Chapter XII: Part IV: Paris (2)

Some weeks later there came a letter which brought the reality of things into his own life. It was a short and regretful letter from a firm of Easterham solicitors, announcing the death of his aunt.

They informed him of the fact in a few, brief, dignified words. There was an undercurrent of excuse, as if they felt themselves personally responsible for the sudden demise, and were anxious to apologise for any inconvenience that might be felt by Mr Quain. He gathered that his aunt had lived on an annuity, which expired with her; that a little financial trouble--loans to a brother of whom Humphrey had never heard--absorbed her furniture and all her possessions, with the exception of a watch and chain, which she had willed to Humphrey. The funeral was to take place two days hence--and that was all.

The letter moved him neither to tears nor sorrow. His aunt had been as remote from him in life as she was in death. An unbridgeable abyss had divided them. Never, during the years he had lived in Easterham, after his father's death, had they talked of the fundamental things that mattered to one another. He felt that he owed her nothing, least of all love, for she remained in his memory a masterful, powerful influence, trying to fetter him down to a narrow life, without comprehension of the broad, beautiful world that lay at her doors.

He could see her now in her dress of some mysterious black pattern, and always a shawl over her shoulder, her white hair plastered close to her heavy gold earrings, her lips thin and compressed, and her eyes hard-set, when she said, "You must Get On." She did not know, when she urged him to go forward, how far he meant to go. Her vision of Getting On was bounded by Easterham--what could she know and understand of all the bewildering phases he had undergone; the bitter heartaches, the misery of failure, and the glory of conquest in a world wider than a million Easterhams.

But, as he thought of her dead, a strange feeling came to him that now she could understand everything, that she knew all, and was even ready to reach out in sympathy to him. Her last pathetic message--a watch and chain! The rude knowledge that he had gained of the secret things of her life--how she lived, her loan to the brother; it seemed that some hidden door which they had both kept carefully locked had been flung open widely--that his eyes were desecrating her profoundest secrets.

It was not the first time that Death had stirred his life, but this was a sudden and unexpected snapping of a chain that bound him with his boyhood. Always he had been subconsciously aware of his aunt's presence in the scheme of things; there had been ingrained in him a certain fear of her, that he had never quite shaken off. Behind the individuality of his own life she had lurked, a shadowy figure, yet ready to emerge from the shadows at a moment of provocation, and become real and distinct and forbidding.

And now he could scarcely realize that she was dead--that he was absolutely alone in the world, though there might be, somewhere, cousins and kinspeople whom he had never seen.

She had not been demonstratively kind to him in life. The watch and chain she left was the first present he could ever remember receiving from her. But he felt that he could not absent himself from her funeral; it would be a sad and desolate business in the Easterham churchyard, with not many people there, yet he knew that he could not pass the day in Paris without thinking of her, lowered into the grave to the eternal loneliness of death.

He sent a telegram to London, and received a reply a few hours later, giving him permission to leave Paris, and the next day he travelled to England.

The collection of papers and magazines rested unread in his lap. He looked from the window on the succession of pictures that flashed and disappeared--a blue-bloused labourer at work in the fields, or a waggoner toiling along a country lane; children shouting by the hedgerows, and the signal-women who sat by their little huts on the railway as the train sped by. He could not read; sometimes, with a sigh, he sought a paper (France had just caught the popular magazine habit from England), turned the pages restlessly, and, finally, leaning on the arm-rest, stared out of the window....

The shuttle of his mind went to and fro, twining together the disconnected threads of his thoughts into a pattern of memories--memories of his youth and his work and his aunt interwoven with the strong, dominating thought of Elizabeth....

His thoughts turned continually to Elizabeth; sometimes they spun away to something else, but always they were led back through a series of memories to that night when he had kissed her for the first time.

It was odd how this absence from her seemed to have changed her in his mind. There had been an undercurrent of disappointment in their relations, of late. Her letters had been strangely sterile and unsatisfying. She had written an evasive reply, after a delay, an answer to his last letter begging her to come to him....

Yet he was eager to see her and to kiss her. He felt that she was all that he had left to him in the world: that she and his work were all that mattered....

A garrulous Frenchman lured him into conversation during dinner; he was glad, for it gave him relief from the monotonous burden of his thoughts ... and on the boat he dozed in the sunshine of a smooth crossing.

Once in England again, the delight of an exile returning to his home provided new sensations. The porters were deferentially solicitous for his comfort; the Customs officers behaved with innate politeness, and the little squat train, with its separate compartments, brought a glow of happiness to him. He saw England as a stranger might see it for the first time: he observed the discipline and order of the railway station that came not from oppression but from high organization and planning. There were no mistakes made; the boy brought his tea-basket and did not overcharge him; the porter accepted sixpence and touched his hat, not obsequiously, but in acknowledgment, without a suggestion of haggling for more. It seemed incredible that he should find this perfection, where a year ago he could not see it....

