Chapter III: Part I: I (2)

To begin with myself, only that I may get myself the sooner out of the way. My earlier years I have regarded from different points of view at different periods of my life. It is only comparatively lately that I have attained the true point of view and come to see that all the early portion should be regarded as a joke. For what legend can ask to be taken seriously whose sole remaining evidence is a small white towel, of the sort technically known, I believe, as "huckaback," lying folded now in a drawer of the desk at which I am writing. Two simple motions of the extensor and flexor muscles of one arm, and the proof of former greatness might lie beneath my eyes. But I will not make them. I know too well what would happen next. My fingers would not rest until the smooth bleached folds were shaken loose, nor my eyes until, written in indelible ink that successive launderings have only made blacker, the following legend appeared before them:

"J. B. PRENTICE.
Between-Maid--No. 8."

You see, when a man has fallen, suddenly, from a great height, he is not expected to record his impressions as the third, the second, the first floor windows flashed successively past his startled eyes. He wakes up, if he wakes at all, in a nice, cosy atmosphere of iodoform, neatly and securely packed in antiseptic dressing, with a fluffy, frilly angel at his side, who has been waiting for those tired, tired eyes to open, and who puts her finger to her lips, the moment they do, for fear her voice shan't reach the muffled ears, and says--you know what she says--

"Lie still! You're not to talk nor to agitate yourself."

So I don't propose to agitate myself, and though I've only just begun to talk, it shall be of something better worth while. Farewell, then, for the last time, great showy mansion among the Chislehurst hills, with your orchard and shrubberies, flower gardens and pergolas, your pineries and fineries, your two great cedars, inlaid in the pale enamel of the sky, and shaven lawns, across which and toward the pink-striped marquee a butler hurries with an armful of white napery and flashing silver. And to you, dear little fellow-worker--Polly or Molly or Betsy, as the case may be--who once wiped your honest, grimy phiz on No. 8, a quite especial grip of the hand, wherever you be to-day. Your reproach long since kissed away, I hope; suckling some good fellow's children; cooking some good fellow's meals. Life is so hard on the between-maid.

* * * * *

When I awoke it was in a Pimlico bed-sitting-room, writing literally for dear life, and for life that is growing dearer each year. I have a fatal facility for descriptive writing, and my speciality is the psychology of crowds. As old Winstanley of the _Panoply_ would say when assigning me to anything I was to write up from the non-technical point of view, Aeroplane Meet, Palace Cup-tie, Royal Progress or what not: "Off with you, my boy! Column and a half, and a little more 'tripe' than last time. Turn 'em all loose, 'the hoarse cheer,' 'the lump in the throat,' and the 'mist over the eyes.' Don't be afraid! People have time for a little sentiment on Sundays."

I think they have. And I think I'm a witness to the price they are prepared to pay for it. Once a year, too, I write a novel whose circulation, for some occult reason, always stops short at eighteen hundred. Often when I'm reporting a football match, or anything like that, I try to count eighteen hundred, roughly, and imagine how my people would look all bunched together. A good many readers, but--what a gate!

Of all the pranks America has played upon us, I count not the least its having sent us an Ingram as a recruit to the cause of reform. The name is familiar over there, but it is quoted, I fancy, rather as a peg upon which would-be subverters of established anarchy hang their arguments than as authority for democratic ideals. Colonel Ingram, of Omaha, president of the Mid-West Chilling and Transportation Syndicate, is of the family; so is the Hon. Randolph Ingram, the great "Corporation Judge" of the Supreme Court. Jared Ingram, of Milburn, author of that contribution to Christian Unity, "A Rod for the Back of Dumb Devills," was one ancestor, and Elmer Ingram, the soldier-lawyer who helped to bait Arnold to his treason and damnation, was another. These names are not the fruit of any research on my part: I cull them from a little book which I saw at Ingram's rooms quite early in our acquaintance, and which, with a smile at my curiosity, he was good enough to lend me. It was one of those boastful little pamphlets "for private circulation," which are multiplying across the Atlantic, as a caste which has secured an undue share of material welfare becomes conscious of its origins and uneasy amid the obliterations of the democratic spirit. Of those we love, however, even the generations are dear to us, and I insist on recalling, with vicarious pride, that "Hump. Ingraham and Damaris his wyffe," who landed at South Bay from the brig _Steadfast_ in Worcester year, and rode off, saddle and pillion, through forest paths to the clearing where their home was to be raised, were of good and gentle English stock, from Ministerley in Derbyshire. Sweet little Damaris (one almost loves her for her name) wilted and died within the year, but the task of increasing and multiplying, and getting hold of the land, was taken up by a sterner and, let us hope, stronger, Deborah, eight months later, and thence the seed has spread, through a riot of Bestgifts, Resolveds, Susannahs and Hepzibahs, broad of breast and hip, strong of limb, stout and undismayed of heart. Westward--always westward. Across Ohio and Indiana, striking its roots north and south in farm and factory, store and workshop; halting here for twenty, there for thirty, years, but always, as a new generation grows to manhood, up and away again. Over the plains in crawling wagons, too impatient to await the harnessing of the iron horse--the riveting of the strangling fetters of steel: through the lawless and auriferous canyons of Colorado and Nevada: blown along on the mad wind of the 'forties and 'fifties, until, amid the grapes and roses of the Pacific slope and upon the pearly Californian beach, a wind, warm and wasted and very old from across the great still ocean, whispered them, "Thus far!"

