Chapter IX: We Await Developments (1)

If it were necessary to epitomize our attitude towards Mr. Carville during that lunch, it might perhaps be discovered in the word "doubt." Without accusing him of intentional deception, he had certainly led us to believe that he would explain to us the many points of interest which his previous history had raised. We had felt quite sure that in the course of the morning we should learn of his meeting with his wife and the reasons which led them to make their home in the United States. We expected to have the mystery of the prodigal brother co-ordinated with the painter-cousin's story. We--but of what avail was it to grumble? He had set out to tell his tale in his own way and it was only right that we should permit him to do so.

In one thing I agreed with Bill and differed from Mac--the question of "Gladys."

"So her name's 'Gladys'?" said he, when he had brought Miss Fraenkel's knowledge up to date.

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Bill. "Oh, no!"

"He said so," persisted her husband.

"No," I said, "so far he has not mentioned Mrs. Carville."

He came round to our view in the end, when I reminded him of the _scaldino_. Personally, the idea was incredible. When I thought of Mrs. Carville bending over the brazier, of her dark, noble face with its large tragic eyes, and then of the smart convent-bred miss who was called Gladys--absurd!

Miss Fraenkel remained faithful to her mission throughout the meal, and enlisted our sympathy by recounting the struggles of Mrs. Wederslen to capture the league for her own social purposes. It was an old story, this of the ambition of Mrs. Wederslen. Mrs. Wederslen seemed to think that in a community of artists the art-critic's wife is queen. Mrs. Williams had rebelled against this, and there was tension between them. Mrs. Wederslen had even made the insane experiment of trying to patronize Bill. There had been a meeting, a few words on each side, and the rest was silence. Without any definite verbal information on the point, Mac and I knew that Bill's tongue would be stilled in death ere she would speak charitably of Mrs. Wederslen. And here were Miss Fraenkel's piquant features aglow with a flush of indignation and her hazel eyes aflame with ladylike resentment, because that imperious woman was endeavouring to assert her sovereignty over the league. In the great problems thus raised it seemed likely that the smaller matter of Mrs. Carville's allegiance might be swamped. I endeavoured to bring this discussion into alignment with my own imaginings, a common human weakness.

"But perhaps she's like me, hasn't got a vote," said Bill.

"Well," said Miss Fraenkel, "she may have some day. And anyhow, the great thing is to spread the light in dark places. We want every woman to know her power. Mrs. Wederslen----"

She began again. Mrs. Wederslen had done the one thing needful to rouse Miss Fraenkel's feelings towards her to the temperature of Bill's: she had expressed her opinion that civil servants should be debarred from political activity. In spite of my efforts, the conversation became sectional. Mac motioned me to join him on the porch for a smoke.

"What do you think?" he said, when he had lighted up.

"The time is past for imaginative forecast," I replied. "It is obvious that Mr. Carville, having been tremendously interested in his own life, is determined to tell us all about it. Before lunch I hardly knew what to think, but now I feel fairly certain that he will bring us safely to the conclusion."

"There never is a conclusion to stories in real life," said he.

"Well, you know what I mean. He'll account for the facts as we see them, anyhow. His wife, his brother, his living here, and so on."

"And Gladys," added Mac.

"Ah! I expect we've heard the last of Gladys. She was evidently an early flame, since gone out." I struck a match.

"I say, old man."

"What?"

"What a tale his brother could tell, eh?"

"Possibly; but perhaps his brother has not the faculty," I said.

"No. Here he comes!"

Mr. Carville appeared on the sidewalk, his Derby hat on his head, his corn-cob in his mouth. For a moment he turned, and, looking back, flung out his hand with a gesture expressive of petulance and dismissal towards an invisible person at his door. And then he came towards us sedately, caressing his pipe, eyes on the ground, and seated himself in the Fourth Chair in silence.

"I was wondering," he said at last, "if after all you'd just as soon I didn't tell you all this about myself and got right on to my married life. Eh?"

"Speaking for myself," I said, hastily, "no! Please tell your story as you have it in your mind. Don't edit it. _I'll_ do that."

He gave me one of his quick looks and smiled.

"Right!" he said, and shook himself straight in his chair. "I'll get busy. I've got to get the five o'clock train, and the wife--she said she'd have a bit of tea ready for me at four."

He sat at the far end of the verandah, the furled hammock tickling his ears, and he shifted the chair so that he faced north, looking towards his own house. As he opened his mouth to replace his pipe, Bill opened the door and led Miss Fraenkel out to be introduced.

It was a ceremonious bow with which Mr. Carville greeted her as he rose. He did not offer to shake hands, as middle-class people generally do, to their credit. He gave her one square look and then dropped his eyes, and I couldn't detect him even glancing at her again. He seemed to have made a brief examination and then dismissed her from his memory.

The problem of chairs was instantly solved by Bill. She opened the window and she and Miss Fraenkel sat inside. Mr. Carville studied the toe of his plain serviceable boot while these arrangements were being carried out. He sat motionless in the Fourth Chair, and I could not help feeling that the business of transferring Miss Fraenkel established Mr. Carville's inalienable right to his seat.