There were Frenchmen in the carriage, and he sat with the conscious pride of an Englishman in his own country. The train moved out, giving a glimpse of the harbour and the sea breaking in white lines over the sloping beach; and then through a tunnel that emerged on fields. The first thing he noticed was the vivid green of the country, and the way it was cut up and divided into squares and oblongs: the small clumps of low-set trees, the fat cattle, and the peace brooding over the land. And then he noticed the little houses, low-storied and thatched, with a feather of blue smoke waving from their chimneys. The whole journey was a series of new impressions that elated him. Stations flashed and left behind a blurred memory of advertisements, and names that breathed of yeoman England: Ashford--Paddock Wood--Sevenoaks--Knockholt; and then the advertisement-boards stood out of the green fields, blatantly insisting on lung tonics and pills, marking off mile after mile that brought him nearer to London. The houses closed in on the railway line; the train ran now through larger stations of red brick, passing the peopled platforms with an echoing roar; other crowded trains passed them, going slowly to the suburbs they had left behind. A new note seemed to come into the journey as the evening descended, and the world outside was populous with lights.

The memory of the clean, sweet country, with its toy houses, was wiped away by a swift blot of darkness as the train flashed through New Cross, and out into the broad network of rails with which London begins.

He saw the factories and the sidings and the busy traffic of trains overtaking one another, running parallel for a space, and then swaying apart as one branched off to the south-eastern suburbs. He saw the smoke hanging in thick clouds on the far horizon; masts and rigging made spidery silhouettes against the sky; and the tall, factory chimneys thrust out their monstrous tongues of livid fire.

The city was before him right and left, overgrown and tremendous. They ran level with crooked chimney-pots and the scarred roofs of endless rows of houses. The upper windows were yellow with light, and he caught glimpses of women before mirrors and men in their shirt-sleeves. Dark masses of clouds rolled before the moon. Something wet splashed on his cheek.

A silent Englishman sitting next to him, said moodily: "Raining as usual. I've never once come home without it raining." He laughed as though it were a bitter joke.

Fantastic reflections wriggled on the wet, shining approach to London Bridge--a swift vision of bus-drivers, with oilcloth capes glinting in the rain, hurrying crowds, and something altogether new--a motor-omnibus.

Then the train, with a dignified, steady movement, swung slowly across Hungerford Bridge, and he saw the strong, resolute river, black and broad, flowing to the bridges, within the jewelled girdle of the Embankment.

The sense of England's greatness came to him, as the landmarks of London were set in a semicircle before him: the tall dome of St Paul's, the spires of churches, the turrets of great hotels, grey Government offices, culminating in the vague majesty of the Houses of Parliament.

How different the streets were from Paris! There was a force and an energy that seemed to be driving everything perpetually forward. This business of getting to dinner--it was about half-past seven--was a terribly earnest and crowded affair. The throng of motor-cars and omnibuses jammed and flocked together in the Strand, held in leash by a policeman's uplifted hand, and when it was released, it crawled sluggishly forward. Here and there, rare sight for Humphrey, one of the new motor-omnibuses lumbered forward heavily, threatening instant annihilation of everything. There was no chatter of voices in the crowd--no gesticulation--the people walked silently and hurriedly with a set concentration of purpose.

He went to a hotel in the Adelphi to leave his bag. Then he came out, pausing for a moment irresolutely in the crowd. It was too late, as he had foreseen, to go to Elizabeth. He had made up his mind to see her on his return from Easterham.

An omnibus halted by him: he boarded it, and as he passed the Griffin, he breathed deeply like a monarch entering his own domain, for the scent of the Street was in his nostrils and the old, well-known vision of the lit windows passed before him, and a newsboy ran along shouting a late edition. This was the only Street in the world, he felt, that he loved; its people were his people, and its life was his life.

He turned into the Pen Club, to friendship, good-fellowship and welcome. And all the old friends were there--Larkin, retelling old stories, Chander spinning merry yarns, and Vernham making melancholy epigrams. Willoughby, he learnt, was away on a mystery in the north, and Jamieson was at a first night.

"By the way," said Larkin, "heard about Tommy Pride?"

"No. What's happened?"

"He's left _The Day_."

"Sacked?" asked Humphrey.

Larkin nodded. "Rather rough on poor old Tommy. Married, isn't he?"

A picture of his first visit to the home of the Prides leapt before Humphrey's eyes, and the comfort, the cheeriness, that hid all the hard work of the week. The news hurt him queerly.

"What's he doing?" he asked.

"Well, not much. Tommy's not a youngster, you know. I suppose the Newspaper Press Fund will tide him over a bit."

Larkin dropped the subject, to listen to a story from Vernham. After all, it was the most casual thing in the happenings of Fleet Street to them: it might happen to them any day; it was bound to happen to them one day. And there would always be young men ready to take their places. Nobody was to blame; it was just one of the chances of the inexorable system which made their work a gamble, where men hazarded their wits and their lives, and lost or won in the game.

Humphrey knew more than they did what it meant for Tommy Pride. He heard as a mocking echo now, the old cry, "Two pounds a week and a cottage in the country."...

"Have a drink," Larkin said.

He became suddenly out of tune with the place. His perception of Fleet Street altered. He saw the relentless cruelty of it, the implacable demand for sacrifice that it always made. He visioned it as a giant striding discordantly through the lives of men, crushing them with a strength as mighty as its own machines that roared in the night ... a clumsy and senseless giant, that towered above them, against whom all struggles were pitiful ... futile.

