
smelling of the scholar's lamp than he was. But his "apt quotations"
always came with a leap of spontaneity like a boy's laugh. The world
without might sometimes jar him, but take his own life all round and I
think he had achieved, or made for himself, a world not so pitiable--a
happy world of glad, airy actualities.




VII


Henry wandered round the shelves in the shop of the bookseller and
stationer in Solway. I say "the," though there were others, because
this one had on sale no small crockery with the town's crest on it.

The books were such as one might expect in Solway, even though there
was no small coat-of-arms crockery. In glass cases were morocco-bound
and padded Hoods, Tennysons, Elizabeth Barrett Brownings. In long rows
were boys' books and girls' books, with much gilt and many coloured
plates. There were guide books on tables, picture postcards in
revolving show-cases. But in a corner Henry paused, a row of books on
a shelf there detaining him, for the books were of the kind known as
_belles-lettres_. At sight of them such a joy came into his heart
that, if he had been introspective at the moment, he might have
suspected, feeling then joyful, that he had perhaps been sad
before--or perhaps that he had just been beginning to be lonely in
Solway and had not admitted it to himself. He was glad to see these
books as might a Martian, wandering exiled on this earth, be glad to
find here a chunk of stone not a bit like the surrounding stone, but
one he recognised, without any disrespect toward the stones on this
planet, as from his.

"Pardon me," said the bookseller, "these books are ordered books--they
are not for sale."

"Oh," said Henry, and bowed to them as he might have bowed an apology
for having by accident looked, in passing, into a stranger's study, of
which the blinds were not drawn. "Well," he turned and looked in the
bookseller's eyes and knew he could say it quite straightforwardly,
"they are the only books I can see that I wish to handle."

"I am afraid you will find Solway rather lonely for you then," said
the bookseller, and scrutinised him with puckering eyes as an artist
views a model. "I know only one--or two--customers for such books."

Henry continued his perambulations along the rows. He was too desirous
to be courteous, after the late rudeness of staring at someone else's
shrine, to ask who the customers might be--even though he would have
liked to know, being already, though he did not know it, solitary in
Solway.

The bookseller's eyes were on him still, following him, scrutinizing,
intent.

"But even in that row you don't care for them all?" he suggested.

Henry turned and looked, not at the books, but looked his man again in
the eyes.

"I find myself," he said slowly, "almost appearing arrogant in what I
am about to say--I was about to say: 'One cannot have all well. This,
at least, is _getting there_. There are discrepancies; there are
flaws; but whoever ordered these has an eye in the right direction.'
You observe how blandly I say, 'the right direction,' as though----"

"Why not? I presume you have thought, pondered, meditated in your
life. Why be more humble than those who do not--those who do not ever
think and yet have very hard and fast codes, oh, very hard and fast,
and you must conform to them or they make you an outcast?"

The two men looked at each other a long while. At first Henry had
wondered, "Is he a bit of a sycophant, without the outward bearing of
one, never, for instance, rubbing his hands and bowing over them, a
clever sycophant?" But he decided: "No, he's not. He's a Man."

"I say," said Henry, "I'm awfully glad to meet you."

"Are you to be in Solway long?" asked the bookseller.

"Oh, perhaps six months, perhaps longer."

"Then I shall see you in here sometimes," said the bookseller.

Yes; he was a man.




VIII


"Did you notice," said the bookseller, laying down his pen and turning
from a business-looking ruled volume on his desk, in which he had been
writing--not sitting, but bent over the desk with the air of saying,
"Just a minute till I enter this"--"did you notice that our remarks on
books the other day led us off at once to life? They seemed to be
remarks on life as well--quite mixed up in it." He saw ink on his
second finger and balanced himself on one leg to wipe it on a sock.

"Yes; and you reminded me of an instance, brought it all up before me
again."

"Oh!" The bookseller's foot came down and he stood to attention--and
then at ease.

"Yes; a woman I once met and knew for a little while. We were thrown
together by accident. She had travelled and had three languages. But I
began to find that every conversation that we had drifted always
somehow to--well, to a sort of feeling that I had been led whither I
had no desire to go. Her eyes generally told me--and the atmosphere;
also a kind of alert, victorious air she wore then. Her eyes used to
dance, brighten, she seemed to become the tabernacle of a fierce
hilarity. She spoke of Maeterlinck once, I remember, and from the
vague tapered it down to _Monna Vanna_ and the essay on Silence--and
then came to the passage, or sentence of the essay on Silence--spoke
about the wonderful bit about being alone in a room with one, in
silence, and feeling in that silence. Then she spoke of Anatole
France--and soon tapered him into _Thas_--and then, again, a bit
only, of _Thas_."

"I don't know France," said the bookseller; "but I see what you mean
about Maeterlinck."

"She was the same all round. It gave me a shock to see her books and
find how one could have three languages, and a college career, and
travel, and make one expect something, and then give--and evidently
acquire, at the end of all--_that_."

"And I suppose you've met quite illiterate women who, without books,
could acquire all she had lost?"

"Not acquire--had it already. The horrific thing is to see where it is
possible for the mere beast to find herbage. It's terribly misleading.
If a man tells me he reads Maeterlinck and Anatole France, I know he
is of those who have a bit in them that aspires. That woman--oh, the
feel of her!--I always think of her as something slimy that had
climbed over a bust of Anatole France on my mantelshelf and left a
streak of slime that smelt of hair and perspiration on it."

"Never mind. It won't spoil the bust."

"But, my God, man, it talks about the bust it has been over and may
delude----"

"It didn't delude you?" asked the bookseller, but almost with the tone
of one stating a fact a little belligerently.

"No! True! It gave me a feel of horror and a feel of----"

"Of----?" said Haskell, and brought his lips together like a priest's
or an actor's.

Henry sighed.

"Well, a feeling that one must be careful and _not_ be deluded--must
not be gulled by a name. Ah! I have it!"

"Yes?"

"These things make us stronger. After all, it's a tribute to us when
the Devil gives up shoving the raw material under our noses, but
dresses it up."

The bookseller's eyes were radiant. It was as if he had watched a man
perfectly solving a puzzle the while the man kept on saying, "I can't
do this."

"I see where you are travelling," he said thoughtfully. Then he
sighed. "I wonder," he said, staring unseeing at the wall where Ade,
Lester Arnold, Boothby, Corelli sat blindly in worn covers, "if, till
the end of all things, there will be a fight for those who do travel,
and pitfalls all the way--more cleverly covered as the way goes on."

"Doubtless--but they are only covered more cleverly because the
traveller is more clever, greater. But always he is great enough to
see the pitfall and pass on."

"We seem to be talking of men and women?" suggested the bookseller.

"Of all things," said Henry.

There was a space of silence; the bookseller put his left hand to his
clean jaw and stroked it with the palm, looking sidewise; his unseeing
gaze, unseeing so far as circulating library went, was riveted
meaninglessly on the row where stood, shabbily and worn, William
Westall, Stanley Weyman, John Strange Winter--the juxtaposition of
company in a circulating library being droll as that at a Lord Mayor's
banquet.

"Then," said the bookseller, "as a side issue, let me suggest--is
woman but the slimy thing on your bust always? Does the symbol serve
for those who can see through a thing? Even when she gets three
languages, and travels, is she just that, the slimy thing on the bust,
and even her Maeterlinck and France talk just to aid her in her crawl,
seeing the man has them?"

"I believe," said Henry, and his head went up oddly and he looked away
before him, "that there are women who will accompany man because he
is travelling, to travel also, with him, because he is strong----"

"Pardon me," said the bookseller, "there is someone in the shop," and
he departed and left Henry alone in the back premises amongst the
hotch-potch of books bought but not sorted. Henry turned his eyes from
them and gazed through the window on the little court visible to rear,
with a bit of old Solway opposite, a mullioned window, with the gold
of some reflected sunlight in it, a whitewashed wall with a creamy,
elusive light in it--a kind of "light that never was," he thought, and
yet, to be seen, of course _is_; though that seemed the only way to
express it, the tangible, for some reason, being always called the
real, even by poets; seldom even a poet having the courage to say
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter."

When Haskell came back, gaily, he almost startled Bliss Henry, the
world our author had been in during Haskell's absence having been so
real.

"It was the young lady to take the books you were looking at," he
said; but Henry was, despite the almost start, still staring at the
shaft of sunlight that came through the window, at the motes dancing
on it. There was a great quiet there--just a shaft of sunlight. Henry
turned back a little on Haskell's return, standing foursquare as it
were, staring; the bookseller standing suddenly still, the expectancy
with which he had returned fading from his face. The talk seemed not
interrupted, but over.

"Well," said Henry, "I'm afraid time flies. I'll look in again--good
day." He walked out of the "circulating library" into the shop and
paused, the bookseller following a little way, his eyes wide. Then
Henry turned in the centre of the shop, the sunlit street without, the
tapping of feet going to and fro on it, looked back again, nodded.

"Good morning," he said.

"Good morning," said the bookseller.




IX


Little Colonel Jukes, to whom Henry had a letter of introduction, was
a man that tickled Henry. He had charge of the town records, some city
post that entailed dictating letters, in the phrasing of which he took
great pride, but not so much joy as he took in his scrap album--a
curious medley of cuttings and portraits, chiefly relating to persons
who had some connection with Solway or the district.

He was a short, broad man, with an air almost dapper; dapper without
being dapper--which Henry found entertaining; he was dapper by
personality, not by costume. He had a way of standing talking with
hands on ribs, fingers backward, then removing his pince-nez and
throwing them at his interlocutor; but, as the pince-nez were affixed
to a button of his waistcoat by a slender chain, they were fairly safe
despite this usage, fell with a gentle clatter, swung plumb-like by
the chain, steadied gently, trembling, and then somehow, by the way
they hung, drew attention to the fact that Colonel Jukes had a slight
tendency to paunch and also stood with his legs well taughtened--a
fine, fresh, vigorous, clean little figure of a well-built man--_with_
a kindly eye, sparkling eye.

He had a witty way of describing the magnates of the town, so that
Henry might know them. Jukes had every opportunity to know them, he
being secretary to the town, it would appear--librarian, curator of
the museum, secretary to the local art school, and I know not what
besides--quite secretary to the town, letter-writer for every
illiterate councillor, tongue in cheek often, putting into unfittingly
perfect business English their preposterous and amusing ideas.

A councillor had once called him a jack-in-office! The way of that was
that the councillor had wanted to harangue his fellow-citizens for
their vote in the news-room of the public library. The librarian
informed him, politely enough, that he could not speak there; but he
persisted, with a snort at Jukes, raising his voice in oratorical
falsetto with: "Hic! Fellow-electorates, I have pleasure in standing
before you----"

"Pardon me," said Jukes, "I must inform you that this is against the
rules, and must ask you to retire."

"I shall report you for insolence to the committee," said the
councillor.

"At the moment I must perform the duties that the committee has
appointed me to perform," said Jukes, "and request that you retire."

"I refuse," said the councillor, drawing up with a shuddering movement
in his shoulders.

The bumpkins reading the daily papers scratched their heads and opened
their mouths.

"You are a jack-in-office and I am a councillor. You can't put me
out," said the councillor. "Jack-in-office," he ended.

The jack-in-office walked to the door and opened it.

"Councillor Williams, will you go!"

Councillor Williams, for some reason, went; and then the
jack-in-office retired to his sanctum and wrote a minute on the matter
to his town's committee: "Gentlemen, I have to inform you that this
evening, at eight o'clock, in pursuance of my duties as curator of the
town's library," etc. etc.; and after the next council meeting a
written apology came to him from the councillor.

He was just reading it, smiling, when the mayor entered and shook
hands with him.

"Nothing special," said the mayor, and drew a hand down his Vandyke
beard; "I was just passing and looked in. We had a council meeting
last night," his chubby, red face wrinkled in a smile, the beard
thrust out, and he shook hands again in his affable manner, his eyes
telling of some great interior hilarity, and away he went without
telling the joke, just looking back a moment grinning on Jukes--Jukes
grinning on him.

Bliss Henry had seen in Jukes's eye the possibilities of such a story
long ere he heard this particular story; and also he saw the signs of
the scrap album in the colonel's fussy little movements.

Henry came to drop in often at the sanctum of this secretary to
everything in the town and hear him talk.

"We have no great demands for any books such as you, I suspect, would
call books," said the colonel one day. "I must tell you a thing that
will interest you: some time ago two persons asked for the complete
works of Dickens and pored over them for three days. Then they got out
Thackeray and spent three days over him. This sort of thing continued
for some time, and then one day the gentleman explained in a friendly
way to me that he had been taking part in a great anagram competition,
I believe he called it, and had won one hundred pounds. Still, one or
two persons in town do have what you would call an interest in life,
have a thirst for knowledge--is that it?--geology, botany. Ah! there
is one such now," Colonel Jukes peered away; along through the vista
of glass partitions behind which lay (according to the statements on
their varnished doors) newspaper-room, reference-room, writing-room,
lending-department, and so forth. "Ah--she has just gone out--an
interesting girl--Miss Montague."

"Oh! What kind of woman is she?"

"Oh!--reads. There are one or two literary women in town. There's a
Miss Fox, I believe she does literary work of some kind. She often
comes in to look up the old town files--takes an interest in her
country. I think you would get on with her."

"I've a sort of introduction to her."

Jukes gave a little bow.

"She comes in here too. I know her slightly from that; but that's all.
Miss Montague, however, you'd like. I'd like to introduce you. She's
charming and she's up-to-date. You'd like her, I fancy."

"The sort of woman a man can get along with? Can really talk--has real
interest in life--in books--eh? The sort of woman one can be at home
with?"

"Yes."

"I like women like that--to squat on the floor with and look over a
file of etchings, and rave and smoke with over books."

"Smoke with! Oh, scissors!" cried the colonel, and put a paper-weight
on some missives, flicked some dust from them.

"Oh, well, I speak figuratively," said Henry with a little nod, and
stared at the paper-weight.

The colonel put on his pendent glasses again and then threw them away,
and stood smiling to himself; then he became suddenly fussy, arranging
more papers, flicking dust, but smiling all through the performance of
these trivialities.

Henry left him soon, and on the way home thought:

"That sweet, elderly boy is dying to tell someone what I said."

Steps sounded to rear, hurrying--and the colonel made up on him,
dapper and buttoned and erect, his chest a little more military than
when indoors.

"I'm just going to lunch," he said. "I had no idea the time had passed
so. Looked at my watch after you left and just shut my desk and
followed."

They walked together, the colonel talking lightly on various themes
with the air of a man thinking of another, like a schoolboy repeating
the solution of a problem under his breath to memorise it.

"Well, good morning; I turn off here," he said presently, standing
still with neck well pressed back against his collar, smiling, hand
extended. "By the way," he turned back, bubbling, scintillating,
"Solway is not London. You do not squat on the floor and smoke here
with the other sex. Certainly never alone----"

"Why?"

"Well--they don't do it here," and the colonel lowered his head
sidewise and looked up as if at the edge of his eyebrows, lips pursed
the while.

"Oh!" said Henry lightly.

The colonel's odd gaze and puckers ebbed.

"No, you don't do that here without hearing of it," and the colonel's
eyes went wide.

"Oh, I don't mind hearing," said Henry with his light toss of head,
the colonel infecting him and making him as gesticulative as an
Italian actor--or ice-cream vendor, let us say.

The colonel took a new measure of Henry.

"You don't know our _convenances_" said he, without any elaborate
histrionic display.

"I know only decency and freedom from ill-intent," said Henry
quietly--and then, with vigour, but still quietly, "and, damn it all,
sir, if a man and woman have tastes in common, why shouldn't they
meet, unless, unless----"

"Unless?"

"Unless for fear of giving a chance for the depraved to say, 'Oh, they
do so; why not we? They can't consider themselves right and us
wrong.'"

Colonel Jukes seemed thoughtful. He might have been present at a court
martial by his air.

"That would be your only restraining thought in not inviting a woman
to see you and rave on your floor?" he asked, pressing his chin into
his collar.

"I think so--my only one," Henry replied slowly.

The colonel looked him long in the eye and then said:

"Yes; I believe you are all right. It is refreshing to meet you; if
you intend living like that we shall have some gossip in Solway. That
sort of thing is not _comme il faut_."

"No," said Henry; "and I hear that those who make the _convenances_ in
Solway never read anything, never think anything--perhaps that is why
they are what they are? But, good God, do you tell me that whenever a
man and woman are left alone in Solway they think of what Shakespeare
called incestuous pleasure!"

It was an ejaculation; it was not spoken as a question; and so the
witty colonel enjoyed, bubblingly, his rejoinder:

"Yes--in Solway anyhow."

"Oh, well," sighed Henry, "that explains Solway then."

They parted at that with a quick look each to each.

"Now," thought Henry, "he's going to go and talk; I know. And all he
can talk is about the smoking, which I meant least. You see, it would
be indelicate to say the rest to a lady--very terrible, very
indelicate."

He squared his shoulders. He felt as if he was going to have a fight
with Solway, if he touched it. He thought perhaps he had better not
touch.

_Anti-climax:_ And then he gave a grim smile as he remembered the
colonel's twinkling eyes. Colonel Jukes had a sense of humour to such
an extent that it saved him from ever seeing the tragic in life; when
a thing was not humorous to him it was merely painful; whereas Bliss
Henry saw humour and tragedy; also he saw squalor and buffoonery. He
was not the sort of man that Colonel Jukes would say had a very great
sense of humour.




X


Henry was "far too direct," oh, "far too direct," quite shockingly
direct, when he came close to certain things, in the phrases he used
to express how these things appeared in his eyes; not that he was
prone to heated invective, far from it--it was his precise,
uncontrovertable exactness of statement and expression that made him
"oh, far too direct." He was a very disturbing element when he came in
touch with the prurient, for there was that about him that made them,
in replying with the usual "How shocking you are! How vulgar! How
nasty!" know that he was nothing of the sort and that _they_ were not
honest.

But Colonel Jukes liked him immensely--liked his directness, his
desperate, flashing seriousness; and the colonel was tickled at the
thought of this dear, ingenuous man in Solway, just as he would have
been tickled at the sight of, say, the parson reading prayers in a
state of nature. The colonel was a clear-skinned bachelor, who had
long since given up wine because it "played the deuce with my side
somehow." He felt almost as if he would like to egg this stranger on,
to egg him on to live up to his ideas in Solway.

But despite the hopes of the colonel's practical-joker side, Bliss
Henry did nothing unwonted for the moment. Henry left them alone--was
in Solway, but not of it. He relished its grey days and its sunny, and
the blue hill air over it; and after Colonel Jukes's explanation of
Solway he lifted his eyes to the hills afresh, went for rambles on the
moors, dismissed Solway, let the dirty taste that he had got in his
mouth go from it in deep breaths as he walked, notebook in pocket, the
surrounding country among heather and grouse. Solways rarely try to
attack Bliss Henrys; they just wait for the Henrys to commit
themselves, for they always get hurt in attacking. If the Henrys take
a long time to commit themselves the Solways may give them
"invitations," in the hope of getting them into the hive and, once in,
of burying them in with wax, right in the hive.

But at present Henry strolled down to his bookseller, calm and
self-possessed and free. It was Saturday afternoon and his journals
should be awaiting him.

The bookseller hailed him with joy, the morning shoppers being gone,
the evening ones not yet claiming everybody's attention.

"Come in, come in," said the bookseller; "don't stand in the shop. I
want a chat. Oh, your journals--Mr. Henry's papers--thanks--there you
are; now----" he led the way through the library into the back
premises, the "circulating library," where a medley of books was
stacked awaiting classification.

They stood together looking at the litter, and then the bookseller,
straightening a stack of old books, remarked:

"I've been thinking about our talk when last you were in here." He
rose from his task and looked up in rising. "Don't you think you aim
too high? Your ideas, I mean--not practical, not practicable?"

Henry fixed him with his eye and read this not as a doubt, nearly so
much as a feeling, of him.

"Quite practicable--when alone," he said. "Of course 'other existences
there are which clash with ours.' Pray don't think me----Oh, no, I
see" (he looked in the face of the bookseller), "I see you don't think
me selfish when I say that. I speak as an aspirer, not as misanthrope.
At first when you said 'Don't you think you aim too high?' I thought I
had been mistaken in you, that you were of those who are quite
unwilling to listen to one who does aspire unless to, when he is done,
say: 'Don't you think you aim too high?'" He gave his droll smile.
"But no, you are not of those. You are merely remembering those who
say so and, thanking them for the reminder, as it were, saying the
phrase to yourself, asking yourself if they, or you, are right. My
friend--you are right."

The bookseller grew grave and his eyes were very wide and full.

"I wish I had met you long ago," he said.

"There you are," said Henry; "one always does--we are so scarce and
that makes us, by God, very lonely sometimes."

The bookseller's eyebrows lifted. It somehow eased him to hear that
tone.

"Yes," said Henry slowly; "one always wishes, when one attains
something, that one had seen the simple way to attain it before--but
perhaps one was not ready then--oh, I don't know--it's queer--yes;
it's always lonely, with just an occasional and magnificent oasis for
anyone who wants to feel--feel--eh--oh, mounting on, and not sliding
back. But if one never met another with such thoughts one _might_ let
them go--as quite futile. It's queer--oh, I don't know."

"Well--there is my point; is it possible to go on as you seemed to
indicate, more than to say, in our last talk, to go on so--always?"

"For a certainty one must begin by making one's heights and not one's
depths the standard. That's where women irritate me. See," he took his
stick loosely by thumb and finger and began swinging it like a
pendulum. "See--the aspirer comes up here and swings down and comes
up here. He is, however, the soul of honour, and the woman knows
that!" (He kept on swinging his stick and the bookseller watched it,
fascinated.) "She catches him as he swings past here--here--the bottom
of the swing." (He swung his stick with higher ends to the swinging.)
"Some women, God bless them, do come up with the man--a bit--perhaps
up to there" (he indicated a small segment of the swing), "bless them
for that."

"Some of them," said the bookseller, following keenly, "pretend
to--till they are married."

Henry glared on him.

"Yes," he said; "that's another point. I had not thought of that just
now."

"Never mind. Go on. I'm only seeing side-issues--additions. Go on with
your 'symbol,'" Haskell requested.

Bliss Henry swung his stick again.

"The majority just sit down there," he said, indicating the low end of
the pendulum's swing with the forefinger of his disengaged left hand;
"heavy, weighty as dead meat; and if the man refuses to acknowledge
that he has touched them in passing, there is a row."

"You would not have him refuse to be responsible?"

"God forbid! The man who could refuse is a cad,
despicable--despicable as the woman who, knowing his sense of honour,
relies on it and never swings up for his sad sake."

He paused a moment, gazing like a visionary, and swung his stick again
till he swung it level at each height. Then said he:

"When the man and woman swing thus together, and stop not at all at
the bottom of the swing, but swing thus--thus!--thus!" He was swinging
his stick so that it described the whole semicircle--the whole
possible swing of a pendulum.

"What then?" asked the bookseller.

Henry raised the stick erect as in a salute, and then described the
top half of the circle.

"It will not be for a long, long time; but we who know must go on
unfaltering. There are dangers; and one must remember them; there are
too many evil, mean, despicable people to take advantage of every good
to hang evil on it."

"The crawly thing on your bust of Pallas, or whatever it was?"
suggested the bookseller.

Henry gave a glad nod.

"Yes--just like that."

"But what then--what then?" said the bookseller; "and you will observe
that we are back to sex again."

"Um! Yes--damn it, 'tis so. Well! Perhaps when we get that settled we
shall be able to go on; perhaps that must first be settled."

He took his stick and swung it slowly, pendulum-wise, and both watched
it swinging till it swung out straight at either top.

Suddenly he gave it a spin that made it form the whole circle. Then he
held it erect as if to make once more the upper half alone, and as he
did so a step entered the shop, paused. The bookseller did not go out,
leaving it to his assistant to attend; but the step came on and a
woman's rich voice said: "Mr. Haskell in? Thanks--all right--I may go
in, I suppose?" and in to them, following her rich voice, came a young
woman--suddenly paused, startled, drew erect, stared straight at Bliss
Henry with a sort of fascinated stare, and her form oddly dignified in
its drawing up. Then she seemed to dismiss him--with his stick held up
so oddly--and turned to the bookseller.

"Excuse me, interrupting--intruding--have my books come yet?"

"Yes, Miss Montague," said Haskell, and dived out with her to the
shop.




XI


It was a grey day, not a depressing grey day, but a grey day when the
twin church towers in the climbing High Street were washed with shreds
of passing mist and stood all day as if seen through tissue paper. And
the fields and hills and trees had that look of the paintings of those
artists who, having painted dreamingly on a canvas, scrape and
sand-paper the canvas. But never mind the process, nor let it
disenchant us. The effect is there.

Such was the day. And Bliss Henry, a lover of all days, loved this
too, having a lonely, quiet match in his soul for it.

It was difficult for Bliss Henry to work, for mere rejoicing in that
veiled day; and perhaps because of something else--but he was not sure
of that yet.

It was a day to think of simple, dull, porcelain vases he had seen in
curio shops, to think of the grey pools lying solitary in high,
unexpected places in the hills above; to think of quiet and strong
cadences in the works of the authors whose work came to him in the way
that things came nearest to him, in a mellow and tranquil way, as
though they had suffered and yet were fair--and so were fair, and
therefore were fair.

He had an idea, as a rule, that he did not care for men who wore
rings; but he put on, that day, an old ring that had been his
grandfather's, an old gold collet ring of rare make with his
grandmother's hair in it. It was in keeping with the day--and his
mood. It spoke of old things passed away, old loves, old dreams, and
the world drifting on, and told him nothing was real and sure but
dreams.

He dressed for the day. He dressed for many things, being not of those
who dress but for eating; for making the seeing of a play into a
bourgeois "correct thing"; for marriages and deaths. Dressing often
for his own moods, he dressed also often for the moods of the quiet
nature. So it was that he earned sometimes a name for being "groomed";
and yet he was groomed in his own way.

He was glad, immensely glad in some quiet, inner place, of his
consciousness; glad in the grey day, with the hills peeping through,
and the grey nightfall, with the blobs of gold spattering it down the
village street and dropped here and there across the hazy landscape.
The dreaminess eased him, for he had felt a something he refused to
dwell upon; something not easing, in the sudden coming into his talk,
in the bookseller's, of that girl who read the _belles-lettres_.

He had been immensely aware of her. Her voice had come to him very
decidedly. Their eyes had met very decidedly. Perhaps he had thought
it was all because of the _belles-lettres_--tastes in common between
people in the midst of a society that had no such tastes. But then he
remembered how his heart had leapt and her eyes had--was it challenged
him? There was some lure, some attraction. Was it the sense of kindred
tastes? If so--all was well. But she had disquieted him somehow, a
little excited him. There was a feeling in his heart something like
the childhood days' "bubbling" the day before going off on holiday
into an unknown green world by some promised sea. He thrust her gently
to the side in his mind.

And this grey day helped him. He preferred to walk in a world not
realised; the only world that suited him was one not realised.

Yet it was good to know that someone else in Solway must understand
these feelings; reading such books she would, surely. But what upset
him was that she who, reading such books, must so realise, had somehow
moved him.