"Full speed ahead!" said Mac, jocularly.

"I ought to explain," said Mr. Carville, "that as the years had gone by, my mother and I had ceased to have very much sympathy with each other's way of thinking. We had lived together, as was natural, but we had gradually lost sight of the career my father had outlined for me. And when I had lost my job in Victoria Street, really that was the last link that snapped. I had no fancy for living in Oakleigh Park, especially after what had happened to Gladys. You can understand that.

"Another thing. I had become in a small way an author. Don't imagine that I'm setting up myself with you, sir. Not at all. I understand, I hope, now, the difference between writing a book and being an author. It was this way. To me, breaking into sea-life so sharp and suddenlike, there were many things I noted that most men would never heed. I don't heed them myself now. But then I did. And in port on Sundays, and sometimes at sea when I couldn't sleep on the middle-watch, I'd jot down little thumb-nail sketches, you might call them, of the things I saw. 'Cameos of the Sea,' I'd put on the top. The whole thing wasn't as long as some of the chapters in Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' and, to tell you the truth, I had no great opinion of them. I only mention them because of what happened. I had the sheets tied up in brown paper in my sailor-bag.

"Well, I told my mother I wanted to live in London awhile, and as I needed to be within reach of the Board of Trade Offices until I had passed my exam., she saw no good reason for objecting. The next day, as I was walking up the Strand, one of those streets in London that I've never seen anywhere else, I caught sight of an old gateway at the end of a passage. There was a date, 1570 or something as old, on the arch, and as I strolled in I remembered I'd called on an architect who lived there in the old days, when I was in Victoria Street. It was Clifford's Inn. I was looking round at the old houses and wondering if I could hire a room or so there, when a girl came down one of the staircases.

"Well, I didn't recognize her at first. I remember wondering why she jumped back when she caught sight of me. 'Hullo!' I said, 'what are you doing here?' 'I live here,' she said; and sure enough there was her name on the wall, bracketed with another one: _Miss Gladys Sanders and Miss Octavia Flagg_.

"'You!' I said. 'You live here?' She nodded and asked me if I would come up. We went up the dusty old stairs to the top floor, and she took a key from her purse and opened the door. I felt there was something pretty brazen about all this. This wasn't the sort of thing to appeal to Oakleigh Park, I was quite sure, and said so. 'Oh, I've done with Oakleigh Park,' she said, 'and they've done with me.' And then her friend, Miss Flagg, came in, a thin woman of about thirty-five, with a green dress and rather untidy hair. I said thin, but so was Gladys. It almost seemed to me, when I'd seen them a few times, that there was some fierce fire inside of those women, wearing them thin and showing through. Neither of them was beautiful; they didn't try to be. They just lived for--what do you think? I'll tell you in a minute.

"At first I was all abroad at the sudden meeting. A minute before Gladys came down that staircase, if you'd asked me whether I cared for her I'd have said no; it was all burned up long ago. But now I'd seen her again, thin and sallow and changed as she was, it had all come back with a rush. Do you know that kind of love? It's because of the way it rushes back on you, knocks you down and tramples on you, makes you feel mean and degraded and ashamed, that I pray God it may never happen on me again. I like to think a man may never have it but for one woman. Sometimes, away out East, when I've been drowsing in a hammock listening to the sweat dripping on the deck and watching the blue hills in the distance, it has come upon me. Sometimes in dreams I've seen her face clearer than I ever saw it in life.... You know them, perhaps?... Dreams so vivid that one's brain and body ache with the pain of it? Ah!"

He paused and none offered to speak. I sat facing him in some astonishment. There was to me something fundamentally shocking in a man making such a confession. If it had been dark so that the words floated to us invisibly; but in broad day! Perhaps more convincingly than anything else did this impress upon my mind Mr. Carville's deliberate intention to fashion for us a tale from the agony of his life, to give us, with such art as he possessed, a picture of an obscure and alien romance.

"Miss Flagg, it seems, was a journalist, and Gladys--well, she was a journalist too, I suppose. From what she told me I gathered she did translations for different agencies, and earned a little that way. When I told them what I'd come in for, they said there was a flat in Serjeant's Inn just around the corner, which was to be let furnished. I told them I was going in for an exam. and afterwards I was going to take my little papers to a publisher. Miss Flagg lit up like a bonfire at this, and says she, 'I'm a literary agent. Do let me read it; I may be able to place it.'

"I looked at her. To my mind she didn't seem the sort of woman who would understand the things I'd been writing about; old Croasan and the Chief with the glass eye, the firemen and all the rest of them. However, I said I'd let her have it if she liked. Gladys looked at me when I came out as an author. She'd never had any opinion of me, you see. She liked _clever_ people, people with flash and glitter, who could dance and talk with a spatter about everything--like my brother. You can believe I wanted to know why she'd left him, if she'd ever gone to him. I said, 'I thought you were going out when I saw you,' and she took the hint. We went down again and out into the Strand.