VI

"One lump or two?" asked Elizabeth, holding the sugar-tongs poised over his cup of tea.

"One, please," said Humphrey.

"Milk or cream?"

"Milk."

She handed him the cup in silence. There was something in the frank, questioning look in her blue eyes that made him avert his gaze. Their meeting had not been at all as he had imagined it. He did not spring towards her, boyishly, and take her in his arms and kiss her. He had approached her humbly and timidly when she stood before him, in all her white purity and beauty, and their lips had met in a brief kiss of greeting. Her manner had been curiously formal and restrained, empty of all outward display of emotion.

And now they sat at tea in her room with the conversation lagging between them. As he looked round at the room with its chintzes and rose-bowls, its old restfulness reasserted itself. But to Humphrey it seemed now more than restful--it seemed stagnant and out of the world.... Somewhere, in Paris, there were music and laughter, but here, in this quiet backwater of London, one's vision became narrow, and life seemed a monotonous repetition of days. He felt moody, depressed; a sense of coming disaster hung over his mind, like a shadow. Her quick sympathy perceived his gloom.

"You ought not to have gone," she said, softly.

"You mean to the funeral?"

"Yes; you are too susceptible ... too easily influenced by surroundings. There was no need to come all this way to make yourself miserable."

"I don't know why I went," he said. "We never had much in common, my aunt and I, but somehow ... I don't know ... I couldn't bear the thought of not being present at her funeral. I had a silly sort of idea that she would know if I were not there."

"You are too susceptible," she repeated. "Sometimes I wish you were stronger. You are too much afraid of what people will think of you. This death has meant nothing at all to you, but you are ashamed to say so."

"It has meant something to me," he said. "I don't mean that I felt a wrench, as if some one whom I loved very dearly had gone ... I felt that when my father died ... but her death has changed me somehow--here--" and he tapped his breast, "I feel older. I feel as if I had stood over the grave and seen the burial of my youth."

"It has made you gloomy," Elizabeth said. "I think you would have been truer to yourself if you had remained in Paris."

He reflected for a few moments, drinking his tea. He felt sombre enough in his black clothes and black tie--dreary concessions to conventionality.

"Ah, but I wanted to see you, Elizabeth," he said earnestly. "It's terribly lonely without you."

She leaned forward and laid her hand lightly on his, with a soft, caressing touch. "It's good of you to say that," she said, and then, with a frank smile, "tell me, Humphrey, do you really miss me very much?"

"I do," he said; and he began talking of himself and all that he did in Paris. Elizabeth listened with an amused smile playing about her lips. He told her of his work and his play, growing enthusiastic over Paris, speaking with all the self-centredness of the egotist.

"It seems very pleasant," she said. "You are to be envied, I think. You ought to be very happy: doing everything that you want to do; occupying a good position in journalism."

He purred mentally under her praise. Already he felt better; her presence stimulated him; but he could not see, nor understand, the true Elizabeth, for the mists of vanity, ambition and selfishness clouded his vision at that moment. If only he had forgotten himself ... if only he had asked her one question about herself and _her_ work, or shown the smallest interest in anything outside his own career, he might have risen to great heights of happiness.

This was the second in which everything hung in the balance. He saw Elizabeth lean her chin in the palm of her hand and contemplate reflectively the distance beyond him. He marked the beauty of her lower arm, bare to the rounded charm of the elbow, as it rested on the curve of the arm-chair. So, he thought, would she sit in Paris, and grace his life.

And then, suddenly, her face became grave, and she said, abruptly:

"Humphrey, I want to talk to you very seriously. I want to know whether you will give up journalism."

He remembered her hint of this far back in the months when she had first allowed him to tell her of his love. He had thought the danger was past, but now she came to him, with a deliberate, frontal attack on the very stronghold of his existence.

"Give up journalism!" he echoed. "What for?"

All the weapons of her sex were at her command. She might have said, "For me"; she might have smiled and enticed and cajoled. But she brushed these weapons aside disdainfully. Hers was the earnest business of putting Humphrey to the test.

"Because I think you and I will never be happy together if you do not. Because, if I marry you (he noticed she did not say, 'When I marry you'), I should not want your work to occupy a larger place in our lives than myself. Because I hate your work, and I think you can do better things. Those are my reasons."

He stood up and walked to the window, looking out on the trees that made an avenue of the quiet road. A man with a green baize covered tray on his head came round the corner, swinging a bell up and down.

"Well?" she said.

"Oh but look here, Elizabeth," he began, "you spring something like this on me suddenly, and expect me to answer at once...."

"Oh, no! you can have time to think it over. You've had nearly a year, you know."

"How do you make that out?"

"Have you forgotten? When you were going to Paris--before you were going to Paris even--I tried to show you that I wanted you to give up the work. I remember you promised things. You said you'd write books, or do essays for the weeklies...."

"But, dear, you can't make a living writing books--unless you fluke, or unless you're a genius; as for essays for the weeklies, frankly, I don't believe I can do them--I'm not brilliant enough."

"Yes, you are," Elizabeth urged. (Fatal mistake to make, it smoothed all his vanity the right way.) "I believe in you, Humphrey. If I didn't believe in you, I wouldn't be talking as I am now. And, besides, I've told you before, I have enough for us both."