"A damned magnetic stir!" he broke out, staring out of his window at
the gradual dusk, his back to the table where his work lay, not done
to his mind to-day because of the memory of her voice and her
presence--of which he had been aware, too much aware.




XII


Suddenly he remembered that he had received an invitation to an "at
home" at Colonel Jukes's--and had accepted.

To go to an "at home" had never been, to Bliss Henry, a momentous
procedure. It had certainly never fascinated him, as it does some; had
assuredly often bored, as it does some. But he had not yet reached the
stage of quite living his own life, of doing nothing at all simply
because he had been asked in a slack moment to do it, and in a slack
moment had promised; and, because of his promises, he always
fulfilled, trying to look as if he enjoyed fulfilling them.

He managed to get through the evening without much fret, with but one
annoyance, and one--well, you shall hear of both these matters.

The annoyance was occasioned by the white-faced bank manager, a thin,
pretty young man, with a gushing voice and an ingratiating pose, who
seemed to take to Bliss Henry more than Bliss Henry took to
him--though probably that was only his manner. If one had not been
told that he was a bank manager one would have taken him for a
competent and successful shop-walker.

"Someone," Henry thought, "has told him I am an author," for the
manager spoke of authors. One he had met, and described him: "With all
his travels in the wilds and that droll way--don't you know?--of going
off to the wilds so often--don't you know?--he is never _gauche_ in a
drawing-room."

"Oh, is that so?" asked Henry quietly. "He certainly is not in
hunting-camps, in ships' forecastles, in logging camps or shearing
yards."

"What--have you--eh--have you met him--eh----travelled too?"

"Yes--and I had the pleasure of seeing him once in a salmon cannery on
the Fraser River, where I was working, and once in a sheep-shearing
gang in an Australian back-block. He knew how to conduct himself
there--it is quite interesting to hear that he is not _gauche_ in a
drawing-room. He has, of course, a great self-control." And inwardly
Henry thought: "Hang him; he'll think I'm bragging about having
travelled--and I'm not!"

Then said Henry: "Pray don't take me for a moneyed traveller. My trip
to the West of Canada was a boyish escapade more than anything else. I
could not get on as I wished at home, so I gathered together what
little money I could and went West. Then I discovered that I could
write. I came home with a bagful of notes and they got me a job on a
paper as 'Our Special Commissioner in Canada.' I sat in an attic in
Tottenham Court Road writing them up, one a week, at thirty shillings
each. Then, thanks to their success, the half-lie became a whole
truth, and I was sent off to Australia by the paper in question."

"How interesting!" said the manager. "What was the paper?"

"I never mention it," said Henry. "It had a circulation of 350,000 a
week."

The pretty manager had a thoughtful look--he was of those who look
thoughtful when thinking. He judged from Henry's expression that there
had been some witticism; he accordingly gave a forced smile, very
slight, however, lest there had not been a witticism.

Then:

"When are you going to the _wilds_ again?" he asked, with an air as of
recovering his urbanity.

Henry thought, without showing it. He often looked blank when
thinking. He seemed to recognise the drawing-room polite insult and
was about to respond brusquely: "When I want to see men again"; but
looking at this pretty gentleman, the incompetent manager, he found
him not worthy of his steel--not even that pretty gentleman's own
steel, as one might say, his kind of lady's bodkin. He just left it at
that, gave no reply--just paused as one can do, looked absent as one
can do, and then bowed farewell and passed on among the moving little
crowd that laughed and talked so as to be not silent.

This palm-tub affair was not Jukes's really, but his sister's; yet to
the sister's credit be it said that she did it as seldom as possible,
having no natural bent that way. But when others in Solway did things
like that, one had to do them, now and again (if as seldom as
possible), just not too seldom to be ignored on the rambling hill
street on those mornings, two mornings a week (I forget which), when
those who lived in the houses that looked through the trees along the
hill came down to town to get more goods on a long credit and pay off
a little of the last bill--with a discount if possible.

Bliss Henry, however, managed to get pleasure everywhere. In the
mythological hell, I fancy, he might have admired the design of the
toasting-forks or the colour of the flames. Here he found a kind of
peace in the dull brown expanse, the great polished surface of the
floor where the dancers sat round by the wall between the dances, two
and two, two and two (a splash of shirt front, and a daub of slight
millinery), two by two as it is in the little old ballad about the
ark, which he remembered then and which helped him to wear a pleasant
smile.

He was not a dancer, and so gravitated to another room, where were
card tables. There were a good many people there too, standing in
groups. Music sounded from some unseen place and the _frou-frou_ of
feet began in the next room, the large room, going on anon into a sort
of long sighing of "th" infinitely prolonged. He felt as if he would
welcome a drunken navvy fallen by accident into the midst of the
assembly, sprawled on the floor, trying to regain his feet--quite
_gauche_. He could not play bridge; and bridge partners were forming.
But he played whist, in an emergency, and so was soon seated at a
table with a trio that he liked--they looked as if they played whist
similarly.

Then--as romance writers might say--the strange thing happened.

He felt as a bit of filing might feel, drawn to a magnet; or as a
magnet might feel, drawing, by reason of what was in it, though by no
will of its own, the filing; or was it two magnets? He simply sagged a
little back, or was drawn back where he sat. He turned his head, and
as he did so a girl at another table, a girl sitting with her back to
him (she who read the books of value in his eyes), sagged similarly
and turned her head.

It felt an eternity that he leant there in his chair thus turned to
her. He was in horror. He waited for the three at his table to say:
"Well--sir?" Then he drew erect, sat foursquare, raised his head,
grew as it were in his chair; and as he came thus erect he heard the
girl behind speaking, in a beautiful voice with just an odd thrill in
it, and a something else, as if, though speaking to someone at her
table, the voice was given an impetus toward him. He drew a little
more erect, found his three all examining their cards, just as they
had been before that brief by-play that had seemed so far from brief;
and then, and only then, the three at his table looked at him, looking
up quickly, simultaneously, with just a tinge of question in their
eyes, he thought, of course, as if they noted something and did not
understand. He wondered if they had seen. He focussed them--and they
had a new look at him, as if for the first time.

But then the whist began and it served the intended purpose--it sped
the time till one might go away without offending anyone. He went home
rejoicing in the open air, the empty little town lying under the night
with breaths of air passing through it, and was really quite fatigued
enough by the hot rooms to simply be glad to fall into bed and go to
sleep in his own room with the windows wide open to the open, clear
night, forgetting the last few hours.

At first he had thought that he would not sleep at all. A restless
night such as he had known in midsummer London seemed to be before
him, the hot air of the rooms having thickened his brain. But there
came, fortunately, to his mind a snatch of a conversation overheard at
his elbow that night. A lady with a high voice, and a high colour, and
much rustling of skirt, had been talking with a man beside her.

He had heard the man say: "Is that so?--And is he also semitic?"

And the lady had replied: "Oh, no, he's clairvoyant."

That fragment of, clearly, cultured talk attempted boldly, jumped back
into his mind then; he tittered--and fell asleep.

Next day, as he sat at work, he suddenly dropped his pen, and rose and
walked to the window, and looked down his elbow of village street.




XIII


Miss Montague was passing.




XIV


Bliss Henry went back to his table and sat frowning. A commotion was
in his veins and it prevented work. Then the maid entered and said:

"Mr. Squires."

"Squires!" he thought; and then the bearer of the name entered--and
this Mr. Squires, he perceived and recollected, was one of his
partners at whist of the night before. Henry had taken him to be a man
who killed such evenings with whist (perhaps taken him so rightly),
and yet--what think you?--Mr. Squires had come to invite Mr. Bliss
Henry to an "evening" he was going to give. And Henry had come to
Solway for peace!

It was after sitting on the edge of a chair for ten minutes that Mr.
Squires made his invitation, and he did it so gently that----

"Hell mend him," thought Henry, and accepted.




XV


The bookseller came to Henry's rooms two evenings later, self-invited,
drawn thither merely by kinship; and Henry welcomed him with joy,
uncoated him, thrust a chair for him, poked the fire, laid by him the
evil cigarettes and the unnecessary tobacco-jar for which we men live,
and matches, and then lay down on the rug and hit out his own pipe
upon the bars, preparatory to recharging.

The bookseller looked round the walls and at the mantelpiece, lit his
already filled pipe and rose, the room being quiet and feeling just as
if it was his blissful own, and wandered to the books.

The fire crackled. The author lit his pipe with a coal, which he liked
to do because of boyish memories of a tale of an island by Jules
Verne, in which some character--Penfield--Pyefield--he could never
remember the name, had done so. He had promised himself, in his
boyhood, that he would one day so light a pipe. Not only one day had
he done it, but often. He had a way of dreaming his dreams true, even
these tiny, foolish dreams that had their beginning in a boy's romance
and an illustration in it.

"Hullo," said the bookseller, "I didn't know you had published poems,"
and he took down a small volume and read somewhere, Henry did not know
where, for the bookseller faced him. But what the bookseller read was
that lyric called "A Song of Silence":

    "If thou possess thy soul in peace
      It matters not what may befall
    From Springtime till the Summer's lease
      Of flowers be o'er and on the wall
      No roses flutter or birds call."

He read on and paused, and read twice the stanza:

    "Even she who sets thy heart aglow
      With love's strange lure, half sad, half gay,
    Must in a little rise and go
      Into the dusk the wonted way:
      What love speech, there, can a man say?"

He wondered if our author were morbid; but, looking on his face and
seeing how the leaping firelight made his eyes amazing and showed the
wild youth in them, he decided he was not.

The bookseller closed the book and put it back on the toy shelf, and
then sat down in the easy chair and looked at our author very keenly
out of the corner of his eyes, his head a little turned from a
preceding stare at the twinkling fire.

"Been seeing life in Solway?" he asked--or remarked--it would be
difficult to say which.

"Yes; well--I've been looking at Solway. I say, who are these men at
the corner? How do they live? They are always there; and always their
boots are in repair, I notice; but yet they never work. They just
stand in a sort of fire zone of expectoration, and sometimes
double-shuffle, and now and then chuck a chest and leer at those who
pass by. Who are they? How do they live?"

"They! They are husbands of 'factory girls.' You get the word for them
in books of that period," and he pointed to the Fieldings on the
mantel.

"Oh," said Henry and shuddered; "legalised pimps--eh? More despicable
than a Whitechapel trull's bully."

"Well, that's street-corner Solway," said the bookseller. "I see you
take it all in. I hear you have already been to see two other phases
of Solway life--the retired military, and the distinctly upper ten of
the upper middle class." He paused and said: "And you know the
bourgeois shopkeeper."

Henry looked up and smiled.

"You would add--compare?" he asked.

"Well," and the bookseller laughed.

"I can tell you slap off which I respect most. I could tell you which
I personally consider of most value--if it wouldn't sound like
confounded patronage." He paused and added: "I do love your thinking,
aspiring, at least desiring, bourgeois shopkeeper, but--but I don't
know that he's typical--the one I know. He may be an exception. And
I'm hanged, by the way, if I think the military man typical. He got me
aside after a bit at a function of his I was at and told me he was
'most damnably bored.'"

The bookseller laughed.

"But the women like it," he said. "It's a concession to them."

"So he said."

"And what do you think?"

"I believe," said Henry, "that there is a woman who is herself, and
not a member, not just an unquestioning, savage unit of a union with
unwritten laws and rules by which the world is kept from progressing,
a union that, if one questions it, replies that it is protecting its
units against man!"

"You must remember your legalised pimps at the corner," said Haskell,
with the tone of an admonishing Plato carefully guiding the logical
unfolding of an argument.

"I do--they are one of the outcomes of----"

"Of?"

"Lust."

"Whew!" said the bookseller. "I thought you were going to preach
annihilation of marriage laws--or free love."

Henry leapt up and very quietly, in a strained voice, said: "Mr.
Haskell, never mention free love to me again, I beg of you--and pray
never read into any dream that I may talk, a materialism."

"How long are you going to be in Solway?" asked the bookseller after a
pause.

"Some months."

"Oh!" and then they both shifted their positions and the air changed
somehow.

"By the way," said Henry, "I see there are very distinct classes in
Solway, and what 'goes'--to use a vulgarism--in one, at one value, has
another value in another class. I mean to say, for example, at the
colonel's was one set, at the upper ten of the middles, as you call
it, was another set. The few who were at both functions seemed to
stand higher at the upper ten of the middles than they did at the
colonel's; got more kow-towing there."

"I don't cotton. Oh--yes! I see what you mean--I think I do."

"Well, an example will make it clear--Miss Montague, for instance, at
the colonel's palm-tub affair was just one of them; at the upper ten
of the middles she soared a little. Though Miss Montague did not
condescend she was treated as if she had the right to if she cared."

"Was Mrs. Montague at both?"

"No, she was only at the colonel's and there, when I was introduced,
she gave me such a queer scrutiny, as if she was measuring me for
clothes, and then turned and looked at Miss Jukes who introduced us,
and then looked at me again, and then began to talk and turned the
talk on to the country and the families of the country until I got a
bit fogged. I just bowed to her tangle of histories, bowed and
inclined my head and said nothing till I heard her say, at last,
'_That was my father_,' and saw her staring at me, so I said: 'Oh,
indeed. That is very interesting.' She seemed to sort of change then,
stared at me and looked--well, as if she had had enough, or was angry
a bit. Another of the women who were at both places spoke to me in the
same strain--asked if I knew the country round about, and before I
could answer dashed off like this: 'The moor roads are very
beautiful--but they have such sharp turns--and the hedges are too
high, don't you think? When I am driving our dog-cart I am always
afraid of running over people--oh, but I'd not for worlds let anyone
else drive the pony--he's such a high-stepper and has so fine a
pedigree.' I said: 'Yes, the lanes do have sharp curves, don't they?'
and she got red."

The bookseller smiled.

"I'm hanged if I understand what they are getting at," said Henry.
"She began again so queerly about the country and seemed to forget
what she was talking about and got back again to her pedigree pony. A
lady near--a Mrs. Goodge--leant across and said: 'Oh--Mrs. Stokes, how
is your dear daughter?' And the amazing lady answered: 'Oh, she is
better, thanks--she's getting better. I could leave her to-day to come
to dear Mrs. Squires. The poor child is, however, a little
despondent--influenza, you know--it leaves one despondent. She begged
me to come over in a brougham and not to drive over myself in the
dog-cart. It's such a high dog-cart, you know, and she's nervous, and
the pony is such a spirited animal. When I drive out the villagers all
run out and cry: "Oh, there's Mrs. Stokes in the high, lovely dog-cart
with the fine pony!"'"

"What did Mrs. Goodge say?" asked the bookseller.

"Eh--oh, she said: 'Poor child--she has the dog-cart on her nerves
also, then. You'll have to get her to live it down; tell her it's just
influenza, and one gets one's head a little turned of course even over
a dog-cart.' And Mrs. Stokes answered: 'Yes, of course. It's a very
high dog-cart.' And the other lady answered: 'Oh, I quite see that.
Well, do remember me to the sweet innocent.'" Henry lay back and
groaned. "What does it all mean?" he cried. "Wouldn't it make you
tired?"

"Or amused?" suggested the bookseller.

"That depends. If it's harmless, yes, amused. It's funny; but that
sort of thing is all part of the stone that sinks people."

"Helps to weight the pendulum," suggested the bookseller, "seeing you
will be serious."

Up went Henry's head and he and his guest smiled in each other's eyes.

There was a tap at the door and the maid entered.

"Colonel Jukes," she said, half terrified, half proud.

The bookseller shifted uneasily, felt his necktie, rose. Henry gave
him a quick look.

"Sit down on your stern, damn'e!" he said. "It's only another man."

"Thanks," said the bookseller, and then laughed a chuckling laugh in
his throat, and then composed his features and twinkled on Bliss
Henry.

Colonel Jukes entered and Henry went to meet him, and took his hand,
and then his coat.

"Oh," said Jukes, "you've got company, perhaps I----"

"Come away," said Henry. "I expect you know each other--in such a
small place as Solway----"

The bookseller rose. Henry gave him a quick, sharp look--then a quick
sharp look to Colonel Jukes and rasped suavely:

"Colonel Jukes--Mr. Haskell."

"Oh, we've often met over business," said Jukes, extending a hand.

They shook hands; Henry pushed a chair gently to the fire and clapped
it, looking at Jukes, who subsided.

The bookseller sat down, thrusting his chair back a little so that it
was level with Jukes's, neither before nor behind.

Henry sat down, gently pushing the evil tobacco-jar toward Colonel
Jukes, and, shaking the matchbox, set that necessity also before him.




XVI


Next day was Saturday and Henry strolled down the High Street of our
little hill-side town, his eyes gazing out to the far fields (with the
white of roads winding amongst them) till he came to the bookseller's
shop half-way down that rambling thoroughfare. In the front shop an
early yokel was buying, possibly acting on the advice of the Y.M.C.A.
Superintendent, who had heard of it, a copy of Smiles's _Self-Help_.
Henry perceived him in the act of final decision, eyes pathetically
staring, mouth pathetically bulging, the assistant watching him as a
terrier watches a rat. The boy was dusting, or at least moving about
gently and furtively with a feather duster in his hand.

"Mr. Haskell in?" said Henry.

"Yes, sir."

The assistant, employed upon fussily tying up the _Self-Help_, looked
up jerkily between his slapping of the parcel's ends and said: "Oh,
Mr. Henry's journals. Boy--over there. Mr. Henry's papers."

The boy, infected by the assistant's manner, fell a-fussing over some
papers, with his feather duster under his arm, till the assistant
should be free to come and thrust him aside in the wonted manner and
he be able to watch the desired papers being found.

"Yes, sir, straight through," grunted the boy.

Henry passed through to the library. The first person he saw, for some
reason, was Miss Montague; but then he had been taken by surprise. He
looked quickly to Haskell. Colonel Jukes was in amiable talk with the
bookseller, and both raised their heads, turning about at his step,
and greeted him, Haskell with his smile and Jukes with: "Ah, here he
is! Here," he turned to his sister who stood by, "is the man who was
responsible for my lateness of last night."

Henry bowed to Miss Jukes and she gave him a friendly greeting, with a
look of mock reproval. Miss Montague looked on Bliss Henry with
expressionless face, stood erect, squarely fronting him--and then her
eyes sparkled on him.

"You know Miss Montague--I think you met----" began Miss Jukes.

Miss Montague, with her alert, quivering graciousness, turned from one
to the other and said: "Oh--well, I fancy we saw each other at least."

"Yes; Miss Montague was sitting behind me at the next table," said
Henry, also looking from one to the other.

"Oh, you gamblers!" cried Miss Jukes.

"I'd prefer whist to dancing myself," Jukes broke in, turning from the
bookseller; and then came that bachelorly twinkle, "and a smoke and a
talk to either," he added, and then the twinkle increased. To Henry's
mind there was some further banter held in reserve; but the colonel
half turned back again to the bookseller when Henry looked on his face
thus expectant, or prepared.

"If they were all like last night's smoke and talk," said the
bookseller.

Jukes returned then to the others, his eyes twinkling on Miss Montague
and his sister in a swift, comprehensive glance.

"That's the worst of women," he said. "If only they'd--eh--squat down
on one's rug with us and smoke--and rave with us," his gaze flickered
halfway to Bliss Henry.

"George!" cried Miss Jukes.

Haskell looked a little puzzled, scenting some banter, but not "in the
know."

"I agree with you," broke in Miss Montague, with an odd, supple
quickness, a kind of alert spring, as it were, into the conversation.
"I like to see a man smoking and at ease; and I don't see why a woman
can't keep him company and join in his raves, as you call them."

Miss Jukes's eyes opened wide. Jukes gave an odd little frown, in his
turn, as though of mock seriousness.

Henry felt a leap at his heart. He knew that the bookseller's eyes
turned to him then.

"At least there is a possibility of comradeship there," he said, and
felt somehow as if he didn't mean it now, as if, in that atmosphere,
to be faithful to a former expression of belief in comradeship were to
be its dupe.

"Oh, tush--comradeship--my dear man," said Jukes and fumbled for his
pince-nez; "is not that a sentimentalist's idea?" His blue eye was
both roguish and cold.

"Sentimental?" said Henry. He had been caught on a tender place or he
would just have given back persiflage for persiflage, levity for
levity, instead of getting so serious. "Do you know what a
sentimentalist is? He is one who hunts for a thing he will not
possess. If one wants comradeship and gets it," he felt getting back
to his own viewpoint, "is he a sentimentalist?"

"I have not ever heard that definition of a sentimentalist," said
Jukes with a show of interest. Always when in the company of women his
facial expressions were like an actor's--he used his eyebrows, his
eyes, his mouth, the canting and bobbing of his head, to aid and
accompany talk. "Your argument is right--but your definition, well, it
is not mine," he plucked up and twinkled again, his hand going round
and round in a little circle before him, holding the closed pince-nez.

The bookseller withdrew; but it was only a moment's withdrawal to a
shelf; he opened a book there and turning to a page walked slowly
back, book in left hand, right hand finger-tips daintily turning the
pages, said: "Chambers says, '_Sentiment:_ a thought occasioned by
feeling'--um--'exhibition of feeling. _Sentimental:_ having or
abounding in sentiments or reflections; having an excess of sentiment
or feeling; affectedly tender.'" He looked up and closed his lips
tight and scrutinised the company like a parson after reading the text
and before going on to its dilution or decoration.

"There you are!" cried Jukes, and was not aware that the bookseller
was quietly thinking: "Dear me, little Colonel Jukes is affectedly
everything--every expression--every gesture."

Haskell turned about, his face still toward the company, and put the
book back in its place. The colonel was staring ahead of him. He felt
that the ladies expected something of him. Miss Montague's head swung
left and right gently.

"Your definition is your own," fired the colonel after a pause.

"Good!" said Henry. "I shan't try to foist it on you nor on another
then."

"And we can't call you a plagiarist," interjected the bookseller.

"Keep to Chambers," said Bliss Henry. "Let's keep to Chambers," he
went on; "I'll meet you there. Is it in your eyes an affectation of
feeling that prompts me to say I wish that comradeship?"

"You _have_ said it then?" asked Jukes, and gave Miss Montague one of
his delightful sparkles.

"Let me hint so now, for the sake of----"

"An argument," suggested Miss Montague.

"In the fine sense, to arrive at a goal," said Henry, "not to
dispute."

And at the same time Miss Jukes was crying out:

"Now we're going to have an argument!"

"Never mind, one sometimes arrives so," Haskell replied, for Miss
Jukes had accompanied her cry with a look at him and a little shudder.

Miss Jukes turned away and looked at the shelves. Miss Montague
remained smiling, eager; the look on her face was that of one who
knows that after talk is over cometh always laughter and the old,
inevitable, amusing story, freshly returned to.

"If," continued Henry, "you think I say so because I regard
sentiment--mere feeling--" he underlined it, as it were, "more
important than reason, I don't know that I agree. I'd rather be
comrade," he plunged on, "with a woman than," he took a leap,
"perhaps you have noticed the spitters at your corners--the factory
girls' husbands--than that!"

Miss Montague did not look shocked. Neither did Miss Jukes. But only
Miss Montague looked elated.

"Well," said Jukes, "true! I agree with you there," but he looked
round about as if thinking that perhaps his sister might be ready to
go, and stuck his pince-nez in his waistcoat.

Miss Montague drew closer. Henry felt a thrill suddenly--the emotion
he had felt before in her presence--but whether it was kin with the
scent of a rose or was more like a snake's unconscious rattle he did
not know. There was no mistaking the fact that there was a thrill, an
emotion.

"And I think my feeling is right and my reason is sound," he went on
nevertheless, "when I say that comradeship between man and woman is
more lasting than what is commonly called--love," he said, and had a
difficulty in saying it--something seemed trying to weight his speech.
He had a vision of a manacled man with a great ball dragging at his
heels.

The odd, magnetic thrill died suddenly; the word seemed to have slain
it.

"I agree," cried Miss Montague, and Miss Jukes turned back amazed from
the shelves. She had been listening! "I do agree," cried Miss
Montague, "I've always got on well with men. I like men. I say it
quite frankly" (the thrill woke suddenly). "I've bird-nested with my
cousins over at Bavelaw and enjoyed it far more than skipping-rope.
I've gone round galleries with artists and enjoyed it far better than
going round with some old dowager with a catalogue and lorgnette. I've
even dared the conventions and met men friends in London and lunched
with them. Everywhere I go I make friends with men--and I expect I've
been called a flirt because of it. That's what one gets--told not to
flirt."

Her voice dropped. She looked round. Miss Jukes was at the far end of
the shop now, had fled farther this time.

"I've even smoked," said Miss Montague quietly, seeing Miss Jukes so
far off, "with men," and she gave the most engaging look to all three.

Henry frowned. Jukes bubbled and muttered, "Oh, fie!" The bookseller
smiled affably. Henry, knowing the bookseller now, saw a something
behind the smile and wondered what it was.

"I like Mr. Henry's idea of comradeship," said Miss Montague suddenly
solemn, almost stern.

Henry was moved again--his heart leapt. He felt he had done her an
injustice.

The bookseller said quietly: "And you agree with him, against Colonel
Jukes; you agree that he is not a sentimentalist--even according to
his own definition? For to believe in the comradeship, as you do, is
to believe in it as an end, not as a means."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," said Miss Montague a little frigidly.

Haskell, at any rate, did not take her coolness as a sign that he
there ceased to be on equal terms and became--her bookseller; it was
as though they were still on equal terms and had just explained
themselves to each other a little more clearly.

But Miss Montague thought, as she went homeward, how foolish it is to
unbend with those below one in social station.

"And yet," thought she, "one can always recover at a press, by
reminding them of--of their station. It does not matter."

As for Bliss Henry, he puzzled her a little. She smiled anon to
herself. She would see him again. He would not be rude to a woman, she
was sure. Indeed, she found him a "shy man." There was not the
slightest doubt to her that he was a shy man--that was perfectly
clear--and she liked shy men.

"That Mr. Henry is a gentleman, of course," said Miss Jukes, going
homeward with her brother.

"He has a slight Oxford accent. One sees he is a man of culture,
but--eh----"

"Yes, dear?"

"He's very outspoken. If it were not for his accent I should almost
think him vulgar to speak so--before the other sex."

"Oh, my dear, you should hear him before his own."

"I shouldn't like to."

"I assure you it's great. He says then precisely what he means."

"How disgusting it must be!" said Miss Jukes, staring at the cobbled
pavement.

"On the contrary, my dear, I find it most cleansing, edifying,
purifying," said Colonel Jukes.

"Dear me--why, you're serious, George. What is it?" and her other
side, her true side, I think, awoke.

"Yes, of course I am. I wanted at first to egg him on for fun--to
stick him into Solway society and then wave a red rag at him, as it
were, so that he'd cease to be a lamb and show them the bull he is."

"He has ideas?"

"Yes, and they'd shock Solway. In other words: they'd be the making of
Solway if Solway would listen and appreciate."

"Perhaps in a quiet way," suggested Miss Jukes after some thought,
"with a man here, and a man there, if your belief in him is sound, he
may be of use in Solway then--in a quiet way."

"Yes; that's the way of ideas. You're not a bad woman, sister"; he
paused in the roadway.

