Chapter I (2)

“Unfortunately only facts are shipped on Abel’s line.”

“Then all is over. For I am just a sheaf of theories held together by a cage of bones. There is no fact in me at all.”

“Don’t be humble. It’s waste of time in such a humiliating world.”

“I’m not humble”—the gardener indignantly repudiated the suggestion. “I’m proud of being what I am. I am more than worthy of the _Caribbeania_.”

“Then come and prove it,” said Mr. Rust, and dragged the gardener passionately down the street.

The gardener found himself placed on the door-step of an aspiring corner house. Mr. Samuel Rust stood on a lower step with his back to the door. It is part of the code of shadows to pretend, when you have rung the bell, that you do not care whether the door is opened or not.

The gardener, following the code of the socially simple, stood with his nose nearly touching the knocker, and his eyes glued to the spot where the head of the servant might be expected to appear. It therefore devolved on him to draw Mr. Rust’s attention to the eventual appearance of a black-frocked white-capped answer to his summons.

“Ah!” exclaimed Samuel, “Mr. Abel in?”

The maid, with fine dramatic feeling, stepped aside, thus opening up a vista, at the end of which could be seen Mr. Abel advancing with both hands outstretched.

When people shake hands with both their hands and both their eyes and all their teeth, and with much writhing of the lips, you at once know something fairly important about them. They have acquired the letter of enthusiasm without its spirit, and their effect on the really enthusiastic is like the effect of artificial light and heat on a flower that needs the sun.

The gardener became as though he were not there. All that he vouchsafed to leave at Mr. Rust’s side in the library of Mr. Abel was a white and sleepy-looking young man, standing on one fourteen-inch foot while the other carefully disarranged the carpet edge. The gardener was not shy, though on such occasions he looked silly. He was really encrusted in himself; loftily superior to Mr. Abel and his like he hung, levitated by the medium of his own conceit, at a level far above Mr. Abel’s house-top.

Fortunately Mr. Abel and Mr. Rust both took his aloofness for the sheepishness to be expected of one of his age.

“This is the instrument of my designs, and the victim of your kindness, Abel,” remarked Mr. Rust. “He doesn’t always look such an ass. He is a gardener, by profession.”

“In theory,” added the gardener, whose armour of aloofness had chinks. There is something practical about this inconsistent young man which he has never yet succeeded in smothering, and to this day, though he poses as being superbly absent-minded, his mind is generally present—so to speak—behind the door.

“In theory,” repeated Mr. Abel, ecstatically amused. He made it his business to shoot promiscuous appreciation at the conversation of his betters, and though his aim was not good, he was at least gifted with perseverance. If you shoot enough, you must eventually hit something. Hereafter he kept his profile agog towards the gardener, a smile hovering round that side of his mouth in readiness for his guest’s next sally.

One pose in which the gardener has never approached is that of the wag, and he made renewed efforts to unhook his mind from this exasperating interview.

“Is there any opening for a gardener on the _Caribbeania_?” asked Mr. Rust.

“A gardener ...” said Mr. Abel, looking laboriously reflective. “We have no gardener as yet on board.”

“But is there a garden?” asked Mr. Samuel Rust acutely.

“A garden,” repeated Mr. Abel, ruminating intensely. “There is the winter garden. And a row of geraniums on the promenade deck. And some trellis work with ivy. Yes, there is certainly a garden.”

“Then the thing is settled,” said Mr. Rust, and at these hopeful words the gardener rose loudly from his chair.

“Wait a moment,” said Mr. Abel in the same voice as the voice in which Important Note is printed in the Grammar Book. “What about the salary?”

There was no reply and no sensation. The gardener was yearning towards the door.

“Of course....” said Mr. Abel. “The position is not one of any responsibility, and therefore could hardly be expected to be a paying one. Your passage out....”

“I wouldn’t touch money. I hate the feel of it,” said the gardener abruptly. That threw Mr. Abel into a paroxysm of humour.

On the door-step the gardener did a heroic thing. He turned back and found Mr. Abel in the hall, completely recovered from his paroxysm.

“What about——” began the gardener, with the suffragette in his mind. “Dangerous to lose sight of her,” he thought.

“What about what?” asked Mr. Abel, and was again very much amused by the symmetry of the phrase. He was a bright-mannered man.

The gardener’s new pose lay suddenly clear before him.

“What about my wife?” he asked.

He was rather pleased with the sensation he made.

“Your wife?” exclaimed Mr. Rust and Mr. Abel in duet (falsetto and tenor).

“What on earth did you do with her last night?” continued Samuel solo.

“Can’t she ship as stewardess?” asked the gardener.

Poor suffragette! But in the eyes of men one woman is much the same as another. Every woman, I gather, is a potential stewardess. This is woman’s sphere when it takes to the water. The gardener thought he knew all about women. All her virtues he considered that she shared with man, but her vices he looked upon as peculiarly her own.

“The boat sails to-morrow,” Mr. Abel observed reproachfully. “The stewardesses have been engaged for weeks.”

“Why can’t you leave her behind, what?” asked Mr. Rust. “Women do far too much travelling about nowadays. There’s such a thing as broadening the mind too far, you know. Sometimes, like elastic, it snaps. A lot of women I know have snapped.”

“Yes,” said the gardener. “But it would be better for England if I took her away.”