Paul was the last Ingram that will ever be born in the old homestead. His father he never saw; his sister died as a girl, and his mother, struck down by some obscure woman's disease, moved, within his memory, only from her bed to her chair, and from her chair to her bed again. He says he was a lazy, loafing, dreamy boy, with very little interest in anything beyond his meals; but the beautiful words in which he has enshrined that early home for us are proof how busily his brain must have been employed in those seemingly idle hours, and how keenly the spiritual significance of all that he saw came home to him from the first. Probably in the mere work of the house there was not enough to occupy strong, bony hands, such as his. Successive mortgages had nibbled the property away piecemeal, sparing only the house and yard; and even for that the last mortgage was running a race with death. He went to free school, but seems to have had few companions of his age. The village was depopulated; the house-doors opened only on old faces. He used sometimes to sit alone through a whole summer afternoon, he has told me, swinging on the garden gate and whittling wood. From the fence an old beaten track led away, through a marsh where a few ducks quacked and waddled still, up the shoulder of a little hill, and away around one of those woods of second growth that have sprung up all over the old pilgrim clearings--right into the heart of the setting sun. Often, he assures me, on looking up quickly from his whittling, he has seen an arm and hand beckoning him westward, from the edge of the trees. Set aside the stubborn mysticism that could conceive such a vision, and can still maintain its actuality--is not the picture a sufficiently haunting one? Within, the mother, waiting for death; outside, the lad, straining to be gone. And the old wattled kitchen chimney, smoking thinly, and the red glory through the sapling wood, and the drowsy quack of the ducks!

After Mrs. Ingram's death the mortgage foreclosed upon the farm and its contents with the precision and completeness of a highly organized machine. It is proof how forced a growth the modern cult of the family in America is, that it never seems to have occurred to son or mother to appeal to any of the prosperous breed whom the old house had sent forth. The land had long been earmarked for the great weighing-scale factory that has since galvanized Milburn into strenuous life, and made it a sort of industrial model, which commissions and deputations from Europe are taken to see, presumably, says Ingram, as a warning to what devilish lengths efficiency can be carried. The old homestead was torn down to make a site for the boiler-house. Nothing is left of it now except one rafter, in the lavishly endowed Museum, with what is presumably an Indian arrow-head still embedded in the wood.

I am bound to add that my indignation upon the subject never roused Paul to a corresponding heat. To his mind, already set upon first causes, no doubt it seemed very natural, a mere incident in the exploitation that dubs itself progress. He ate his last meal in the despoiled kitchen, warmed his coffee over a few sticks on the hearth that had burned away ten forests, and set off, by the path up the hill and round the corner of the wood, to wherever the arm might be beckoning him.

The lad was only fourteen when he left home, but tall and strong for his years. He tramped to Philadelphia, "jumped" the freight by night as it pulled out of the clattering, flaring yard, was shunted into a siding at Scranton, forgotten, and found there three days later starving and all but mad. From Scranton he beat his way to St. Louis; washed dishes and set up pins in a skittle alley; tired soon of the smoke and blood-warm water of the old French city; fed cattle in the stockyards of Kansas, wrestled a drunken brakeman for his life on the roof of the rocking, bumping cars halfway down the Missouri canyon, and wrestled him so well that the man begged a job for him at the journey's end. He was jacking wagons in the Union Pacific workshops at Rawlins when the White River expedition came through, and joined the force as teamster at a dollar a day. He smelt powder for the first time, lay trapped for ten days in the stinking _corral_ at Snake River, when the water failed and the relief went wide, and "Bummer Jim" and "Flies Above," having thoughtfully strewn the carcasses of three hundred slaughtered horses to windward, serenaded the poisoned pale-faces nightly with copious obscenity, the burden of which was "come and be killed." After the relief and disbandment of the force, he stayed on in the Rockies and grew to manhood amid the silent aromatic barrenness of its _mesas_ and _arroyos_. Settlers were dribbling into the old Indian reservation. He was in turn horse-jingler, range-rider, prospector, stage-driver; built fences, freighted logs, dug ditches; spotted the banks of Bear Creek and Milk Creek, with his campfires and tomato tins, and was happy, until something, indefinable as the scent that steals down wind to the hunted stag, told him that the civilization from which he had fled was hard upon his heels again. He left Colorado the year before the railroad came through, and turned his face east again.

* * * * *

I know I am telling the story of Ingram's early life very baldly and badly. You see, there is so little romance in it; just the instinctive repulsion that one so often notices in the history of the world's reformers toward the thing they are to do battle with in the end. As Paul used to tell it himself, leaning forward over the fire in my stuffy little sitting-room, his strong, lean hands clasped round the bowl of his pipe and the smoke drifting lazily about his moustache and beard, it was only from an occasional gleam of the deep-set eye or quiver of the thin nostril, as he talked, that one could gather how deeply every lesson of force and fraud had sunk into his soul, to bear its fruit later in unalterable resolve. I never saw him really moved from his stoicism but once. We had been walking home together from dinner through the West End streets and had been unwilling witnesses of a sordid detail of their policing. A woman, crying and screaming, was being led away, not roughly, I think, but very determinedly, by two men in blue. Her hair had come loose, and one great curl hung to her waist. Her fur stole had tumbled in the roadway, and some careless Samaritan had thrown it over her shoulders, besmearing the velvet coat with mud. We were very silent during the rest of the walk, and when we got to my rooms Ingram unbosomed himself.