"'Is it any use?' I said, and the big Law Courts' clock boomed out over our heads. It sounded like NO in my ears.

"She shook her head. 'Quite impossible,' she said. 'Well, where's Frank?' I asked her.

"She didn't know. He'd dropped her just the same as he dropped anything else he had no use for, without a word. And I think it was shame more than because she didn't care for me that made her say it was impossible. I don't know--what is a woman's pride, anyhow? See how he'd treated her; worse than I'd treat my dog. And yet when he came back, flush with money and with flash friends, and he lifted his hand, she ran to him, _ran_! Explain it if you can. I can't.

"That was later. I got my flat and passed my exam all right, and my uncle in Fenchurch Street said I could have a job as soon as I liked. But I thought I'd wait a bit. I was seeing London from a fresh angle, you might say; seeing it as an outsider, as an alien. I had about a hundred pounds to spend, and in a modest quiet way I enjoyed myself. The razzle-dazzle of London doesn't appeal to a man much, when he's been on the bend in sea-ports. Humph!

"And Miss Flagg took my manuscript and went crazy about it. She said she sat up all night to read it. Knowing what I do of women now, I think she was a liar. Besides, anyone could read it in two or three hours. The point is she told the publisher that lie, and he believed it. Her enthusiasm was contagious. He said it was fine, and gave me ten pounds for it. Miss Flagg said it was a generous offer and raked off a sovereign for her commission. I often wonder how authors bear up under such generosity. But of course I know nothing about the business side of it. Only for a short time did I get bitten about the idea of being an author. I found I had nothing to say. Miss Flagg told me she knew a man who 'did fiction' at the rate of twenty thousand words a week. She might have lied, but then, how do I know? Anyway, I saw it wasn't in my line--'fiction.'

"You see, when I went to their flat and met their literary friends and heard them talking about their work, I felt out of it. I was an alien in their world. I had no interest in the details of book-writing. I'd just put down what happened to come into my mind. I wondered what they wrote about. Love I suppose. I'd sit and look about me and try to imagine what those people would have thought of the old _Corydon's_ engine-room. Humph! Do _you_ know what those thin, half-fed men and women thought the most important thing in the world? Not husbands and wives and children, not war, nor even courage; not books nor pictures; nothing of this. No; they were wearing their souls out clamouring for a _Vote_!"

We sat very still. You could have heard a pin drop.

"There was Gladys. She was only nineteen, and ought to have been helping her mother at home; but no, she was emancipated, as she called it. Her experience with my brother taught her that the _Vote_ was necessary. Miss Flagg told me that unless women got the Vote England would drop behind. They all said that. To me it was amazing. It showed me how far I'd travelled away from the old ideas. It angered me to see women acting like that, spoiling themselves, making themselves ridiculous and ugly, all for that!

"I'd been home a couple of months, not more, when I began to get restless. My mother asked me why I didn't get a job on shore. But I couldn't see myself going to Victoria Street every day, clean collar and umbrella, sitting at a desk dictating silly little letters to silly little people. Those who wanted it let them do it. I went to my uncle and asked for a job. His eyes twinkled when he said, 'Well, the _Corydon's_ chartered for the Mediterranean, and they want a Second.'

"'When shall I join?' I said.

"'Oh, I was only joking,' says he. 'We'll get you a better ship than that now.'

"'No,' I said, 'I'll go back to the _Corydon_. I know her and she knows me. When shall I join?'"

Again Mr. Carville paused, and appeared to be lost in thought, oblivious of our presence. An expression of gentle earnestness had settled upon his face, almost melancholy. I imagined for a moment that he was endeavouring to arrange his thoughts.

"I do hope," he remarked, without looking at us, "I do hope that anything I've said hasn't given offence." He turned to us with a slight smile. "I mix up so little with genteel people nowadays--you see?"

I nodded vaguely, and he relapsed into thought again.

"I was thinking," he observed presently, "as you are so quiet, I might have said something. I remember that was the way they signified dissent, so to speak. And--I wouldn't like to offend--anybody."

"Pray go on," I said. "We are not genteel in that sense of the word."

It was plain that, apart from any scruples concerning our gentility, he had some difficulty in picking up the thread of his story. It was a relief when he began to speak.

"I come now," he said, "to a time that I hardly know how to describe. The next few years, taken together, were my _Wanderjaehre_. You know Wilhelm Meister, of course? My apprenticeship was over, but I wasn't a man yet for all that. There's an intermediate stage, what we engineers call being 'an improver,' in a man's life. It seems strange that I should speak of myself so at twenty-seven, but there it is; I was late maturing. Again, I like to think that the Dutch are right when they use the same word for husband and man. Until he is married a Dutchman is not a 'Man.' That's how I looked at it!

"When I rejoined the _Corydon_, the Chief said the Second was going to stay on one more trip, but old Croasan was clearing out and I could go Third. I wouldn't mention these details, only they are important, because--well, you'll see.