This spark nearly put an end to the career of Mr. Abel. He squeezed the gardener’s hand in an agony of appreciation.

“I won’t go without her,” said the gardener, rather surprising himself. He gave Mr. Abel no answering smile. He was too busy reproaching himself.

“Abel,” implored Mr. Rust. “I simply can’t let old Mrs. Paul go without some one to keep the Red Place in her line of thought. This is obviously the man for the job. My career hangs on you. Be worthy. That is—be a sport, now, what?”

“I’ll find your wife a berth,” said Mr. Abel, accompanying each word with a dramatic tap on the gardener’s arm. “The boat is not full.”

“Settled,” exclaimed Mr. Samuel, and after that, of course, escape followed. The idea of dinner together hovered between the two as they emerged into the principal street, but as both were penniless, the idea, which originated chiefly in instinct, died.

The gardener went to call on the suffragette. He was conscientious in his own way, and fully realised that the woman had a right to know that she was now a wife, and, if not a stewardess, an intending passenger on a boat bound immediately for the uttermost ends of the earth.

He found the suffragette, looking sad, playing a forlorn game of solitaire in forlorn surroundings in the little hotel sitting-room. With her hat off she looked not so ugly, but more insignificant. Her hair seemed as if it would never decide whether to be fair or dark until greyness overtook it and settled the question. It had been tidied under protest, and already strands of it were creeping over her ears, like deserters leaving a fortress by stealth.

The room was papered and ceiled and upholstered in drab, there were also drab photographs of unlovable bygones on the walls, and some drab artificial flowers in a drab pot on the table.

There are some colour schemes that kill romance. Directly the gardener felt the loveless air of the place, he plunged headlong into the cold interview. Like a bather who, on feeling the chill of the sea, hastens desperately to throw it around him from head to foot.

“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener.

“I have been crying,” said the suffragette.

They each thought that it was thoughtless of the other to be so egotistical at this juncture. There is nothing that kills an effect so infallibly as a collision in conversation.

“I have been telling lies,” said the gardener, “about you.”

“I have been crying—about you.”

(These women....)

The gardener took a deep breath, recoiled for a start, and ran upon his subject.

“I have told them that you are my wife, and that you are coming with me on the _Caribbeania_, sailing to-morrow morning for Trinity Islands.”

“Told who ... _Caribbeania_ ... Trinity Islands ...” gathered the suffragette, with a woman’s instinct for tripping over the least essential point. And then she interviewed herself laboriously on the subject.

There was ample motive for a militant protest, and that was a comfortable thought. She was justified in throwing any article of the drab furniture at the gardener’s sharp and doubtful face. This creature had put himself in authority over her without the authority to do so; he had decided to lead her to Trinity Islands, whereas her life’s work lay in England. This cold and curious boy had twisted off its hinges the destiny of an independent woman. She had hitherto closed the door of her heart against to-morrow. She had momentarily liked the idea of having a friend who loved the shape of her face, especially as he was leaving the country to-morrow. The unconventionality of the friendship had crowned as an ornament a life of dreadful refinement. She had meant to step for a moment from the lonely path, and now she found that her way back was barred—by this impenetrable trifle. It was infuriating. But the suffragette searched in vain for a trace of real fury in her heart. She tested the power of words.

“It is infuriating,” she said.

“Yes,” said the gardener, not apologetically. “I quite see that.”

But she did not see it herself—except in theory.

“All the same,” said the gardener, “you are an incendiary, not exactly a woman. Can’t two friends, an incendiary and a horticultural expert, go on a voyage of exploration together? Mutual exploration?”

“One can be alone in couples,” thought the suffragette. “It would be studying loneliness from a new angle. My life has been a lifeless thing, run on the world’s principles; I shall try a new line, and run it on my own principles.”

But, as I may have mentioned, she was a woman, so she said: “What is to prevent my going back to that house in the woods now, and burning it down—if I ever meant to do it?”

“Me,” said the gardener.

“But you can’t sit there with your eyes pinned to me until the boat sails.”

“Unless you give me your word as a World’s Worker that you will not leave the hotel, I shall stay here, and so will you.”

For quite a long time the suffragette’s upbringing wrestled with all comers, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. There is no strength in the principles created out of a lifeless past. Besides, the woman of six-and-twenty was very much flattered and fluttered, whatever the militant suffragette might be.

“I will come with you on your exploration tour,” she said, and her voice sounded like the voice of the conqueror rather than the conquered. “I will give my word as a—woman without principles that I will not leave Southampton except to go on board the _Caribbeania_.”

The gardener left her, he felt innocently drunk. He made his way out of the amethyst light of electricity, into the golden light of the outskirts of the town, and thence into the silver light of the uncivilised moon. On the beach the tide was receding, despite the groping, grasping hands of the sea, which contested every inch of the withdrawal. The gardener stumbled upon the soft solidity of the sand above high-water mark, and slept the sleep of the thoroughly confused. He dreamt of a pearl-and-pink sea, and of unknown islands.

I need hardly say, after all this preamble, that the suffragette and the gardener sailed next day on the _Caribbeania_ for Trinity Islands.

Mr. Samuel Rust, for some time before the boat started, was conspicuous for a marked non-appearance on the wharf’s edge.

The gardener, who had a vague feeling that tears should be shed in England on his departure, stood feeling a little cold at heart on the starboard side of the main deck, looking at the tears that were being shed for other people.