It was when he was working his way back east in the shiftless and circuitous fashion that had become habitual to him. He got off the train at a small city, the seat of a state university. He wouldn't tell me the name, but I imagine it was somewhere in the Southwest. It was eight o'clock on a fall morning, the hour at which the stores are opening and the saloons being swept out. As he left the depot, his grip in his hand, on a hunt for breakfast and work, he became aware of some unusual excitement. Men were leaving their houses, collarless and in shirt-sleeves--calling to one another and running down the street. At the end, where it joined the main business avenue, a crowd had gathered--old men, young men, even children, and a few women. "And what do you think they were watching? Well, sir, there in God's blessed morning light, three women in silk dresses, with satin shoes, and bare heads and shoulders, were sweeping the filthy street with brooms and shovels and pitching the mud into a zinc handcart. Think of it, Prentice! Every one of them somebody's daughter--some mother's little girl. They were all good-lookers; but one, who might be my own child to-night, had a face like an angel--fallen if you like--with a slender neck such as the artist men we've been talking to to-night rave about, that's got those cute little blue shadows where it joins the shoulders. She was the one that had the spade. A man in the crowd told me what it all meant. They were sporting girls from a joint that had been pulled three times in the last month. The magistrates had got tired, and, instead of fining them, had worked in a state law two hundred years old that treats such women as tramps and vagrants and sets 'em to scavenging. 'And I guess,' my man adds, 'that's where they b'long all right.' He was a patriarchal old billy-goat, Prentice, with a nice long Pharisee beard, and, I'll bet, a sin for every hair. While he was pitching me his simple lay, my little girl looks up, and, either seeing I was a stranger or because mine was the only face there wasn't contempt in--or worse--gave a sort of heart-breaking smile; and just as I was trying not to see it, a lad behind me, with his hat over his eyes and a cigar sticking out of his cheek, calls out:

"'Get on to Mamie, fellows, with the mud-scoop!'

"Well, Prentice," (Paul breathes hard) "I hit him, clean and sweet, on the cheekbone, just under his damned leering swine's eye. It was very irregular: I suppose I should have given him a chance, but, by God! I couldn't wait. I've had to fight all my life, in warm blood and cold blood, but I've never hit a man as hard as that before or since. He went down like a skittle, and I thought I'd killed him; but the boy was full of gall and devil, and knew a lot besides. He fought me five minutes good before they carried him into a drug store. And how those canting woman-drivers came round! They wanted me to drink, wanted to carry my grip--asked me to name the job. But I went and sat in their depot, without breakfast and with a face like a boil, for four hours until the next train pulled out. I shook their mud off my feet pretty smart. I'd have thrown away the shoes if I'd had another pair. But I couldn't shake off what I'd seen.

"No, no, Prentice," he went on, stubbornly, as I, with my cockney worldly wisdom, tried to argue him out of what I thought an unhealthy view of a vexed question; "No, sir: you can split men up into sheep and goats, bad cases and hard cases; but women stand or fall together. Everything you do to one you do to the rest. On every woman's face--good or bad, white or black--I've seen since, down to that woman to-night, I've seen the shadow of the same wrong."

* * * * *

He was twenty-five years old when the desire of seeing Europe took hold on him. He had no money, and, though he was strong and handy, there was nothing he could do that any other strong man could not do as well. He had his health, however, and staked that. Wages were high in one department of the smelter at Leadville, for reasons that forced themselves on the bluntest intelligence after a few months. He worked there for a year, laying money by and fighting with the nausea that grew upon him week by week. At the end of the twelve months, reeling, half-blind, and with his teeth loose in their gums, but with more money in his pockets than he had ever owned before, he turned his face to the healing desert. An old miner turned ranchman found him at sunset lying under a rock, his face pressed to the earth, and quivering, like a landed trout, in the full grip of the deadly lead-sickness. He laid him across his pony, took him to his mud-roofed hovel close by, kept him for six months in his own blankets, gave him all the milk of his one cow, drove him to the railroad as soon as he was able to travel, and--bade him God-speed with a torrent of invective that struck even Leadville dumb. Ingram had committed the capital error of offering him pay for his hospitality, an error over which I believe he broods to-day.

By the time he was fit to work again his savings were gone. He was twenty-six, and Europe as far off as ever. This time, having damaged his health, he staked his reason, and for two years herded sheep on the Wyoming plains. Herding sheep seems at first cry a simple, pastoral task, with Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Biblical Associations. I must take Paul's word for it, then, that some special danger either to body or soul attends it, and that few men retire from it with a competence except to go into a madhouse or found a new religion. In either case, he says, they will have seen "Hell on the plains." The day before Ingram left for the sheep country he bought for a few dollars the entire stock of a misguided Englishman who was trying to sell second-hand books in Cheyenne City, loaded them into his grub-wagon and read them, slowly, one by one, in the exact order or disorder in which they were packed, and with a cold fear at his heart as the second year drew to a close, that his shepherding would outlast them. It seems absurd, but, as far as I can gather, this has been Ingram's sole literary education.