"What is it? What have you forgotten?" said Miss Jukes.

The colonel turned a strange, calm face to her, without any bantering
sparkle.

"I was thinking about comradeship--and having it--as Bliss Henry spoke
just now."

Miss Jukes felt a little lost again and fumbled.

"Oh! Do you think Miss Montague meant all she said?"

"Eh? I think," said Jukes, "that Bliss Henry will find that out."

"You think he's in love with----"

"Ssh! I think nothing about that. But oh, Miranda, if you'd only be
yourself, what a woman you would be!"




XVII


Solway was watching Bliss Henry, but he was blissfully oblivious of
that. Of course he saw the inhabitants look--they did more than
glance; they looked. Perhaps it might not be offensive to say that
they stared; but of course he recognised that he was a new-comer--a
stranger. The observing of these scrutinies did not lead him on to
consider that, as well as Solway being aware of a stranger, Solway was
waiting for the stranger to commit himself, to show of what set he
was, what he was, to write out a label, a finite label for Solway to
take and pin on him and then be content.

The factory girls looked at him, wondering if he ever required a
mistress.

The spitters at the corner looked at him wondering if ever he got
drunk, and so gave an opportunity to be helped home and blackmailed,
ever after, with touching of caps; no wonder that there was a certain
roguish, waggish, vagabondish twinkle often visible in the eyes of
these men--their only redeeming twinkle; they were then doubtless
thinking how droll it was--the way they lived on the moral rectitude
of the place.

Not only were they husbands to the factory girls, but they knew those
of the shopkeepers who sometimes found a tangle of roads outside the
hotels and had to be conducted home and propped there with a "Mum's
the word, sir--I won't tell a living soul--gentleman must have his
fun, but there's people talk--not that I would, sir. I keeps my thumb
on it; and I, bless you, sir, I like to see a gentleman enjoying
himself." Looking at Bliss Henry, their outlook on life being what it
was, their first thought was that he'd be a difficult devil to handle
in liquor, or out of it.

The tardy bill-payers looked at him because he seemed so dem
sufficient to himself and yet seemed not in Society. Who the dooce was
he? They had a hideous fear that perhaps he was of a better set.

But Bliss Henry did not understand these things, wandered about
looking at the Solway that he had the eyes to see, supremely ignorant
of the pornographic and idle sides of Solway, seeing rather the
changing effects of day and night in the place, its yellow and white
and cream-coloured gables and hurly-burly of red tiles and
thatch-eaves; seeing the misty or purple hills billowing round it
toward the sky, and just setting a-going, in that scenery, his own
puppets--not Solway's own puppets, as I am doing.

He strolled thus ignorantly down to his bookseller, with whom he had
arranged to "take tea." It being Saturday evening a jostle of girls
came and went in High Street, from Bavelaw Road to Mill Lane. That
little portion was trod to and fro, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a
wild rush, with a flutter of cheap flowers and ribbons, from
seven-thirty till ten every Saturday evening, amidst a constant jabber
of pattering talk, constant screaming and laughter and humming.

Yes, there they went rushing about two and two, arm-in-arm, sometimes
pausing to bow together in convulsions of laughter, sometimes seeing
some friend of the other sex and humming to him, in passing, a bar of
some popular ditty, such as "When there isn't a girl about, you _do_
feel lonely!"

Bliss Henry slipped through the throng and gained the bookseller's
shop to the strain of an Italian piano-organ playing, and girls
singing, "Stop yer ticklin', Jock," with a sudden suggestion in his
mind that there was a French song "Ne me chatouillez pas"; and
wondering which was made first--but not greatly interested. He entered
the shop, between the hanging rows of monthly magazines and sixpenny,
paper-covered prints. Some people were in the shop; so, having been
stared at on his way hither sufficiently to be aware of the stares,
and having no desire to emulate those whom he had felt uncouth, he
stared at a shelf of morocco Bibles and Prayer Books--with furtive,
occasional glances to the occupied bookseller, until he received a
signal that he was to pass through to the back premises. He
considered, dryly, that he had been staring a long while at the
morocco bindings, and wished he had been, instead, in front of the
Everyman bookcase. He often read the Bible, but not in morocco. He
read it as Literature, neither as an ordeal of home life, nor as a
state affair in the Church of his land.

The bookseller followed on his heels into the library.

"You may find something to interest you," said he, "if you go right
through to the back. I've been buying up a parson's library. I haven't
looked it all through yet. Just go right through. I'll be with you
presently," and he sped back to some affluent customer.

Henry walked through to the dusty room beyond the library, the
entrance to which was cloaked with a red curtain, and looked at the
books laid out in rows on the floor: volumes of sermons and
theological books in a small row; then two great rows of railway
novels--Miss Braddon, Ouida, Guy Boothby, Marie Corelli.

Then the curtain lifted behind him and the bookseller entered the
twilit little lumber-room of a place.

"Not much money in them," he said; "but I can stick them in the
library. These are the things on which to found a circulating library
in Solway. There's a shelf up there--twenty Zolas, and other novels,
Vizetelly edition."

Henry took one absently down and turned its pages; then another; then
he noticed that on the end fly-leaf of the book he held were page
numbers. What might the numbers signify? He took down the others
again. Yes--all were annotated in like manner. He turned up a page in
a volume so noted, and on the page found a line beside a paragraph--a
second clue. He read the paragraph with expressionless face; turned up
another page, read the marked part there; then another, then another.
His face was blank. He drew a long breath. He looked as though he was
going to go no further with this occupation, put back that volume with
an air of finality; but suddenly he took out, almost fiercely, another
volume, turned up a page or two--a marked page or two--and again blew
a long breath.

"From a parson?" he asked.

"Yes--what is it?" asked the bookseller.

"Oh, take any of them--take any--I expect his passages marked in any
are as instructive as in this. Yes; that one is marked."

The bookseller opened the volume in his hand and looked at the end.

"I hadn't noticed that," said he and began to consult the parson's
noted pages. Then he paused and looked at Henry, who stood staring on
him, having not quite given over his occupation.

"God!" said the bookseller.

"'The arts,'" said Henry quietly, "'are about to take upon their
shoulders the burdens that have fallen from the shoulders of
priests.'"

"Who said that?"

"Yeats," said Henry, but more interested in his thoughts than in
imparting information on the origin of his quotation--just burst the
name out coldly in reply and stood frowning.

"Zola wasn't a priest," suggested the bookseller in one of his
flashes.

"More priest than artist it would appear," said Henry, turning to him
quickly, like one who had been dreaming. "I don't know Zola--I could
never come near him--I never liked the odour of his--eh--temple" (the
bookseller smiled), "and so I never went inside to hear him. Still--by
the Lord--he can't surely be as bad as this parson makes him out to be
by his pencil notes. Yet I'm afraid--no--I'm afraid Zola wasn't an
artist. As you see, few of the books this parson had are by artists."

Then Henry sat down on the broken chair that the bookseller was wont
to sit hunched upon when he bent over his piles of books in that
little rear room, sat down and put an elbow on knee, a hand over his
eyes.

"Take care--there's a leg loose in that chair," said Haskell. "You've
to balance----"

"That's all right. Has this parson a large following?" asked Henry.

"He's a great ladies' man," said the bookseller.

Henry's eyes were full of tears. He felt suffocated. The room had
fallen gloomy. As late afternoon fell there came no shaft of sunlight
streaming in to make even the dust-motes bright. There was just the
old court visible from the window, the mullioned windows staring down
dead and heavy; the whitewashed wall looked drab, the eaves above it
seemed heavy, giving darkness instead of shelter. Haskell turned up
the gas, seeing Henry sitting there miserable--feeling gloomy himself.
It was an old burner, there was no incandescent light in this little
rearward room, and the ragged flame, most part blue and one edge high
and the other low, made the little higgledy-piggledy room look more
dilapidated; and as Haskell turned up the light Henry saw the court
without very dismal, dimly and uncertainly seen through the dusty
window in which the ragged flame and the face of the bookseller were
reflected as in a very aged mirror. The court seemed to Henry to take
a horrid dead life, the blank windows opposite, under the eaves, to
peer on them.

"I think I'll go outside," said Henry, rising gingerly from the
rickety chair doing its last service out there in the room no customer
saw. "I feel it stuffy in here, if you'll excuse me saying so."

"That's all right," said Haskell.

Our author went out into the street to find with joy that the night
that was beginning to fall was not terrible, but ethereally blue, and
vast, and tender; he looked up and saw stars beginning in the immense
concave of wonder that dreams always over Solway. A wind was blowing
down the gulch of the High Street, down from the hills. He took a
great breath of it and then, sustained, turned again into the
bookseller's; but he had not to go back to the little rearward room,
though I am sure he could have lit it now with his renewed faith so
that the ragged gas-flame even would have seemed more a ludicrous
aside than one more touch in the making of a dusty and disagreeable
impression.

The bookseller had on his hat--the two assistants were hastily
covering the tables with their nightly wrappings.

"Coming?" said the bookseller; and they went home together.




XVIII


The window was open to the night with a tree rustling in it and a
stream talking quietly through it, that sound entering with more
insistent peace as the night grew quieter. A scent of roses came in,
and there was no feeling of slackness or weakness despite all the
tushery "poets" have babbled about roses in ladies' breasts and hair.

Henry looked out and saw the roses in the garden and quoted from Poe:

    ". . . while the moon
    Fell on the upturned faces of the roses,

        *    *    *    *    *

    Fell on the upturned faces of these roses
    That gave out, in return for the love-light,
    Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death--
    Fell on the upturned faces of these roses
    That smiled and died in this parterre . . .

        *    *    *    *    *

    Upon the upturned faces of a thousand
    Roses that grew in an enchanted garden!"

He quoted so, in snatches, just as he recalled the poem, and then
strayed round the white room that this bookseller had made his
individual own, and saw a volume of Lang's _Aucassin and Nicolette_,
and opened it and turned smiling, as to a memory of old summers with
their apple blossom, turned to a passage and read here and there, read
in the preface too, thinking how, despite Mr. Lang's elderly and
exquisitely scholarly regret that the public will have prefaces, he
had yet given out much beauty in prefaces here and there. He read with
pleasure Lang's quotation (or misquotation and perhaps improvement) of
a stanza from Thackeray's _Old Lamp_:

    "When I was young as you are young,
     When lutes were touched and songs were sung,
     And love-lamps in the window hung."

The bookseller sat with his head resting on the back of his easy
chair, feeling that Bliss Henry was happy. Then Henry looked to the
piano.

"You play?" he asked.

"If you wish."

"I do wish," said Henry most heartily. The music, he thought, might
heal him of the parson.

The bookseller rose and swung slowly to the piano.

"I have a friend you must meet," he said. "He plays as I can't play.
Odd--I have another friend," he delayed at the piano to tell of his
friends brought to mind then. "He has left Solway long ago. He is a
composer, you must have heard of him. He comes down here now and
then--leaves Glasgow and comes back here without any swagger, and we
talk again just as before. He says a piano to him is just an aid--that
he hears a whole orchestra; when he talks of music he may go over to
the piano--half sit down in an off-hand way, and more indicate than
play; that's about all you could call it; and then he says: 'A piano
is of no great use. It just helps.' The other man--the man I began
about--goes to the instrument and as he sits down he changes somehow.
His face, his figure--the whole man changes. It's a thing one can
never forget. He doesn't know himself. He couldn't do it if he tried.
He goes to the piano as if it were an altar."

He played this; he played that. He played Leoncavallo, Dvo?k,
Beethoven. He played wondrously. Henry sat gazing out on the wavering
trees and the moonlit garden, seeing the outside world splendid and
ghostly, like the land of faery, dazzled by the light in the room.

"Thanks," he said, after a playing.

The bookseller went on; and then nebulous thoughts were in Bliss
Henry's mind: they moved and gathered to some parts of the music, to
fall apart again. He was hardly aware that he was thinking of a woman,
a girl, that he had known for years quite quietly without ever
thinking how well he did know her. She came to him then, but not
visualised. There was no picture of her flung vivaciously before him
to make his heart leap--only he remembered her, and poignantly too, I
think; but he did not know how deeply he was thinking of her! She was
just with him then--but he did not _want_ her; or is it _so_ he did
not want her? Colonel Jukes might have called such a state, whether
the man living in it was aware of living in it, or unaware, a
sentimental state. But we have thrashed that out--a little.

There was no longing, no "fever of love"; so he did not know--for down
the years the symptoms of love have been given as such--so he did not
know--that he was in love.




XIX


In the morning not May but Mrs. Sturge in person brought in his
breakfast. He had just strayed into his sitting-room from the little
bedroom when she tapped and entered with a swirl, a rush. He felt the
swirl and the rush as warning of some explosion; and then, remembering
how people said he was imaginative, informed himself that there was
nothing in the wind at all, no explosion heralded so. But of course
there was; men who are informed that they are this, that, and the
other--well, they are generally right!

He was consoling himself with the sunlight streaming through the
window on the white tablecloth, the wind blowing the white curtains of
the long, low window, when the first volley was fired.

"I'm an honest woman!" cried Mrs. Sturge, striking an attitude of
belligerent virtue, and her whole face hard with vinegary rectitude.

Henry looked at her quietly and bowed.

"I'm as straight as the day. Fair with me and I'm fair with you," she
cried.

Henry frowned and stared--and sat down and spread his serviette.

Then her manner changed.

"In my house, too! Oh, in my house!" cried Mrs. Sturge.

"Something has troubled you this beautiful morning?" hazarded Bliss
Henry, tapping his egg.

"What would my mother say!" cried Mrs. Sturge. "She was the kind of
woman that I'd rather die than let her know of such a thing. Trouble!
Yes; trouble is the word for it. That girl of mine--oh, the sly slut!
Well, I'm not surprised; I always suspected her of being a bad one,
with her select ways."

"Run away has she?"

"Run away! God forgive me that I should say it to a man, but she's had
a baby."

"What! A baby, Mrs. Sturge! When? I--eh----"

"I've just found it out--last night I found it out, and not a wink
could I sleep all night for thinking of the sly puss and all the
gentlemen, one time and another, that has been here with me. Not that
I hold with reading private letters. I once had a girl that I caught
reading letters in this house--reading them deliberately. I gave her
the fright of her life. I knew something about her, you see. I got it
quite by accident; and it shows how the Lord's ways go. I found a
letter, found it lying on the floor, she had dropped it, you see; and
I lifted it and began reading it to see what it was, not going
ferreting about anything. It was sheer accident. I just read a bit,
and then I saw the letter wasn't one of mine I had dropped, but hers.
And what was in that letter made me that ashamed I couldn't give it to
her. I just burnt it. But when one day she up and gave me some
impudence and made some remarks about my folks, I let her have a bit
back. That's the other girl I'm talking about. And here with this girl
now--I can't tell you how I found out--it's too disgusting, I assure
you, for an honest, God-fearing woman. But what I said to myself was:
'It might have been anybody. A girl like that would blame anybody. I'm
glad my dear husband is dead and gone or maybe she'd have----' Oh, Mr.
Henry, she'd say anything, that sly puss. I says: 'It might be this
fiction author that's with me now. If she did the like again she might
blame him as soon as another.'"

Henry gave a sigh and said:

"It really wouldn't matter who was blamed, as you say, if the man was
innocent. Quite candidly, I may say that May has no attractions for
me, physical or mental. All I have observed about her is that she has
very short arms, and a very rolling eye, and that when one does not
smile at her she sets the dishes with a clatter and makes a deal of
noise." Mrs. Sturge drew up a little, her hands crossed; her lips came
together. "And really, Mrs. Sturge, I think I'd rather not hear about
the immoralities of your servants."

Mrs. Sturge went white and then stood staring at Bliss Henry, giving
him what she would doubtless call a penetrating glance. He remarked it
and thought it insolent and disgusting and rudely searching. Damn the
woman--and damn Solway!

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Henry," she said suddenly as he gave back her
stare; his hand, which had been resting on the table, clenched and
unclenched--a sign she understood, it being primitive. "I'm so upset
with it all I had to tell you, seeing you are such a fine gentleman."
At that she retired.

"The harridan!" he thought. "I expect she's worse than May."

But it appears that one could pick and choose little in the mass of
Solway.

Oh, Solway! And this was the place in which he was to find peace! This
was the place in which he was to write a charming romance! He knew now
that his puppets would never move! The "local colour" was all right,
changeful skies, mutable moors, fields lying in unintentional design
of brown and green in the valley; but the puppets would not move.
After an insipid breakfast that morning he felt that they were dead,
that they had stuck. And he knew that his moral landlady, who had
spoiled his breakfast, had killed them. The air of the house told him
that he would have difficulty in getting life into them again--he felt
that they were dead indeed. It was a disastrous state of affairs.

Then hope returned, a frail hope.

He would go out and tramp on the moors, notebook in pocket lest, up
there, in the clear air, his puppets came to life again and talked; he
would then have the wherewithal to note their sayings and doings. But
he didn't think they would.

He thrust a clean handkerchief in his sleeve, took his stick and hat
from the sofa--it was his way to toss them there instead of leaving
them in the hall.

And then suddenly the church bells broke out through Solway, making a
strange buzzing in the room. He looked round to find the cause of that
unpleasant sound, traced it to a flower-vase. At every leap of the
church bells the flower-vase gave a discordant buzz. Was it cracked?
He lifted it and examined it. No; it was all right. He put it down
again, wondering. And then he found that the vase did not buzz again.

"Um!" he thought, "it must have been the way you took the sound. You
seem all right, after all."

He glanced out of the window to see if there was much crowd of
church-goers, for somehow he always imagined that people with
frock-coats and high hats and satin dresses going to church in Solway,
on beautiful sunny mornings when the Border hills were an amazing
purple all round the little town, seemed to be annoyed at sight of a
young man in leggings, and with a rough stick, going up High Street
toward the sky, instead of down Mill Lane or along the Carlisle Road
(as the case might be), to church or chapel.

He saw Mrs. Sturge sail forth.

A wind blew in at the window and he decided to go out, not to wait
till the church bells had stopped. After what he had heard he did not
wish to see May that morning, and she would be up soon to arrange his
room. He felt a pity for her. Mrs. Sturge had talked so loudly that he
feared May had heard. If the poor sinful girl had heard she might feel
ashamed.

He went slowly downstairs, feeling an unpleasant atmosphere around
him, nearly fell over a slop-pail at the door of the room below his,
and, just as he did not, heard a burst of laughter--May's--and her
gleeful voice crying: "Oh, sir! What would missus say if she saw us?"
Evidently May was all right.

He went out and walked briskly up High Street. The bells ceased as he
came to the last house; and beyond lay only the road, winding on the
moors. All the way up he had been haunted by a feeling that his
puppets were dead. Now he felt suddenly that they were not dead. But
he, he had lost something, lacking which he could not wheedle them
into acting or talking any more. He would be a fiasco, a failure; his
romance would never be written, that romance that was to bring joy and
beauty to man; he would be a failure, a fiasco; and meanwhile people
would go on letting rooms, and going to church, and fornicating, and
annotating indelicate passages in inartistic books; reading books that
suggested loathsome things; banning others that suggested the
possibility that men had souls as well as bodies, and adding to their
ban (those of them who were dishonest as well as disgusting and fond
of the disgusting) some mean phrase to the effect that we all know
that when a man objects strongly to something he feels its lure
strongly. Bliss Henry knew all that talk. What a tangle!

He turned round on the hill-crest, the moor beyond hazy with coming
rain, and looked down on Solway--place of peace!--and said: "To hell
with you!"

He was to say it with much more feeling ere he was done with it, and
able to ignore it.




XX


The rain poured down, but here on the high land the rain was a joyous
event. On he tramped, the collar of his waterproof coat up under his
ears, his head raised, his mouth closed, he drawing great breaths
through his nostrils. The rain beat on him. The roadway was deep in
mud, but he kept to the road, for the grassy verges were all sodden.
Round the little spring, where he had often paused to drink in summer,
was a pool of dancing water; for the spring lay in a hollow and the
moors were draining down that way.

He watched the rain charging across the moor, now like lances, now a
white, swirling mist; and he was very happy. Whether in sun or rain he
was always happy up here. He thought of that girl friend in London. He
had written to her of the moor in summer and had sent her a copy of
the fragment he had chanted here before. He thought she would like to
be here in rain as well as in sun.

He had met her once on Chelsea embankment, umbrellaless and radiant,
her cloak-collar snuggled under her chin, her dark tresses wet; she
tilted a little against the wind and smiling into it. It had cheered
him to see her. He must tell her of the lances of the rain, the white
mists driving in the cloven glens and scudding across the open moors.
He turned about and went squelching back to Solway to change his
clothes, rub down, relish tea as only such a day's tramp can make one
relish that poison, and then get on with his work--freshly, if not
with spontaneity.




XXI


May came blithely and quietly into Bliss Henry's sitting-room and went
down on her knees before his grate, her head a little on the side
listening to his movements in the adjoining room.

Presently he walked in from his bedroom, he slightly irascible,
beneath his quiet exterior.

He had had a feeling ever since that hideous Sunday morning of
something around him preventing him from doing anything that he wanted
to do. He had called himself lazy. He had even told himself that he
was already a failure. His first book had been a success. So also his
second. Every month now some magazine had his name on a headline as a
special attraction, but--there was the "but."

He had come down to Solway, as it were with a boxful of puppets,
knowing just what he wanted them to do. He had laid them all out,
stood them all up, set them all a-going with, in his mind, the
complete whole of their play; and behold, at the end of the first act,
when all was going well, something went wrong with the curtain. He
could not raise it again.

He tried to hearten himself by remembering what difficulties he had
had at first--to get the puppets set out. But he could not hearten
himself. Ever since that hideous Sunday his work had been at a
standstill. Everything he had written he had destroyed. He blamed Mrs.
Sturge. She had just flung a pailful of hypocrisy and sordid
parlour-maid underworld of lust over his puppets and then left him.
She had left a blight on him. The whole house was inimical to him, the
atmosphere atrophying. He came out to his sitting-room and saw May
before the grate.

No, he could not say she was attractive. She had a heavy neck, he
noticed then, on which the profuse hair hung in a net. She was short,
square. Her complexion was pink and white. She had perfect teeth and
short, dangling arms, and large breasts that bobbed above constricting
stays. He had wondered once or twice if May knew that her mistress had
told him that distressful bit of her history. After that Sunday he had
felt May, when Mrs. Sturge was at home, rather dejected; our sensitive
author felt her dejection, or whatever it was, every time she came
into his room. And yet it did not seem like real dejection. It did not
awaken sympathy--rather made him irritable; and he was not sensible
enough to call himself a fool for being upset by a boarding-house
drudge. He had the democratic as well as the aloof spirit of most
poetical minds. One good change, to his mind, was that she was very
little inclined now to roll her great eyes as she attended on him. He
wondered why the change had come, exactly. When Mrs. Sturge was out
May's laugh often rang on the stairs. But as the days passed she
regained her bouncing manner, even when Mrs. Sturge was at home.

This morning she looked up and favoured Henry with that familiar roll
of eye, as if she felt that she had something in common with him. He
had known maids overawed by his books and prints. May seemed not at
all overawed. Not that he desired to overawe; but he wondered what
thoughts this girl had, as we wonder of a dog or a cat that comes
about us.

He looked at her again and saw that she was really very pink and white
and that her eye had what the robust worldly call, with a note of
admiration, "the come-hither" in it. He could conceive a stable-boy
being enamoured of her square, fleshly plumpness. Also, it struck him
that if she were garishly dressed she would be like the women one sees
in London restaurants smoking cigarettes and looking as though they
were waiting for a friend. She looked squarely round and ogled him. He
stared at her, deep in her eyes, his face still with that look as of
trying not to show his inner deep distress at the cessation of his
capacity to make his puppets move.

"Oh!" she cried and stared. Then again, "Oh, don't look at me like
that. You make me feel ashamed!"

And then it struck him that men were truly pigs. He made her feel
ashamed! And there were men, it struck him, who, at such a roll of
eye, marked her for their prey. He was sorry that he was a man. He
regretted sex.

But, May still before him there, he turned from his nebulous
philosophy to thought of what Mrs. Sturge had told him; also he
thought of how, on the very day that he had heard that tale, he had
heard her amorous voice in the room below what time the slop-pail and
brooms waited on the landing.

In the manner of a god stooping to earth to aid he said:

"All right--all right! Don't you do anything to be ashamed of and then
you'll be all right."

He thought of the hypocrisy of the world. Mrs. Sturge had said that
she had heard by accident that someone who was keeping the child had
been wanting more money. Well! May could not have much money here, to
send on to wherever the child was housed. He put his hand in his
pocket and encountered a sovereign.

"Here," he said, "take this."

"Whatever for, sir?"

"Oh--that's all right. The past is past. Don't repeat it; but don't
forget it unless you've learnt its lesson. You need the money, I've no
doubt. You take that. Any time you really need money to help you--you
understand--come to me. I'll help you as far as I can. The ones that
hurt are not the ones that help----" he stuck--feeling that that was
perhaps cruel, and he had been trying to handle the subject
delicately, lest the poor girl might feel pained. He had heard that
even an unacknowledged mother has sometimes an intense primitive
hunger for the skulking, unnamed man that is father of her child. But
a sudden shadow on her face, as of some selfish thought, made him call
himself a fool.

"Remember," he said; "it's for the baby."

"Who told you?" she cried, whirling about and looking up on him, one
fore-foot raised half-way toward her breast.

"That's all right," he said.

She gave him an appealing look and a gesture that she felt, the moment
it was made, had no effect on this strange man.

She burst into tears.

"I am sad," she cried; "I try not to show it, but oh, I am sad! The
baby is a cripple, too."

"Oh! Oh, I am sorry."

"Yes, a cripple. I did all I could to stop it and--the doctor knew
when it was born. He did round on me. 'You've made the child a cripple
for life,' he said. Oh, he did round on me! I've suffered."

An immense horror took Bliss Henry. He had heard of illegitimacy. But
he had never pondered it. He had a look beneath now, as it were. A
door opened into a sordid, selfish world of passion.

May cried again, a fresh, piteous outburst.

"I'm fond of the babe," she said.

He could not understand her.

"You tried to----!" he stuck.

"Yes--I did my best--and it's a cripple. Oh, the doctor did round on
me! I've had a terrible lot of suffering through it all. I wish it
could die! I wish it could die!"

For the first time in his life Bliss Henry playacted. A hideous
thought came to his mind, wakened by a look on the girl's face. He did
not pause to question then if it was only his imagination that made
him read her face so. He had a thought, a horrific thought, to him.
Perhaps because he felt it so horrific he believed that he had read
her expression rightly. He acted on the thought. It was the last
speech to expect from Bliss Henry. It was not Bliss Henry who spoke.

"I suppose," said he quietly, "that sometimes if a child is boarded
out--eh---- Is the baby boarded out?"

"Yes," and that look on her face again.

"I suppose sometimes children--like that--boarded out--do die?"

"I couldn't manage that, sir--the woman that has her couldn't do that,
I know. But I'm afraid to take her away. I didn't send on money for
some time and she wrote to my folks at home and they paid up for me
and wrote me a terrible letter. So now--now--if I took it away from
her and gave it to a woman I've heard of since--if anything happened
they'd maybe suspect."