Though she was offering him freedom; though, if he wished, he could accept her offer and be rid for ever from the torments of Fleet Street, he could not leave its joys.

"You don't understand," he said. "You couldn't expect me to live on you...."

"Why not? I should be prepared to live on you, if I were poor."

"That's different. You're a woman."

She laughed. "We won't go into the side-issues of arguments over ethics," she said. "You need not live on me. You told me that you had saved four hundred pounds. If we lived simply that would keep us both for a start, and you could be adding to your income by writing. Humphrey, don't you see I'm trying to rescue you. I want you to do something fine and noble; I want you to go forward."

"Well, I've gone forward," he said. "I've made myself in the Street. You don't know what you ask when you want me to give it up. Nobody can understand it unless he's been in the game. I can't think what it is--it isn't vanity, because all that we write is unsigned; it's sheer love of the work that drives us on."

"But you hate it, too."

"We hate it as fiercely as we love it..." he said, simply. "One day we say to ourselves, 'We will give it up.' That's what I say to you, now. I'm going to give it up, one day."

"That you have also promised before," she said, in a gentle voice. "Let us talk it over between ourselves. Why shouldn't you leave now?"

He was cornered: he stood at bay, facing her beauty, but behind it and above it he saw all the struggles and endeavour and splendid triumph that awaited him in the restless years to come, when each day would be a battle-field, and any might bring him defeat or conquest. He saw the world opening before him, and far-off cities close at hand; he saw himself wandering through the years, touching the lives of men; a privileged person, always behind the scenes of life, with a hint of power perhaps.... And, in exchange, she offered him peace and rest, both of which corroded the soul eager for war; peace and rest and love, that would be so beautiful until the years made them familiar and wearisome, until he would be forced to go out again into the thick of the battle ... and by that time his armour would be rusty, and the years of peace would have blunted his sword.

"Elizabeth," he said slowly, "I can't live in a room, now. I can't always look out of the window on the same scene. I must keep moving. Each day must bring me a fresh scene, a fresh experience. I have grown so used to change and movement that a week without it makes life dull and unbearable. I'm not fit for anything else but the work I do. I'm born to do that and nothing else. Everything in life now I see from the point of view of 'copy.'" He laughed, but there was a sob in his laughter at his shameful confession. "Why, even at the funeral, as I stood over the grave, and watched them lower the coffin, I felt that I could write a splendid column about it, and instead of feeling the solemnity of it all, I found that I was watching the white surplices against the green trees, and looking at the faces of the people, and painting a picture in my mind...."

He paused. Her eyes were downcast, and her fingers played absently with the loops of the chain that hung from her neck.

"It's a habit," he went on. "It's grown on me, so that I see life and its emotions as a series of things to be written about. Why shouldn't I have thought as I did at the funeral? I have been taught to do it, when I go to the funerals of great men that I have to report. I'm a journalist ... a reporter. I've seen men eat their hearts out in a year, after they've left the Street light-heartedly. The reaction comes suddenly. Things are happening all around them, and they're out of it. And they creep back, and try to get a job again. That's what Kenneth himself will do one day.... I don't want to be one of those, Elizabeth. I want to go through with it, right through to the failure at the end of all, and when the failure comes, I'll build up again."

She spread out her hands helplessly. "I see..." she said, "I see...." That was all for a moment, and then, again: "If you were doing something worthy, I could understand; if you were producing art, I could understand, too ... but this"--a copy of _The Day_ was on the table, and she held it in her hand--"this is unworthy. This is all you produce with your infinite labour."

"It's not unworthy ... we have our ideals."

She laughed, and her laugh stung him.

"Humphrey, you have the ha'penny mind that does not see beyond its own nose. You just live for the day itself. Oh!" she cried, "if you knew how I hate your Ferrol, and all that he stands for: all the ignoble things in life, painting everything with the commercial taint of worldly success. There was a beautiful picture bought the other day for the National Gallery. I see it is to be known as the '£60,000 picture.' That's the spirit behind Ferrol ... we might be crying for great reforms--I have not spoken of my work in all this--we might be lifted up with the power at his command...."

When she spoke of Ferrol, Humphrey remembered all that had been done for him. What could she know of Ferrol's personality, of his splendid force, of the thousand generous acts that remained hidden, while only the things were remembered that blackened his reputation. His admiration for Ferrol was immeasurable. He saw in the indomitable energy of the man something tangible and positive among all the negative virtues of life. Ferrol stood for achievement that crowned the indefatigable years. And with it all, this superman could descend from his loftiness and be human and weave the spell of his humanity about the lives of others.

"You don't understand Ferrol," he said. "Very few people do. But he has been kind to me ... there's something in Ferrol that draws me to him. One day you will see he will do all that you expect him to do, but the time is not yet ripe for that. And you speak as if Ferrol were the only man in England who owned a newspaper. What of the others--have any of them done as much good as he has done?"

"Whatever good he has done, is done from motives of gain."

"I do not look at motives," he retorted. "I look only at the effects of the action. If a bad deed is done from good motives, it does not make the deed anything but bad."

They were standing face to face now.