Either the wages of loneliness, or, I fancy, something else of which he has not told me, must have given Paul his heart's desire, for, two years afterward, at the recruiting office in the Rue St. Dominique, which has been many a good man's alternative to Seine water or the cold muzzle-end, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.

Whatever his reasons for this step (and I never was told them), I think the five years that Paul spent under the iron discipline of the Legion cured what, with all due allowance made for the strange ways by which men find themselves, was becoming an incurable unrest. Among the sad middle-aged soldiers who were his comrades, many of whom had come a longer and a stranger way than he, to find a hard bed and a bloody grave at the end, something, I believe, which he had roamed the world a-seeking and which had evaded him till now, was found at last. Out of that uneasy human cauldron, into which the deserter casts his broken oath, and the _roué_ his disillusionment, and the unloved his loneliness, and the branded their shame, and to which, as long as it or its like shall endure, from time to time the artist will turn for inspiration, the brave man for opportunity, the coward, perhaps, for the stimulus which his own quailing heart denies him, and the saint for relief of temptation, and the hungry for bread, a vision, I believe, did arise for this lonely, unlettered American which the others missed, a knowledge was gained that all the schools and universities of the world could not have taught him: the vision and the knowledge of the human heart.

He was thirty-four years old when he left the Legion--a little gaunt and worn. He had given the world twenty years' hard service, and had a worsted stripe on one arm for his earnings.

V

"SAD COMPANY"

I first met Ingram by chance at the old _Café à peu près_ in Greek Street. The _À peu près_ of those days was far from being the institution which, in the capable hands of Philippe, the sulky waiter, who took to himself Madame's moustached daughter plus Madame's economies, it has since become--an over-lighted, _bruyant_ restaurant of two stories and a basement, wherein an eighteen-penny meal of six exiguous courses, served at inhospitable speed to hurried suburban playgoers, is raised to the dignity of a _diner français_ by various red and yellow compounds which masquerade under the names of the old French provinces of the _midi_. Then it was nothing but a secluded back room, panelled and painted green, with an oval table in the centre, round which the little circle of which I was, if not an ornament, at least an accredited unit--free lances of the press, war correspondents stranded during lengthening periods of peace and ill-will among nations, obscure authors and unbought painters--met nightly to dine and to nurse our chilled ambitions, under Madame's supplemental smile and in the warmth of a roaring fire which, during nine months of the year, was burning under the heavy Jacobean mantel.

Strangers were not exactly resented at the _À peu près_, but by an elaborate unconsciousness of their presence, to which the Oxford manner of one or two of us was a great assistance, we contrived for a long time to keep the circle restricted. Thus it happened that the bronzed and bearded man who spoke French so volubly at coming and going, and who seemed so little discountenanced by our exclusive attitude--glad, indeed, to be let alone--had been an irregular visitor for some weeks before we entered upon any conversation. One night the talk had turned, as it often did, upon the strong British preference for death as a preliminary to appreciation in matters literary or artistic, and little Capel, burrowing, as the subject drooped, into the obvious for a suitable remark, repeated that well-known legend--Milton's ten pounds for "Paradise Lost." The big man at my shoulder laughed.

"Fancy," said he, "any one getting as much as that for a poem to-day."

I turned, before the guard had descended on his eyes, and saw in them an expression that I, of all men, should recognize at the first glance: the sickness of the literary hope deferred.

We had become sufficiently intimate for me to receive a call from him, at my rooms, during an attack of the gout, which is an inheritance from Chislehurst, before he mentioned his book. I grieve to-day, remembering how often he was on the point of doing so, and waited in vain for the word from me that would have made the task less irksome than, I am sure, it was at last. By what I know now isn't a coincidence, his final appearance in Pimlico with the dreadful brown-paper parcel under his arm followed upon a period of three or four months during which he had practically disappeared from my consciousness. He looked worn, I thought, and had a new trouble in his eyes. He told me his story shamefacedly, and stammering like a schoolboy.

He had written a book, a novel, and could not get it published. None of the houses to which he had offered it advanced any reason for rejection, and in the one or two cases where he had pressed for one, seemed to think his insistence a solecism. He understood I not only wrote but published. Would it be troubling me unduly.... If I wasn't too busy....

Well, it _was_ a great worry. I was busy just then too, after my futile fashion; but somehow it didn't seem the thing to have that man stammering and blushing before a wretched little ink-slinger like myself, and I tendered the vague service that is known as one's "best." But I was unaffectedly sorry the thing had happened. It is such happenings that, in literary circles, write FINIS to many a promising friendship. Ten men will lend you a pound for one that will lend you his countenance.

It was six o'clock the next morning when my lamp suddenly flared and went out. I stretched myself--realized that the fire was out as well, that I was cold and stiff, that dawn was coming up over the roofs of the stuccoed terrace opposite, and that the reason I had forgotten light and fire and the march of time lay in a disreputable, dog-eared typed manuscript that I had begun in weariness, gone on with in half-resentful surprise, and finished in a complete oblivion of everything save the swift rush of joys and fears, sorrows and mistakes to a doom that never befell. I remember a funny swelled feeling, as though I had been crying internally.