"Old Croasan was going ashore when I joined. Didn't even shake hands with the Chief! I thought he was going home to the bonny Scotland he always shouted about when he was canned, but the Second says, 'Na, na. He'll never go back to Grangemouth,' and Chief says, 'He'll get a job all right, all right.' Well, I was busy enough with my own concerns, and, as usual, there was a-plenty to do on the _Corydon_; but one evening I was up at Cully's Hotel talking to Miss Bevan, when in walks a smart, tidy-looking man of, say, forty-five, and calls for a bottle of Bass. I wouldn't have given him more than a passing glance if he hadn't looked me in the eye. 'Eh, lad,' says he. 'Will ye have a drink?' 'Croasan?' I said. 'Ah, it's me,' says he. 'Ah'm away the morn in yon big turret.'

"I was that astonished I couldn't reply, and he drank up his beer and went out with a wave of the hand. Miss Bevan asked me if I knew him. 'Sure,' I said, 'but he was old and grey three days ago.' It was my first experience of a sea-faker. He'd been up to Cardiff, had a Turkish bath, hair-cut and shave, and the barber had dyed his hair and moustache. Then he'd gone round to the offices and eventually got a job. Of course, the first green sea that went over him would add twenty years to his age, but he'd be signed on then. The Chief laughed when I told him. 'And you'll see him in Genoa,' he says; 'yon turret steamer's goin' there too,' I did see him. In a way, he introduced me to my wife."

Mr. Carville paused and struck a match. Bill's head appeared at the window.

"Oh!" she said, "I thought you were never coming to it!"

He proceeded, carefully putting the burnt match on the window-sill and blowing great clouds.

"The run to Genoa from the Tyne," he said, "takes a fortnight. It was during that voyage that I began to see how I stood with regard to Gladys. I suppose you read Ibsen? I used to, on the _Corydon_, and one of the most remarkable of his plays, in my opinion, is _Love's Comedy_. You remember the moral of that play was that a man should never marry a girl he is madly in love with. It sounds wicked if you put it that way, but old Ibsen was right. He knew, as I knew, that a young man may be in love with a girl who is not suited to him. He knew that there isn't much difference between that sort of love and hate. He knew that you can have a contempt for a girl and her ideals and yet love her. That sort of love is like those big thin bowls they showed me in Japan--beautiful, expensive and awful frail--no use at all for domestic purposes. I thought this out on the voyage to Genoa, and put Gladys, so to speak, on a shelf, where she is now. And as I thought it out, I saw how I stood. I saw I was not only an alien wherever I went, but I was alone. I began to be afraid. I used to look ahead and tried to see myself in twenty years' time, alone. It is not good for a man to be alone. That's how I felt when we reached Genoa.

"Those who know best often say that sailormen know less about foreign countries than many people who have never travelled. I daresay that is true of many of us. It is very likely true of any uneducated people who go abroad. Most men who go to sea have very little education. They have no knowledge of their own country, let alone others. To a certain extent I was different. I had always wanted to see Italy. Years before, when I was in Victoria Street, I had read about her history and art. I had even learned a little of the language. And so, when we came into Genoa, and I saw that beautiful city, with her white palaces and green domes and fort-crowned hills, when I remembered what she'd been, and saw what she was, I could hardly wait till nightfall to go ashore and see it all at once!

"Since then I've been to nearly every port in the Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Smyrna and from Marseilles to Tunis, but I never experienced anything like that first night ashore in Genoa. The next day the Chief asked me where I'd been, and I told him. 'Why,' he says, 'didn't you go into the "Isle o' Man" or the "American"?' No, I hadn't been in any of those places. He said they'd have to show me round.

"That night I went with them, leaving the new Fourth in charge, and I learned why sailormen know so little of foreign places. All along the Front, as they call it, were scores of dirty little bars with English names. I wouldn't mention them at all, only it is necessary in a way, as you'll see. We went into several and had a drink, and the Chief was known in them all. Finally the Chief says, 'Let's get on to the "Isle o' Man,"' and we went out and walked along the Via Milano a little further. The 'Isle o' Man' was rather bigger than most of these places, and had a very comfortable room with plush settees and marble tables shut off from the main cafe. It was kept by a big, heavy, red-haired woman, about fifty years old, who came in and sat down by the Chief and talked about old times. I found she was married to a steward in the Hamburg-American Line, who ran this show on the side. It was a mixed company in there, skippers of all nations sitting round and drinking; and a tall young chap, with a velvet coat and long hair, was playing a piano and singing songs. After every song he would come round with a tin saucer and collect pennies from us. I remember thinking how strange he looked. He had a noble face, I should call it; he looked like a gentleman and spoke like one, and there he was, collecting pennies! I was watching him coming round to our table when a girl came in, a tall, dark young girl, with a tray of glasses. 'Hello!' says the Chief, 'that's not Rosa, is it?' The old woman nods and says, 'That's Rosa all right, Chief.' And he called out to the girl to come over to us.