"Come, Elizabeth," he said, moving towards her. "You do not know how I love you, and if you loved me, you would not ask me to give up my work."

Her face was white and beautiful, and her hand went up to her heart with a womanly gesture. She spoke in a low, deliberate voice.

"In all that we have said, there has never been a word of what giving up _my_ work may mean to me. Yet you would have me abandon it, and forsake all the good we have tried to build up...."

"You would have to give it up, one day, Elizabeth. Besides, if you like," he said, desperately, "I'll go to Ferrol and ask him to remove me from Paris back to London. I'll do anything to meet you, I only want to make you happy."

"Oh, don't keep on saying that sort of thing," she said; "it irritates me. Those hollow repetitions of set phrases--just because they're the right thing to say."

"I think you are unreasonable," he began. "I have worked all these years for success, and now, just when I've won it, you wish me to throw everything away."

"I wish you to do nothing against your will. I thought you would have seen my point of view. I thought you would be ready to share in my work, which is the work of humanity.... I am sorry. You see, we clash. We shall be better alone."

He stared at her with dull incomprehension. "We clash. We shall be better alone." The words repeated themselves over and over again in his brain. And his mind suddenly went back to a little room in the Strand and the tears of Lilian....

"You mean that," he said, slowly. "You mean that."

She nodded. "Don't you see how impossible it would be?"

"You never loved me," he flung forth as a challenge. "You could have helped me and understood me.... I am not so bad as you think I am."

A sad smile answered him. "I understand you so well, Humphrey, that I know I shall never be able to help you."

He looked about him in weak hesitation. "I suppose I must begin again," he said.

"You ... you ... all the time it is you," she cried, passionately. "And what about myself; must not I begin over again, too?"

"I'm sorry," he said, feeling the inadequacy of his words. He longed intensely to be away from her now, to be out in the open street where he could think. This room was stifling. He went through the horrid methodical business of parting as if it were all a dream. He remembered glancing at the clock in a casual way, and saying, "I'd better be going"; he remembered the ludicrous search for one glove, he murmuring that it didn't really matter, and she insisting on a search with aching minuteness....

He never saw her again; her life had impinged on his, and left its impression, as many others had done. He did not regret her as he had regretted Lilian, for she had outraged his self-respect, and left him abashed and humbled.

VII

He went back to Paris, and a week later the trouble broke out in Narbonne.

At first it did not seem very serious. One understood vaguely that the wine-growers were in revolt. The Paris buyers had been adulterating the vintages--making one cask into a dozen--so that they came to a year when there was such a glut of this adulterated wine on the market, that the wine-growers of the South were left with wine to spill in the gutters, and wine to give to the pigs--but without bread to give to their children.

Then there arose one of those men who flame into history for a few vivid moments. A leader of men, whose words were sparks dropped among straw; who had but to say "Kill," and they would kill, until he bade them stop.

For a time, in a way essentially peculiar to France, the ludicrous prevailed. Municipalities resigned, mayors and all, and there was no giving nor taking in marriage, no registration of births or deaths. Odd stories of the despair of love--sick peasantry at postponed weddings--filled the papers; the _Assiette au Beurre_ published a special number satirizing the situation. It was a good joke in Paris--but at Perpignan and Montpellier twenty thousand _vignerons_ were talking of bloody revolution, and marching with blue and silver banners, and calling on the Government to put a tax on sugar, so as to make adulteration so costly that it should be profitless....

And Humphrey in the Paris office distilled a column a day from the forty columns that the French Special Correspondents sent to their papers, while Dagneau, up at the Ministry of the Interior, garnered facts and official _communiqués_.

Work was his salvation and his solace. Everything of the past was wiped away from his mind when Humphrey worked. The personal things affecting his own private life became trivial beside the urgent importance of keeping _The Day_ well-informed. And thus habit had fortified his power of resistance to external matters that might have disturbed a mind less trained to make itself subservient to the larger issue of duty. In a week--a brief week--he had gone through every phase of sorrow, anger, self-pity at his rejection. He thought of writing--indeed, he went so far one night as to compose a letter imploring Elizabeth for forgiveness, promising everything she wished ... but, when it was written, he tore it into little pieces. A mood of futile oaths followed. He felt that he had been balked of her by trickery. It led to violent hatred of her cold austerity, her icy splendour. He put away the thought of her from him. After all, what did it matter? They would never have been happy together. Always she was above him, distant and unattainable ... yet those fine moments, when she had stooped down and lifted him up, when gold and brilliance took the place of the dross in his mind! How she filled him with dreams of overwhelming possibilities, of ennobling achievements.... Below the crust of the selfishness and vanity of his life, there was a rich vein of good and strong desire ready to be worked, if she had only known. There were moments when his whole soul ached with an intense longing to be exalted and free from the impoverished squalor of its surroundings. He knew it, and the thought of it made him unjust to Elizabeth. She had not known of those constant conflicts which endured over years that seemed everlasting,--a guerrilla warfare with conscience.

They had not mattered. She had given his soul back to him, to do as he liked with it; she had forsaken him before he was strong enough to stand alone....