"What?" cried Henry. "It is so then--you'd have it killed for you--and
you say you----" he stuck again.

"Well, sir!" she spread out her plump hands, "the poor little thing,
sir--it's a cripple--a poor little cripple."

Henry stood looking at her and decided that the evil of the world has
neither memory nor imagination. He was to return to that thought later
and know how without memory and imagination there is no love. He
turned away toward the window, somewhat stunned and, in that mood,
somewhat stunned, in an absent fashion saw his paper lying on the
table beside the ink, paper on which nothing had been written for
days; or, if aught had been written, it had been written only to
destroy.

Here perhaps was life--the thing there, pink and white and square,
kneeling on the floor, was giving him real life. Perhaps, he deeply
thought, hardly aware of the thought, it was the real life round him
that prevented him being able to make his puppets move in their
make-believe. But was it real life? It seemed like nightmare. Was it
life? Was it life!

A touch on his shoulder recalled him. He turned, and May was at his
side.

"You won't tell anyone, sir?"

"Tell! I! After what I've said to you? Of course not."

"Thank you." Then suddenly she smiled in his face, slipped a hand
tentatively on to his shoulder--shining tears stood in her come-hither
eyes. "Tell me how you knew," she said. "Who told you--who told you?
You can kiss me if you tell me that."

Kiss her!

He stared in horror; but his own self he hid quite, dully, horrified.

"Why, your mistress told me, if you want to know," he said in a hollow
voice, answering her in as matter-of-fact a way as he could, since he
talked at all to her; but he backed from her and looked with horror on
her. She, transfixed, stared on him. Yet it was not at the knowledge
of the source of his information she looked so, with something of
horror too.

"Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ!" she said. "Oh, for God's sake don't look at
me like that! You make me feel--oh--you make me feel ashamed!"

She bent her head and, yes, assuredly her face was crimson, for some
reason; then she staggered from the room, squat, and deformed in his
eyes.




XXII


Bliss Henry closed his inkbottle and rose and regarded the litter of
his table a moment. Then, angrily, he gathered together the scattered
journals and stepped to his cupboard and put them away on the floor
there.

He felt as if, willy-nilly, he was plunged into the midst of a world
with which he had nothing in common. He walked to and fro in his room,
hands in pockets, brow furrowed, distressed.

    "I have not loved the world, nor the world me,"

he quoted,

    "I have not flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
     To its frivolities a patient knee."

He walked to and fro feeling very bitter. He did not want to be
bitter.

Henry's memory went racketing through many illogical futilities of
argument heard in the past. Cant phrases of privately embittered
people who had joined this or that public movement, as young jilted
boys often join the army, echoed in his ears; Babylonian incoherencies
that, if it be granted that the talkers possessed brains, might more
accurately be called dishonesties, so obviously dishonest, shifting
from base to base; cries _pro_ and _con_ on matters assumedly
religious and civic, which were really private snarls of people who
had not got something they wanted (a managership, or a baby) echoed in
his ears. But at the moment, because of his own private troubles, he
was not able to pity these poor perverted people; he remembered them
all with anger.

    "I have not loved the world, nor the world me."

And then he felt immensely sorry for himself that, loving the world as
he did, its simian inhabitants should make him, from their point of
view, "a bitter man," he whose heart was really bubbling with joy,
like a spring.

Then his eye caught sight of a _Spectator_ and a _Nation_ lying on the
table and he spurned them into his wastepaper basket.

Of course it was not the journals that irritated him. It was May, the
serving-maid; Mrs. Sturge, the landlady; the editor of a paper who had
promised to pay on the 3rd, and it was now the 30th--and also his
puppets would not move. Why should there be such hideous people in the
world when a mere man, Bliss Henry to wit, could create on paper, with
a pen, absolutely engaging women who were always beautiful, newly
washed, newly coiffed; and delightful, strong, tender men who loved
the beautiful women but felt unworthy and had at last to be told by
the heroine gently that they were the dearest, most wonderful men in
the world? I wonder if there was anything else wrong with Bliss Henry?
He wished he might meet someone with whom he could have a pacific but
inspiring talk about life and books.

"Oh, pshaw!" he said.

He gathered together the strayed sheets of his writing-paper and put
them in their drawer; gathered together the scattered volumes and
ranged them in their places on the shelves and went out for the day,
walked smartly up High Street, left behind, with joy, the last
cottages; came to the open moor.

He walked with downcast head staring at the familiar grey dust and
blue gleam of the roadway. His puppets, as he went, stirred a little;
he thought they were almost beginning to act--and then he found
himself thinking, willy-nilly, of the serving-maid's outlook on life,
of Mrs. Sturge's outlook on life, of--he checked himself; he banished
his thoughts wholly, seeing they were determined to be gloomy,
depressed ones. He passed on, walking well, across the moor to the
foot of Bavelaw hills; went on through the woods where streams
trickled, and in their broken banks mica shone in flakes; and the
woods were all a-swim with wavering light and leaves. And so on he
went to the open slopes, where only sheep broke the stillness and
where were low tombstones half hid in grass, and fallen grass-hid
walls, and one stone only erect, an Iona cross, with the mystic
letters I.H.S., giving thought of the world's greatest dreamer and of
all these ages, of time, eternity, and a dreamer's peace; and the
sheep bleating all around, and the august mountain towering behind
with a scarf of mist swinging along its face. And he threw himself
down in the heather and said:

"Oh, my God; my God; it is good to be home!"




XXIII


After a long, long rest he felt better, less lonely. Something of
solace had come to his heart. Perhaps he had been really longing for
kinship, for a meeting with someone who looked on the world as he
did--and saw it a bright, glittering, peaceful and yet invigorating
world of blue china and roses and etchings and bicycle rides on long
white roads, with a cold tub in the jolly morning and incense of
tobacco-smoke at twilight to the stars--and fresh sleep at night with
the windows open!

He stretched himself and sat up and saw the curlews flying, and heard
them, and chanted his broken fragment of an epitaph or whatever it
was:

    "I would go back to my own loved hills
        When I am dying,
    And die to the old, old voice of rills
        Where birds are flying--
    Flying and crying over the hills."




XXIV


In spite of the glory of the hills there was no work for Bliss Henry
that evening. He had healed himself; but just healed and no more; he
had no reserve of peace and joy with which to turn to his puppets and
make them live.

He tried again on the morrow to get them a-moving and alive, but could
not.

The day without veered and changed, spells of thin sunshine suddenly
ended in quick, deepening shadow, bursts of rain; and then came the
sun again.

He went out and tramped over the hills above Solway, smiting the
thistles with his stick. As a rule he loved to feel the rain on his
face, a swirling wind coming now from this quarter, now from that,
unexpected and stimulating. To-day he found the ways muddy, difficult
to walk on. The wet seemed to go into his bones and chill instead of
refreshing him. The intervening spells of sunlight seemed pallid, ill.
In the hedges a bird gave a frail, disconsolate twitter--no song. He
had fled from Solway to the hills for peace, but he had, after all,
just brought his pitiable condition with him. But he stuck to it
manfully, tramped all the way to Currie and had lunch there at the
little hostelry that stood grey in the high moors, with bent trees by
it and a wind crying in its quaint chimneys. Then he began the return
tramp; but the whole rolling chaos of hills spoke of sodden misery to
him.

"I shall go down to Haskell's," he thought, "and I shall say:
'Haskell, to save my immortal soul from torment, also to make me fit
to work again, play to me, give me again, in music, some peace.'"

He went down the village street with the swing--left, right--of a man
who has travelled far, splashed with mud above his knees. It was about
sunset; the rain had taken off and a glow filled the west, and red
fires banked up there in a wet gorgeousness. The High Street was
deserted; one could hear the gutters whispering. The shops were all
lit, but hardly anyone was abroad.

He went home and tramped up to his room and changed his soaked clothes
for dry.

If he had only lain down to rest the events that followed might not
have followed; but he did not lie down to rest. He had made up his
agonised mind to go to the bookseller and say: "For God's sake play to
me. I am generally strong and quiet. To-night I am in torture. It is
a filthy world, a shambles, a tangle of hypocrisies and maze of
filthinesses and their veils, just a great choking tangle. Play, and
give me back the capacity to be quiet and to go on with joy."

So he dressed again and went forth and took his way to the
bookseller's. The pavements were all white and dry in the wind, though
still the gutters trickled from the day's rain. The street lamps were
being lit, one by one twinkling to life, the lamplighter coming
plodding down the street sheltering his light as best he could--then
spark! another lamp lit and fluttering.

"Hail, Prometheus!" Bliss Henry murmured as he passed the lamplighter,
and the lamplighter gave him an odd, sidewise glance and then looked
back on him.

"Talking to himself," he said; "been drinking maybe."

When Henry arrived at the shop it was to find that the bookseller was
gone for two days to overhaul a library somewhere.

"Another hideous parson's, I suppose," he conjectured miserably.

Henry was evidently not sufficient for himself. He had buoyed himself
up with the hope of the bookseller being there, perhaps on the point
of leaving for home; but that he would be absent he had not for a
moment expected. The place seemed dead. He heard a far-off rumble of a
cart, tappings of feet went by in the High Street and sounded as if
they were far off, as if his ears were muffled--as if either he did
not really exist or else Solway did not.

The girl assistant gave a winsome, sympathetic smile as he took the
blow. Very clearly he advertised upon his face that he had come upon a
disappointment.

"I shall tell him you called," she said, "whenever he comes back
to-morrow."

To-morrow! But his self-centred soul--or to be fair to him--his soul
that had been thrust back on itself--felt that to-morrow was ages
away, and to-day had been an age--an age he could not have lived
through had he not, all through it, had the hope of a little music at
the end, a sop, perhaps a peace. He passed out and ran into the arms
of Jukes.

"Ah, the very man I was thinking of. I say--come home with me--my
sister is away seeing some relatives and I'm alone."

Something said: "No--don't go. Go home. Go to bed. Rest. Say to
yourself now: 'Solway is a lie,' and then go to sleep. In the morning
you will waken to the full realisation of the truth of your own
world--and that without having any sop of music--all, as it were, off
your own bat. Go home quietly, and go to bed and rest."

"Come along, dreamer," said Jukes.

And so Henry went along.




XXV


Bliss Henry was miserable. He did all he could to cheer up, to look as
though he had nothing on his mind, to show a smiling face and debonair
manner to Colonel Jukes and Mr. Drummond--a friend of Jukes's who
dropped in shortly after their arrival.

Dinner freshened him in a way, but only in the "feed the brute"
manner, if I may put it so. He could not get ease. He had to jog
himself to join in the conversation, for though he knew what to say on
the various subjects discussed from the oxtail soup to the cheese and
celery he, as it were, heard himself talking, knew he was talking
quite correctly, but wondered what on earth made people talk at all
about politics and travel and all the rest of it, when around one were
brutes, just brutes; and possibly even the most debonair people around
one were just brutes too, with a veneer on. Kipling's horrid lines
about the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady being sisters under their
skins, came into his head.

In that odd way that makes one sometimes suspect telepathy to have
been at work, that very phrase was quoted by Mr. Drummond at close of
one of Colonel Jukes's stories of India a little later.

Henry roused himself somewhat then.

"Yes," he said softly; "perhaps the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady
may be so; but perhaps, again, there are Judy O'Gradys not a bit like
the colonel's ladies--and," he added, smiling, "also here and there
colonels' ladies not a bit like Judy O'Gradys."

Drummond stared. He evidently did not understand.

Jukes glittered. If he had thought a little he might have understood.
He had in him the power to understand. But his excessive fondness for
"pulling a man's leg," for "gently roasting" someone, for "having a
fellow on" was uppermost. He suggested a removal to round the fire,
and filled up two glasses of whisky and soda which he put on a table
beside his guests. Jukes did not take liquor himself because, as he
remarked, it "played the dickens with his side," but he kept a fair
cellar for his friends.

"That remark of yours needs explaining," he suggested. "Don't you
think so, Drummond?"

"Well--I confess I don't quite understand," said Drummond, elevating
his brows and looking blankly left and right.

Henry wanted to say: "Then damn you, I'm afraid I can't explain," but
he had trained himself, rightly or wrongly, to be always polite when
he was a guest--just as also he was always polite when he was a
host--there are various courtesies to observe in life.

"Oh," he said, and spread a hand in a slack gesture, "I don't know
that it's worth going over."

The end of the gesture brought his hand to the table, and he took up
the glass and sat sipping while Drummond broke new ground with some
local topic which Henry did not understand, and thrashed it out with
Jukes. Henry was rather relieved. A little amused, he observed Jukes's
endeavour to make the conversation general. But he was quite satisfied
that it was not. He put down his glass and Jukes replenished it. He
sat frowning and biting his upper lip. Drummond rose and paced the
floor, in a way he had, as though he wearied of sitting; then stood
swaying with his back to the fire and his hands behind him--then edged
to one side of the hearth and leant against the mantelpiece.

A word on this Drummond.

He quite prided himself on being a Peace-maker. If he heard that two
men had "quarrelled" he immediately set out to bring them together,
thus often aiding some rogue of whose roguery a simpler soul had grown
weary at last--like a worm that turned. He often managed to make the
worm return, and so gave the rogue another chance. It made him feel
happy to do things like that.

It suddenly occurred to him that he had been taking up the
conversation and talking about matters that a stranger would scarce
understand.

"Have you been long in Solway, Mr.--eh--Henry?" he asked.

"No; not very long," said Henry.

"Here on holiday?" chanted Drummond, and took his glass from the
table, sipped, and set it on the mantelpiece.

"Mr. Henry is here," explained Jukes, "to take notes--a chiel amang us
takin' notes, I expect."

"Oh? Eh?"

"Mr. Henry is an author. You know the name----"

Drummond bowed and looked quickly round to see that he was not keeping
the firelight from Henry.

"Yes; certainly," he said. "I was not aware that I was having the
pleasure of talking to _the_ Mr. Henry--an author."

"You needn't kow-tow to him," said Jukes. "He's not that sort of man.
Are you, eh?"

Jukes's tone seemed sweet to Henry. He was glad that Jukes understood
the unassuming bit of him. He was glad that Jukes felt that he could
speak thus.

"No," he said, smiling; "an author is just a man like any other man, I
fancy." Then he laughed. "Not that the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady
are sisters under their skins," he added.

Jukes had a fresh smile. He had at first hoped to see Henry "catch the
needle," as he phrased it. Now it would appear that Henry was going to
pull Drummond's leg gently. Well--that would do as well. He cared
little who was bantered, but he dearly loved banter.

"Where are you living?" asked Drummond.

"Everywhere, I think," said Henry. "I began at 'The Gamekeeper,' and
then went to rooms at the top of High Street in one of the old houses.
Now I'm just at the bend of High Street, with a view of the moors
above and fields below."

Drummond stared.

"And comfortable at last, I hope?" said Drummond, and lifted his glass
and looked at the slight fluting on it.

"Well, the view is all right," said Henry, and lifted his glass and
looked at the slight fluting on it. "I would move to-morrow if the
view was not so friendly," he set his glass down again. "I can see the
top rolls of moor and the crest of hills beyond by looking up the
street. Looking down I can see the fields and one or two twists of
river. And the street--oh, the street is rich with the drollest
foreshortening of people under the eaves--tops of hats with feet
protruding under them. Oh, droll!"

"I wonder if I know your landlady?"

"Mrs. Sturge is her name."

"Sturge--Sturge--no, I don't think I know her," and Drummond sipped
and set his glass on the mantelpiece again.

"Then I can tell you a joke about her; at least I hope it's a joke. I
call it a joke. To look at it otherwise would irritate me. I heard the
other day from a friend of mine--that--" he gave ever so slight a
pause and looked at his glass--"she was going to visit friends at
Dunecht--and it struck me that she could come this way--by Solway----"

"Yes, surely--a beautiful drive from here. But the coach goes only
every other day, you know."

"Yes; I know. I thought of writing, suggesting," he flushed a little,
but Drummond did not see that--only Jukes, "suggesting that she come
this way by an early train, have a view of Solway, and then go on by
the coach at four o'clock. My landlady happened to come up when I was
thinking of writing to her, and I said: 'Oh, Mrs. Sturge, I suppose if
a friend came up with me some day next week you could give us lunch
and tea?' She looked at me and said: 'A friend! Do you mean a lady
friend?' I said, 'Yes.' And she said: 'No; not in my rooms. I can have
sisters come to see my gentlemen, but not cousins. I'm suspicious of
cousins, and you can't tell them by the face; but a lady
friend--alone--oh, no!'"

Drummond's face seemed always to wear an astonished or expectant look,
and Henry did not see in it any suggestion that his story fell not as
he imagined it necessarily must. So he went on:

"I said: 'What?' like that; and she said: 'Na, na! You may be all
right, Mr. Henry; but I've to think of what the neighbours would say.'
I said: 'Good heavens, Mrs. Sturge, you're joking!' And she said: 'It
may be all right in London, but this is a small place and'--you
wouldn't guess what next!--'human nature is human nature, and we're
all John Thomson's bairns.'"

He ceased and awaited the outcry of derision--laughter, or short,
angry outburst.

Drummond was very erect and proper.

Jukes was solemn and twinkling.

"What did you say?" asked Jukes.

"I? Oh, I said: 'Madam, we are not, distinctly are not, all John
Thomson's bairns.' She went away and left me--but I didn't write. I
really felt I couldn't ask my friend to come to a house with such an
atmosphere."

Drummond coughed.

"Pray don't think me prurient, sir," he said; "but I fear I must say a
word on behalf of this estimable woman. There is a word to be said
for her, you know."

"Oh?" said Henry, and looked up, all astonishment.

"Well, sir, I quoted just now that the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady
were sisters under their skins----" Drummond paused.

"And," said Henry, as Drummond seemed to have more than paused, seemed
to have taken it for granted that he had sufficiently explained
himself and need say no more, "I tried to explain the way in which
that is true; also the way in which, far more, it is not true. I also
quoted my remark that we are not all John Thomson's bairns. However,
pray proceed," he said, for Drummond had begun to make a stammering
sound and to wave his hand. Jukes, who knew Henry a little at least,
found a new note in his voice then. It was dangerously suave, he
thought.

"Well, sir, I see how you are irritated," said Drummond kindly,
leniently, benign; "but think how things would go if you, with all
good intention, had lady friends to see you alone. Think! Think how
others, not honest and good, if I may say so, would take advantage of
that----"

"Oh, let them talk--for _me_, that is. I know what you mean. I've seen
a little of Solway. Let them talk--for me."

"I don't mean that. I mean that the serving-girls, for instance, might
say: 'The master has a girl friend to see him alone. Why can't
we?'--and then--well, you know what the majority of people are----"

"Yes," sighed Henry. "Colonel Jukes once informed me that----" (Jukes
glared frightened at him, wondering what on earth he had given
information of at all apropos; but Bliss Henry went on relentlessly;
he had been drinking Jukes's whisky, which Jukes had been glad to see,
hoping it might render him amusing) "informed me that when a man and
woman were left alone together in Solway for two minutes----"

"I protest!" cried Jukes.

"----they immediately thought of what Shakespeare calls incestuous
pleasures," continued Bliss Henry, and pursed his lips and raised his
head a little.

"They were your words!" cried Jukes.

"It was your statement," said Henry, and blew smoke. "However,
Mr.--er--Drummond, you were saying?"

Drummond looked from one to the other and then:

"Um--well--this is rather straight talking; but of course we're all
men here--no ladies. I would say, also, about this young lady friend
of yours, that to invite her to--er--'digs,' as they are called, is
not quite the thing."

Henry was going to cry out "Why?" when Mr. Drummond went on:

"Especially if there is anything between you."

Henry sat erect.

Jukes was gentleman enough, as the phrase is, to feel a pang, as host,
and grew serious.

Henry remained calm a little longer.

"What makes you think that?" he said. "Anything between us? How do you
mean?"

"Well, I mean inviting a friend so. Your landlady doubtless thought
she was what, in her sphere, would be called your 'young lady.'"

Henry felt as if he would suffocate or faint. He wondered if perhaps
he had drunk too much--he thought he had almost the symptoms of
apoplexy now. It was only, however, the strain of restraining himself
that affected him so. He would let himself go presently. In certain
cases one should be silent--in others, speak!

"You mean that if we were in love it would never do?" he asked, quiet,
speaking slow, distinctly. He wanted to make quite sure of Drummond,
to have him state his case so coldly that there would be no shuffling
afterwards when the reply came.

"Thanks, yes--I mean that then, of course, it would be quite wrong
and I should agree with your landlady."

The girl he had thought of thus writing to, in a moment of
unquestioning turning to her, was she of whom I have already once
mentioned he had had a thought; you remember--it was while the
bookseller played one night and the stream crooned without. He saw her
now in his mind's eye--remembered their many meetings in London--their
many talks. God! How all this would pain--aye, pain--her.

Jukes thought the storm was over, thought Henry was going to make no
reply, had decided to leave affairs at that. And despite his love of
banter he was glad. But no.

"Why?" Henry's voice exploded.

There was no answer, but a shrug from the swaying Drummond.

Said Henry "Why?" again.

"Well, sir," said Drummond, "need you ask why? Is it necessary to
press the point?"

Henry rose.

"It is," said he. "I shall press the point. I have never met you till
this night and if I see you to-morrow I am hardly likely to recognise
you. But I shall ask you this question: Do you mean a worse thing than
all? Do you mean to say----" he stuck, gasped, gave then a low cry,
there is no other way I can describe that burst of soul: "What? Shall
a man lust after the woman he loves?"

All three were now on their feet.

"I put it," said Henry, with a great restrained gesture in the silent
room so strangely charged with a deeper thing than emotion, "not as a
fact. I would not speak of this girl to you. Indeed I declare to you
that I do not love her. I put it all theoretically to you--as I
presume a gentleman would have it--in the way in which I presume you
quoted about the colonel's lady in a retired colonel's house--you
being a gentleman--I put it theoretically, not personally. I ask you:
Does a man lust after the woman he loves?"

Jukes stood flustered. Drummond fluttered on the hearth.

"Really," he said, "your language is----"

"Sir," cried Henry. "Your ideas are worse than my language. Your ideas
are such that I would not stay a moment under the same roof with you.
I withdraw from you. Evidently you are too far gone even to desire my
help. I withdraw. I wish you farewell. I shall never see you
again--here--or hereafter." He turned and bowed to Jukes.

"Colonel Jukes, I must crave your clemency for this scene--which was
none of my seeking. Thanks--I shall find my way out. Pray don't leave
your friend. He may wish to talk to you of colonels' ladies and Judy
O'Gradys." He bowed deep, and then drew up and looked in the eyes of
this Mr. Drummond who had assisted at such a scene as never in his
life had he dreamed of as possible.

But Jukes came quietly to the door with Henry, helped him on with his
coat. Then he did an odd thing. He clapped Henry's shoulder as he took
his hand.

"Come again," he said. "Come soon. Come when my sister is at home. I
hope you are not offended."

"Offended! I hope I have not offended you," said Don Henry.

"Not at all--not at all. I can't ask you to stay after the way you've
been insulted, however. Good night."

He caught Henry's hand again. The smile he gave then was not of
banter, but of goodwill.




XXVI


Bliss Henry walked down the broad carriage-way, his feet crunching
emphatically in the gravel; then, with his hand on the side-gate he
looked back, and the thin light from the hall that had lit him forth
went out. He saw Jukes a moment against it, as though bowing at hazard
into the unseen. He waited a moment that his eyes might be better
acquainted with the dark, windy night; and then, seeing there was
scarce any light in the sky, and as he saw, dimly, the borders of the
road, deeper shadow of wall and hedge, he plunged forward down-hill.

Branches creaked, and leaves rustled in a subdued immensity of sound;
blown leaves flicked his face as they were harried through the dark by
the whirling wind. He plodded on, his occasional brushing of the wall
due chiefly to the darkness and the uneven way. The worst of having
touched liquor at all is that the sceptical may suggest--or the
introspective may even suggest to themselves--that one who had not
touched anything more heady than water might not, at least, brush the
wall, even in a dark and blustering night, so frequently. But it was,
in all honesty, a dark night and an uncertain pathway.

There was relief for Bliss Henry when he came to the first lamp above
Solway, for then he found that his occasional divagations had been due
wholly to the dark. On that point I think one may trust his verdict;
for he was his own severest critic. It was an immense relief, and
eased him of a growing irritability toward himself, to find that, as
to the legs he was blameless. As to his mind--he was still aglow with
a sense of the fitness and logical sequence of his remarks. He saw
that he had gone to the root of the matter, with impeccable insight,
and acumen such as one associates with the legal mind. As to the
emotions--a flurry of wind about him, a sudden departure of a cloud
and breaking forth of the moon, settled their drift. He looked up and
gazed, in the dusk, with glowing countenance, on the moon, as he
posted down-hill, passing here and there pillared and gated entrances.
When he arrived at the first houses of Solway proper, apart from these
dotted upper houses, a quick patter of rain came over him--the moon
was hid--revealed again--hid again--anon revealed.

The rain came in splashes and he held up his face to its wet freshness
with delight.

A sudden great joy came to him; nay, an emotion beyond joy. The touch
of all the sordid things that he had been encountering seemed
suddenly to be torrentially washed from him, and he stood stock still
when that sense of newness came to him.

The place was under a great plane tree, the trunk of which jutted out
into the road, it being partly within and partly without the wall of
its garden. The wall was about as high as his waist, and above that
were railings set in it. He looked through and saw a row of gardens
and trees and dotted shrubs and houses beyond, all standing dark.

Below twinkled the street lamps of Solway, splashed about on the slope
and marching up toward him in flickering lines. Over all were the
flying clouds giving to the moon the aspect of a fleet courser, a
courser that did not progress, a kind of dream courser, a kind of
squirrel on a wheel--not that such a simile was in Henry's mind.

Still he remained motionless where that sense of being washed and
blown clean had come to him.

I know not how long he stood there tasting and living that immense
joy. He stretched out a hand and leant it on the abutting plane tree;
and at that contact a new joy came to him. He clapped the wet, rough
trunk. He looked up, called to by a grand, subdued, and yet in its way
stormy, dancing of the leaves over him. His eye pierced through the
wavering spaces of the billowing top, and he saw again the speeding
and motionless moon, the blown stars.

A splash of rain came and went.

It was so windy a night that the pavement was drying ere the next
splash came. He saw it spotted black with the raindrops--saw it
lightning.

Then a high, amazing, kind of victorious laughter of the leaves broke
out again over him.

He looked up rapt and joyous.

"Oh tree!" he cried. "Oh tree!"

And at the sound of his voice came a consciousness of himself sole, in
the world empty save for flying wind, and leaves, and rain, and the
flying moon.

"Oh wind among the leaves!" he cried.

He fumbled in his hip pocket and drew forth that inseparable
companion, his hopeful notebook. The nearest lamp gave sufficient
light for him to see at least which pages were blank; and straightway
he began writing:

    "This is a sad thing that a man must say
      Farewell to the blue waters and white moon,
      To dawns across the sea, to nights of June
    And red Septembral sunsets; pass away
    Beyond the song of rivers and the play
      Of wind among the grasses on the dune;
      Or, on the wall, of sun and leaf-shade; soon,
    So soon, farewell, the wonders of the way."