"She came at once. 'Here's a friend o' yours, Rosa,' says the old woman, and the girl looks at the Chief and smiles a little. 'Why, she was only so high last time I was here,' says the Chief. 'She has shot up.' 'Yes,' says the old woman, who was called Rebecca, 'she'll be a fine woman one o' these days.'

"They told me about her as we went back to the ship. No one knew who her parents were. She had always been at the 'Isle o' Man,' and sailormen had petted her because she was a nice little thing and would rap out a bit of slang without knowing in the least what it meant. But now, as the Chief said, it was a different matter. She was 'too big to kiss now.' One point in her history I was very interested in, and that was the fact that neither the Chief nor anyone else I ever heard speak of her ever suggested that she wasn't straight. I liked that. There she was, living among all the draggled, dirty seaport crowd, and yet the seafaring men that took their drinks from her believed she was straight.

"I was coming down from the theatre one night about a week later, and I thought I'd look in at the 'Isle o' Man' for a drink before going aboard. There was a good few in there, Greek and Norwegian skippers; and a Belgian engineer was sitting across from me with old Croasan. The piano was going with _Little Dolly Daydream_, _Pride of Idaho_, when in comes Rosa with her tray. To get past she had to squeeze between old Croasan's table and the piano, and I saw him take hold of her waist. She was hampered by the tray, and he was pulling her down on his knee.

"I don't think it was all gallantry that made me do what I did. I'd never been a whale on that sort of thing. I'm not built on those lines. I think it was a feeling that has always possessed me very strongly when I see an old man with a young woman--disgust. To me it is a horrible sight, the lust of an old man. You can argue as long as you like, but that is one of my fixed eternal prejudices. I feel sick when I see an old man giving way to it. I feel that somehow or other he is debasing humanity. That was the real reason why I jumped up and went over to Croasan.

"He looked up at me as I stood over the table. I could see the crease in his cheeks, the sag under his eyes, and the grey roots of his dyed moustache. He looked up at me as I raised my hand. 'Let her go,' I said, shouting at him above the jangle of the piano, 'let her go, Mr. Croasan.' He was holding her down on his knee.

"'Mind your own affairs!' he says to me, showing his teeth, great dirty yellow fangs; 'Is she yours?' he says. The Belgian engineer sitting near him laughed at this and looked up sneering at me. 'Let her go,' I said again. 'Rosa's a friend of mine,' says he, still holding her. Just then I saw Rebecca's head over the piano, and as I looked down again I saw a peculiar expression on Rosa's face. Her eyes were on me and she seemed to be thinking 'What are you waiting for?' It all happened, you know, in two or three seconds. I waited no more. I put the flat of my hand across Croasan's mouth, hard. He jerked back to avoid it, and the tray that Rosa was trying to set down on the table, so that she could get at him with her nails, went all over him. The old woman came round the piano and saw him. Croasan started up and I hit him again, and he fell over the Belgian.

"At first I thought I was in for a big row. But Croasan had more experience than I had. He'd been in rows before. When he started up it was not to hit me, but to get out. He crawled under the table between the Belgian's legs and ran to the door. The others were crowding all round me, arguing and shouting. The young chap at the piano was standing up and looking over the top, and Rebecca was trying to calm them. 'Easy, gentlemen!' she kept on calling. Rosa had disappeared. Then the Belgian jumped up and shouted, 'Ee interfere wis my frien'!' pointing at me, and marching out.

"When we got quiet again I began to explain to Rebecca what had happened. Do you know, I thought that was the real danger. I thought she would be the one to get on to me for interfering. Rebecca was a woman who looked more evil than she really was. She sat down at my table, and while I told her and the piano jangled away again, she kept patting my arm and saying, 'Yes, yes, I know.' What did she know? Why, the simple fact that Rosa was no longer a little girl to be petted, but a grown-up girl to be insulted. I learned a similar thing had happened once or twice in the last few months. You see, the girl was neither in one class nor the other. A young Genoese will not look at a girl who lives in those houses along the Front. He thinks they are all rotten bad. As for the foreigners she met in the 'Isle o' Man,' I needn't tell you what an average Englishman thinks of foreign women.

"I told the Chief about it next day, and he looked up sharp from his plate when I mentioned Croasan. He said hard things of Croasan. 'Think of that?' says he. 'An old chap wi' married daughters!' 'Huh!' says the Second. 'They're aye the wurrs't. But I'm glad ye punched him, mister,' he says. 'Many a time I'd ha' done the same, only we were on articles. Rosa, too!'

"'Ay,' says the Chief, 'but Rosa'll have to put up with men clawin' her now.'