The telephone bell rang. He adjusted the metal band over his head. "Londres," said the voice of the operator. His ears heard nothing but the voice of _The Day_ calling to him; his eyes saw nothing but the sheets of writing at his side, and everything else faded from his mind but the news of the night....

* * * * *

He put the receiver down, and almost immediately the telephone bell rang, and he heard a voice telling him that it was Charnac.... "Where have you been?" asked Charnac. "One has missed you." Humphrey explained his absence.

"Can you come to supper to-night," Charnac called. "Your little Desirée will be there." His voice came out of the depths of space, calling Humphrey to the gaiety of life. "Your little Desirée...." It brought to him, vividly, her thin, supple figure; those strange blue eyes that looked widely from beneath the pale eyebrows; and the lips of cherry-red. The song that she had sung that night had been lilting ever since in his mind:

"... Je perds la tête
'Suis comme une bête."

He saw her in all her alluring languor, secret, and mysterious. And it was the eternal mystery in her that attracted him. For a few moments he hesitated, indeterminately, at the telephone. "_Eh bien, mon vieux_," called Charnac's voice. "Will you come? 11.30 at the Chariot d'Or."

"I'll come," said Humphrey.

It was ten-thirty. Ripples of unrest stirred his mind; he felt deeply agitated. He knew that he was on the brink of a new and complex development in his life; and the future stretched before him, vague and impenetrable, full of a promise of mournful and fierce delights, of happiness inconceivable, and sorrow inexperienced. No scruples retarded him now, and the voice of conscience was stilled, but despite all this, an indefinable mist of melancholy clouded his soul.

Dagneau came briskly into the office. Humphrey ceased brooding, and swung round in his chair.

"Lamb," he said, "I'm going out to supper to-night."

"Oh! la! la!" Dagneau laughed. "Who's the lucky lady?"

"Not for the likes of little lambs that have to stay in the office and keep the fort."

Dagneau made a grimace. "I suppose it isn't safe for both of us to leave," he said.

"No fear," Humphrey replied. "There's no knowing what these fellows mayn't be up to in the South. Anyhow, if anything urgent happens, come along to me. I shall be in the Chariot d'Or until one o'clock."

Dagneau was a good fellow, thought Humphrey, as his cab climbed the hill to Montmartre. It was jolly decent of him not to mind. He forgot the office now, and thought only of the night's adventuring. There was fully a half-hour to spare, so he idled it away on the terrace of a café sipping at a liqueur. Every variety of street hawker came to persuade sous from him: they had plaster figures for sale, or wanted to cut his silhouette in black paper, or draw a portrait of him in pastels, or sell him ballads and questionable books, bound in pink, pictorial covers. The toy of the moment, frankly indecent, yet offered with a childlike innocence that made it impossible for one to be disgusted with the vendors, was thrust before him fifty times. They showed him how it worked, and when he refused, they brought from inner pockets picture-postcards which they tried to show him covertly, until he drove them away with the _argot_ he had learned from Dagneau.

At the time appointed a cab climbed the steep Rue Pigalle, and drew up before the Chariot d'Or. Charnac sat in the middle comfortably squeezed in between Margot and Desirée. They waved a cheery greeting as they saw Humphrey, and he helped them down. Without any question he linked his arm in Desirée's, and led her up the brilliant scarlet staircase to the supper-room. Her meek acceptance of him, and the touch of her, gave him a strong sense of possession. This woman acknowledged his right of mastery over her, without a word being spoken, without any pleading, or the bitter pain of uncertainty. From that moment he felt she was his completely and unquestionably. There was no need to woo her and win her; she was to be taken, and she would yield herself up, as women were taken and women yielded themselves up in the earliest days of the earth.

They went to their table. He had no eyes for anyone but Desirée. She threw off her wrap, with a gesture of her shoulders, and as it tumbled from them, they shone white and shapely, and a rose was crushed to her bosom, making a splash of scarlet on her white bodice. She laughed and looked at him frankly, as if there were to be no secrets between them, and once, while the supper was being ordered, her thin hand rested in his, and he was stirred to wild, delicious emotion. Yes, she was all as he had imagined her; she had not changed at all, and her yellow hair and pale eyebrows and thin face culminating in her pointed chin, reminded him of an Aubrey Beardsley picture--those slanting eyes, and red lips eternally shaped for a kiss, and the slender throat that rippled below the white surface of its skin when she spoke, the thin bare arms, and her hands, balanced on delicate wrists--those hands with their long dainty fingers and exquisite finger-tips. The sight of her inflamed him.

Their conversation was commonplace. Why, she wanted to know, did he run away the last time they met. He lied to her, and pleaded a headache.

"And you won't run off this time?" she asked, with a childish note of appeal in her voice.

He sought her hand and held it in his own. She drew it away with a little grimace. "You're hurting me," she said.

Occasionally Margot cut into their conversation. She lacked the beauty of her sister, her figure was stouter, and her face was not well made-up. She treated Charnac with good-natured tolerance.

During the supper--again the famous mussels--Desirée asked Humphrey many questions about himself--they were not questions which penetrated deeply into his private life, indeed, she showed no desire to pry into his surroundings. She wanted to know his tastes, and his likes and dislikes, and when, sometimes, he said anything that showed that they had something in common, she laughed delightedly at the discovery.