He had had a slight pause at the blue of waters and a leap of his
heart at the white of the moon. Now he had a longer pause.

Then the tree gave a great glorious outcry.

Yes; the inspiration at that moment had at least momentarily failed.
But when the tree cried again tempestuously with the wind, he gave a
glad cry--upturned his face again.

He lay against the protruding stem, part embracing it as far as the
wall would allow, and waved up into the tossing top.

"Oh tree!" he cried. "I love you more than all things." Then he saw
again the moon--a cloud whisked away from its face--and "Oh moon!" he
cried. "Oh tree and moon!"

A squall of rain splashed him.

"And rain! Oh rain!" he cried, and in the joy of it all he then took
off his coat and jacket, all in one magnificent gesture, and thrust
them hanging between the railings a-top the wall.

He took his notebook from teeth that had exquisitely and delicately
held it for the disrobing, and turned a page lest the rain should
smudge the octave he had written; and then with a sudden concentration
and gathering of his brows, as when he sat at his table at home, he
plunged into the sestet:

    "Yet it may be that he shall understand,
    When to the ultimate august silences
    He is led forth by an immortal hand,
    The reason why to leave these things he grieves,
    And grieveth not to leave all else that is----"

He felt it in his whole consciousness--he could leave all--all
Solway--all life--all--all--even Haskell--and then a pang came, a pang
that sobered him for a moment--a pang born of a nebulous thought of a
woman living on and he one with the wind in the leaves, and the
twinkle of stars and the flying of clouds. But he returned to his book
and wrote the culminating line of his sonnet:

    "O sun, O moon, O wind among the leaves."

And then he drew a great breath, and blew out a great one from his
nostrils--and took off his waistcoat and put it with the other
discarded raiment--and sat down on the pavement with his back against
the tree and chanted his sonnet to the vasty and uninhabited night.

He ceased, and sat rejoicing in the feel of the rain on his arms. He
was just turning up his shirt-sleeves when came a voice:

"Hullo, mister! Ye'll be getting cold. What are you doing there?"

He looked up and saw a constable before him, looking down on him heavy
and coated.

"Writing a sonnet," said Henry. "But, oh, far more than that! Living!
Living, sir! Cleaning my soul!"

"Writing a what?"

Henry rose and with a compelling gesture conducted the constable
nearer to the lamp and produced his notebook and read, holding his
book close, subconsciously thinking that the writing was bad, but glad
that it was at least decipherable and that there was no hitch in his
declamation:

    "This is a sad thing that a man must say
      Farewell to the blue waters and white moon,
      To dawns across the sea, to nights of June
    And red Septembral sunsets; pass away
    Beyond the song of rivers and the play
      Of wind among the grasses on the dune;
      Or, on the wall, of sun and leaf-shade; soon,
    So soon, farewell the wonders of the way.

    "Yet it may be that he shall understand,
    When to the ultimate august silences
    He is led forth by an immortal hand,
    The reason why to leave these things he grieves,
    And grieveth not to leave all else that is----
    O sun, O moon, O wind among the leaves."

"There's a fine sound about that," said the constable, when the
reading was over and the poet waited in silence with an air that
seemed to say: "If you appreciate, it is a good sign of you. If you
fail--well, I am sorry--but you have heard something of high value."

"Did you do that?" said the scrutinising constable.

"Just now," said Henry, and waved his hand lightly toward the tree--to
which he retired again, the constable pacing slowly back after him.

"Well," said the constable after a short but sufficiently sympathetic
and decorous silence, "you'll have to be getting home now."

"Home!" cried Henry. "I am not going home. Constable," the moon was
disclosed again, "I am going to live for ever--like the moon," he
added.

"All right, all right," said the constable.

"And here I am going to stay to-night."

"All night?" asked the constable.

"Till morning," said Henry.

"Well," said the constable with a kind of sigh, "I've to go up a bit
farther. Maybe I'll see ye when I'm coming back."

"I'll be here," said Henry. "Constable--would you care to hear the
sonnet again?"

"Thank you--I've heard it once."

"I can speak it to you," said Henry.

The constable tarried, and Henry spoke it again. He began it sitting,
and then was smitten with a sense of the lack of reverence toward the
phrases, and rose at the second line and stood reverentially speaking
the words in a fashion he conceived as not without much of the
splendid and fitting.

There was silence at the close and Henry thought his constable a man
with some fine strength--a godsend in Solway. The constable looked on
him long from the deep shadow of helmet and brows and doubtfully
remarked:

"You'll be catching cold."

"I'm all right," said Henry.

"Very well," said the constable and continued his slow way up-hill.
When his footsteps ceased Henry looked up again to the plane tree top,
caressed the stem and sat down again in his old posture. Now and then
he looked up and waved--now to the moon--now to the tree--now in a
comprehensive wave that included all the dome and all the tossing
trees of the night, his heart full of he knew not what wonder. He felt
another poem in him, one that he had not the power to write, and he
began to feel the sonnet a poor affair by comparison with that
unwritten but felt pan in his life, somewhere, he knew not
where--head, heart, in his very veins, they being filled from his
pumping heart with surely not blood, but with immortality and
splendour and glory.

Suddenly again a voice:

"Hullo! Are you not in bed yet?"

It was the returned constable.

"Hullo, constable! Back again! Pass on, please--pass on--I would be
left alone with the tree and the moon."

"Ah, well," said the constable, "I've to go up a side-way here next.
I'll be back again," and he moved on yet once more and disappeared in
a side shadow.

But when he returned the poet had departed. The constable walked to
the wall to see that he had not by accident left his clothes. No--they
were gone also.

The tree was alone, waving and singing in the night--Oh, sun; oh,
moon; oh, wind among the leaves.




XXVII


There was a little buzz of voices in Haskell's incandescent-lighted
library, and to our extravagant author the place was of course a
_salon_, or possible _salon_. A brightly-lit book-lined room, with one
or two people in it talking--how could it be otherwise? He forgot the
quality of the books for one point!

Haskell, moving in a corner with that odd air more of master of the
assemblies than of your obsequious servant, saw him enter. He noticed
that Bliss Henry gave a quick smile in response to his, and then
looked away, as though not desiring to interfere with business.
Haskell, glancing again, after that recognition, took stock of Henry
in the openly surreptitious way that is possible to one who wears
_pince-nez_, aided by the sheen on the glasses. He thought that Henry
looked remarkably well and wondered if the author had been busy; he
had not seen him during these two days since his return from
"arranging a gentleman's library."

As a matter of fact Henry had been indoors, self-prisoned, for shame,
and when he had come out that evening had faced the streets prepared
to hear a whisper through Solway: "Now you know him. He's a drunkard."

Henry moved along the walls glaring at the books, and then a voice
said:

"You _are_ engrossed, Mr. Henry."

He was indeed engrossed, not just pretending till his bookseller
should be free to talk; for he had found an old calf-bound Jeremy
Taylor in a side shelf with other books--not similar inside, but as to
binding--probably from some merely moneyed person's house, where all
the books were bound in skin from the same family of calves, or
something of that kind. And now he was reading of the tomb of Ninus.

He turned and bowed--to Miss Montague, who stood behind him, tall,
stately, in a dress of a greyness that made her eyes more wondrously,
witchingly grey, with three daffodils--the stems cut short--just
showing in the folds of her loose grey cloak, a blue scarf over her
hat, tied under her chin--giving our author a thought of Arnold's

    "Paint that lilac kerchief, bound
    Her soft face, her hair around:
    Tied under the archest chin
    Mockery ever ambushed in."

She had had to speak to him to attract him. It pleased him, turning at
her voice, to know that he had not _felt_ her presence, not felt that
"damned magnetic stir" again; and so he was wholly pleased to see her.
Ah, if only he had had such as she to talk with, the thrill-less she,
the she minus thrill!--instead of Drummond--the affair of the plane
tree had never happened! As he turned to Miss Montague, seeing her
open, direct eyes, and their dancing clearness, he thought: "I wonder
if by any chance she knows." She did not--but the story, I am sure,
would have amused her immensely.

She held her hand tentatively to him and he took it and bowed. Here
was the _belle lettrist_ who would have understood all Henry's side of
the Drummond _v_. Henry business--or so he believed, for he did not
yet know her. It was splendid to meet her to-night--and in so frank
and friendly a way. She healed him--but with none of that magnet and
filing emotion of which he had been conscious before.

He looked at her very candidly. Then he was suddenly a little
disturbed to observe that she became oddly nervous. Her queenliness
seemed to be suddenly a strained matter. What! Had he been rude in his
manner of greeting! She looked left and right at those in the _salon_
as though afraid they were staring, her first ease shaken. To put her
at ease Henry turned his back fully to the wall, that she might face
him, so that if any stared in the queer way of Solway when a man and
woman stood talking (he had observed that way of Solway), he could
return a quiet gaze on the starer that did not even say, "Well?"--just
a quiet look of unobservance and the starer would look away and Miss
Montague need not feel put out--not seeing these looks, the knowledge
of the possibility of which, he at once quietly opined to himself, had
made that sudden nervousness of manner, she being of a refined cast of
mind.

"Here's a beautiful old book," he said, and she looked at it quickly,
almost snatched it, the way one snatches a life-belt. Then she
regained her ease.

"What is it? No; I don't know him," she said. "I've to come to him
yet. I know he has wonderful passages. Fancy finding this here!
Haskell is bucking up--oh, I hope you don't mind slang?"

"Why--I like it. How bucking up?"

"I mean he is buying books that there is not a great demand for--not
popular. Look what I have found. I've been making discoveries here as
well as you."

"Ah! _Ballades and Rondeaux. English Odes_--that's a fine little
volume. Do you know Patmore's _Unknown Eros_?"

"Um--yes. It's beautiful music, but very vague, mystical, I suppose. I
like it, of course, but----"

The boy appeared from the shop and Miss Montague held out her hand for
the books he brought her.

"He knows not to put them in paper unless I ask," she said, taking
them from the boy. "I've just been getting Laurence Hope's poems," and
she held up the volumes.

"Yes--I know them. They are interesting."

She frowned a little.

"I don't object to erotic verse," she said. "Do you?"

"Everything is interesting," he said.

Her eyes blinked quickly and her lips went tight.

"Some people," said Miss Montague, "think if there is anything about
fleet white limbs, or brown limbs, in a book of poems that the poetry
is bad. I hope you are not like that. I don't think you are from the
things I have heard you say."

"No," he said. "No--I'm not like that. I hope I look far deeper than
that."

Suddenly her eyes had a fascinating beauty for him, looking deep and
questioning in his.

A sudden squall of rain rang on the dark window that looked out on the
little court with the gnarled tree in the midst of the cobbles and the
old houses round it.

"Oh," she said, "what weather! I'll have to get these wrapped up,
after all. What weather! It deludes the poor birds. To-day I found a
dead blackbird by the roadside. I stopped and buried him under a great
lime tree and put one of these flaunting daffodils on his grave to
match his yellow beak."

The magnetism he disliked died--fled out at the phrase.

She put up her hand to arrange the daffodils. It was a beautiful
phrase, he thought--and a beautiful thing to do, to bury the bird and
deck its resting-place. Here, he felt, in the beauty of that phrase,
was something to live by, something of what he had sought to ease him
of the hideous wounds of Solway.

Miss Montague gathered her books and skirts and smiled, nodded--not
bowed--"Good night," glanced round toward Haskell, "Oh, he's engaged,"
nodded again to Henry and went out into the shop.

Bliss Henry put the Jeremy Taylor back in its place.

The crowd thinned. Haskell came to him.

"Well, stranger, I see you had a talk with Miss Montague just now."

"Yes."

"I'm glad. She reads; and I daresay you could find things in common.
She would be bucked up, I expect, to hear you."

"To hear _me_!" said Henry, he not feeling particularly great.

"Certainly, oh, humble egoist."

"She--why, she said----" and Henry quoted the lady's words of
blackbird and daffodil. "Why, she's great--I'm--I'm immensely----"

"Oh--that'll soon pass," said Haskell.




XXVIII


That night Bliss Henry again found the capacity to work. He took up
his puppets on his return and went on gloriously, getting down just
what he wanted. What was sordid around him had been thrust back by a
beautiful phrase. He worked till long after midnight, and then,
arranging his papers neatly and quietly, acting rather as a deft
surgeon arranging his instruments, after one clean and successful
operation and preparatory to the next, than as a neurasthenic author
who is supposed to throw about disorder and ink, he went to bed. There
were no sounds through the open window save the running of a night
wind in the valley and far-off crowing of cocks--here, there, yonder,
in scattered farms of the plain--speeding the night.

The next morning he rose early, tubbed, and had already done a good
day's work when his breakfast was brought up.

The table was strewn with his papers. He cleared only a corner and
said: "That's all right. Just set there."

He hardly looked up to see who had brought the meal to him, so intent
on the world of his puppets. He had ceased, at least for the time
being, to know the need of _living down_ the atmosphere which had
atrophied his powers. He was not aware that it was May who had arrived
with the tray and that she was a little exultant in her manner; so he
was not aware that, at his ignoring of her, the exultation faded and
she departed, heavy, squat, stolid, crushed.

He went on working after breakfast; and when Mrs. Sturge came to clear
away the dishes he was again deep in the world of his puppets. She
gave a peremptory tap, such a tap as would have irritated him
immensely a few days ago. As he now was he just cried out: "Come in,"
and, not looking up, went on with his work, not aware that it was Mrs.
Sturge who entered and that she had come in very stately and defiant.

Her jaw dropped a little at sight of Bliss Henry's self-sufficient
pose. She stood a moment stock still, her mouth open--then she cleared
the table.

Once or twice, at this employ, she paused, looked at her lodger,
frowned, seemed about to speak; but he worked on, his pen going surely
over the paper. She departed a little more quietly than she had
arrived. She came back presently and passed through to his bedroom to
make his bed--but she could not disturb him. She even seemed a little
fearful of doing so, went rather subdued behind his chair toward the
bedroom.

Yes; Bliss Henry had a grip on the life of his puppets. Day after day
he worked on. His days were glorious. Each day he tramped up High
Street and forth on to the moors for a couple of hours; each day he
wrote another substantial portion of the book that Solway was to have
given him peace to write; whether Solway helped or hindered he was
certainly writing now. His funds were, of course, sinking; but he had
one or two small commissions for articles and the like. It had been
his intention to pause in the work when it was half written, and write
these articles; but so much of it must be done first. Now, thanks to
this new peace, he was going, after all, to be able to carry out that
intention, which he had feared had been all blown to the winds during
recent days. Yes, at last the book was half written--and despatched,
so sure was he of it, to his typist in London.

How the second half was to go on was perfectly clear in his mind, so
clear that he had a great conflagration of abortive pages, a great
tidying up, and laid his papers out afresh and took a new pen to do
the "pot-boilers."

And then, coming home from one of these tramps that kept his physical
frame well for the sake of his mind, a little old woman (whose wont
it was to come on Sunday afternoon to the house to get the scraps of
meat left over during the week) bobbed a curtsey to him.

Henry had heard a deal of this little old woman, for Mrs. Sturge was
not the woman to give away scraps of meat once a week without talking
about it, if possible, every day. Amazing it was what a variety of
occasions would serve for a harangue on that philanthropy. If it were
not noted in the book that Mrs. Sturge imagined God kept for her it
must assuredly have been recorded in His gramophone record many
times--but perhaps Mrs. Sturge would think a gramophone with her name
on it in the shelves of heaven not so fitting as a Book, blasphemous
perhaps!

"Excuse me, sir," said the wrinkled and smiling old dame, and Henry
paused and touched his hat.

She gave him another bob and smile.

"Excuse me, sir, but I'm an old, old woman, and I like you, sir, for
your fine carriage and your beautiful eyes; and I have a word to say
to ye."

His brows elevated over his "beautiful eyes" that he had not known
were beautiful. He remembered more the despite of men than the
praise--which he generally feared was flattery--and he had been told
that "he had a bad eye in his head, a bad, wild eye," once, years
ago; he had been sorry and had deeply hoped it would improve.

"I'm an old woman," said the dame, and Henry's hand went a little to
his pocket and then, feeling that was not what she wanted, his hand
paused and--

"No, no," said she; "it's not that I'm after, sir. It's something to
tell you, sir; and now I really don't like to tell you. But why
shouldn't I? It's that sly puss of a girl here, sir; she told me such
a thing of you, sir, the other day. Told me, sir, her own words, that
you had been trying to take liberties with her."

"What?" He looked horrified, and then smiled a stupid smile.

"Just what I said, sir," cried the dame; "and I told her that if I saw
your bonnie face I'd tell you what she said. I knew that she was
lying. And when I said that I'd be after telling you on her she showed
it on her face that she lied."

"Silly girl!" said Henry. "And I gave her a sovereign," he mused more
than uttered. But she heard.

"Whatever for, sir?"

"Because--because I am still able to be disillusioned," he spoke to
air and waved his hand.

"I don't understand," said the old dame. "But anyhow, sir, I've told
you what that girl said; told you because of your beautiful eyes--and
a boy I had once with eyes like them. I think it's right you should
know. If she'd talk like that to me she'd talk the same to anybody;
and Solway talks, sir."

"Oh!" cried Henry in disgust, "oh--well!" he decided with hard voice
and forceful toss of head, "if servants will talk filth they'll have
to talk it and, as Solomon said, one need not give heed to what
servants say--just let them say."

What sort of soul the menial had he did not pause to consider. It was
his way to consider these things; but this was too small, and paltry,
and disgusting for him to go psychologising and dissecting. He had
work to do--_big_ work, _the_ book--one or two "pot-boilers," besides,
to keep him in funds that he might write _the_ book, the great book,
full of beauty for those who would have it.

The little old woman bobbed and tittuped away with aged agility; she
looked, he thought, as if fearing a return of his hand to his pocket
where was his money. He liked the old wrinkled dame. She had sweet old
eyes.

He walked into the "digs" determining to say nothing. Why fuss about
servants who, well treated, took advantage of that--and became
_menials_! He would dismiss it!

Then suddenly: "Tut! The only way is to treat them as menials!"

With sudden vigour he rang his bell and when May answered it, with
head in air, which settled it, said he:

"I wish to see Mrs. Sturge."

"Sir, sir--forgive me. I----"

"Your mistress!"

Mrs. Sturge came up at once, bonneted, and cloaked in a cloak with
hanging bits of black glass and ribbon about it, little bits of black
glass like prisms; she had just returned from afternoon service.




XXIX


"Mrs. Sturge," he said, "I give you a week's notice."

"And whatever for?" she cried. "Is that a way to treat an honest
woman? If you was being a Christian and going to church instead of
hatching plots to annoy an honest widow on her return----"

"A week's notice," said Henry, "from to-day."

"A fine man you are to take on such airs!" Mrs. Sturge drew terribly
erect. "Ever since you found out that that poor girl of mine had got
into trouble you have treated her scandalously--scandalous! It's
cruel, I call it, to a poor unfortunate girl. And now I've got a word
for you--now that you've given your notice. Oh, I know the kind of man
you are, coming home drunk and insulting a woman."

"Eh?"

"Aye! You may well look as if you had to be careful. You came home
here drunk and came into my room half naked--to think that I should be
heard with such a word on my lips! And what would Solway think if they
heard such a story? Answer me that! You came into my room with half
your clothes off--an honest, God-fearing, respectable, married
woman--and widow! What would Solway think if I told them that? And I
shall now! I'll tell them! I'll tell them the kind of man you are in a
house with a respectable widow and a maid-servant."

"When was this, madam?" asked Henry quietly.

"Six weeks ago, and never a word from you since; just sitting there
over your papers and books--you that think yourself a man with
brains--brains!--you come into my bedroom and then treat me like dirt;
aye, more than a month ago it was, if _you_ don't remember; six weeks,
pretty near."

"And I came into your room?"

"Yes, you did! And I have a witness. That poor girl is a witness to
it. May was so flustered that she came running in to see what was
wrong. I sent the poor girl away and got you quiet to your own room. I
couldn't have a young girl like her see a man like that."

At this juncture May appeared in the doorway, her hand upraised as
though knocking in air.

"If you please," she said, when Mrs. Sturge turned about, "Mr. Haskell
to see Mr. Henry."

Mrs. Sturge stood triumphant.

But so did Henry.

"Come up! Come in, Haskell!" shouted Henry. "Tell him to come up--come
in."

Mrs. Sturge stood erect, but not triumphant, rather nonplussed.

Haskell entered and looked amazed. May retreated a little way--just
out of sight.

"Mrs. Sturge," said Henry, "will you repeat your story before Mr.
Haskell, please?"

"Oh!" cried Mrs. Sturge. "I----!"

"Then I shall. You say that six weeks ago I came into your bedroom
half naked----"

"You did! You did!"

"Six weeks ago----"

"You did; I swear it. You bring this on yourself, remember--and if you
have so little shame left---- May! May! Come here. I have a witness.
Come in, girl; don't stand back. It's all right with me here. Come
in." May appeared again at the door. "Didn't Mr. Henry come in drunk
about six weeks ago and come into my room and----"

"I don't know, Mrs.--please----"

"Don't know!"

May hung her head and then: "Yes."

"He was drunk?"

No answer.

"Do you hear? Don't be afraid."

"Yes."

"There you are!" cried Mrs. Sturge.

Haskell stood smiling foolishly and blinking; Henry, with head in air,
looking exceedingly well indeed, radiant, bright.

"Good!" said Henry. "Now, ma'am--you hear this, Mr. Haskell--now Mrs.
Sturge," he raised a solemn finger, "what do you think Solway would
think of that? Nay, more; what do you think Solway will say when it
knows? I came into your room half naked six weeks ago and--observe--_I
am still here_. A fine state of affairs, Mrs. Sturge, for an honest,
married widow! Oh, Mrs. Sturge!"

Mrs. Sturge tried to speak, but only made a clucking sound.

"Six weeks ago," went on Henry, "I came into your bedroom and--Mrs.
Sturge, are you listening?" She tried to speak, but again in vain. "I
am still here," declared our author; "and what do you think Solway
would think of that, ma'am?"

Mrs. Sturge was collapsing.

"You! Oh, you wouldn't tell such a thing, would you?" she stammered.
"Think of your own character, sir--as a man with a character to lose
for respectability for yourself."

"I do not think of myself as a man," said Henry, "and with a character
to lose. I am a brain. I am a symbol."

"Eh?" Mrs. Sturge was feeling behind her for a chair.

"I don't know," went on Henry thoughtfully, "but what it is my duty to
tell Solway, for the sake of decency, about you six weeks ago. I have
a witness to the event and another now to your own statement. You
can't deny it. It would be quite futile to try to deny it now. I have
Mr. Haskell here for a witness that you have admitted it. May is a
witness." He paused, and then: "Mrs. Sturge, here's a fine story for a
respectable married widow!"

Mrs. Sturge sat down, lay back, choked.

Haskell choked a little, too.

"Six weeks ago, madam--a naked man----" Henry's voice went on.

"Half naked," said Mrs. Sturge, and fainted.

May stood in the doorway like dead meat in a butcher's shop. Haskell
stood grinning at nothing, like an effigy. Henry stood with his left
hand in pocket, right hand toying with his thin watch-guard, head up,
smiling like a cherub.

Then Mrs. Sturge came round.

"Are you awake?" asked Henry gently but with determination.

She sat up and said: "Oh!" and her eyes rolled.

"Mrs. Sturge," said Henry, "I have altered my plans. I shan't leave
you--I'll stay on."

She rose like a plucked turkey after combat.

"And, Mrs. Sturge!"

"Yes?" murmured Mrs. Sturge.

"You'll be very civil to me," said Henry, "and attentive, and very
careful about your tongue--remember; the tongue is a small member, but
the root of all evil. And if you are all these things I won't tell
Solway that horrible story about you and a naked man that you have
been harbouring--for six weeks! It's a shocking story, madam!" Her
eyes bulged. She looked apoplectic. "Look after your mistress, May!"

May advanced, took her mistress's arm, led her forth; they passed from
the room. Haskell and Henry stood in the middle of the room looking at
each other with changing expressions on their faces, expressions that
beat me to describe.




XXX


The postman's knock sounded, that double knock that always beat a
tattoo of hope and preparedness for Bliss Henry: if anything
joy-bringing came--good; if nothing helpful came--it was always one
more post gone past, one more tattoo sounded toward the last tattoo!
To be alert at the sound of a postman's knock is evidently common to
all folk; Haskell also, at the sound, had the air of expectation; and
then, considering that he was not in his own house, the expectancy,
for himself, suddenly died out.

May came pattering upstairs with that odd, quick step of brutish thew
and heavy coquetry, tapped, entered. Droll how May's manner changed
with the weather in the house! She was now defiant, bold indeed
Haskell esteemed her, with a mental note of her manner and a thought
that he would not have a servant enter a room so. He would teach her
manners. He had a puzzling thought: "Why did she enter so?" But no--he
dismissed that. It was just like Bliss Henry to allow a servant to
flaunt about in a fashion that might suggest, to the average observant
person, that her master had cheapened himself with her. Haskell was
annoyed at the suggestion in his mind--annoyed therefore at the girl.

"The bitch!" he thought, in his--er--coarse way. "I wonder if I could
hint to Bliss Henry what people might think! Oh, faugh! He's all
right! What does it matter!"

She tossed down half a dozen letters on the table, swung about to go
out.

Bliss Henry looked at the letters, his mouth puckered. The top letter
was in the handwriting of that girl friend whom you heard him
mention--talking theoretically with Drummond at Jukes's house. To see
it cast down so stirred him!

"May!" he said sharply.

She swung back, looked on him. But he did not yet look at her.

"Yes?" she said, standing at the door, still with that flaunting air,
but forced now.

Then Bliss Henry raised his head.

"Come here," he said. "Take these letters up. Take them to the hall,
put them on the salver and bring them in on the salver."

She tossed her shoulders, shook her hips, half turned as though to go;
but then her eyes dropped a little from staring on him. And she felt
that he was looking at her, and she came to the table and lifted the
letters.

"And, May!" His voice came oddly.

She looked up at him again, but now only as high as to his waist.

"Say, 'Yes, sir,' to me! I have been too lax with you, I see.
Evidently you can't stand my treatment. Now, go and bring these
letters back on the salver."

There was no word when she went. Henry stood stroking his chin and
looking out of the window. If he thought at all about Haskell it was
only to conjecture (careless, however, of Haskell's possible opinion):
"Very likely he thinks me a petty, domineering ass."

Haskell, of course, thought nothing of the kind. He stood with eyes
that seemed to see nothing, stood there patient, heedless looking, his
manner much after Henry's, till May returned and advanced with the
salver--but, oh, he was observing.

May found Henry still looking out of the window; and now he turned and
lifted the letters leisurely. The girl stood a perceptible moment,
then tossed her head and whisked about.

"May!"

She turned.

"Say 'Yes, sir,' that I may know you hear."

"Yes--sir."

"You thought I should have said 'Thanks' just now. I used to say
'Thanks' at first when I came here, used to say 'Thanks' when I took
letters from the salver. I continued to say 'Thanks' when you
discontinued to use the salver but handed me my letters. Not that I
didn't perceive the change--only, as I say, I'm lax. I am going to put
that right now--with you." She looked a little awed. "There was really
no need for me to say 'Thanks' at all, ever. But now you are going
back to the use of the salver and I'm not going to say 'Thanks.' May!"