"It was my intention, to avoid trouble and talk, to keep away from the 'Isle o' Man' for the future, but it turned out otherwise. I'd got leave from the Chief on Thursday afternoon to go up to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo to see the Holy Grail. They keep it in the Treasury there and show it on Thursdays for a franc. Most Englishmen laugh at these tales of the Church, and even Catholics I have met tell me they don't believe in miracles. I don't know why; I'm interested in them. Sometimes I get a glimpse of the state of mind in which they are reasonable and necessary things. The more we learn the less we know. They say that saints, because they led good lives and kept away from evil, were able to perform miracles. Why should a statement like that annoy anybody? Good is a power and evil is a power. Why deny it? I read a book the other day in which the author, a German with a name like a lady's sneeze, denies the existence of good and evil. Humph! It's a long time since I read Hegel, but I don't think he was ever as mad as that!

"I was coming through the church after quitting the sacristan, when I caught sight of a girl kneeling on the steps of the Chapel of St. John. I suppose you know that the Precursor is buried in this church? They show you a silver box with a chain round it, the chain that bound him in prison. There were other women in the church, but this girl was not in the chapel, only kneeling on the step outside. Women, you see, are not allowed to enter that chapel; on account of Salome, I suppose. I saw this girl kneeling on the step and crossed over to see what she was doing. It was Rosa, saying her prayers. There is a difference between a Catholic and a Protestant praying. You may have noticed it. A Protestant shuts his eyes and thinks hard about the money he's making or the automobile he's going to buy. A Catholic plays about with his beads and chatters all the time while he's thinking of religion. Protestants are scandalized when they see how Catholics make a sort of rough-house playground of their churches--children playing on the floor during service even. They can't understand how Catholics manage to reverence a thing and yet not hate it. Englishmen always draw wrong conclusions about an Italian's relations with God. You see, most Englishmen feel about God as they used to feel about Queen Victoria. They respected her and felt she was necessary, but all the same they felt exasperated with her for being so particular at times! Humph!

"Well, Rosa looked up and recognized me, smiled and went on praying as fast as she could. I bowed. Of course I had my hat in my hand, so I had to bow. I saw her go red, and I thought I'd done something she disapproved of. I stood there hardly knowing what to do, and she bent her head to finish her prayer. She told me afterwards that it was the first time anyone had ever bowed to her. She turned red because she thought I was mocking her, and then, I suppose, with pleasure. That was the beginning of our courtship.

"Of course, in one sense, it was an unusual courtship. It happened to come about by a number of accidents. If I hadn't hit old Croasan she would never have looked at me, for I'm not a very conspicuous figure at any time. If I hadn't met her in the church just as she was praying for my soul, because I'd acted kindly towards her, I might never have seen her again. And so on, if--if--if. It was in that sense unusual. But in another sense I don't suppose there was ever a more commonplace affair than this of Rosa and me. If we'd lived in Brixton we couldn't have been more respectable!

"For some mysterious reason or other Rebecca took a fancy to me. Mind, I was only third engineer of the oldest tramp in Genoa. If I'd been Chief, then I could have understood her making a fuss of me. But I was Third. I have an idea Rebecca had seen better days. Now and again she dropped hints that pointed that way. She had a manner too, when she was sober, and had been cleaned up. The men who drank in her bar little knew how she was transformed when she dressed herself to go up town. They little knew, either, how very like the house upstairs was to houses in Brixton or Hartlepool or the Paisley Road. Middle-class people are the same all the world over. I expect they have fringes on their curtains even in Honolulu! Rebecca had, anyhow.

"The news made a bit of stir among the ships for a while as might be expected, and gradually spread right through the Merchant Service. 'Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged to the Third of the _Corydon_!' By George, that _was_ a morsel of gossip. Miss Bevan had heard about it in Barry; Polly Loo in Singapore heard it, the girls in the Little Wooden Hut at Las Palmas heard it. It went round the world, that Rosa of Rebecca's was engaged.

"For three years we traded as regularly as a mail boat to Genoa with coal, then across to Cartagena in Spain for iron ore and back to the Tyne. I was Second, of course, and I passed for Chief when my time was all in, just taking a few days off to go to Shields for the examination. I might have got another ship, but I was pretty comfortable by now, I knew my Chief and my engines, and I naturally wanted to keep on the Genoa trade as long as I could. In those days they took weeks to discharge, and so I used to have quite a spell with Rosa. She was never bothered with 'men clawin' her,' as the Chief expressed it. I used to take her up to the Giardino D'Italia to listen to the band and to see the movies, or we'd take the Funicular up to Castellaccio and have a bit of dinner at a little trattoria near the Righi, where you can look out across the sea, I learned to speak the language pretty well, and it was my intention at first to settle in Italy. But Rosa would not hear of it. She wanted to get away from the associations of her childhood.