The suffragette, who was under the impression that her hand was against all men, stood bleakly on the port side, looking at the hydro-aeroplanes leaping self-consciously about the Solent in seven-league boots. She was proud to stand thus aloof and unhampered on the threshold of a novelty. The pride she had in her independence was one of her compensations. This is a world of compensations, and that is what makes it the hollow world it is sometimes. So seldom do we get the real thing that in this age we congratulate ourselves upon our compensations.

Mr. Samuel Rust made a late and dramatic appearance upon the gangway after the first bell of preparation for departure had been rung. His hat, inspired by the prevalent aviation craze, blew away. But Mr. Rust’s thoughts were occupied with other things than the infidelity of hats. He passed the gardener without noticing him, and with restrained fervour addressed a square elderly woman, who stood leisurely on the deck, surrounded by an officious maid, like a liner being attended to by a tug.

Mr. Samuel Rust did not seem like the sort of person who would have had a mother. He gave the impression of having been created exactly as he stood, with one stroke of the Almighty Finger, and not gradually evolved like you or me. You could imagine the gardener, for instance, at every stage of his existence. You could picture those light bright eyes under those scowling brows looking out of lace and baby-ribbons in a proud nurse’s arms. You could see him as the fierce little schoolboy, with alternately too much to say and too little. You could imagine him as an old man, with that thick hair turned into a white strong flame upon his head, and those already deep-set eyes blazing out of hewn hollows above his abrupt cheek-bones. But Mr. Samuel Rust seemed to have no past and no future.

He addressed the woman who, contrary to appearances, had played an important part in the creating of him.

“I couldn’t let you go without saying good-bye to you, Mrs. Paul,” he said.

“Of course you couldn’t,” said Mrs. Rust, and the words seemed shot by iron lips from above a chin like a ship’s ram.

Something that might have usurped the name of a kiss passed between them, and Mr. Samuel hurried to the impatient gangway. As he passed the gardener he winked earnestly, conscious of his mother’s eyes on the back of his head. The gardener, feeling delightfully unscrupulous and roguish, made no sign.

The vulgarly tuneful swan-songs of Cockney emotion trailed from the deck to the wharf and back again. The sound was like thin beaten silver, becoming thinner as the distance increased. There were tears among the women on land, and the shivering water blurred the reflections of the crowd until they looked as though they were seen through tears. The last song fainted in the air, the crowd on the wharf ceased to be human, and became a long suggestion of many colours, a-quiver with waving handkerchiefs.

The gardener looked at Mrs. Paul Rust. There was a tear following one of the furious furrows that bracketed her hyphen of a mouth.

The south of England is a land that reluctantly lets her deserters go. For full twelve hours she stands on tiptoe on the sea-line, beckoning their return.

The gardener watched the land and felt the sea for long hours. He felt no regret at having forsaken one for the other. For the moment he prided himself on heartlessness, or rather on intactness of heart, for he had left none of it behind. He was proud of the fact that he loved no one in the world. He prided himself on his vices more than on his virtues. There seems something more unique in vice than in virtue.

The gardener had the convenient sort of memory that is fitted with water-tight doors. His mind conducted a process by which the past was not kept fresh and green, nor altogether left behind, but crystallised and packed away on shelves in a businesslike manner. He could label it and shut it away without emotion. He shut away England now, and rejoiced to do so. Poor grey silly England that I am so glad to leave and so glad to see again....

The gardener turned presently to look for his garden, and found—the girl Courtesy.

Her brilliant and magnetic hair.

Her broad face with the abrupt flush on the cheeks, that was an inartistic accompaniment to the red of her hair, and looked as if Nature had become colourblind at the moment of giving Courtesy her complexion.

She herself looked herself—simple yet sophisticated.

“To think of seeing you here,” she said. “Who would have thought it.”

The gardener was one of those who are never surprised without being thunderstruck. He was very thorough in habit, and drank every emotion to its dregs.

His manners fell in ruins about him. His hat remained upon his head. His words remained somewhere beneath his tongue.

“I got a sudden invitation from a cousin in Trinity Island,” explained Courtesy. “And Dad gave me my passage out as a birthday present. I gave the threepenny bit to a porter, so I hope you don’t want it back. Have you kept a halo for me in this Paradise?”

“There is the glassy sea,” replied the gardener, recovering. “And the halo is just flowering. It is exactly the colour of your hair.”

“I hope the sea will be as you say,” said Courtesy, “for I’m a shockin’ bad sailor.”

And at that moment the sea ceased to be totally glassy. You could suddenly feel the slow passionate heart of the sea beating.

Courtesy did not look at the change in this poetic light at all. She hurried along the deck and disappeared.

Even if you are a good sailor there is, apart from a natural pride in your sailorship, little joy about a first day on board. The climate of the English seas is not adapted to ocean travel. If I could steam straight out of Southampton Harbour into the strong yet restrained heat that I love, if I could glide from the wharf—mottled with regrets—straight to the silver and emerald coasts of a certain land I know, where the cocoanut palms lean out over the strip of immaculate sand, to see their reflections in the opal mirror of the sea, I think I should love the first day as much as I love its successors. And yet I would not have the voyage shortened by a minute.