"Yes, sir."

"Be always careful. Remember your position. You understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

She stood still.

"That's all."

She went away and closed the door--quietly.

"It's damnable," said Henry, "the way one is forced to behave. Sit
down, do."

"I don't think I shall now. I had only a little while to stay and it's
gone now, pretty nearly. Anyhow, I don't know that I need say what I
came to--eh--hint to you."

"Dear me, this is mysterious!" said Henry, but seemed not extremely
interested in the mystery, seemed as if he could live on without it
being explained.

"I don't think you need it, after all," said Haskell. Then: "By Jove!
By Jove!"

"What?"

Henry seemed more interested.

"I've seen a change in you to-day," said Haskell, nodding.

"Oh, well," he almost apologised, his voice a little petulant. "They
force it on me."

"Of course they do! I'm in sympathy with you--very much. I'm sorry
though--I'll never live up to you. I admire it all. I believe I could
help you--for I understand you. But I'll never live up to you. I'll
always say: 'Oh, well, what does it matter!' when it comes to the bit.
But, oh, God, I admire you. You've turned over a new leaf." He paused,
meditative, seemed about to speak, then to change his mind and keep
silent. Then: "I wonder if you'll carry out into Solway what I've seen
you begin here in your own room in Solway," he said.

"If they force it on me."

"If you stay long enough they'll force you," said Haskell. He stood
half smiling, half serious. "It has its comic side," he said; "but it
has a very deep, significant side, too."

"Do sit down," said Henry, for Haskell had leant against the wall.

"Not now. I've my business to attend to--I just looked up--that's
all. How long are you to be in Solway? You told me, but I forget."

"Till I'm ready to go," said Henry with quiet vehemence. "I said about
six months, but I don't know now. I'll go just when I wish."

Haskell looked gleefully on him and squared his shoulders, as if
inspired by him.

"Good-bye--I must go. Drop in," he said, and was off.

Henry presently opened his letters: one from that friend that Mrs.
Sturge's morality had made him not invite to go to Dunecht via Solway;
one from his publisher, a kind letter, enclosing two introductions to
people in Solway--"lest you feel lonely sometimes." There was also a
returned manuscript; also there was a cheque for a manuscript that had
been accepted eighteen months ago, and appeared six months ago,
payment of which had been obtained by his solicitor, who enclosed a
note from the editor which remarked: "I have been ill or would have
attended to this matter earlier. I am sorry Mr. Bliss Henry has
brought you into this matter. There is really no earthly reason for
his having done so."

After he had read the letters he went to the window, opened it a
little wider, stood gazing away down the High Street over the vista of
green fields into the blue distance, with its two shining twists of
river. With calm, then, and a sense of power such as came seldom to
him with so great certainty, he turned to his table, seated him, and
began on the second part of his book, in which were the beauty and
colour of Solway--as to the moors, and the air, and the white gables,
and the red-tiled and brown-thatched roofs; in which were his own
puppets doing romantic, and exhilarating, and beautiful things--not
the real puppets of Solway, as they are in this book of mine; but I
have already hinted something to that effect. He went on quietly,
calmly with his work, aware only of the wind blowing in to him from
the quiet world of moors and rivers; quite untouched now by what he
found atrophying in the "atmosphere" of the house, and had, by the
way, as you may guess, knowing him as you do, called himself a
decadent, a neurasthenic, all sorts of names, for feeling.

Personally, I believe he had felt that atmosphere atrophying because
he was clean, like the hill-wind, and that he did not feel it now
because he had blown it from him, and so made himself stronger.




XXXI


"You look wild and sad," said Haskell.

It was Friday evening, and Friday was a quiet day in Solway. The back
premises of Haskell's shop were vacant; the books, both fresh and
faded, those handled and those not handled, were all standing mute
round the walls, with the incandescent light glinting on the gold
letters on some, on the red splashes on others--the bright light
making the dilapidated appear more sordid, the clean more shining.

"I am," said Henry, "sad, wild, disgusted, sick."

"You've been seeing more of Solway," suggested Haskell, "since last I
saw you."

"I've been going out a bit more--visiting, I mean."

"That's it, is it? I wondered whether you were working or doing that.
I had hoped you were working."

"I have been working. My book is three-quarters through. But
everything is wrong."

"Wrong? Everything? Come now; I see by the _Publishers' Circular_ that
your last book is still selling well," and Haskell indicated the
table where lay _The Clique_ and _The Publishers' Circular_ and _The
Bookman_ and _Clegg's Directory_ and the odd implements of his trade.

"Ah--but there's nothing in it," said Henry dismally.

"What!" ejaculated Haskell.

"All frippery! All frippery! It is of the literature that is for the
idle to read on sofas with a cup of tea on a little table by their
sides, or in a lounge chair at the club. So is the one I've got so
near an end. There's the dear old central character, made a little
extravagant, so as to stand the limelight, as those publishers'
readers phrase it who are more commercial than artistic and hag-ridden
by the phrase 'What the public wants,' instead of remembering that
what the public wants it wants only for a week, and that when authors
give _themselves_ to the public, instead of _giving the public what it
wants_" he snorted, "they live for years instead of weeks. Well--I'm
what the public wants in a refined sort of way. I've given it, once
again, the quixotic character who does no harm and is looked upon with
smiling affection, and at the end is married to a delightful puppet, a
rag, and a bone, and a hank of hair, some Irish lace, some French
frills--and just a little scent, not too much. Oh, a delightful
creation, and all my own! He's an author this time. In _The Fan_ he
was merely a moneyed 'out-o'-work.' They are of a leisured class, or
supposed to be leisured, my puppets, taking their leisure. A leading
character harmlessly quixotic--such a dear man!--witty, epigrammatic;
_in_ a panama and sunshine, and with a cigarette; well-bred, humorous.
Love in a garden! Tea in the garden, with sunlight in the silver, and
a bird in the ilex. The leading lady a smiling dummy! My books have
what is called 'charm'; but I'm a bit sick to find who reads them.
Certainly the censor will never ban them, certainly there is not a
phrase in them that the libraries will say may offend readers----"

"Hang it all!" broke out Haskell. "It's something to charm tired
hearts. You don't want to teach, do you?"

Henry looked as if he had received a blow below the belt. Then he
recovered.

"If I charmed the striving," said he, "gave them a little rest to go
on again, I should be happy; but I'm only charming those who live to
be charmed by any charm, good, bad, or indifferent. And to be a clean
charm is not much better than being a dirty charm--to those who live
only, solely, to be charmed--diverted. God! I'm going to hold the
mirror up to life a little more in my next book, I assure you."

Haskell blew a stage sigh.

"What's the cause of all this depression?" said he.

"The cause of the depression is that I find I am known in Solway,"
said Henry coldly, "known among the leisured class. My books have been
put in Mudie's boxes for them; and so I am known among the class that
come in and pay you half of an old account and ask for discount. Have
you ever visited any of them?"

"Never; I'm a shopkeeper."

"Ah, well, I'll tell you, just as I see it; but it's not as I write
it--the leisured life in gardens with a peacock on the lawn. That's
the dashed thing," he swerved in his intention, got back to his own
grievances; "my puppets are for the amusement of these people. I am a
kind of soother. I am in the same world as the man who massages them,
or their Turkish-bath man, or their _coiffeur_."

"Nonsense! They don't treat you like that."

"Not quite--they want rather to pet than to patronise. They say: 'We
have read your last book and have been charmed.' But I know. I would
fain say: 'I am your humble jester.'"

"I wish you would get to what's worried you in Solway."

"What has worried me? It is the unpublishable fact that I am a whore,
a prostitute. _That_ has worried me. I have been to half a dozen 'at
homes' in Solway since I've seen you and--oh, fame!--they seemed all
to know me--the people at them. I'll tell you the kind of people. It
is hardly likely that high literature can be appreciated by a society
that drinks wine--my dear man, it's a solemn fact--till it is bleary.
I've seen whole rooms of people playing cards, or talking--and music
being played--and wine going round--and all bleary, sir--bleary; and
all dressed, oh, all dressed! And I know the men. I've seen them. Oh,
worse--I'll tell you that too. I'm read by blas, immoral men, who
perhaps lighten their immorality by pseudo-advancedly calling it
'a-moral'; by women who, preparing for their 'at homes,' have to see
not to the cleanliness only of their underwear but to the bows and
ribbons on it (and what librarian would allow that truth to be told!)
lest some other woman should flaunt more _lingerie_ than they, and
they be unable to vie with her in that respect. There's no getting
away from that. They are humbugging and hypocritical. Prettiness they
see and can't see beauty--hence such a phrase as I heard one lady
laughingly fire off. 'What a good girl So-and-so is,' said someone.
'Yes,' said this lady, 'she's rather plain, you see.' And I looked at
the girl they were staring at and found that she was not pretty, but
beautiful. And she was the only girl in that room whose garters I
could not give you the colour of. They'd call her _mock_-modest, I
suppose. You see, they are slightly educated and know phrases to lie
with. I think they hate her."

"Or envied her?" suggested Haskell.

"I hope," and Henry beamed, "that it was envy--that is more hopeful."

He considered that new thought a space and then went on, looking a
little more relieved:

"What I was going to say is that, when these people read, any
so-called refinement they may seek must be a refinement, as it were,
of _lingerie_, not the other refinement, which is strength. I know I'm
called a literary man, a man of letters, a man with a decent style.
It's worse than if I wrote _Molly Macquire, the Mill Maiden of
Pillport_, for _The Peoples' Periodical_. That sort of thing
gives--which should please you--a worker a little forgetfulness. But
as it is, I'm a gold-tipped cigarette; I'm a box of chocolates--the
high-toned kind with alcoholic and sickening stuffs inside; I'm a
high-heeled slipper with a silver buckle; I'm the pendant tassels on a
society lady's drawers; I'm an aigrette; I'm a swinging chatelaine;
I'm a scent-bottle and a powder-puff; in short, my dear Haskell, I'm a
bawd. The only consolation that I can get in the reading line for
myself, the only ease I can get in the reading way, is in
Shakespeare's sonnet:

    "'Tired with all these for restful death I cry;--
     As, to behold desert a beggar born,
     And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
     And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
     And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
     And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
     And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
     And strength by limping sway disabled,
     And art made tongue-tied by authority,
     And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
     And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
     And captive good attending captive ill:
       Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
       Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.'"

Haskell looked with great wide eyes on our author. I think he was glad
he was a bookseller and not a book writer.

"Yes, I know what you mean. You must feel bad," said he.

"Bad! What makes me feel so very bad is the last knock I have had. At
each of these 'at homes' I tell you of there has been a man,
Dodge--Tommy Dodge they call him. He rather hung on to me as a
literary man himself! He's----"

"I know. He's editor of the _Solway Sewer_," and Haskell snorted.
"Hung on to you!"

"Yes. He writes songs, I hear, music by So-and-so, words by T. D.
Dodge. He's presented me with a copy of one of his volumes. He's a
great favourite with all the ladies. You know the way he jumps about,
and bows, and draws erect, and fires compliments, and when he sees
_they_ don't go down, veers round on the other tack. I don't
understand the married women. They seem to like him sitting at their
feet."

Haskell was staring. He felt that something bad was coming. He was
glad he was only a shopkeeper, after all, not of the leisured class.

"Go on," he said. "Do you know _all_ about him? You certainly see
things. You observe."

"You know?" cried Henry.

"Go on, and I'll see if I know, by living here, what you know just
popping in on us."

"All right. It's this--he left along with me last night. He had been
carrying cake to Mrs. Jones and turning the music for her, and he sang
one of his own songs about a lady's handkerchief, which he wished he
was. Then he sat down again in a ring of ladies, all sitting with
their toes pointed at him and gently moving and twiddling. I wondered
if I was prurient. I didn't like the way he looked at the women. They
didn't seem to see anything wrong, so I fancied I must be prurient.
They sat, with one leg over the other, laughing and talking, and their
slippers slipping off a bit--oh, damn! Haskell, I'm _not_ prurient."

"Go on."

"Well--this Tommy Dodge came down with me. He was clearly a
favourite. I heard someone say what a decent little fellow he was. We
were not a dozen yards down towards town when the factory girls, going
home, began passing us--those that live up in that row of cottages,
you know--and----"

"What?"

"They all knew him."

"How?"

"In different ways--thank God. Some winked to him, some said, 'Hullo,
Tommy!' others threw up their heads and glared at him. They are
primitive but----"

Haskell quoted: "'The colonel's lady and Judy----'"

"Don't quote that!" cried Henry.

"No--it's not quite true. It's a half truth," said Haskell. "I'm
sorry."

"Thanks. Well--there was one of the girls quite young. Do you know
what this curled darling said about her?"

"Something filthy."

"Indeed it was. I must tell you that just as we met these girls he
calmly remarked: 'That Miss Robinson up there is an innocent little
thing. Sweet, simple, unsophisticated. She'd need gentle handling to
break in, I should think.' I didn't like the way he said it, but made
no reply. He turned about after ogling the young factory girl, she,
giving no response, just walking on looking straight ahead, and
said--no, I can't tell you! I can't tell you! He took it for granted,
oh, God! he took it for granted that I---- Took it for granted, do I
say! Why the man never dreamt that I mightn't like that sort of talk.
I thought to fell him to the ground. Instead, I held myself together
and said quietly, to see if he had a decent spot to touch at all: 'Her
figure somehow reminds me of that Miss Robinson.'"

"Lord! What did he say?"

"Say! Why he turned his dancing eyes to me and gave a leer and began
appraising her figure--for its innocence and freshness, as he called
it. Oh, why--why--oh, to hell with him!"

"Put him in a book!" said Haskell.

"In a book!" cried Henry. "I don't write about life at all. He's not
for a book of mine. There are some men write only of the underworld of
life in books; hideous, gripping books; but one feels they can't be
true. He'd do for them. But life is not all that. Then there are some
men write of only the ideal side----"

"Like your books!"

"Mine! Oh, mine are fairy tales; they're too airy and dainty to call
them even the happy side of life. What I should like to do is to write
a book about life as it is, dark and bright, proportioned as like
life as possible. I don't think that would be a bad book, or a book
that anyone worth listening to would ask me to cut bits out of; for I
believe in Emerson's phrase--'Light is greater than darkness.' But I
don't know--oh, I don't know! If I did write like that I suppose I'd
be read by a certain section for the dark parts alone; and those who
don't wish to look on the dark parts (and they have my sympathy)
perhaps would feel that I marred the fine parts by these dark parts.
Oh," he broke out, "I wish to God I knew! I wish I could feel myself
writing something of value to art and life--not just writing relief
from tedium. Still, I'd rather write to do that than to titillate idle
women or to titillate soldiers and sailors and serving-girls, whose
classics are _Maria Monk_ and certain parts of Holy Writ. The worst
shock I got of late, in thinking of art, was to see that girl May
reading--what think you?--Hardy's _Tess_. What did she get there? Oh,
if only I was sure that in the main I'd be read for good!"

"'Light,'" suggested Haskell, "'is greater than darkness'." He paused.
"I remember once how I felt when my sister was out somewhere and that
Dodge convoyed her home. _He_ goes everywhere. She said he had been so
charming, so courteous to her. I was sick. I could have vomited to
think of his courtesy. But she soon said, one day: 'I don't like
Tommy Dodge.' She had seen him again, I suppose, and his courtesy had
turned into something that she felt was unpleasant." He paused again,
and then: "I often wonder what would happen if the girl he is engaged
to be married to should----"

"What!" cried Henry, "engaged to be----" and he stuck. "Oh, no more,
Haskell, for God's sake, or I shall pray the High and Mighty Gods, if
They do exist, to give me not for certain (if there be such a thing as
an after state), to give me not an after life in it--but just death,
death and no waking--never any more knowledge of aught--for I, too, am
a man built as this creature we have been discussing."

"Cheer up! Cheer up!" cried Haskell. "I don't agree with the proverb
that we are all John Thomson's bairns." Henry had a quick flash of
light in his eyes--remembering that night at Jukes's. "The very state
you are in, because of having seen that set in Solway, shows that we
are not all John Thomson's bairns. And--take my tip--a good many girls
do loathe Tommy Dodge, but they speak civilly and sweetly to him
because they see what he is so well that they'd be disgusted with
themselves for sitting on him--it would look as if he needed sitting
on."

"Oh, what a relief, Haskell!" cried Henry. "I hope you really believe
that! I hope it's true! And, no--as you say--we're not all John
Thomson's bairns. Some of us have 'lain burningly on the divine
hand.'"

And then both turned about suddenly and faced the door, for a voice
said:

"What a phrase! Who said that? Is it your own, may I ask--or where
shall I find it?"




XXXII


The voice that came in on them was that of a youth who stood smiling
in the doorway; as to his face, it was like that of Chopin; as to his
carriage, unaware of his arrival, and at first sight of him, beholding
him full in the doorway, he standing there a little smiling, radiant,
expectant, Henry thought that he was somehow like a flower.

Henry looked at him with a special joy--and had an indescribable sense
as of already knowing him, though perfectly sure they had never
met--knew him, knew he was the manner of man for him; and also that
some people would think this man effeminate because of that face--and
that form reminiscent of a birch tree or, as I said, of the slim,
stately delicacy of flowers.

Haskell met the new-comer with a kind of reticent, constrained
exuberance; and then stood in an off-hand fashion after the
hand-shake. Henry, taking note, knew they were friends.

"Let me introduce Mr. Queen," said Haskell, "Mr. Henry. I have spoken
to you of Queen," he added to Henry; and to Queen, as the two shook
hands: "I have written to you of Bliss Henry being here."

The sensitiveness of the face told Henry that this must be the
musician friend that Haskell had mentioned; not, he fancied, the
famous composer of great scope, who ran down now and then from
Glasgow, but he to whom the piano was as an altar.

And he it was. And these three were all suddenly at peace and had the
feeling of tasting a great moment in their lives.

"Why, it's late!" said Haskell, aware of the silence, and walking
towards the front shop.

"Yes," said Queen, "I noticed the tables were all covered over for the
night out there."

"Come along home; come along home. All right, boy. You can go, I'll
lock up. Come along you two," said Haskell, and seemed eager to be
gone.

"I say," said Queen gently, "I wonder if your boy would care to go to
the station for my bag. I have the left luggage ticket." Henry was
reminded of his own arrival in Solway. "I left my bag till I could
find if----"

"As if you didn't know that always you can put up with me."

The round-faced boy, waiting outside the door with his "penny
dreadful" (purchased not, of course, from his master, who did not
sell such books, but from a shop in a side lane, a funny little shop,
with two long pipes in the window, old chocolate losing its gloss, and
two shapes of potted head), the jolly, laughing, old-fashioned
youngster bobbed forward, with his old-young face a-grin, and touched
his cap, piped: "Yes, sir, with pleasure." Evidently he knew Queen of
old, liked him. The three all smiled at the boy's eagerness.

"All right," said Haskell; "Mr. Queen will give you the ticket." And
then again, "Come along."

"Here you are, Cupid," said Queen, handing the ticket.

And then the three went home.

It was one of the greatest evenings in Bliss Henry's life in Solway;
and one such evening atones for a hundred others, and inspires for a
hundred to come. To chronicle the sayings of a Tommy Dodge is
comparatively easy; but who can chronicle silences? The silences were
the chief beauty of that night. They were not the aggravating,
watching, furtive silences of such an one as Tommy Dodge--if ever he
was silent; they were the silences of rest. His silences were more
holdings of breath.

Haskell, once or twice, before he understood that Henry and Queen had
already--as he would have expressed it--cottoned, tried to make talk;
but that endeavour was as unnecessary as it was futile; the quiet
Queen did not have his almost absent-minded-looking air at all
changed, made no leap into talk in response to these efforts of his
friend.

"We were talking of Tommy Dodge," said Haskell after a long lull. "You
have met him, have you not, Queen?"

"I have evaded him oftener," said Queen.

Haskell laughed.

"Mr. Henry and I were talking of him this evening," said Haskell.

"You're not going to any more, I hope," said Queen.

Haskell laughed a short, joyous laugh of friendship.

"Won't you play?" asked Henry, seeing Haskell eyeing the piano then.

"If you wish," said Queen, and passed to the instrument.

Henry was amazed at the change that came over Queen between the chair
on which he had been sitting and the piano-stool. He had been sitting
like a drooping lily; and when he said, "If you wish," he became a
little more erect, his easy and graceful looseness departed and his
graceful modelling showed; he rose, not suddenly, but as with
leisure; Henry thought it was as if he cast something from him, or
took something to him, or both--the man who rose seemed not the man
who had been sitting there. Certainly now, thought Henry, not even the
undiscerning would hasten to label him effeminate.

And the amazing change went on. As Queen stepped to the piano Henry
observed that he had shoulders, and a pliant back. As Queen stretched
his hand and arranged the stool our author noticed that the musician
had wrists, supple, strong wrists, such, thought he, as one sees in
artists and cowboys. Queen sat down squarely, stretched his arms out a
little so that his sleeves left his wrists more free.

Then suddenly, sudden now if you will, as if by some last touch of the
strong artist's soul within on the visible body, that body that
changed at the spirit's dictates, Queen seemed to have changed to a
broad-shouldered, large-made man--and then the music began.

It was a music that Henry knew, a favourite music, too, by the way, of
that friend of whom he had thought, in this room, once before.
Therefore, as it was being played, something in his breast stirred;
and he wished that she was here to hear it rendered so. She would like
to be here. She would appreciate this man who played. Yes; he was
sure she would like Queen and Queen would like her--and then he sat
listening.

When the music was over, played as certainly few could play it, Queen
sat still and, looking up at a corner of the ceiling, spoke to Haskell
over his shoulder. Haskell caught Henry's eye, read his face, saw
signs on it that Henry had observed more than the execution of this
artist, signed to him to take another chair, pointing also to his own
face as he did so and twitching an eye toward Queen. "Look at his
face," he signalled.

Henry wondered. But he knew at any rate from that mute aside, that the
change on Queen was visible to others, no fancy of his own, and that
Haskell had watched to see if he observed it.

As Haskell signed, Queen stirred uneasily--was about to turn.

"Will you play the _March Funbre_"? asked Haskell, dropping his eyes.

Queen turned to Henry.

"Perhaps you think it a depressing and morbid work?"

"No, neither. I think it one of the most healing of musics."

Queen bowed and looked a moment far off as he turned again to the
keys.

Henry gently rose and took a chair by the wall. Queen looked before
him, upward a little, over the piano, at the wall. When he had turned
about to the room he had seemed to be again what some might call
effeminate; a loose strand of hair was over his high forehead, his
face had the suggestion of delicacy. But as he raised his head the
strand fell back--and again came that amazing change. His hands fell
on the keys and the great ode, as Henry esteemed it, putting it in the
same world as Crashaw, and Patmore, and parts of Wordsworth's one ode,
had begun.

The music came directly into our author's heart--but he was also
interested in Queen, whose face, he observed, had changed, even as he
had observed the form change. Before, it had been a face somehow
delicate; now it was of a stern cast. And here was no illusion. He
glanced to Haskell and their eyes exchanged question and answer: "See
it?"--"Yes! It's amazing." Then he averted his gaze from the player
and let the music only be his interest.

Time went on, with music, and a little talk, and long pauses of quiet.

"I wondered if you had come to Solway to play at the concert," said
Haskell. "I thought it hardly possible, but fancied perhaps you had
been moved by considerations that Solway had some claim on you--as you
were once long ago--remember?" "Yes. But Solway has none," said
Queen. "No--I was not aware that there was to be a concert in my
native town. I just came down to see it and--not all the people in it;
one or two. Besides--one can't play to the people of Solway."

"How do you mean?" asked Henry's elevated brows.

"They turn music into something of the devil," said Queen. He turned
to Haskell for confirmation.

Haskell nodded, and studied him.

"Not but what I have played in Solway," said Queen, "years ago, once,
twice, as a duty. I'm afraid duties are only for the depraved. I'm not
depraved, I believe."

"You're one of those for whom impulses are more than duties?" Henry
suggested easily.

Queen smiled.

"It's not a doctrine for all men; but for those who generally do their
duty the impulse is worth listening to. And I am impelled not to play
to Solway," said Queen.

"Can you explain the impulse, or do you just obey without
questioning?" asked Henry; and Quarle Queen perceived he was
interested, not inquisitive.

"Obey without questioning?" he said and considered. "No; I question
till I get answer definite enough to satisfy me. I don't probe to the
heart of the mystery. But I get a sufficient explanation from the
impulse when I ask it why. And the reason I don't play to Solway is
that, when I played to Solway, my music seemed devilish, somehow. I
listened to it, to my own playing, with Solway's ears; and I didn't
like it. It was horrific," he said; but the strong word was spoken
quietly, his manner again almost languid, some might have said. "I
don't ask further than that. I'm not analytic enough," and he looked
in our author's eyes sweetly. "Too much of such analysis is apt to
make one strained, I think. I won't play to Solway--just as I could
conceive a woman saying, if once she went into what is called
'society' in Solway, 'I shall not go back there again.' And I wouldn't
ask her to state to me exactly why she made that resolve. I'd know by
her voice that she was right; and wouldn't," he smiled, "ask how I
could possibly know by her voice. I believe in these things. I live by
them."

I had wondered how to give an idea of the peace and strength of this
evening, an evening that atoned to our author for the one of which he
told Haskell with such horror. I had thought to leave a blank page,
not even so much as to note any of the talk. I had thought to leave
just a white page, signifying silence and the rest of it. But Laurence
Sterne once left an unprinted page (a marbled page) in a book, and so
I may not. It has been done already, the untrue critic in me would
say. But this is different, the sensible critic in me would reply.
There is a possibility of that looking droll, or somewhat so, and the
night was not droll, the judge, summing up, would say to the thirteen
good and true critics in me.

You understand--you know that what I want to tell I can only tell by
implying--the peace that was in that room, the quiet.

It was as if these three men had come from the same world and would,
after this life, return to it, and meet there again. Tommy Dodges did
not matter. The silences of Quarle Queen were greater than the sound
of Tommy. And, by the way--to hark back--if I had put a blank page in
here it would have looked as if, though what Tommy said could be told,
what was said and played, and left unsaid at Haskell's, that night,
could not be told--or I mean that Solway might "cutely" see _that_
could be said--and say it. Oh, dear me! What an evening that must have
been, of which one can't say a word! And, oh, dear me--how tangled
one's brain does get in trying to be true to oneself and keep from
running foul of Solway too!

It struck Henry anon that he was selfish to stay on so long when these
old friends might wish to talk of old days alone, and he rose.

"I know your books," said Queen then, not earlier.

"He likes them," said Haskell.

"Yes," said Queen, "if I may say so. I like their atmosphere, their
music, their whiteness, if you know what I mean--if I express myself,
I mean. The story doesn't interest me much in either; you don't mind
me saying that. And your characters are dressed as for the stage--I
suppose you must do that. I suppose you have to give your public a
story, and dress it. But I have read your books several times; it's
the singing bits that come in here and there I like to read; the bits
on lawns, with birds and dew and so on, I often turn to in certain
moods; they're coloured a bit, a little bit like light opera--but it's
good light opera scenery, and it has something else--something of air
and sweetness and happiness. I read these bits when I want freshening,
when I----"

"When you've met beasts?" suggested Henry, Solway on his back, his
black dog.