"Perhaps it was because of this desire of hers that we so often went up and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea. And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not think that the romantic surroundings had inflamed my imagination, and that I was apprehensive of a lurid story. Not at all. I had turned the matter over, in my prosaic way, for several voyages, and I put the question to Rosa in a direct and simple form. I asked her who she was. It is all very well, in novels, for shy damsels to run into the arms of some casual Prince Charming, or for heroic clean-cut young college-men with over-developed jaw-bones to marry strange girls for, I suppose, heroic reasons. All very well in novels. But you try that sort of thing in real life, and see where you land. I don't mean externals--parents, social sets or legal tarradiddles. Such things are very slight obstacles. I mean the tremendous obstacles inside you: the mass of your inherited shrinkings and shynesses and delicacy; a whole quickset hedge of brambles and nettles and thistles, behind which your naked soul is hiding in a sort of terror; and you can't do it! I was in that position, because, so far, Rosa had made no reference to her birth except to say that, although Rebecca wasn't her mother, she was as good as one.

"And Rebecca, when I had mentioned the matter to her one day, had said, with her chin resting on her knuckles, 'Ask Rosa.' I said.

"'Ask her what?'

"'Ask her if she wants you to know all about it.'

"'Why,' I said, 'is there so much to know?'

"'Little enough,' said she, 'but Rosa made Oscar and me promise to say nothing unless she gave us the word.'

"'So Oscar knows it as well,' I said. Oscar was the steward Rebecca had married a few years before, a Dutchman, who was nearly always at sea when I was in Genoa, so I saw very little of him.

"'Of course, Oscar knows,' said Rebecca. 'He knows a good deal of it first hand.'

"'All right, I'll speak to Rosa,' I said.

"And I did, as I was telling you. I asked her who she was.

"'You have a good right to know,' she said, looking up to where a sentry's head and bayonet were sliding to and fro above the wall. 'I have meant to tell you, but I know very little. So little!'

"I said I left the matter in her hands entirely.

"The sentry stopped above us, presented arms, grounded, looked round, and then took a peep at us over the corner. A pair of lovers! His yellow, livid face cracked a smile as I caught his eye. For another second or so we grinned at each other, and then he put on his professional mask again, as though he had drawn down a vizor, shouldered his rifle and thumped along his little gangway. Rosa waited until he had passed the further turret and then turned to me.

"'It isn't easy to say it, though, after all,' she said. 'I was a little baby at Aunt Rebecca's, then a little girl and now a big girl. Before that, there was my mother who was dead. My father, dead too, a soldier like him'--she nodded towards the head and bayonet sliding backwards and forwards--'in Abyssinia, you know.'

"'Ah!' I said. 'Yes. But why don't you know your----' Rosa interrupted me.

"'That is just it,' she said. 'Now you come to it. I can't tell you all about it. I don't know the words. There are people in Genova who know. Uncle Oscar knows. He can tell you ... if you ask him.'

"Now it was perfectly obvious to me that my girl was not trying to hide some shameful secret from me, but rather that, her speech in our tongue running for the most part on the material details of life, she simply hadn't the words, as she put it, to relate a story in a higher key. I own I was interested, because it was a point which had struck me very much in the study of languages. You must have noticed how you can go along smoothly enough, learning vocabularies, verbs, adjectives, idioms, and so on, reading newspapers and books, filling in what you don't know with a guess or a skip, asking for things at the table, giving orders to a tailor or a barber; and when anybody asks you if you know that language, you say yes, and I suppose you are justified in a way. But just try to express the fundamental and secret things of your life, something that has happened, not in a book, but in your own soul, and see how ragged and beggarly your vocabulary is! The fact is, you don't often speak of these things in any language, let alone a foreign one. Rosa was never talkative. She could be silent without being sullen. Ours, you may say, was for the most part a silent courtship.

"Well, I did what she suggested. By good chance Oscar Hank's ship, the _Prinz Karl_, was due in from New York at the time, and when I saw her two big yellow funnels and top-heavy passenger decks blocking the view of the Principe, I went over. Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man who had seen the best of his life before he married Rebecca. He was a tall, spare-ribbed man with high shoulders and thin hair brushed across an ivory patch of bald scalp. His face was strong enough, but worn. He had prominent eyes and sharp cheek-bones accentuated by the hollows in his cheeks, and a sharp, thin nose jutted out over one of those heavy grey moustaches that get into the soup and make the owner look like a hungry walrus. He might have been rich, as they said he was, and he might have been clever in days gone by; but as I knew him he was a faded, soiled ghost of a man, a man preoccupied with the dirty pickings of life, just as his wife, strong character as I knew her to be, was only a drunken parody of her real self, a shrewd, calculating, good-hearted, bad-principled old failure.

"Mr. Hank sat in his cabin, talking to a young fellow in American clothes and French boots, who was, I could see, one of those shady characters who tout for ship-chandlers, whose business makes them toadies, sycophants and pandars. There is something detestable about the ship-chandlering trade, somehow. You see them lick-spittling the old man, taking him ashore if he is a stranger, bringing boxes of candy for his wife if he has her on board, sending a boat every day, for his convenience, and so on, and then, when the ship's stores are rushed on board at the last moment, and you put to sea, the stuff turns out to be bad or short. The flour is damp and won't rise, the potatoes are a scratch lot, the meat poor and the fruit rotten. And the Old Man says nothing, the steward says nothing, because they've been squared, and after all it's only the crew who really suffer, because the captain has his own private stock, which Mister steward shares, you may be sure. It is a dirty business and the sight of those sleek, cunning, pimple-faced young men, in their fancy vests and dirty cuffs, always sickens me, because I know the knavery in their hearts.