I wonder why nobody has ever brought forward as a conclusive Anti-suffrage argument the fact that more women are sea-sick than men on the first day of a sea-voyage. I can so well imagine the superb line the logic of such a contention would take. If the basis of life is physical ability, and if physical ability depends upon the digestion, then must the strong digestion only constitute a right to citizenship. To the wall with the weak digestion.

Mrs. Paul Rust and the suffragette were the only women who scaled the heights of the dining saloon for that evening’s meal. Mrs. Rust looked supremely proud of her immunity from sea-sickness; all the men looked laboriously unaware that such a thing as sea-sickness existed; the suffragette looked frankly miserable. The gardener was obliged to remind himself casually from time to time that there was no pose that included sea-sickness.

But any disastrous tendency he might have had to give too much thought to his inner man was checked by the appearance of Mrs. Paul Rust, the fortress he was there to besiege. She was a truly remarkable woman to look at. The absence of her hat revealed a surprise. Her hair was dyed a forcible crimson. And it might have been mud-coloured like mine for all the self-consciousness she showed. It was so profoundly remarkable that for a time one’s attention was chained to the hair, and one forgot to study the impressive general effect, of which the hair was only the culminating point. Mrs. Rust’s only real feature was her chin, but no one ever realised this. Her eyes and nose were too small for her face, and seemed to fit loosely into that great oval; her mouth was only redeemed by the chin that shot from beneath it. Altogether she would have been sufficiently insignificant-looking had it not been for her hair. She proved the truism that the world takes people at their own valuation.

It is always a surprise to me when a truism is proved true. I have come across the rock embedded in these truisms several times lately to my cost. And each time it bruises my knuckles and shocks me. It almost makes one wonder whether, after all, the ancients occasionally had their flashes of enlightenment.

The world thought of Mrs. Paul Rust what she thought of herself. It is so often too busy to work out its own conclusions.

Of a modest woman with a heavy jaw, the world would have said, “A dear good creature, but dreadfully underhung.” Of a well-chinned woman with dyed hair, it said, “There goes a strong character.” The hair did it, and the hair was dyed by human agency. Providence had no hand in the making of Mrs. Rust’s forcible reputation. Nowadays we leave it to our dressmaker, and our manicurist, and our milliner, and our doctor, and our vicar, to make us what we are. This is an age of luxury, and it is so fatiguing to assert a home-made personality. Shall I go to my hairdresser and say, “Here, take me, dye me heliotrope. Make an influential woman of me”?

The gardener did not quail before the terrifying outer wall of Mrs. Rust’s fortress. Believing as he did that man makes himself, and that the pose of victor is as easy to assume as any other, he was unaware of the reality of the word ‘defeat.’ Whether woman also makes herself, I never fully understood from the gardener at this stage. But I gathered that woman takes the rôles that man rejects.

The gardener, as a protégé of Mr. Abel, who, on the _Caribbeania_, was respected because he was not personally known, found himself treated _à la_ junior officer, streaked with a certain flavour of second-class passenger, but distinctly suggesting ship’s orchestra. He was allowed to have his meals in the first-class saloon, he was occasionally asked about the weather by lady passengers, and the captain and officers looked upon him good-naturedly, as a sort of example of poetic licence.

It seemed a good thing when dinner was over. One had proved one’s courage, and the strain was past. The suffragette, who had given a proof rather of obstinacy than of courage, retired weakly to her cabin. And the gardener stood on deck and looked at the sea, while the moon followed the ship’s course with her eyes. A table companion, an Anglican priest, with a weak chin and piercing eyes, came and leaned upon the rail at the gardener’s side.

“You smoke?” he asked, and you could hear that he was very conventional, and that he believed that he was not.

A man-to-man sort of man.

“No,” said the gardener, and added, “I have no vices.”

He said this sort of thing simply to exasperate. The pose of indifference to the world’s opinion is apt, sooner or later, to lead to the pose of wilful pricking of the world’s good taste. The gardener had a morbid craving for unpopularity; it was part of the unique pose. Unpopularity is an excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood.

The priest did not appear exasperated. He was tolerant. The man who aims at unlimited tolerance, as a rule, only achieves the absorbent and rather undecided status of spiritual blotting-paper. But he is a dreadfully difficult man to anger.

I hate talking to people who are occupied in reminding their conscience: “After all this is my sister, albeit, a poor relation. I must be tolerant.” Then they pray for strength, and turn to me, spiritually renewed, with a brave patient smile.

This was the priest’s pose.

“You have no vices?” he said, in a slow earnest voice. “How I envy you!”

The gardener was more concerned with the varied conversation of the sea. Each wave of it flung back some magic unspeakable word over its shoulder as it ran by. But he answered the priest:

“You don’t really envy me, you would rather be yourself with virtues than me without vices.”

The priest smiled the inscrutable smile of the vague-minded. “You have a very original way of talking. You interest me. Yerce, yerce. Tell me what you were thinking about when I came up.”

The gardener did so at once. Sometimes his imagination weighed heavily upon his mind, and he expanded, regardless of his listeners.

“I was thinking about the things I saw,” he said. “Things that I often see before I have time to think. Snapshots of things that even I have never actually imagined. Do you know, wonders crash across my eyes like a blow, when I am thinking of something else. Ghosts out of my enormous past, I suppose. There was a very white beach that I saw just now, with opal-coloured waves running along it, and a mist whitening the sky. There were very broad red men in grey wolf-skins, standing in the water, dragging dead bodies from the sea. There were little children, blue and thin, lying dead upon the beach. I know the way children’s ribs stand out when they are dead. I have never seen a dead child, except those....”