Queen, considering, twisted his thin-lipped mouth a little.

"I'm not introspective," said he; "it doesn't suit me--I can't just
say--but I often like to get the spirit of these parts. I often read
snatches of your books, as I say. I like them. There are parts that
remind me of Chopin's Nocturnes."

"Thank you," said Henry, and held out his hand and they smiled in each
other's eyes.

They never met again.

But----




XXXIII


Bliss Henry rose up early in the morning and had a cold tub and was
seated at his table working while yet the pigeons, wheeling over
Solway and over the fields (he noticed them when he paused and looked
up and out, seeking a word), were wondrously lit under their wings
with a light that told of morning.

The voices of the sparrows that chirped in the High Street told him it
was early, for they had a sharp, reverberant sound, echoing from the
stone of the old houses like actual tappings of tiny metallic hammers.
The far-off rattle of carts on the Carlisle road told him it was
morning. The great fields of corn and sun down there, beyond the
wakening town, with its blue roofs and new grey-blue smoke that went
up with that odd appearance of not being sure about how smoke should
go out of a chimney, were of morning. The ridge of the high moors,
when he bent and looked sideways up-street, he perceived with joy,
blue and shimmering in the pristine light of morning. His heart--it
was of eternal morning. He had met a fellow. He had found himself not
alone, an exile on this planet; and joyfully he resumed his writing
of the joyous doings of his puppets, doings a little bizarre of his
hero, a little dollish of his heroine, but all in the atmosphere of
joy that made the "charm" of his work. He worked all day, with just
the pauses for meals and short walks and, a little tired, but not at
all irritable, looked out on the stars at night before going to
bed--content in his life and in his calling.

Next day was a repetition of that one, and in the evening he went
again to see Haskell.

"You liked Queen," said Haskell.

"Liked him! Indeed I did," said Henry with that deep cadence in his
voice so different from the high note of drawing-room stereotyped
appreciation. Had he even said "he was charming" in such a tone the
hearer would have known that he meant it.

"He liked you," said Haskell.

"I wonder," said Henry, "if he would come up to my place some
evening?"

"He's gone."

"Gone?"

"Yes; yesterday. He came down chiefly for his girl--they're off
together, quietly smiling; there's no church marriage for him--and the
rector permitting him to have the church decorated and turned into a
reception hall for a morning and then coming to the marriage
breakfast and telling vulgar stories to the knot round him. No; he and
she just went quietly off." Haskell laughed.

"What's his girl like?" said Henry, for some reason that he did not
probe to put a name on.

"I don't know if you know her--a Miss Robinson."

"Yes; I've met her. Why, she----" and our author paused.

"What?"

"She's the girl I liked so much at the Jones's 'at home.' I thought
her the only decent girl there. She's----" he stuck.

"What?"

"Tommy Dodge spoke of her--said he liked innocent charm too, or
something like that. I don't think I told you--he made me so sick.
Wouldn't Queen be mad if he knew?"

"I expect Queen, if he heard, would say just: 'Oh, is that so?' and
then look away off in that absent-minded fashion of his--and never
another word; you wouldn't even know he had been ruffled."

"I'd be mad for the girl's honour, I should think," said Henry. And
then: "Dear me! Here am I who know that not what others say of us, not
how they look at us matters at all, and that, as Marcus Aurelius said,
'others can talk and act as they please, I must be an emerald and I
must keep my colour,' and yet I go tormenting myself because a mere
nothing has said a fatuous, evil thing! Um! I'm glad you tell me more
of Queen like this. I'm glad I've met him."

He stood staring before him and his eye lighted on a book--the Jeremy
Taylor he had once before handled--an old, clean Jeremy in half-calf,
with a spaced title and a rich black type on the old, sacred paper.

"I say," he said, "I think I'll take this, please, and if you'll give
me a pen I'll inscribe in it to him."

Haskell gave a bow, the meaning of which Henry could not fathom at the
moment, and dipped a pen and handed it to Henry.

      "Quarle Queen. In memory of an Eternal evening--from Bliss Henry,"

wrote Bliss Henry in his quaint caligraphy.

"Will you forward it to him?" he asked in a casual voice.

Haskell went to his desk and took out a little packet.

"That's for you," he said.

It was a book. It was a Marcus Aurelius. He took it a little blankly,
wondering. He opened it.

"To Bliss Henry, from Q.Q." he read, "because of the evening of----"
and the date. His eyes were moist and shining when he raised his head.

He thought of Q.Q. and Miss Robinson speeding away together out of
Solway.




XXXIV


The stage setting was very much like that of one of Bliss Henry's own
books. There was a house beyond the rhododendron bushes, looking
through the trees--the back of the house, with French windows, and
lattices thrown back against the blue-grey walls. There were people
straying here and there on the lawn rearward, and one saying, "Isn't
it a sweetly pretty day?" and another replying, "Isn't it?--prettily
sweet."

It was an opportunity for Henry to transmogrify as usual. Here was the
setting for one of his books of "charm," with its ineffectual hero
loving, and hiding his love; and dreaming quixotic dreams; and doing
dear, extravagant things.

"The opalescent sheen of August"--"the light sifted through the
feathery trees." Even a butterfly went obligingly past and "rested,
breathing with its wings"--sweetly pretty, prettily sweet. Here were
men in striped summer things and ladies--"magic penumbra"--"sweet
garden scents"--"haze"--"crystal clearness"--"chiffons." Yes, there
was a setting here just to his own hand.

Miss Jukes was home again and summer was clearly come, and Bliss Henry
had been invited again to "The Laurels."

"Was it Fox snubbed Pitt or Pitt snubbed Fox when the one, or the
other, remarked to the other--you know what I mean----" and Miss Jukes
laughed gaily and ruffled in her chair.

"Yes; we know," said the colonel; "never mind the dates and the
characters, let's have the argument."

"--remarked to the other, or the one, that 'in the society I move in
we do not discuss a guest when his back is turned'? I wonder which it
was." She turned to Henry.

"I really don't know--I'm not a politician," he apologised.

"Well, it doesn't signify so long as the phrase was said. But really,
I must say--do look at Miss Montague. What a picture she makes on the
lawn----"

"We must get a sundial," said the colonel, bantering.

"An old one," said Miss Jukes seriously.

They looked at Miss Montague straying gently in her garden frock, her
slender hand extended and dropping infinitesimal crumbs on the sward;
walking gently, her toe just visible, protruding from the gracefully
falling frock. "Peas! Peas!" she crooned and dropped more crumbs, and
the pigeons eyed her sidewise with tilted heads, and picked, and
fluttered. She looked round and saw the watchers.

"Aren't they sweet?" she said.

Henry thought she did certainly make a picture--she might have been
out of a Harland story--or even out of one of his own!

"I do like Penelope Montague," said Miss Jukes. "She is exquisite,
queenly, _spirituelle_ and," she added, "she is a very clever girl.
She reads----"

"She doesn't smoke," said the colonel, staring before him with that
bulgy look that came in his eyes sometimes.

"Smoke! Oh!" cried Miss Jukes.

"What do you say?" called Miss Montague, in a voice of ivory and
velvet.

Miss Jukes shook her head--then looked at her brother and saw the
glitter.

"Oh," she said, "joking!"

"I thought you called something to me," said Miss Montague.

Henry gave a little smile toward the colonel, whose gaze had a knowing
slant toward him.

"_Apropos_: have a cigarette?" said Jukes, and passed his silver case.

Henry sent out gently in the summer a blue feather of smoke and
thought how this girl was she who had spoken of the blackbird dead in
spring, which she had laid to rest under a daffodil--a flaunting,
golden daffodil to match the yellow of his beak. She came toward them
presently, toeing it slowly and swingingly across the lawn and
subsided in a vacant chair with a rustle and gentle creak, her frock
being of a rustling order and the chair of cane.

Henry had a certain desire to be courteous, or knightly, to this lady
of a beautiful phrase.

The accidents, incidental to a garden "at home," were bringing them
nearer, which was, after all, but fitting. Had they not already met
now and then? Might they not be better friends? He had a desire to
talk to this lady of the _belles lettres_, and she gave him the
opportunity in the shuffling of the talk. The others dropped out,
Jukes forming a quartette for tennis. The click of a croquet mallet
sounded from rearward. The pigeons cooed. They found themselves alone.

Miss Montague rose and looked round her on the regal day.

"Let's stroll a bit," she said.

"With pleasure."

So they strolled across the lawn, among the trees, wandered on up the
hill beyond the house.

"I do love the view from here," she said. "Shall we sit a little?" and
she subsided with her sinuous grace on a great block of shining,
granite-like rock, blue and grey.

After they sat down the birds, that they must have flurried a little
by their arrival, again took heart; innumerable chirpings and bars of
song shot about in the wood below. From overhead somewhere, in airy
isolation, other notes dropped on them, a lark, up there in the sky
that dazzled them looking for it, raining its silver rain of song on
them as Henry would have phrased it in _The Japanese Fan_, writing
also of the epiphanies of blossom and bud in the wood.

"Can you see it?" asked Penelope, looking up, and then quickly down on
him, and suspecting that he had been gazing on her instead of into the
sky, looking on her neck as her head was raised so. But no, he was
blinking upward.

"There!" he said.

"Ah, yes," she said, and looked a moment and was at once content,
having found, returning her gaze to earth and swaying the long grass
beside the boulder with her toe.

"Do smoke," she said. He saw a light in her eyes, the light that the
leading characters in his books saw. Bliss Henry found that he did not
like it. It repelled, not drew him.

"I believe Jukes told her," he thought, smiling at thought of that
jester, and then let the thought go.

"Do you know Henry Harland's books?" he asked presently.

"Yes--rather! Why do you ask?"

"I don't know."

She looked keenly on him. Oh, she knew him all, absolutely. He was a
shy man, she thought. She did not know how a discerning critic had
said of Henry: "When you meet men you are great; when you meet clerks
and mugwumps you are--eh--shy!" and then laughed at the ill-treated
word.

"But I'm not reading fiction just now," she said. "I'm reading
biography--it's far more interesting--that's life. Oh, I've been
reading a book of love-letters--a delightful anthology. Can you
understand two people meeting and just seeing each other once or twice
and then writing to each other by their Christian names?"

He did not seem interested. He looked round on her and she gleamed on
him, and he wondered whither had fled the girl of the blackbird talk.

Penelope, in her grey-blue confection of a material called, Henry
believed, _voile_, leant back against the blue-grey granite boulder,
gazing down the slope of grass, and seemed to muse a little, like one
of his heroines. They could look down into the wood (like his leading
man and leading lady) and see the sunlight, that found a way through
the tree-tops, dapple the wood's green and brown carpet (of sparse
grass and brown earth) with patina of bright gold. In her grey-blue
frock, her dark hair loose above her ears and straying on her brow,
her grey eyes meditating, her lips smiling--and he thinking of her as
the girl of the phrase about the blackbird dead in spring--Henry found
her very engaging, very interesting. A soft wind fanned them; her hair
fluttered; Bliss Henry felt, as he would have said in his _The
Japanese Fan_ or _The Jewelled Snuff-box_, something violent happen in
his heart. But it did not affect him, this thing in his heart, as it
affected his heroes. It was to him a warning, not a lure. He
distinctly did not like it; it seemed to him in the same world with
Tommy Dodge.

"Oh--well, I daresay all things are possible," he said; "I don't think
I could. I'm very slow with people." He had been a little slow with
his reply and she had wondered what was coming, but she had waited,
smiling.

He thought how long it had taken him to drop the "Mr." with one of his
best friends. But not to appear a contradictor and disagreer he added:

"Perhaps in some cases I could understand it. Yes--it would be
unusual, of course," he said noncommittally.

She gave a silvery laugh.

"I like unconventional people," she carolled.

He felt that that which had happened once again in his heart was what
he had already called "a damned magnetic stir!"

"When do you leave us?" she said, turning her face full on him.

"Very soon now--I'm afraid," he said, staring ahead and speaking
firmly.

"Are you glad to go?" she said; and he looked then full on her, so
that she was almost startled.

"Well, for some reasons, yes; for others----"

She let her gaze drift from him a little. He was thinking it was not
worth while to say how he hated a deal of Solway.

"I like the country," he allowed. "But, oh--well, that's rude."

She had a frown suddenly.

"Oh, go on. I'm not easily offended."

"It's rude," he went on, "to malign the people that are your people,
of course--but I don't," he thought her "broad" enough for him to say
it, "like Solway people much; that's what I was going to say."

"Certainly their interests are a bit limited," she agreed, one might
almost say stiffly--compared with her former graciousness.

"Yes--you must also feel--I mean that I have felt now and then I'd
give a deal to talk to somebody about something apart
from--er--superficial party politics among the men, and absolutely
nothing, absolutely nothing, with the women," which was putting it
very decorously.

"Pretty slow," she said. "I know--and fast too, sometimes," she added,
and shot a glance over his well-cut frame. "You know the Jones's, I
believe," she hazarded, switching her dress and looking up on him.

"I have visited," he said.

She scrutinised him, more coldly, almost calculatingly.

"You can be honest with me. You don't like them--and their set?"

"I don't. I don't like the people one meets there. You don't play
bridge?"

She gave him a wondrous look that made his heart know the "damned
magnetic stir" again.

"No," she said. "I say--by the way--what sort of a man is that Mr.
Dodge of that set?"

"Dodge?" He made a wry face.

"He seems--eh--an amorous youth," she suggested.

"Amor----" he stuck. Loving! "Well----" the magnetism died. "He's----"
he stuck again.

"Vulgar?" she said.

"Yes," he exploded.

"I thought so," she said, and settled at ease again. "I've never met
him. I had suspected that, however." She had the air of dismissing the
matter and----

"You find few friends in Solway?" she asked.

"I must not complain, I've introductions I haven't used. I've only
seen the people I've bumped into, as it were. But I _will_ go the
length of saying that I've sometimes, since coming here, felt a desire
for occasional confirmation of my ideas!"

"I know," she said; "I'm often lonely here. I've just wanted somebody
in the glorious spring, when the sun is drawing the winter out, drop,
dropping, from the smoky thatches, and to be able to spout to somebody
who would feel it, Thompson's lines about the spring:

    "Spring has come home with her world wandering feet,
     And all things are made young with young desires."

He was very thoughtful suddenly, and she marked his brows and smiled.
Really he had turned his light from her on to his dreams. He was
thinking: "There is a developing capacity in this girl. I hope, for
her sake, that she is strong enough to develop in loneliness."

"It's been very jolly meeting you anyhow," she said. "I like shy men;"
she leant sidewise, for a change in position, supporting herself with
stiff arm, white fingers spread on the rock.

He reserved his whole thought.

"There's a good deal to be said in their favour," he laughed.

"I certainly see I judged you right from the beginning," she said,
looking full on him. "I generally am right at first." She was quite at
ease with him, he thought, and he was glad she was. He liked to be at
ease with men and women--and know them so with him. Being thus at ease
she came out with: "I had a good idea how far one could go with you."

So she had not understood him, having her opinion of men; nor he her,
engrossed on his partial portrait of her. He had a gasp at that; but
she did not notice the gasp.

He rose and answered fairly promptly, if lightly.

"With me? Oh, I give people my whole self always. It saves mistakes.
Often after I've done it I'm sorry, for it hurts sometimes; but I
always continue, and what matter hurts like that so long as one is
hurt oneself and, by so being hurt, progresses?"

She flicked her dress, rising, and they moved down from the knoll.

She did not know quite what to say and gave another facet to him, one
that had a steely glitter in it rather than any light.

"But _does_ one progress?" she said.

"Rather!" he cried, as they bent under a spray of apple blossom and
came again on the lawn where Jukes now lay smoking a cigarette, his
tennis over because of his bad side.

Croquet mallets still sounded; also chatter--but added to their sounds
was the more blissful tinkle of crockery being carried out to the
garden for tea.

Jukes eyed them, smiling from under his tilted panama. Miss Jukes had
a glimpse of them and looked as if she hadn't.

"Tea!" she cried. "Tea, you tennis players."

"I expect," said Miss Montague, "for all your ideas you touch our
common humanity somewhere," uttering the words half turned from him,
moving away with her engaging, lissom beauty, and all her
"possibilities" that he could not get at for the "common humanity." He
was sorry--for her. He was a little piqued, for a moment, thinking how
she would have her own ideas of him--and they be wrong! Only later he
observed that she carried a little chatelaine at her wrist, and that
there were pendant ribbons to her hat. He wondered he had not seen the
significance of these earlier, and fancied she would have a smiling
contempt for a girl who carried a muff instead of a chatelaine. But he
dismissed her and his regrets when a whirl of white fantails went
overhead and the birds alighted and strutted on the green sward. He
had learnt something from Quarle Queen.

He subsided beside Jukes.

"Have a cigarette?" said Jukes.

"Thanks."

He blew a feather of blue smoke into the summer air and watched it
glitter and be dissipated in the bright day.




XXXV


The next day Bliss Henry could not work. True, the book was near an
end, and the whole plan of it still, as always, clear in his mind; but
something restrained him; he could not write. Something without
himself, or something within, he could not tell which, would persist
in checking his hand, damming the flow of the shining, debonair
romance with its two central puppets and the few assisting ones.

Had his viewpoint changed? Had he changed, that his book should seem
so _difficult_? Or was it a thought of those who would read, reading
him not for what he meant to say but for what they supposed he said,
that made him glum? He knew Queen had helped him; he knew Queen had
made the puppets live again, and he had been grateful to Queen; but
now he had no thought of blaming anyone for the horrific unanimous
swoon of his puppets.

He knew only for certain that he was again deterred. At last he gave
in, as many writers do, to the laziness, or atrophying spell, or
whatever it might be, not vexing himself farther to inquire whether
spell from without, or malady from within checked him, and went away
south of the town, across windy moors, along winding roads.

A great chirping in a hedge drew him to it and he looked through.
Bright beady eyes peered up at him and he scrutinised closer. The
beady eyes still peered up at him; and then he saw a squirm of weasels
in a nest of young birds--a hideous, bloody business. He thought it
better to retire and give the weasels freedom speedily to finish the
business they had begun. It was a hideous sight, the torn, chirping
bodies, the chirping destroyers.

"After all," he thought, "why grieve? The weasels, I presume, must
live."

But the blue sky over him took a coldness, the fresh fields a
hardness, the distant hills an aloofness.

Though he had dismissed his inert puppets, they evidently unable, or
unwilling, to help him in finishing charmingly their history, though
he had dismissed them, they had been haunting him all the way, as if
with rolling, fainting eyes. Now they ceased to haunt. And now
something in him, apart from the puppets, found vent; he drew forth
his notebook and he wrote there, by the distressful wayside, his
haunting (but to some incomprehensible) lyric "You Believed in the
Triumph of Passion."

He was gone till tea-time; and after his return with the drafts of
that song--and a rest and tea--he went over the criss-crossed lines of
it in his notebook, giving it the final sh
ape, the shape it
has in his published volume:

    "You believed in the triumph of passion;
      But I, in the triumph of love,
    Who have loved you long time, though my fashion
      Of loving a vain thing must prove,
    As long as the call of maid's passion
      Is stronger than calm of men's love.

    "I have wearied you now with my loving;
      Cometh not what you thought might appear
    Through my love; in the woodlands naught moving,
      No piping of Pan drawing near:
    Like the vast of the sky, my loving,
      Where no clouds, where no passions appear.

    "Long since you had ceased prophesying
      'You will change in the change of the years.'
    And to-day when you turned hence sighing,
      Your maiden eyes wet with maid's tears,
    'Twas but Hope that had been prophesying,
      You knew; these were hopeless tears.

    "And I knew that the Hope I had cherished,
      Long time, was as vain as your hope,
    My soul of no kisses had perished,
      Your soul had no door that might ope'
    To the cry of my vain love, cherished
      As vainly as your mortal hope."

After it was finished he heard his puppets stir and, listening, heard
their voices go on again. They had recovered from their unanimous
swoon.

"To-morrow," he thought, "I shall attend to them. I have let the day
go by and night is coming. I shall do nothing at all to-day to the
book. It can rest."

The postman's knock sounded; and May, coming up with the letter, found
our author before his open window staring out like a man in a trance.
He turned leisurely, absently, and took the letter from the salver.




XXXVI


His face brightened at sight of the handwriting, and he opened the
letter with a sense of peace. He was now quiet, instead of dazed; at
ease, instead of inert; peaceful, instead of distressed; just a slight
change--the singing of a bird in a dead landscape, the sun coming out
on a city wall--but it meant an immense difference.

There was no leap at heart, no excitement, as he unfolded the letter.
It was from that friend, mentioned three times already in this
narrative; a reply to his last letter to her, enclosing, besides, a
setting to music of the lyric of the birds and the hills, and the
rest, that he had sent her shortly after his arrival in the place of
peace. She had been a long time about it, she wrote, but from the
first reading had always wanted to do it--and here it was, and might
it please him. Not that the words required music! They were music.

Henry tried to hum the air. He tried to sing it. But, though he could
make music of words, he could not make music of music; so he looked at
his watch.

Yes! Haskell would be even now on the point of going home, filing the
loose letters, snapping shut the ink-pot. He would go round to
Haskell's. Haskell would sing it to him.

He had a strangely elated feeling as he went down High Street, almost
deified. A great river of wind, blowing into Solway from over the
fields, was in his face. He swung down-hill with head sidewise
lowered, to keep his head-gear on. His cheeks rejoiced with the
freshness, and the lights of the town had a blurred glitter because of
the wind in his eyes.

He passed Tommy Dodge, and Tommy hailed him with:

"Hullo, old chap!"

He passed on.

Tommy ran after him, his showily cut waterproof fluttering about him,
and caught Henry's elbow.

"Hullo, old chap! You're not going to cut me, are you? I had no idear
you would do that! You ain't goin' to cut me?" and his gay manner
overflowed, familiar and ingratiating.

"Yes," said Henry and passed on; and Tommy Dodge stood with the weak
vigour oozing out of him and looking oddly like a suit of excellently
cut clothes, under a fluttering waterproof, hanging on nothing at all.
If you had seen them then you would only have seen the clothes on
Tommy and would not have remembered what Henry's clothes were--only
remembered the swinging form clad in glory.

Perhaps it was the freshness of the night that made the thought of
going indoors repellent, as if no good would come of being between
walls in gaslight. Henry felt a premonition of disappointment and
spiritual disaster on the threshold, but flung out his joyousness
against it. Such a feeling was not usual on Haskell's threshold. Yet
he thought that Haskell, rising to meet him when he was ushered in,
seemed a little "off colour," and the brightness of the chamber seemed
more glare than brightness.

Haskell, on his side, was glad to see Henry; but a part of him was
annoyed, willy-nilly, at the author's triumphant, monopolising dash
upon him, like the breeze of the night. He made him welcome, he seated
him, he played the fragment, and sang it--but all still in that mood.
And he found the music good, too, though he did not quite do it
justice--and knew he didn't--wondered if he really tried to. He turned
from the piano, nevertheless, much refreshed; but, perhaps a little
tired from the day, such is our droll nature, he acted still the mood
in which Henry had found him. All of which means that Henry was a
fresh man out of the wind and Haskell a tired man out of a bookshop.

Henry, despite his self-centred mission, and his vigorous arrival, had
been aware of Haskell's unwontedly, and then wilfully, unsympathetic
deportment, and had almost snatched the music away and said: "No--not
in that mood." But the music, in the event, had proved itself greater
than a mood.

"By the way," said Haskell, "a lady has been asking for you to-day."

"A lady asking for me! And who, I wonder, may she be?"

"Guess."

"I have no guess."

"A Miss Fox."

"Oh!"

"Aye. You may well say 'Oh!'" Haskell felt for his pipe. "Here you
have been taking in Solway for all you are worth--as an outsider; and
you have an introduction to two people and never gone to see either of
them--for I don't suppose you've been out to Sir Henry's place yet?"

"No--and it was very decent of my publisher to give these
introductions. I hope he isn't hurt. But, man! Do you know--I can't
tell why--but I do dislike introductions. If I could bump against the
people by accident I wouldn't mind; but to go to see an unknown with
a letter of introduction, like a birth certificate or a seaman's
discharge papers, well--one's just got to like people then, and
they've got to like us; and if they don't, or if we don't, they, or
we, have, for the sake of the introducer, to put up with----"

"With we or they!" said Haskell. "Yes; I understand you. But you talk
as involvedly as Miss Jukes does when she comes in here and tries to
talk with precision. Seriously, however, you should go and see both
Miss Fox and Sir Henry Stubbs. Sir Henry has a better library than he
has a kennel--which means much in this part of the borders. Miss Fox
asked about you to-day; she has heard that you often came in here, she
said. She suggested, in her half-cynical, half-smiling way, that if
you got lonely you might perhaps remember your introduction. Your
publisher has evidently written to her, you see, to look out for you."

"I'd better go at once to call then--or she'll think, when I do turn
up, that it's sheer melodramatic loneliness and no courtesy that
brings me."

"I'd go, if I were you. You'd like her, I fancy. It's odd, now I think
of it, that I've not mentioned her to you before, for I've often
thought of her choice of books."

"She buys books?"

"Yes; but don't be falling in love with her now. I'm afraid you're
susceptible, Mr. Henry. Miss Montague, if I may say so, I
think--well--charmed you a bit, eh? And Miss Fox, I can assure you, is
considered mighty charming. I'm afraid there's a bit of dalliance in
you." Henry frowned, and Haskell saw and added: "What, for instance,
about your musical girl?"

"Musical girl?" said Henry. He had for some cause felt an insolence in
the remark, but he thought of Quarle Queen and smiled and said again:
"Musical girl? Who is she?"

Haskell turned his arm and flipped the song where it leant on the
piano. Henry didn't like the gesture but--

"Oh!" he said, which could mean anything.

And then he stared at Haskell with new eyes and thought he did not
like Haskell's expression; so he dismissed from him his breezy
dreaminess, focussed his eyes afresh, and looked on Haskell.

"I say," he said; "that's a queer way to talk of her. I bring up the
music for you to do me a favour, to play it over for me as I cannot
get it for myself. Have I hurt you somehow? You talk like a piqued
young lady. If I've hurt you in any way, do say so; don't try to have
a dig at me by labelling and limiting a friend and calling her a
musical girl. It's as if you said a musical _box_. Besides, she's not
solely a _musical_ girl. The appellation is correct, of course--for
she is a musical girl. But she's also a lot of other kinds of girl
that are worth being." He did not stop there. He went on: "For you to
call her a musical girl is less a labelling of _her_, than a criticism
of yourself. It is as if you lit a little match that I could see you
better," and he did not stop there. He went on: "Your label is, if
only you knew, like the paper pinned on a great man's coat-tails by a
little rickety gamin in the street."

"Oh!" said Haskell and looked up and glared--then he smiled. But then
he bethought him of his mood! Said he:

"You talk as if you disrespect women: 'Talk like a man,' you suggest
to me. 'Don't talk like a woman.' Is that it?"