Her eyes held a wonderful knowledge in them, but the boldness of their gaze did not suggest immodesty to him. Her eyes seemed to say: "There are certain things in life we never talk about. But I understand them all, and I know that you know I understand." It made him feel that there was nothing artificial about their friendship; in one bound they had attained perfect understanding, and it was miraculous to him.

It was miraculous to him to sit there, with the music surging in his veins, and to look upon this delicately-wrought creature, beautiful, perfect in body, knowing that when he wished he could take her in his arms, and she would give herself to him without any hesitation. She was utterly strange to him, and yet, by this miracle, their lives were already commingled in swift intimacy. He thought of the other two women who had influenced his life: though he had kissed them, and spent long hours with them, they seemed now irrevocably distant from him, and never had he penetrated to the stratum of full comprehension that lay below the surface of misunderstandings....

He looked back on the years that were past, and he could only see himself struggling and pleading and breaking his heart to win that which was won now without any contest at all. Was it love or passion that he wanted from them. Ah! if we would only be frank with ourselves, and admit that there is no love without passion, there is no passion without love: that by separating passion from love, it has become a degraded and hidden thing.

And Humphrey wanted love: the desire for love, love inseparable from passion, had made a turbulent underflow beneath the stream of his life. Twice he had tried to grasp love, twice it had eluded him. He had been despoiled by circumstance ... cheated by his own conscience.

It was miraculous to him now, that he should be able to wrest his prize from life with so little struggle after all. He looked at Desirée, and her eyes smiled--how incredibly near they seemed to one another, how the unattainable drew close to him and smiled....

He became aware of his name spoken aloud, and he looked up and saw a waiter looking round the room, with Dagneau at his side. Dagneau's face was strained and anxious. He seemed out of breath. Suddenly he caught sight of Humphrey, and hurried towards him. He raised his hat to the group. "Pardon, mad'm'selle," he said to Desirée, as he put a telegram before Humphrey.

The blue slips pasted on the paper danced before his eyes.

"_Qu'est que c'est?_" Margot asked, fussily.

"Ferrol wants you to go to Narbonne," Dagneau said. "There's been shooting there.... I looked up the trains. You can catch the one o'clock from the Gare d'Orsay if you hurry."

Humphrey stared stupidly at the telegram, and Desirée touched him with her hand.

"_C'est quelque chose de grave?_" she asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. "Narbonne," he said to Charnac, laconically.

"_Oh! nom d'un nom_--to-night?" asked Charnac. "_C'est embêtant, ça._"

And, suddenly, Humphrey grew peaceful again, and all the turbulence of his thoughts calmed down and flowed towards the one desire that he had made paramount in his life--the desire of the journalist for news, the longing of the historian for history.

Fleet Street called to him from those blue strips with their printed message. "Go Narbonne immediately cover riots," and the signature that symbolized Fleet Street--"Ferrol"--held in it all the power that had made him a puppet of Fate.

But Narbonne.... From all parts of Europe the Special Correspondents would be converging on the town. There would be great doings to describe, new interests to make him forget rapidly.

Dagneau helped him on with his coat. "Send on my bag," he said, glancing at his watch. "I'm awfully sorry," he added to Charnac. "You'll understand. Explain to them, won't you? Dagneau, stop and finish my supper."

He forgot everything else ... what else mattered?

"_Dis donc_," Desirée said, "are you going again?" How surprisingly unimportant she seemed at this moment. Her expression was half-suppliant, half-petulant. "If you go," she said distinctly, "I will never speak to you again--never."

As if she could hold him back when others had failed! But he was moved to show her tenderness. A momentary pang of regret shot across him because he had to leave her. "Don't be cross," he whispered. "I shall be back in three days."

She turned her head away impetuously. And he realized that there never had been, nor ever could be, anything in common between them.

* * * * *

Once, when he was dozing in the train speeding southwards to Bordeaux, he woke up and laughed as he remembered the ludicrous amazement on the face of Desirée as he left her suddenly and gladly to take up his work.

VIII

The matters that occupied his mind belonged only to his work. In the early morning at Bordeaux, when he had to change, he bought a budget of morning papers, and read them in the refreshment-room over his roll and coffee. The news was alarming enough: people were fleeing from Narbonne and the neighbouring towns. Seven had been shot in a riot on the previous night; the soldiery was in charge of the town, and martial law had been proclaimed.

The French journalists excelled themselves in superlatives ... their stories were vain accounts of personal emotions and experiences, for it is the fashion with them to thrust their personality in front of the news.

Thereafter, on the journey to Narbonne, Humphrey wondered how he was going to get his telegrams out of the town, if it were besieged. He bought a map of the district and studied it: it might be necessary to send a courier to Perpignan, or back to Bordeaux, or, if things were very bad indeed, there were carrier pigeons; the Spanish frontier at Port Bou was not very far away also ... perhaps, he could find some one to whom to telephone. It was his business to get any news out of Narbonne, and there would be no excuse for failure.

The people in his carriage were talking of the shooting.

"I shouldn't like to be going there," one said.

"It will be worse to-night," another remarked. "Those Southerners lose their heads so quickly."