“You ought to write fiction, yerce, yerce,” said the priest. “You have a very strong imagination.”

“I have,” admitted the gardener. “But not strong enough to control these visions that besiege me.”

The priest, who had preached more and known less about visions than any one else I can think of, was constrained to silence.

Next morning the gardener found his garden. He saw it under varied aspects and at varied angles, for a gold and silver alternation of sun and shower chequered the Atlantic, and inspired the _Caribbeania_ to a slow but undignified dance, like the activities of a merry cow. The high waves came laughing down from the high horizon, and curtseyed mockingly at her feet.

There was a bay tree in a tub on either side of the entrance to the garden, and the gardener, as he stood between them, surveying his territory, slid involuntarily from one to the other and back again, as the world wallowed. The garden was conventionally conceived, by a carpenter rather than a gardener. Grass-green trellis-work, which should belong essentially to the background, here usurped undue prominence. Arches in the trellis-work, looking to the sea, gave bizarre views, now of the heavy hurried sky, now of the panting sea. Hanging drunkenly from the apex of each arch was a chained wicker basket, from which sea-sick canariensis waved weak protesting hands. A few creepers, lacking sufficient initiative for the task set before them, clawed incompetently at the lowest rungs of the trellis. A row of geraniums in pots shouted in loud brick-red at the farther and more sheltered end of the garden. It was impossible to tolerate the thought of Hilda associating with those geraniums. She was a very vulnerable and emotional soul, was Hilda. Deep orange is a colour beyond the comprehension of the vermilion and vulgar. A few sodden-looking deck-chairs occupied the gardener’s territory, and repelled advances. But on the farthest sat the suffragette. She was crying.

If you have ever crossed the Bay of Biscay while weakened by emotion, you will not ask why she was crying.

The gardener dropped his pose between the bay trees, and did something extraordinarily pretty, considering the man he was. He sat on the next deck-chair to hers, and patted her knee.

“My fault ...” he said. “My fault....”

Of course he did not really believe that it was his fault, but it was unusually gracious of him to tell the lie.

The suffragette turned her face from him. She had cried away all her vanity. Her hair was lamentable, her small plain eyes were smaller than ever, and her nose was the only pink thing in her face.

“I’m very morbid,” she said. “And that at any rate is not your fault.”

“Don’t let’s think either about you or me,” said the gardener, and it would have been wise had he meant it. “We have all our lives to do that in, and it is a pity to do it in the Bay. When one’s feeling weak, it’s easier to fight the world than to fight oneself.”

The suffragette was a grey thing, a snake-soul. To the eye of a grey soul there is something forbidding about the many colours of the universe, and you will always know snake-people by their defensive attitude. It is an immensely lonely thing to be a snake, to have that tortuous spirit, with no limbs for contact with the earth. And yet the compensation is most generous, for there are few joys like the joy of knowing yourself alone.

In cubes of blue, in curves of mauve,
They spotted up my firmament;
And with my sharp grey heart I strove
To stab the colours as they went.
“Lou-_la_ ...” they said—“Lou-_la_, a thing
At war without a following.”
“Lou-_la_ ...” they cried—and now cry I—
“At war without an enemy....”

“I can’t think how you dare to speak out your imagination,” said the suffragette. “Most people hide it like a sin.”

He was always willing to be the text of his own oratory.

“Imagination is my Genesis, and my Book of Revelations,” he answered. “There is nothing with more power. It is stronger than faith, for it can really move mountains. It has moved mountains, it has moved England from my path and left me this clear sea.”

The suffragette walled herself more securely in. “I have no imagination at all,” she lied, and then she added some truth: “I am very unhappy and lonely.”

“The other day ...” said the gardener, “you were happy to be independent and alone.”

“That’s why I’m now unhappy to be independent and alone. You can’t discover the heaven in a thing without also tripping over the hell. I like a black and white life.”

“Don’t think,” said the gardener suddenly, and almost turned the patting of her knee into a slap. “It’s a thing that should only be done in moderation. Some day you won’t be able to control your craving for thought, and then you’ll die of Delirium Tremens.”

“It’s not such a dangerous drug as some,” smiled the suffragette. “I’d rather have that craving than the drink craving, or the society craving, or the love craving.”

“Better to have nothing you can’t control.”

“You hypocrite! You can’t control your imagination.”

“You’re right,” said the gardener after a pause. He was a curiously honest opponent in argument. Besides, she had stopped crying, and there was no special reason for continuing the discussion. Also Mrs. Paul Rust at that moment appeared between the bay trees.

Mrs. Rust’s hair looked vicious in a garden, beside the geraniums, which were at least sincere in colour, however blatant.

“Is this private?” she asked. There was something in the shy look of the garden, and in the reproachful look of the gardener, that made the question natural.

“No,” said the gardener. “This is the ship’s garden.”

“Good,” said Mrs. Paul Rust.

She always said “good” to everything she had not heard before. To her the newest was of necessity the best. Originality was her ideal, and as unattainable as most ideals are. For she was not in the least original herself. She was doomed for ever to stand outside the door of her temple. And “good” was her tribute of recognition to those who had free passes into the temple. It owned that they had shown her something that she would never have thought of for herself. For nothing had ever sprung uniquely from her. Even in her son she could only claim half the copyright.