It is late in the day to attempt a criticism or even an appreciation of "Sad Company." Even as it stands to-day, in the close stereotype of the popular reprint, it is flawed and marred to my mind with many a _naïveté_ and rawness, with here and there one of those lapses into the banal that are an evil legacy to American literature from the days of Poe and Hawthorne. Imagine what it must have been before, fearfully and reverently, for I knew I was handling a masterpiece, I helped brush off a little of the clay that still clung to it from the pit in which it had been cast.

What I did, then and there, was to sit down, chilled and numbed as I was, in the raw morning light, and write to Ingram bidding him, on pain of perpetual displeasure, repair to me that evening, to be severely rebuked for his presumption in having, without previous apprenticeship or servitude, taken his livery and chair with the pastmasters and wardens of his craft. This letter I carried downstairs through the sleeping house, tremulous with the good consciences of my fellow-lodgers, and slipped it in the pillar box at the corner of the crescent. I remember I even chuckled as I posted it, to the evident surprise of the stolid policeman who had wished me good morning. You see, I thought I was making literary history.

I am sorry to say that my enthusiasm didn't communicate itself to Paul. Six mute and incurious publishers were sitting too heavily on his self-esteem for that. He even took their part, with a perversity I have noticed before in the misunderstood of the earth. I have a theory that books like his are posthumous children, and that the state of mind which created them dies in giving them birth. What enraged him--what baffled him, because it was contrary to every lesson his strenuous life had taught him--was, that so much effort could be all in vain. I imagine he wrote the book with difficulty and without conscious exaltation of spirit.

"If I had put as much pains," I remembered his saying, "into any other thing I've set my hand to, I should be either a famous man, or a very rich one, to-day, Prentice."

And then, returning to the old grievance, that I could see had become a prepossession--

"And yet--six men can't be all wrong."

"Of course they can," I exclaimed indignantly, "and sixty."

He shrugged his shoulders wearily. "What can a man do, then?"

"One thing you can do," I answered severely, "is to sit down opposite me for a few hours a week and alter some of your modes of expression. I've made a list of some: Listen here!

"'_Brightly shone the snow on the roof of the Rio Negro County Farmers' Institute._' You mustn't say that."

"Why not?" asked Paul, simply; "it's the name."

"If you don't know why, I can't tell you. You must take it from me that such a thing, in England, will almost secure rejection of itself. Then again: we don't talk of a man's 'white linen shirt _bosom_.' The word is _de mode_ for a woman, but used for a man, it's offensive. And to say that Celia '_cached the mail-bags in a wash-out_,' conveys no meaning at all to us."

Paul laughed out, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

"Sit down," he said, "and '_fais feu_!' Don't spare me!"

But the revision was a thankless task. Only a determination on my part that such a book shouldn't be lost supported me through it at all. Paul came to work irregularly, and in a mood that oscillated between a careless acceptance of every suggestion I made and a peremptory refusal to consider any alteration at all. But it was done at last, and I admit I waited hopefully for news from Carroll and Hugus.

After three weeks, in fact, I got a postcard asking me to call. Bonnyman was sitting in his sanctum, looking as young and as wise as on the day he came down from Balliol, and with his habitual air of finding the publishing trade a great lark.

"How's the industrious Prentice?" he cried, as soon as he saw me. "What's he been doing with himself these many moons?"

I shook hands and sat down. I profess I have never felt so jumpy when work of my own has been in question.

Bonnyman put his finger to his forehead. "What did I want to see you about, Prentice?... Oh, yes!" He touched an electric button on his desk.

"Byrne!" said he to the clerk who answered it, "bring me down 'Sad Company.' I sent it up to the packing-room the day before yesterday. It ought to be ready."

My heart sank into my boots. "Aren't you going to publish it?" I faltered.

Bonnyman shook his head.

"No go, my boy! No go at all. You've brought it to the wrong shop."

"It kept me awake a whole night," I flashed out angrily.

Bonnyman smiled and yawned. "Kept me awake too, because I'd slept in the afternoon trying to read it."

"Oh! come now, Bonnyman," I protested. "You know better than that. Take the one scene alone," I went on eagerly, "where Holt is sitting with his dead wife, and the step-daughter comes to the door and he won't open because----"

But Bonnyman went on shaking his head with the impenetrable self-confidence any man acquires in time who exercises an habitual right of veto.

"Hugo and water!" he said. "Who can't write it? No, Prentice. To tell you the honest truth we're cutting out a lot of this problem stuff lately. What we're specializing in at present is the 'light touch.' The 'light touch,'" he repeated, illustrating what the world is hungering for, delicately, with an ivory paper cutter on his blotting-pad.

"'Polly Prattlings!'" I sneered.

"And d--d good stuff, too. Bring me some one like that, Prentice, and we'll talk.--Don't get angry, old man! Who is your little friend? American, ain't he?"

I nodded gloomily.

"Why don't he get a Rhodes scholarship and learn how to write English?"

"He's thirty-five," I said; "he's been all round the world and done everything."

Bonnyman pulled a long face that sufficiently disposed of Ingram's future. The brown-paper parcel was brought in and I slunk away with it under my arm, like a man repulsed from a pawnshop.

I didn't see Ingram for a long time, and was secretly glad of it. For I had no good news to give him. Other publishers were equally emphatic, with unimportant variations of delay and discourtesy. I don't say I lost faith in the book, but I did begin to doubt whether, in the present state of things, great work was worth while. It was too much like giving grand opera on a raft in mid-Atlantic.