It seemed odd to Humphrey that while they were talking of it in this detached way, he alone, probably, out of the whole train-load, was about to plunge into the actualities of revolution of his own free will. For the next few days he would be living with the grievances of the wine-growers, learning things that were unknown to him now. He would have to record and describe all that happened. His was the power to create sympathy in English households for the wrongs of these people starving in the midst of their fertile vineyards.

The brakes jarred the carriages of the train. Heads were put out of the window. On the up-line a goods train carrying flour had met with an accident. The engine lay grotesquely on one side, powdered with white flour, and the vans looked as if they had been out in a snow-storm. The melancholy sight of the shattered train slid past, as their own train jolted slowly on its journey.

"What is it--have they wrecked the train?" some one asked.

"No," another said, pointing to a paragraph in the paper, "it was an accident. The engine ran off the metals last night. It's in the _Depêche de Toulouse_."

They all chattered among themselves. It was a trivial affair, then--one had thought for a moment that those sacred Narbonnais...!

But there was something sinister in that wrecked train with its broken vans and its engine covered in a cloud of white. It seemed to presage disaster, as it lay there outside the door of the town.

The train stopped. "Narbonne" cried the porters. Humphrey descended as though it was the commonest thing in his life to enter garrisoned cities. The platform was full of soldiers, some standing with fixed bayonets, others sleeping on straw beside their stacked arms. Officers strolled up and down to the clank of their swords; outside, through the door of the station, itself guarded by an infantryman in a blue coat, with its skirts tucked back, he caught a glimpse of horses tethered to the railings.

Nobody stopped him but the ticket-collector: in the midst of all this outward display of militarism, the business of the station went on as usual. Trains steamed in and departed; expresses pounded through on their way to Paris; porters were busy with parcels. The hotel buses were drawn up outside, just as if nothing in the world had happened to disturb the life of the town. He chose the Hotel Dorade omnibus, and away they went.

The streets were lined with soldiers bivouacking on the pavements. The avenue from the station was a long line of stacked rifles, and soldiers in blue and red lounging against the walls, smoking cigarettes, or lying on the pavement, where beds of hay had been made. Many of the shops were shuttered. He looked up, and the flat roofs of the houses were like barracks, with the _képis_ of soldiers visible between the chimney-pots. The bus passed an open square--cavalry held it, and another street, broad and long, leading from it, was a camp of white tents.

Sentries guarded the bridges across the river, and though the main Boulevard was free of soldiers, he saw a hint of power in the courtyards of large houses. The walls were placarded with green and yellow posters, addressed to "Citoyens," urging them to resist the Government. The soldiers read them idly.

And, in the midst of all this, the people of Narbonne sat outside the cafés in the sunshine, under the red and white striped awnings, drinking their vermouth or absinthe!

Later, after he had taken his room at the Hotel Dorade, he walked about the town through the ranks of the soldiers. Groups of people stood here and there, with grim faces and stern-set lips; they looked revengefully at officers and mounted police, and whenever a regiment marched into the town to the music of its drums and bugles, it was greeted with hoarse shouts of derision, and mocking cries of "Assassins!"

At the corner of a street of shops he came upon a little mound of stones set round a dark stain on the cobbled road; a wreath was laid there, and a night-light still burned under a glass cover. A piece of white cardboard, cut in the shape of a miniature tombstone, rested against a brick. He read the ill-written inscription on the card:--

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RENÉ DUCLOS
âgé de 29 ans
assasiné par le gouvernement.

There were seven other little memorial mounds in the neighbourhood. Each one of them marked where a victim had fallen to the soldiers' ball cartridge. One of the cardboard tombstones bore a woman's name. Her death was one of the inexplicable accidents of life: she was to have been married on the morrow. On her way she had been carried along in the crowd which was marching towards the Town Hall ... and in a minute she was dead.

These signs of tragedy made a deep impression on Humphrey's journalistic sense. He saw that the soldiers had not dared to move the mounds that reminded the people of the dreadful happenings in their midst. And they were surrounded by little silent crowds, who spelt out the inscriptions, sighed, and departed with mutterings.

A man with bloodshot eyes, and unkempt hair, his chin thick with bristles, lurched across the road, and stood by Humphrey, regarding him with a curious, persistent gaze. Humphrey moved away, and the man edged after him. He made for the main Boulevards where the crowded cafés gave him a sense of safety. He turned round, and saw that he was still being shadowed.

A voice hailed him from a café: he turned and saw O'Malley, the Irishman of _The Sentinel_.

"Hallo," said O'Malley, "been here long?"

"Just arrived," Humphrey said. He was glad to see a friend. That unkempt man who had followed him made him feel uncomfortably insecure.

"Where are you stopping?" O'Malley asked.

"At the Dorade."

"I'm there too: there's a whole gang of French and English fellows here. Been having no end of adventures. My carriage was held up outside Argelliers yesterday, and they wanted to see my papers. As bad as the flight to Varennes, isn't it?" He laughed, and they sat down to drink.

The unkempt man took up his position against the parapet of the bridge opposite.

Humphrey noticed that O'Malley wore a white band round his arm with a blue number on it, and his name, coupled with _The Sentinel_, written in ink that had frayed itself into the fabric.