The suffragette tried to rearrange her looks, which certainly needed it. There are two sorts of women, the women before whom you feel you must be tidy and the women before whom such things don’t matter. Mrs. Rust all her life had belonged to the former, all her life what charm she had, had lain in the terror she inspired.

For the first time the gardener questioned himself as to his plan of attack. Hitherto he had pinned his faith to inspiration. He had left the matter in the hands of his private god, Chance. His methods were very simple, as well as bizarre. His mind was a tortuous path, but he followed it straightforwardly, and never looked back. To do him justice, however, I must say that he searched his repertoire for a suitable point of conversational contact with Mrs. Rust. Finding none, he dispensed with that luxury.

“I am the ship’s gardener,” he said, smiling at his intended victim.

Mrs. Rust was broad, and the deck-chair was narrow. It was some time before a compromise between these two facts could be arrived at, so the remark came upon her at a moment of some stress.

“Now, then, what was that you were saying?” she asked at last, in an unpromising voice.

The gardener, who was very literal in very small things, repeated his information, word for word, and inflection for inflection. “I am the ship’s gardener.”

Mrs. Rust grunted. She showed no tolerance for the thing that was not sensational. Nor had she any discrimination in her search for the novelty. Still, energy is something.

“But I am only ship’s gardener in theory,” persisted the gardener. “In practice I don’t even know where the watering-can is kept.”

“Then you are here under false pretences,” retorted Mrs. Rust a little more genially, for his last remark was not everybody’s remark.

“I am,” said the gardener, suddenly catching a fleeting perspective of the path to her good graces.

“Good,” said Mrs. Rust, and turned her little bright eyes upon him.

When she opened her eyes very wide, it meant that she was on the track of what she sought. When she shut them, as she often did, it meant that she did not understand what was said. But it gave the fortunate impression that she understood only too well. She was instinctively ingenious at hiding her own limitations.

It was the end of that interview, but a good beginning to the campaign.

The sea to some extent recovered its temper within that day. Towards the evening, when slate and silver clouds, with their backs to the _Caribbeania_, were racing to be the first over the horizon, the garden was invaded by passengers, racing to be the first over the boundary of sea-sickness. The silence of the unintroduced at first lay, like a pall, along the deck-chairs, but a mutual friend was quickly found in Mothersill, whose excellent invention was represented in every work-bag. The bright noise of women discussing suffering rippled along the garden. Abuse of the _Caribbeania’s_ stewardesses sprang from lip to lip. It was a pretty scene, and the gardener turned his back on it, and went below to water Hilda.

The gardener’s cabin, which was impertinently shared by a couple of inferior souls, was as square as a box, and furnished with nautical economy. The outlook from its porthole was as varied in character as it was limited in size. At one moment one felt oneself the drunken brain behind the round eye of a giant, staring into green and white obscurity; at another one blinked, as a mist of spray like shivered opal spun up over one’s universe; again one enjoyed an instantaneous glimpse of the flat chequered floor of the Atlantic; and at rare intervals the curtain of the sky slid over the porthole, and the setting sun dropped across the eye like a rocket.

Hilda sat wistfully on the recess of the porthole, leaning her forehead against the glass. She had a bud, chosen to match Courtesy’s hair. Just as Hilda’s stalk was necessary to hold her bud upright, so Courtesy herself was necessary to support the conflagration of her hair on the level of the onlooker’s eye. Both were necessities, and both were artistically negligible.

The gardener looked around the cabin. There is something depressing about other people’s clothes. There is something depressing in an incessant attack on one’s skull by inanimate objects. There is something depressing in a feeling of incurable drunkenness unrelieved by the guilty gaiety that usually accompanies such a condition. There is something depressing about ocean life below decks at any time. The gardener and Hilda sat in despair upon the hardhearted thing that sea-going optimists accept as a bed.

“Of course I don’t want to go home,” the gardener told himself.

Hilda, poor golden thing of the soil, had no doubts as to what she was suffering from. But the gardener wondered why despair had seized him. Until he remembered that the spirit of the sea walks on deck alone, and is never permitted by the stewards to enter the cabins. He climbed the companion-way, like a tired angel returning to heaven after a stuffy day on earth. He came upon Courtesy making a bad shot at the door that leads to the Promenade deck.

“Come and sit in the garden,” he said in a refreshed voice.

On deck, a few enterprising spirits were playing deck quoits against the elements. The general geniality whose rule only lasts for the first three days of a voyage was reigning supreme. Young men were making advances to young ladies with whom they would certainly quarrel in forty-eight hours’ time, and young ladies were mocking behind their hands at the young men they would be engaged to before land was reached. The priest, with an appearance of sugared condescension, was showering missiles upon the Bullboard as though they were blessings. (And they were misdirected.) The inevitable gentleman who has crossed the Atlantic thirty times and can play all known games with fatiguing perfection, was straining like a greyhound on the leash towards the quoits which mere amateurs were usurping. Captain Walters, who has a twin brother on every liner that ever sailed, was brightly collecting signatures for a petition to the Captain concerning a dance that very evening.

The gardener, with unusual cordiality, gave the reeling Courtesy his arm, as they threaded the maze of amusements towards the garden.