At last, when I'd practically exhausted the firms I knew, and was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn't have to come down to a publication "by special arrangement," or a setting up in linotype by one of the smaller provincial weeklies, an idea flashed into my head. I knew one great writer, a woman, American, too; fashionable, rich, but with a passionate reverence for all that was worthiest in letters. She had succeeded by means of a brilliance and impetuosity of style that had literally stormed the defences of dullness. In her books I had noticed an underlying mysticism that I thought might find Paul's work akin. It was a ticklish undertaking, and I hadn't done screwing up my courage to it when Ingram suddenly reappeared. His long arm pushed open the paper curtained door of the sanctum where we dined, one raw night in June. By his side was absolutely the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She wore a long purple coat, cut very smartly, and a big ribboned hat, and was swaying a little from side to side as though the lapsed rhythm of some tune she had just heard was still in her feet. She glanced round shyly but brightly and bowed with a pretty blush to Caulfield. We all gaped, and old Smeaton's pipe suddenly smelt very foul.

"Don't move!" said Ingram, as I made room for them at my side. "I haven't come for dinner. Just to ask if you've had any news, before I go away."

"No news at present," I confessed. "But I hope to have some soon."

He smiled a little grimly, and felt in his long rubber coat for a pocketbook.

"If anything turns up in the next month or so, write me here," he said, and handed me a card with an address scrawled across its face. "I'm going to France for a few weeks. Come, Nelly!" and was gone with his companion as abruptly as he had come.

"'Beauty like hers is genius,'" Capel quoted, breaking the silence with an air of saying something apposite, for once.

"Who's the pretty lady, Caulfield?" asked old Smeaton. "She bowed to you."

"She's a little person I've met at dances, and things," said Caulfield. "Goes round with the De Rudder woman. Does _gavottes_ and _pavanes_ and _corantos_ and all that sort of thing. Pretty name, too,--'Fenella Barbour.'"

VI

A CHILD SPEAKS THE TRUTH

Fenella Barbour is the daughter of a clergyman of the Church of England, who remained unbeneficed to the end of his life. Younger son of a noble family, Scotch in origin but long settled in the Midlands, handsome, intellectual, and much yearned upon, the Honorable Nigel let opportunities for advantageous matrimony pass him one by one, to marry, comparatively late in his life and outside of his own class, a young parishioner with whose name the gossip of a small Cornish country town had spitefully and quite unjustifiably coupled his. To the day of her death Minnie Trevail never quite got over the surprise with which she received her pastor's offer of an honorable share in board and bed, and, whether it was gratitude or an uneasy sense that principles which do not often make for a man's happiness had played her hand for her, the fact remains, that to the end of his brief married life the Reverend Nigel Barbour continued to be a sort of married bachelor, free to come or go unquestioned, with a fine gift for silence and without obvious enthusiasms, unless it were for the girl baby who would sit for hours by his study fire, as he wrote his sermons, scolding her doll in whispers, and to whose round cheek and fine dark curls his eyes strayed oftener and oftener during the last year of his life.

Similarly circumstanced, other women by study, by observation, by an endless self-correction, have lifted themselves in time to something like a mental level with the men who have perversely chosen them. Not necessarily from a sense of her own limitations, Mrs. Barbour never tried. It is possible that she never, deliberately measuring the sacrifice which the man had made for her good name, determined the first sacrifice should be the last, but at least the unformed idea governed all her conduct. She kept the ideals, the accents--inside the house even the dress--of her class. For the spiritual companionship which she could never give she substituted the silent and tireless service of Martha. When her baby was born, she would have had the pain and peril tenfold; pain and peril so dimly comprehended by the man who smoothed her moist hair with an awkward hand, blinked his scholarly eyes at this crude and rather unseemly mystery, and, once assured the danger was past, went back to his weaving of words with a relief that even his kindness failed to conceal.

Nigel Barbour was one of the killed in the terrible Clee Level accident. He was returning from a New Year family gathering, the first he had attended since his marriage, and it is typical of their married relations that his wife never even "wondered" why she wasn't asked too. If reconciliation which should include her was on its way, his death disposed of the idea. Denied recognition during his lifetime his widow refrained, with what all her friends considered great lack of spirit, from attempting to win it after his death. He was uninsured, and, of the slender inheritance that devolved upon her, a great part consisted of house property at the "unfashionable" but expensive side of the Park. One of the houses, a great stuccoed mansion in a secluded square, happening to be empty at the time of her tragic bereavement, she assumed the tenancy, furnished it, and, reserving for herself only the basement and top floor, advertised discreetly but judiciously for lodgers.