"I meant," said Henry, still smiling sweetly, "'Talk like a person who
is not mean, whatever your sex, so to speak,' if you will have it that
way!" He gave a little laugh. "There are mean men and there are mean
women. But even a mean man, if hurt, does not try to get his own back
by little, mean, grinning, polite digs that, _oh, surely you can't
take offence at_! No, he doesn't say, 'the musical girl.' A remark
like that, my dear sir, is for, as I said, and I say again, with
emphasis now, _a young lady_. Not that it hurts me--only I observe
it."

Haskell looked round the room.

"I wonder," said he, "what's wrong with me to-night? You're all right;
and I--I seem to be trying to make myself damnably objectionable."

"Would you allow me," suggested Henry, "to open your window?"

Haskell gave a new smile, rose, opened the window, took a great breath
of air; then he turned again, after a silence, to his piano:

"This," said he, "is a piece of music that catches me."

He sat down; this time, Henry remarked, in a fashion reminiscent of
the way Queen approached the instrument. He stretched his hands to the
keys and the music woke--and then his voice:

    "I would go back to my own loved hills
      When I am dying,
    And die to the old, old voice of rills
      Where birds are flying,
    Flying and crying over the hills."

He finished, and both sat quiet.

"Yes," said Haskell, "the woman--or man," and turning he smiled and
bowed, "who wrote the music for these lines--yours, I suppose----?"
Henry nodded--"is more than musical. I hope I didn't hurt you when
I--eh--labelled myself as mean, just now?"

Henry shook his head long and gently, leisurely blowing smoke.

"No; I assure you you didn't. I would, I may say, had I not known you
as a man, have been amused at the appellation. You didn't hurt me
except in the way that I was hurt for you. I had a horrible feeling
that I was being disappointed in you----"

He paused.

"What are you thinking?" asked Haskell.

"I'm thinking that Queen would of a surety call me analytic,
ridiculously analytic."

"I don't know," said Haskell. "He'd not say _ridiculously_ anyhow. He
might say analytic, of course. But he'd have felt me petty, I know,
without having explained me to myself with such impeccable precision
and variety. Quarle Queen would just have gone home and left me to
come round. For you were right," said Haskell, "I was in a petty mood
and I did say that to hurt you--and I only hurt myself--behaving, as
you remarked, like a piqued young lady, _with_ a stress to signify the
sense in which it is used, meaning a petty, mean, piqued person----"

"Irrespective of sex," said Henry, in a mock declamatory manner.

Haskell sat looking before him through his gleaming glasses.

"I say," he said, "if all men and women had your ideas, felt them
strongly, felt your ideas and aims beyond a certain strength----"

"They'd give confirmation of them to each other," said Henry
assisting.

"Yes--oh, of course, and--dear me!--yes, that confirmation would help
in the speed with which such ideas of life spread! But what I was
going to say was that if all felt strongly the ideas you feel they'd
cease--well, to procreate, I suppose, one may as well say, and----"

"And what?"

"The race would die out."

Henry sat back easily. "Yes, the body would, perhaps--the visible body
might. Yes; I suppose that's logical."

"You suppose it's logical! Why, it's a thought you must have arrived
at often, thinking as you do about things--seeing everything as you
do." And then more pause, and then quietly now, not as if in face of
something terrible, but something peaceful: "The world would cease,
man," and he in his turn sat back quiet.

"As most see it to-day, yes. But the more real Eternity is the less
real seems Time. The more real the spirit the less
real--well--Solway."

He sat thinking and then broke out with Thompson's:

    "Where is the land of Luthany,
    Where is the tract of Elenore?
    I am bound therefore.

      "Pierce thou thy heart to find the key;
      With thee take
      Only what none else would keep;
      Learn to dream when thou dost wake,
      Learn to wake when thou dost sleep.
      Learn to water joy with tears,
      Learn from fear to vanquish fears;
      To hope for thou dar'st not despair.
      Exult for that thou dar'st not grieve;
      Plough thou the rock until it bear;
      Know, for thou else could'st not believe;
      Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;
      Die, for none other way can'st live.
      When earth and heaven lay down their veil,
      And that apocalypse turns thee pale;
      When thy seeing blindeth thee
      To what thy fellow-mortals see;
      When their sight to thee is sightless;
      Their living death, their light most lightless;
      Search no more----
    Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore."

"Very fine," said Haskell. "Very fine. It moves me. But who can live
it?"

"Live it? You talk as if it was a strain to live it. Do you think all
the pull of the heart is toward the life we know just now--which is
typified in Solway? The eternal pull is--believe me--far stronger than
the mortal pull."

"Oh, but you are different from other men."

"In what way?--though I didn't say I was speaking of myself. But in
what way?"

"Your tendencies are spiritual."

"Oh! Allow me to tell you, if we are speaking of me _apropos_ my
ideas--that my tendencies, as you call them, are--or were--toward a
careless life, a jingling lyric instead of a sonorous, dignified ode.
You remember what Socrates said of himself that way. There is a
passage in Flaubert's letters to the same tune, telling all the things
he hankered to do and did not do. I don't agree that 'we are what we
are, and there ye be,' as a drunk man said to me the other night. The
men we look up to and admire have fought hard--and they have fallen; I
take that--their falls--as a sign that they did make themselves and
were not made. If they had never fallen I might listen to the
suggestions of the drunk moraliser that 'we are what we are, and there
ye be'; but no--a man has a good deal to do with the making of
himself. Wasn't it Holmes said that a man had the making of his mouth
if of no other feature? No, sir! I'm not going to go back to the drunk
moraliser in the gutter. That's ancient history, I've passed that.
Some may still be disputing in the gutter, but others are up on the
heights, 'where Orpheus and where Homer are', and we must go on."

"Where are you going?" asked Haskell heavily.

"I don't quite know. But I know what we've left--and, looking back, I
wonder however it had even any interest for men at all."

"I wish I could follow you," said Haskell.

"You believe, then, that I am going on?" said Henry, but I think he
knew himself and was not asking for Haskell's expression of belief as
an aid, but wondering if Haskell had the capacity to believe that he
was going on!

"I do. I believe you may even attain something--some spiritual world.
I feel all that you say very deeply;" (Henry thought: "He too, then,
may go on.") "but--but--I know," said Haskell slowly, "that I'll just
say, 'Oh, what does it matter!' and, despite all my ideas--well,
they'll be only ideas."

Henry would fain have helped Haskell farther, but he had a feeling
that he must conserve his own energies. He wondered, in an aside of
his mind, if Queen was (after all) selfish to protect himself as he
did.

"Perhaps your children will make them more than that," said Henry.

"Children?"

"'Yours,' I said, not 'mine.' Oh," he suddenly rose and looked up and
flung abroad his hands, "my children--my children--my children----" he
waved his open palms to the open window. The night was far advanced.
He could hear the river's voice going on with its eternal song, the
tree murmuring of Eternity.

"I know I am at least happy, contented, but I am ashamed when you are
here," said Haskell, as though such quiet outbursts of a guest were
everyday occurrences. "When you go you leave an echo. I fear that when
you go for good you will leave a regret."

"A regret," said Henry, "is very close of kin to an inspiration. Oh,
the Day will come. The Day will come."

"But where are you going--where are you going? Are you not just going
into the darkness?"

"No--into the Light."

"How do you know?"

"By--for one thing, to mention no deeper and personal ones--looking at
Solway, and then looking away at my dreams. And which is the more
real?" he asked solemnly.

Haskell listened to the silence.

"Your dreams," he said.




XXXVII


Bliss Henry was tidying his room. Something had happened in his life.
Seeds that he had sown in hard soil had shown green shoots; cold winds
had threatened the shoots, but they had thriven, and now it was as
though the buds were bursting, the bloom showing. The world without
seemed fairer, the tree in the little rearward court was a glad green
in the well of sunshine against the red-bricked wall opposite. The
landscape, seen from his front window, was glittering with sun and
freshness.

His airy front room had a cleaner atmosphere, and to make it still
more restful and give to it more of the sacred freshness that it
pleased him to have around him, home to him being more sanctuary than
kennel, he discovered a duster somewhere and dusted his books,
polished the glass of the prints and etchings on the walls.

He looked some time at the Helleu of _Lady Looking at the Watteaus at
the Louvre_, and then took it down from its place. He had discovered
that he had ceased to be charmed by it; he had been given, or had won,
a new, or a fuller, light, by which he had strayed away from it. Yes,
it was charming; there was no doubt of that. It was a wonderful and
graceful piece of work; but somehow now, when he looked at it, he
thought of Miss Montague, and with annoyance. If this _Lady Looking at
the Watteaus_ were to turn about and look out of the frame he was sure
her eyes would have a glitter and stab in them, and she would see he
was, not just another admirer of the Watteaus--but a man.

He turned it face down on the table and ran his knife round the brown
paper back, eased up the sprigs, removed the print and put it away in
a portfolio. Then his eyes fell on the photograph of that girl in
London that Haskell had referred to as "the musical girl" and, without
any analytical and introspective arguments whatever, he laid it
tentatively within the framed mount which had held the Lady of the
Watteaus and perceived that it exactly fitted. He set the photograph
in, replaced the back, and put the sprigs in again.

The postman's double knock sounded and then anon the maid's tap at his
door--if one may call her so.

It was a letter from the girl in London, just the usual kind of
letter, with little bits of news of common friends; but it seemed
different somehow, both stronger and closer:

     "DEAR MR. HENRY,

     "Please do not thank me for setting your exquisite
     verse to music; I have kept you waiting for it a long
     while but, after receiving your last letter, I have
     ceased to reproach myself for the delay as, through it,
     the song came to you when you were most needing it. I
     am glad to have taken some active part in the
     dismissing of Solway.

     "At the present moment I am furious with the Editress
     of _Woman's Way_, and to ease my feelings I am going to
     tell you all the trouble. You will understand so well.

     "Do you remember me telling you of a fat, much-ringed
     woman who sat next to me at the Literary Ladies' Annual
     Dinner--the woman who, when I said that I did not
     smoke, asked: 'Too prudish?' and to whom I replied:
     'No--not imitative'? Well, it is she who has angered
     me.

     "I had occasion to call at her office, and after we had
     finished business she worked the conversation round to
     women writers of the day. I mentioned Vernon Lee, and
     what do you think the ringed editress said? 'Oh, my
     dear child--Vernon Lee is so masculine!'

     "I think I gasped. Of course I really am to blame, for
     I should not attempt to discuss literature with Fleet
     Street women; they are so snobbish and so
     dishonest--far more so than the suburban lady who talks
     of nothing but buttons and lace curtains; and yet, in
     spite of knowing how foolish it is, whenever I meet
     anyone who has read I am only too happy to argue, to
     compare, in fact to rave!

     "But Vernon Lee masculine!!! I looked on the fat
     editress and said: 'I do not understand.' That was a
     false step. 'You are so young, my love,' she answered.
     'Vernon Lee writes just like a man.' 'Oh, well,' I
     said, 'she does not write like the authoress of _The
     Hot Widow_, or _The Woman who Wanted To_, or _The
     Mottled Wame_' (my own invention, by the way; I'm
     rather proud of it), 'but, in my opinion, it is she who
     is unwomanly and not Vernon Lee. Besides, we are
     discussing Art--and Art has no sex.'

     "When I mentioned _The Mottled Wame_ the editress
     chipped in with: 'Oh--I've not yet read that, but I
     believe it is very good.' She reminded me of the woman
     you once met--to whom you invented first the authors
     and then the works, all of which she had read.

     "I came out of that office bruised and sick; I wanted
     to cry and I wished, so much, that Solway was near
     enough to be reached by a tramcar. However, I went
     home, read some essays from _Hortus Vit_ and one or
     two of your poems and now, after having flung this off
     my chest at you, I feel convalescent. If you will say:
     'Oh, d---- the ringed editress' for me I shall be quite
     cured."

Bliss Henry put down the letter, and going over to Helleu's
_Cigarette_, took it from the wall, turned it on its face on the
table, slit the brown paper back, removed the sprigs, withdrew the
print and tore it slowly in pieces, which he put in his wastepaper
basket. As he was so employed he thought of the girl who wrote to him,
of her library--he saw the books in it: Pater, Yeats, Charles Lamb's
letters--he remembered these distinctly. He was now so little affected
by outside opinion--whether genuine or insincere--that he did not
think there might be those who would jeer at her library and say that
literature was older than that, that there were Beowulfs,
Maundevilles, Chaucers, Piers Plowmen in the world. He was beyond the
bitterness of the academic and the ignorant, emancipated, by his new
light, so hardly won, from all pettiness, whether of the scholar's den
or the street corner.

He thought of her work on the London press, thought of her playing on
her piano--which he had heard once or twice. Well, he preferred to
consider her womanly, rather than to consider that editress a fair
specimen of woman--she who sent out the office boy for Daisy Delilah's
last novel because "I hear it's naughty." He preferred to look upon
her as a typical woman rather than to take, as a standard of woman,
either May, or Mrs. Sturge, or that amazing Fleet Street lady,
referred to in this letter, or another that he knew (the Editress of
_The Blonde Monde_) who did not read at all, but was, instead, a
member of the Society of Lady Writers and went to its dinners and put
her heels on the table as a sign of her emancipation.

"To hell with them!" he said, quite of his own accord, fervently.

He went to his cupboard and hunted among some old _Studios_ till he
came to the Sargent number. He thought he remembered having
seen--yes--here it was--a reproduction of a pencil sketch of the
authoress of _Hortus Vit_ and _Hauntings_ and other eminently
womanly, and artistic, and exquisite books--books not bestial.

"What has sex to do with art, anyhow!" quoth he.

The Sargent sketch fitted the frame of the discarded _Cigarette_, and
soon Henry was standing in a new room, a quite new room, a room full
of the peace he desired, the peace he had come seeking in Solway, the
peace he could have found anywhere. After all there were individuals,
men and women, in the world, as well as beasts, male and female.

And he was not at all lonely.




XXXVIII


Bliss Henry laid down his pen--and heard the sparrows at their first
chirping in the vacant street. He had come home before midnight and
had written on to the end of his book, determined to finish it. And
now the task was done and he looked up--and felt strangely, terribly
lonely; also faint, as though his hold on corporeal life was
maintained by the merest thread. The intense quiet of his room seemed
to have a word to say to him; the pale light growing in it was like
light in the eyes of one supposed to be dead. The light grew, the
pallid, awful light of dawn, that put out the light by which he had
worked night-long; and he sat there, utterly and awfully alone, the
sparrows' chirpings smiting him.

This last, excessive spurt was due to the fact that of late he had
been considering more and more that he was but writing amusing twaddle
for the idle, sops to make their futility bearable to them, was little
more than a pleasing dauber in a palace of fools, and he wanted to get
the book done and then rest. He could not afford to throw it away. He
did not think, indeed, that it was so futile as to deserve such a
fate. He knew that he had put into it more than he had put into his
earlier books, had written this inspired by a wider and more
philosophic view of the destinies of men; there was here more than
persiflage. But he wanted, for all that, to finish it--and then rest,
rest and forget his quixotic hero and his chiffoned doll, the heroine,
leave them there for ever in their charming atmosphere, of which he
had so well the knack and the name--and then think about his own life
and his own soul.

He wrote "The End," and rose and drew the blind, now yellow with
morning, and had a sense of seeing the quiet heart of things. But it
was still terrible to hear the first twitters of the first birds, to
see the beginning of the day. He felt an immense pity--for what? It
seemed to be for all the sons of men and for all their futile ways.

His futile book was written, his book of amusement for those who were
still sleeping and snoring. He looked out sadly at the now bursting
blue of morning. He had seen sunsets, and nights of stars, since
beginning his book. He had ended it with a grey dawn, not sad in
itself, but sad to him because of something in his heart. But already
the grey was going, blue and pale gold showing. He turned to his table
again and wrote the cryptic words:

     "In a world in which to see the sunset gives no regret,
     to see the stars no loneliness, to see the dawn no
     shame."

He did not understand the words; but they had come from some very deep
place in him. He was a changed man somehow, he felt, after writing
"The End." There had been a death somewhere; or there had been an
opening of the eyes of the blind: he did not know very well what had
happened. There had been a voice--either a death-cry or the cry of one
who had been blind and had found sight.

And then he came back to life, had an acute sense of reality, was not
looking so much at a shifting of scenes on a vacant stage. He read
these words again, as if he were not the man who had written them but
an onlooker--wondered what they meant. With a tired gesture of his
hand over his eyes he dismissed them.

He knew he must now sleep, for he was worn; but he felt he could not
sleep till something else was done, and so he took pen again and
wrote:

     "I have finished the blessed book"--

and then he wrote on:

     "Queer, when I finished it I looked up and found it was
     morning and I felt----"

and he proceeded to tell, as best he could, the effect of that dawn,
and then copied the cryptic phrases:

     "'In a world in which to see the sunset gives no
     regret, to see the stars no loneliness, to see the dawn
     no shame.' What does it mean? Can you explain it?"

Then he bethought him that he had written no name at beginning of his
letter. To whom had he really written it? Something moved in his
breast like a bit of Eternity, and he took an envelope and addressed
it--to the One Woman that he always turned to in thought, as he turned
to himself.

He left the letter on his table to be posted, also a note to Mrs.
Sturge requesting that he might be allowed to sleep, be left
undisturbed until he rang.




XXXIX


He called on Sir Henry Stubbs, six miles out of Solway on the high
moor, and watched him water his roses that grew in tubs of imported
earth, for the moor soil was not friendly to roses, would nourish only
squat firs and juniper, bracken and heather; called also on Miss Fox
and was entertained graciously in a room with old, exquisite furniture
spindling with elegant Chippendale legs on its polished floors and
rugs; and old china glowing in its rare old three-cornered cupboards;
and was taken through the house by Mr. Fox to see old portraits and
old, quaint prints, in hall and on stairs; and into the study to see
some Aldines and Elzevirs and quaint Hindoo and Chinese idols in
jade-stone, incarnations of Brahma and Vishnoo.

He was gently censured for being so long about revealing his presence,
and frankly explained his fear of introductions to "unknowns" when
employed on a long piece of work. He had an internal horror all the
while that he was a queer visitor, a queer person to be introduced by
anyone: for Solway was on his nerves--his work was done--he had now
but the desire to be gone--and now that his work was done he had a
feeling of going about in a dream-world. Solway was not real. It did
not exist at all. Sitting at tea with these people, so charming, so
hospitable, who did not "entertain" like the palm-tub people, but were
content to be simply friendly, he heard their voices far off and his
own apart from him. Surely he was not really there! He was only
looking on!

He had a recollection of being taken round a garden and seeing a
gardener at work; of looking at a tennis-court and saying: "No; I
don't play tennis"; of hoping, more for his publisher's sake than for
his own, as these quiet people were friends of his publisher's, that
they would not think he was drunk! They could think him a little queer
if they liked. He remembered that authors are often considered queer.
Then he heard a voice--it was Miss Fox's now--talking of some great
poet; and he answered her with spontaneity. "He has sat in that very
chair," he heard her say. He came back to life. Solway seemed real
again for a space; no, not Solway; he decided that this house he was
in had nothing to do with Solway.

There he sat talking; or sat with tea-cup in hand, listening, and all
the while feeling as if he were not here.

His work was done in Solway--such as it was. He should really be
gone.

Perhaps somewhat so the aged feel before going. Perhaps somewhat so
the aged join in the conversation, move, act occasionally, to tell
themselves they are really here, but more to tell those around them
so, as it is expected of them to indicate their presence, and old
usages die hard.

He felt, too, that he was introduced here as "Bliss Henry, the
author." Bliss Henry was a fraud; he wrote charming stories about
dear, quixotic men whose dreams did no harm to anyone, because they
were only dreams to themselves as well as to the onlookers, were never
lived out and so made true; dear, quixotic, lovable, absent-minded men
who were more "proposed" to by the heroine in lace than "proposed" to
her--and everybody was satisfied.

He was a fraud!

Fancy on the strength of that, on the strength of such twaddle as _The
Jewelled Snuff-Box_ and _The Japanese Fan_, being introduced to
unknowns and sitting down to tea with them and being shown their old
china and their old portraits! It was very good of them, and sweet,
and kind; but it should not be. Something was wrong in a world that
treated so kindly one who could write these merely amusing and
distracting books--when such a place as Solway existed. Well--he had
not insulted his kind publisher and could truthfully write to him,
after all, that he had called on Sir Henry Stubbs, and on the Foxes,
and had found them all charming. He hoped they could as honestly write
nicely of him--and said farewell.

Perhaps somewhat thus the aged feel at farewell, going away with a
memory of pleasant voices in the room, and tom-tits flying outside the
window, and in their hearts a haunting sense of their own loneliness,
so that every word is delved for desperately, and every slight gesture
dictated--just to show that they are still alive and aware of their
neighbours.

When he was really alone, going back to his rooms, he felt
better--less lonely. The sky was over him. He thought, very
consciously now, of the One Woman and wondered how she fared. He had a
feeling that if ever she felt as he did, then he would like to be near
her--so that she could run to him and be at peace.




XL


"It means," she wrote to him in reply to his letter, "if I am not
mistaken, that you have been living a little in Eternity, which does
not mean that you were intense, or distracted, but calm. You make me
think of the end of Bridges' Ode, beginning, 'Assemble all ye
maidens,' of the bit about the eternal who live 'the fairest moments
of their broken dreams'; and you also remind me of Vernon Lee's words
about--I have her book, I shall quote it; it is more a spirit she
gives than a fact--but it is the spirit I am speaking of--and the
spirit is more than the fact.

"'. . . not the ghost of their everyday, humdrum likeness to
ourselves, but the ghost of certain moments of their existence,
certain rustlings, and shimmerings of their personality, their
waywardness, momentary, transcendent graces or graciousnesses,
unaccountable wistfulness and sorrow, certain looks of the face and
certain tones of the voice (perhaps none of the steadiest), things
that seem to die away into nothing on earth, but which have permeated
their old haunts, clung to the statues with the ivy, risen and fallen
with the plash of the fountains, and which now exhale in the breath
of the honeysuckle, and murmur in the voice of birds, in the rustle of
the leaves and the high, invading grasses.'

"You once mentioned to me something about a Saracen king who, when he
lay a-passing, said: 'I have lived three hundred and ten eternal
days,' or whatever the number was that he had a record of so surely. I
daresay we could always live eternal days, but I gather, though you
don't say so, that Solway is not prone to live eternal days. I read it
between the lines--you are not happy about Solway. But I do like that
bit of your last letter where you broke out with a kind of lyric in it
about the _colour_ of the place, and the birds wheeling over it.

"As for me--thanks for all your enquiries. I go on quietly . . ."




XLI


Bliss Henry was going away, back to London. He did not love London;
but his work here was done. He would go to see the One Woman when he
returned. She was in London. He would be glad to be back there. He
loved her.

He saw Drummond in High Street; and Drummond stopped to look in a shop
window till Henry passed--looking surreptitiously at the author's
passing reflection, but disliking to meet the real man. Drummond was a
sentimentalist. Henry saw his back with something of loathing. Would
that man have understood him if he said: "I know Love"?

Henry walked on, meeting the factory girls coming from work; and they
passed without oglings or asides--some not seeing him, taking him as
much for granted now as the crest of hills above the town; others,
with the stare of wonder in their eyes, as at a strange thing.

He went to say farewell to Jukes, and found him in his little office
with the glass doors, the catalogues and paste-pots round him.

"You have come to say good-bye? Well, if you are going, then I must
say a queer thing for me. I want to say that you have meant a lot to
me. I once called you a sentimentalist and thought you a comical,
quixotic character. Now I don't. You've done me a world of good.
You've made me see life with new eyes and I'm grateful----"

"Oh--please----" began Henry.

Jukes had his return to a whimsical smile.

"Well," he said, "here you are," and opened his desk, "a final
offering. It tells what you have made me see." And he drew forth a
piece of paper, put on his _pince-nez_, read the words on the paper to
himself, then handed it to Bliss Henry with a little bow, the jolly,
irrepressible twinkle in his eyes.

Henry stared.

"I'm serious," said Jukes.

On the paper, in the colonel's admirable handwriting, were the words:

     "Bliss Henry was not a sentimentalist. He sought but
     for what he knew he could get--and having got it was
     satisfied. This do I believe--George Jukes."

Henry read the odd document and then looked up at Jukes. Jukes took
off his _pince-nez_ and threw them away from him. They dropped with a
tinkle, swung a little, and then hung plummet-like.

Henry put the paper in his waistcoat pocket.

    *    *    *    *    *

Haskell came with him to the train. They walked in silence.

Then:

"All these ideas of yours, _apropos_ the symbol of the pendulum and so
forth--is not yours a gospel of negation?" asked Haskell, in a voice
that seemed a blending of the dreary and the hopeful.

"Gospel of negation? I don't know whether a gospel of negation is good
or bad; but I can only tell you the truth, in answer: whatever my
gospel is, it is not a gospel of negation." Our author flung up his
head, radiant. "It is a gospel--if you call it gospel--of almost
hilarious positivism. No; there is no negation in either my actions or
inactions."

"Ah! You have got to that!" said Haskell. "Sometimes, thinking of your
ideas, I have wondered you did not go mad."

"I used to wonder that myself sometimes. But, you see, if I could not
live a real dream, and find it true, I would not have a narcotic
dream. There have been minds, seeking as I have sought, that have
become unhinged; but most of that was due to the fact that, not
attaining an honest dream-world, they drugged themselves into a
spurious. Better the real world, as one calls it, than that."

"You would not escape from life so?"

"The phrase is to me an error. Those who have failed, have failed, I
expect, because they looked at life so, and either took a spurious
dream-world or cursed God and died. I have not escaped from Life. I
have found--well, found Life. No--it was only the loneliness that made
me fear madness might come--but I don't feel lonely now."

Haskell looked at him keenly, to see if there existed the light in his
eye that is called the fanatic's light. He saw it not--but looking for
it he saw a nameless, unforgettable something that awed him. The whole
man was like light; and Haskell was afraid.

The train came in.

"What has Solway done for you?" said Haskell, staring away along the
platform.

"I don't know. I go away a little stunned. Solway doesn't seem to
exist at all. I wanted to help it--and it has ceased to exist."

"When you recover, then, you will find that Solway has strengthened
you--to live with what the kindest in Solway would call your dreams."

Henry stood thoughtful.

"I," he said, "have done nothing for Solway."

"Yes, you have."

"What have I done for Solway?"

"Made some of us at least fair enough to call your ideals, your
dreams, _not futilities_."

Then Henry looked on him and smiled and Haskell was at ease. They
shook hands, Haskell (for the guard blew his whistle then) opening the
carriage door with his disengaged left hand.

"You have done a great deal for some of us in Solway," Haskell
continued, "and the whole, as you once remarked in my hearing" (Henry
climbed in and, standing, closed the door), "is composed of the units,
and the units will. . . ."

The train pulled out--out--out of Solway.


THE END


    *    *    *    *    *


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Transcriber's Note:

Some original spelling and grammar usages have been retained,
while obvious typos and printer's errors have been corrected
without comment.




[End of _A Wilderness of Monkeys_ by Frederick Niven]