There was only one deck-chair unoccupied. It was labelled loudly as belonging to some one else, but Courtesy, always bold, even when physically weakest, advanced straight upon it. It was next to the suffragette’s. And the gardener became for the first time aware of a cat in a bag, and of the fact that the cat was about to emerge.

The suffragette was the sort of person next to whom empty chairs are always to be found. She had plenty to say, and what she said was often rather amusing, but it was always a little too much to the point, and the point was a little too sharp. She had a certain amount of small talk, but no tiny talk. She was not so much ignored as avoided. She had altogether missed youth, and its glorious power of being amused by what is not, correctly speaking, amusing. Her generation thought her “brainy,” it was very polite to her. Do you know the terrible sensation of being invariably the last to be chosen at Nuts in May? This was the suffragette’s atmosphere. My poor suffragette! It is so much more difficult to bear the snub than the insult. Insult is like a bludgeon thrown at the inflated balloon of our conceit. With the very blunt force of it we rebound. But the snub is a pin-prick, which lets our supporting pride out, and leaves us numb and nothing. I always feel the insult is founded on passion, while the snub springs from innate dislike.

“May I introduce Miss Courtesy Briggs ...” began the gardener, hoping for an inspiration before the end of the sentence. “Miss Courtesy Briggs....”

Both women looked expectant.

“Miss Courtesy Briggs ... my wife.”

“O Lor’!” said Courtesy, and then, with her healthy regard for conventions, remembered that this was not the proper retort to an introduction.

“When you left Penny Street, a week ago ...” she said to the gardener, as she shook the suffragette’s hand, “you didn’t tell me you were engaged.”

“I wasn’t,” said the gardener.

Courtesy dropped the subject, because it was hardly possible to continue it. She was not the girl to do what was conventionally impossible. Besides the bugle was sounding to show that dinner was within hailing distance. Courtesy was a slave of time. Her day was punctuated by the strokes of clocks. Her life was a thing of pigeon-holes, and if some of the pigeon-holes were empty they were all neatly labelled. She was the sort of person who systematically allowed ten minutes every morning for her prayers, and during that time, with the best intentions, mused upon her knees about the little things of yesterday. It is a bold woman that would squeeze Heaven into a pigeon-hole.

Theresa stopped in front of the gardener’s chair. Theresa’s surname had been blown away from her with the first Atlantic wind. So had the shining system in her yellow hair. So had most of her land conventions. She was not a thing of the ocean, but a thing of the ocean liner. She had immediately become Everybody’s Theresa. I could not say that everybody loved Theresa, but I know that everybody felt they ought to.

“Captain said no dance this evening,” said Theresa, in her telegraphic style. “Too much sea on. Doctor said broken legs. But I went and wheedled. Called the Captain Sweet William. Dance at nine.”

The dance was at nine. There were no limits to what Theresa could do—in her sphere.

A proud quartermaster was superintending the last touches of chalk upon the deck, when the gardener and the suffragette led the exodus from the dining-saloon.

In Paradise I hope I shall be allowed a furious walk around a windy rocking deck at frequent intervals throughout eternity. I know of nothing more poetic, and yet more brilliantly prosaic. At such moments you can feel the muscles of life trembling by reason of sheer strength.

The suffragette and the gardener walked so fast that the smoke from the suffragette’s cigarette lay out along the wind like the smoke behind a railway train. The strong swing of the sea threw their feet along. There was a moon in the sky and phosphorus in the sea.

But there are people who go down to the sea in ships, and yet confine their world to the promenade-deck. The heart of Theresa’s world, for instance, was the shining parallelogram, silvered with chalk, on the sheltered side of the deck. Theresa, looking extremely pretty, was superintending the over-filling of her already full programme.

“Mustn’t walk round like that,” she said in the polite tones that The Generation always used to the suffragette. “Must find partners, because the orchestra will soon begin to orch.”

“We are not dancing,” said the gardener. One always took for granted that the suffragette was not dancing.

“If you will dance,” said Theresa, “I will give you number eight.” She assumed with such confidence that this was an inducement, that somehow it became one.

“Thank you very much,” replied the gardener. “I’ll ask Courtesy Briggs for one, too.”

The suffragette sat down upon an isolated chair.

“May I have a dance?” asked the gardener of Courtesy. “I can’t dart or stagger, only revolve.”

“I was sea-sick only three hours ago,” retorted Courtesy with simplicity. “But I have a lot to talk to you about, so you can have number one. And we’ll begin it now.”

But the orchestra was still idling in the melancholy manner peculiar to orchestras. Why—by the way—is there something so unutterably sad in the expression of an orchestra about to play a jovial onestep?

“I do want to know about your marriage,” pursued Courtesy, whose curiosity was a daylight trait, like the rest of her characteristics. “When did it happen, and where did you meet her, and why did you have a wedding without me to help?”

“I met her—on the way to Paradise,” said the gardener, posing luxuriously as an enigma. “We got married on the way too. It was a no-flowers-by-request sort of wedding, otherwise we would have invited you.”

“But I can’t understand it,” said Courtesy. “Only a week ago you were snivelling over a broken boot-lace.”

The gardener’s pose had a fall. He might have expected that Courtesy would trip it up.

The violins, relieving their feelings by a preliminary concerted yell, settled down to a lamentation in ragtime.