Although the business is one that seldom shows a profit, and although in order to furnish the one house adequately she had been compelled to mortgage the freehold of the other, yet, if happiness be revenue, it is hard to see how she could have made a better investment. For the first time in her life she tasted liberty. She had her great house, her establishment, the direction of her three maids, and the intense respect of family butchers, family bakers, and family candlestick-makers in staid contiguous streets. On spring or autumn afternoons the champing and clashing of bits and hoofs outside her door, the murmurs of joyous life that floated along the hall and up the wide stairs, sounded no less sweetly in her ears because it was Miss Rigby or Lady Anne Caslon and not the Honorable Mrs. Barbour who was at home to all the fine company. The "Honorable Mrs. Barbour!" Often, in passing through the big bedrooms of the second floor, with clean pillowcases or window blinds over her arm, she would stop and look at her homely reflection in the long cheval glasses, with a little inward smile at the incongruity. And yet in her heart, so sensitive to the duties, so blind to the rights, of her equivocal position, the obligations which the barren title involved were tacitly acknowledged. If it conferred no privileges, it at least restrained her judgment upon the caste, a corner of whose ermine rested, however grudgingly, upon her own shoulder. She grew indisposed to gossip. Such of her relatives and friends as called upon her while upon "day-trips" to London found themselves cut short in their pursuit of one special branch of knowledge. They went home to Cornwall declaring that Minnie had grown "stuck-up."

But the rights which she abdicated so whole-heartedly for herself she claimed with an added fierceness for Fenella. The child was a miracle from the first. Even while it lay, a few pounds of pink flesh, in a corner of one arm and drained her breast, she was worshipping it, humbly and afar off. It is difficult to find words that adequately convey her state of mind toward her daughter without entrenching on a parallel that is sacred and therefore forbidden; but this much is certain: had the legal quibble which can prove a child to be no blood relation to its mother been propounded to Mrs. Barbour, it would have found in her a tearful and reluctant but convinced witness to its truth. For two successive nights before her baby's birth the same dream had visited her. The great house of her brother-in-law, which she had never seen, which her husband had never even thought of describing for her, had appeared to her, wrapped in flame. Pushing her way through the crowd that surrounded it and was watching it burn, after the inconsequent manner of dream people, with quiet satisfaction, she had run up tottering staircases and along choking passages, had reached a splendid room of state upon whose canopied bed a little naked infant lay, and, clasping it to her breast, had carried it out, smiling and unharmed. Fenella was no more truly her child than she was the child of the dream.

The little girl was four and still wore a black hair ribbon and a black sash over her pinafore, when one afternoon in October a big shallow barouche drove up to the door of No. 11 Suffolk Square. The springs were very high, the harness was very brightly plated, the chestnut horses, their heads held in by a torturing bearing rein, very shiny and soapy. A faded, artificial woman, with a tall osprey in her black bonnet, lolled back against the buff cloth cushions and regarded the world through a tortoise-shell lorgnette. A girl, quite young, with fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, sat up demurely at her side.

Fenella was taking tea in great state and composure on the window-seat of her nursery under the slates when the carriage drove up. A mug, on which Puss-in-Boots brushed back his bristling whiskers with one spirited paw, stood at her elbow, filled with a faintly tinted decoction of warm milk and sugar. A bun, delicately nibbled all round its lustrous circumference, was in her right hand, and a large over-dressed doll, with a vacant blue-eyed face, rested insecurely in the hollow of her left arm. From this household treasure her attention was just beginning to stray. James, the coachman, had pulled across the roadway, and was driving his fretful over-heated charges up and down along the railings of the Square. Fenella pressed her forehead against the cold window-pane.

"Gee-gees; gee-gees!" she soliloquized.

To her enter, without cue or warning, Druce the parlor-maid--also a little the nursemaid--in great excitement, and breathless after a non-stop run from the bottom of the house. The bun was snatched from the chubby fingers, Marianne saved, timely, from a headlong course to the floor, the Marquis of Carabas pushed unconstitutionally on one side, and the napkin whisked off, all in four brisk movements.

"Company for my little lady!" the excited girl exclaimed. "She is to have her pretty hair curled, and her best frock put on, and to go downstairs to see mamma's fine friends."

Nelly took the outrage with the docility that was one of her charms.

"Gee-gees, Drucie," she said, pointing over her shoulder as she was borne away. "Gee-gees in the Thquare."

The warm-hearted maid gave her a tight and quite unauthorized hug.

"Gee-gees, indeed! Well, they may _trot! trot! trot!_ until their feet drop off, before they find anything finer than we're going to show them."

The carriage folk were in the front part of the big tastelessly furnished drawing-room, which ran the whole depth of the house, and which happened to be unlet at the time. A fire, just lit, was crackling and smoking sullenly. The elder lady sat, with a transient air, as much on the edge of a little gilt chair as is compatible with a seat at all. I am not quite certain whether vinegar can be frozen at certain temperatures or not. If so, her smile recalled the experiment. The young girl sat back in a velvet rocking chair, her slender black-stockinged legs reaching the ground from time to time as it oscillated. She had a little pale round face; her lank, whitey-gold hair was cut as straight at her waist as it was at her forehead. She had taken off her gloves, and the bony over-manicured fingers were interlocked in her lap with a sort of feeble repression. Near a table, covered with tea-things, but from which no hospitality had been dispensed, Mrs. Barbour was sitting, no less upright than her visitor. She was flushed and there was the fullness of suppressed tears round her eyelids, but there was as little sign of defeat in her face and attitude as in the other woman's unpleasant smile. The fine lady raised her lorgnette as the child was carried in. She turned languidly to her daughter.

"Your poor uncle's face. Oh, the very image!" she exclaimed, with an emphasis that extinguished any lingering idea poor Mrs. Barbour may have kept of a share in the matter.

Set upon the ground, the child beauty gravitated instantly to mother's skirts, and from this coign of vantage surveyed her visitors. Mrs. Barbour put the curls back from her forehead and stooped to her ear.