"'Come in, come in,' said Mr. Hank, as I turned away from his door.

"'No,' I said. 'I'll wait till you are through, Mr. Hank.'

"'Nonsense, come in,' said he. 'This is only Mr. Sachs, representing Babbolini's. He won't eat you,' he said.

"I came back at this, and stood at the door to let a crowd of bedroom stewards with sheets go by. 'It would take a better man than him to eat me, Mr. Hank.'

"Mr. Sachs smiled politely and made room for me on the settee, evidently having no cannibal intentions at the time, or at any rate disguising them. Offered me a cigarette, which I never smoke. Said it was a fine day.

"'It was a private matter I wanted to speak about,' I said to Hank, who looked at me with an expression of eternal anxiety in his prominent eyes.

"'I know,' he said. 'I know. I was ashore this morning.'

"'We won't discuss it here, Mr. Hank,' I said, hastily. 'If you don't mind, I'll see you ashore, since you're busy.'

"Mr. Hank, _Signore_ Hank, was a man I would never be very intimate with, however well I knew him. I'm not saying he was so bad, or that I was so virtuous myself, at all. It was simply, I suppose, a matter of temperament. To me it always seemed as though he had so many mysterious things in his mind that he was borne down by them; that the outward and visible world, in which I saw him and spoke to him, was only a thin mask behind which his real existence was concealed. I may have been wrong. It doesn't matter, for _Signore_ Hank is dead now, his long life of ingenious peculation is over, and the good and the ill of it, we'll hope, have balanced, anyway. But I couldn't possibly discuss Rosa with _him_, let alone have that smooth, dissipated little bounder of a Sachs sit by and hear it all. I had to call a halt. I was making up my mind to leave the mud alone and not stir it up at all, when Mr. Hank, sitting asprawl in his swivel chair at his roll-top desk, his big chin and nose and moustache buried in his hand, and staring at me with his hard-boiled eyes, remarked abruptly:

"'Do you know the Hotel Robinson?'

"'Certainly,' I said. 'What about it?'

"'What you want to do is to go to the Hotel Robinson and ask for Doctor West. He's the man. He'll tell you all about it. You know Doctor West? Tall, big black beard, pale face. Flag's letter P. You know him?'

"'I've seen him some time or other, I dare say,' I said. 'Hotel Robinson, you say. All right and thank you.'

"'Just a minute,' sang out little Sachs as I made to go. 'I'll go with you. I know Doctor West. I'll introduce you.' And he went on discussing a paper he had, with Mr. Hank.

"I felt a little indignant and walked off, walked in the wrong direction, of course, and lost myself in interminable alleyways of passenger-cabins, hustled by stewards and stewardesses who were polishing brass-work, rolling up carpets, washing floors and so on. All about was that curious odour that seems inseparable from the corridors of steamers, hospitals, workhouses and the like--an odour which is a compound of cleanliness, antiseptic and cold enamelled iron. Such surroundings depressed me. I felt, more acutely than ever before, the distance between Rosa's environment and what I would have had it. I felt dissatisfied with _Signore_ Hank, and with myself too, if the truth be told. I had not taken hold of the situation. I had allowed him to impose on me. I suppose you have had the experience, when someone for whom you have no esteem, imposes his pinchbeck personality upon you. Save for the story which this Doctor West of the Hotel Robinson might spin, I would have gone back to the _Corydon_ and forgotten it. I wandered about a good bit, when a bell-hop showed me an unexpected way out, and there was Mister Sachs at the gangway, looking about for me.

"'Why, where 'ave you been?' he asked. 'I thought you'd gone.'

"'Well, you needn't bother to wait if you're in a hurry,' I answered, testily, going down the shrouded gangway.

"Oh, that's not what I meant,' he said, coming after me smartly, buttoning up his coat and taking out his gloves. 'Fact is, Mister,' he went on, 'I'd take it as a favour--this is the quickest way up to Hotel Robinson--if you'd give me an introduction to your captain.'

"I looked at him astounded, all at sea.

"'Representing Babbolini's,' he added, feeling in his pocket for a card. 'Course, any business done's between ourselves. We have a big connection and can always give satisfaction.'

"So you see how the mere contact of these people contaminates. He was trying to make me his tout to the _Corydon_, me, the once future Prime Minister of England, the child of many prayers! You may say, how were the mighty fallen! Indeed, I was ashamed. I said nothing.

"'Of course,' said little Sachs, his pimpled, dough-coloured face close to mine. 'Of course, if you don't care to speak to the Captain, the Chief Steward....'

"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana, and I halted there and said to him:

"'Look here, don't you worry to come any farther with me. You've got business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it. Good morning.'

"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say people take a man at his own valuation. People don't. They average their own experience, and the answer is never very high.