The gardener danced rather well, as his mother had taught him to dance. Courtesy danced rather well, after the manner of The Generation. But the _Caribbeania_ danced better than either. She reduced them to planting their four feet wide and sliding up and down. The ship’s officers, with their lucky partners, leaning to the undulations of the deck, like willows bending to the wind, showed to immense advantage. They evidently knew every wave of the Atlantic by heart. But among the remaining dancers there was much unrest. Captain Walters, who was accustomed to be one of the principal ornaments of a more stationary ballroom, at once knocked his partner down and sat upon her. Theresa and a subaltern slid helplessly at the mercy of the elements into a forest of chaperons. The gardener and Courtesy leaned together and clung, with a tense look on their faces.

I dare not say what angle the deck had reached when the orchestra, with an unpremeditated lapse into a Futurist style of melody, broke loose, and glided in a heaving phalanx to join the turmoil. The piano, being lashed to its post, remained a triumphant survivor, calmly surveying the fallen estate of the less stable instruments.

“I am not enjoying myself a bit,” said Courtesy, as she disentangled a violin from her hair, and strove to dislodge the ’celloist from his position on her lap. The gardener disliked agreeing with any one, but he seemed by no means anxious to continue dancing. The orchestra also seemed a little loth to risk its dignity again at once, and even Theresa, though still plastered with a pink smile, was retiring on the arm of her subaltern to a twilit deck-chair.

In the distance, among her rows of empty chairs, the suffragette was smiling. She had watched the dancing with that half-ashamed sort of amusement which some of us feel when we see others making fools of themselves. And because she smiled, the priest came and sat beside her. He considered himself a temporary shepherd in charge of this maritime flock, and you could see in his eye the craving for souls to save. He had hardly noticed the suffragette until her smile caught his eye, but directly he did notice her he saw that she was not among the saved. He therefore approached her with the smile he reserved for the wicked.

“Very amusing, is it not?” he said.

Now the suffragette liked to see the young busy with their youth, but because she was a snake she could not bear to say so. Especially in answer to “Very amusing, is it not?”

So she said, “Is it?” and immediately cursed herself for the inhuman remark. Some people’s humanity takes this tardy form of hidden self-reproach after expression, and then it strikes inward, like measles.

“Well, that’s as it may be, yerce, yerce,” said the priest, who was so tolerant that he had no opinions of his own, and had hardly ever been guilty of contradiction. “That is your husband, is it not?” he added, as the gardener extricated himself from the knot of fallen dancers.

The suffragette actually hesitated, and then she said, “Yes,” and narrowly escaped adding, “More or less.”

“A most interesting young man,” said the priest, who, with the keen eye of the saver of souls, had noticed the hesitation.

“Naturally he interests me,” said the suffragette.

“He is so original,” continued the priest. “Even his occupation strikes one as original. A gardener on an ocean liner. The march of science, yerce, yerce. Most quaint. I suppose you also are interested in Nature. I always think the care of flowers is an eminently suitable occupation for ladies.”

“Perhaps,” she admitted. “But I am not a lady. I am a militant suffragette.”

The priest’s smile changed from the saintly to the roguish. “Have you any bombs or hatchets concealed about you?” he asked.

“I wish I had,” she replied. I fully admit that her manners were not her strong point. But the priest persisted. He noted the absence of any answering roguishness, and recorded the fact that she had no sense of humour. True to his plastic nature, however, he said, “Of course I am only too well aware of the justice of many of women’s demands, yerce, yerce. But you, my dear young lady, you are as yet on the threshold of life; it is written plain upon your face that you have not yet come into contact with the realities of life.”

“In that case it’s a misprint,” said the suffragette. “I am twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six,” repeated the priest. “I wonder why you are bitter—at twenty-six?”

“Because I have taken some trouble not to be sweet,” she said. “Because I was not born blind.”

As a matter of fact she had been born morally short-sighted. She had never seen the distant delight of the world at all.

The priest did not believe in anything approaching metaphor. He considered himself to be too manly. So he deflected the course of the conversation. “And your husband. What are his views on the Great Question?” (A slight relapse into roguishness on the last two words.)

“I have never asked him. I know he does not believe in concrete arguments from women. Though he approves of them from men.” She fingered a bruise on her arm.

“The arguments about women’s lack of physical force are the most incontrovertible ones your cause has to contend with,” said the priest. “Say what you will, physical force is the basis of life.”

“I think it is a confession of weakness.”

“There is something in what you say,” said the priest. He did not really think there was, for he had taken no steps to investigate. He was busy thinking that this was an odd wife who did not know her husband’s views on a question that obsessed her own thoughts.

The gardener had by now extracted Courtesy from the tangle, and was steering her towards a chair.

“Your husband appears to know that young lady with the auburn hair,” said the priest. “He knew her before he came on board, did he not?”

“Apparently he did,” said the suffragette. “I didn’t.”

She was providing him with so many clues that he was fairly skimming along on the track of his prey. When he left her he felt like a collector who has found a promising specimen.

“Altogether on the wrong lines,” he told himself, and added, “Poor lost lamb, how much she needs a helping hand”; not because he felt sorry for her, but because word-pity was the chief part of his stock-in-trade.

Next morning the _Caribbeania_ had flung the winds and waves behind her, and had settled down to a passionless career along a silver sea under a silver sky,—like man, slipping out of the turmoil of youth into the excellent anti-climax of middle life.