"Nelly," said she, "this is your aunt, Lady Lulford, your Aunty Hortense, come to see poor father's little girl. Won't you go and give her a kiss?"

The grasp tightened upon her skirt.

"Oh, shame!" the mother murmured, with a reproach in her voice that the glistening eyes belied. "Is this my kind little Nelly? Come over, then, with mother."

With a sidelong glance at the tea-table, Fenella was led, obliquely, across the thick new pile carpet, and received a kiss upon her forehead that was not much warmer than the window against which it had just been pressed.

"And now your cousin. Cousin----"

"Leslie," said Lady Lulford, covering a slight yawn with her golden card-case, and glancing out of the window toward her horses.

The girl's face seemed to yearn and melt as the reluctant little feet were guided to her. She pursed her pale lips and held out her thin arms. Fenella was to remember it years afterwards with a spasm of pity and indignation. But she was only a baby now, and struggled in the weak embrace. Once back at her mother's side, a violent reaction of shyness set in, and she buried her face in the maternal lap.

"Impressionable, too; like poor Nigel," the peeress remarked to her daughter in the same icy voice.

"Come," the mother coaxed, "hasn't Nelly a word to say? Her aunty"--Lady Lulford winched--"her aunty and cousin will think they've got a little dumb girl for a niece."

Fenella raised her face. "I weally----" she began, and, not finding encouragement to proceed, down went the black head again.

Mother lifts it gently.

"----was----" Nelly's finger went to her mouth. Her glance wavered, wandered tortuously along the floor, and finally and suddenly focussed the tea equipage.

"----in the middle of my tea." Louder and with sudden confidence as the full nature of the outrage was realized, "Weally was in the middle of my tea."

Lady Lulford smiled abstractedly. Leslie's lips moved. The mother drew her little girl closer.

"You shall have your tea presently, dear," she said, "but I want you to listen to me first. Now, tell me," she seemed to steady her voice, "how would you like to go into the country with your aunt and Cousin Leslie?"

Nelly's eyes grew big and round. "And mother?" added she, joining the palms of her hands, baby-wise, with stiff outspread fingers.

"No, dear. Mother must stay in London, because she has so much to do."

There was an agitation of the black curls, and from under them a most decided negative evolved itself.

"Oh, but my precious," the mother pleaded, as that other mother may have pleaded before the judgment seat of the great wise king; "just for a while; to see the green trees, and the moo-cows, and the bunnies, and, and----"

"The deer," said Lady Lulford, raising the conversation to a higher and, shall we say, ancestral level.

"Great--big--stags, baby," the cousin broke in, with her eager, unsteady voice, "great big stags with horns like this," and she made a pair with fingers that were almost as fleshless.

Fenella refused to weigh the catalogue of attractions a moment. The head shook faster and faster till the dark curls whipped first one cheek and then another.

"Not for a little while? Not for a few weeks?" Mrs. Barbour urged, almost roughly.

At this persistence in a quarter where it was so little to be looked for, two fat tears distilled themselves in Fenella's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She opened her mouth, and I regret to say her face lost, temporarily, its attractive power. Mrs. Barbour snatched her up and sprang to her feet.

"She sha'n't be teased," she cried passionately, clasping the child to her breast. Then, turning quickly first to Lady Lulford and afterward to her daughter, "Don't you see she's too young now? She's only a baby, really. Perhaps later----"

The Viscountess turned upon her own offspring the cold ceremonial eye that on company nights lifted the ladies at Freres Lulford to their feet and up into the drawing-room.

"We must really go now, Leslie," she said, with a little explanatory wave of the card-case. "So many calls, you know. Well, Mrs. Barbour," turning to her hostess with an evident effort, "I suppose we mustn't expect you to decide such a matter in a hurry. For the present I think I may say our offer, Myles's and mine, stands open. I still think it is what poor Nigel would most have wished. And even if you should decide not to accept it now, remember, if at any time--at any time----" and in this golden air of good intentions Lady Lulford's visit ended.

"That is an ordeal well over, Leslie," she said, a few moments later, leaning back and closing her eyes slightly, as the carriage door slammed and the tall footman with a crook from the waist still in his long straight back, swung himself to his perch.

"Mother," said Leslie, nervously, pulling at her gloves, "we could hardly--could hardly----"

"Could hardly _what_, my dear? You are so disjointed at times."

"----expect her to give up _such a pet_," the girl said impulsively, with a gush of feeling that seemed to leave her colder and weaker than ever.

Her mother lifted the frozen gloved hand that seemed to blight like frost, and gave a little tinkling laugh.

"My dear, when you are my age you will not rate so highly what is a mere animal passion. _True_ love would consider the child's material interests first. I still hope," with a little hostile back glance as the barouche rolled out of Suffolk Square, "that Nigel's daughter may not have to grow up in the basement of a lodging-house."

"The _basement_? Mother!"

"My dear, foolish girl, you surely don't think the room we were in to-day (atrocious taste!) is used by them. No, my dear! They live at the bottom of the area, eat and gossip with the servants; sometimes, I have no doubt, the policeman drops in to tea. The _Honorable_ Mrs. Barbour!" And Lady Lulford gave her unpleasant laugh again.

"Mamma!" cried Leslie, really shocked now, "you don't suppose she uses _that_?"