Chapter I

The party had divided in London, three to Wales, Courtney Wallace and Vance to Cornwall and Devon. Vance had been rather insistent on the southern tour. The other man had yielded without enthusiasm.

“I’ve done it before,” he said resignedly. “Lyme Regis, Torquay, Tintagel, Clovelly! And you’ve done it before, Vance. Is it possible, by any accident, that the lady from the Theatre Royal is—going south?”

Vance flushed, although he laughed.

“She is motoring with a party of friends. I believe that is their general direction. There is hardly a chance of our running into them.”

Wallace smoked reflectively. Beneath their hotel window all London passed. Schoolboys with top hats and canes scrambled to the tops of buses, flower women disputed on the pavements, coster carts dodged the traffic; the street was a thousand miracles.

Suddenly Wallace bent forward.

“Ah!” he said. “That’s too bad! That’s—that’s horrible!”

A coster’s donkey, hardly larger than a dog, had gone down and a bus had passed over its foot. It lay on its side, a little island of tragedy in the river of traffic that promptly divided around it. The coster, with his face working, was on his knees beside it, fumbling with the harness buckles.

Vance rose and glanced over the other man’s shoulder.

“It’s infamous!” he cried. “What chance had the little beast, anyhow? Look at that! No room for it to live and hardly room for it to die!”

He flung away from the window. Wallace himself, less highly organised perhaps, did not care to look again. Instead, he turned meditative eyes on his companion. It was his work to study people, and Vance was good holiday material, psychologically, not too complex for hot weather. It was interesting to watch Vance decide that he wanted a thing and to follow the steps by which he got it; further still, to see him justify himself, standing his soul at attention and telling it what it needed, what was good for it, generally bullying it into line. He liked an audience for the process. More than once he had chosen Wallace. The argument differed little from time to time.

“Every now and then,” he would say, “I have got to cut clean loose from work, from everything. You know how hard I work—constant strain, and all that. Most men leave their business when they close the office door behind them, and don’t take it up until the next morning. But I’m always at it. Creative work’s the devil and the strain is cumulative. At the end of ten months, I’ve done a year’s work, and I feel it.”

“Yes,” Wallace would agree. He knew that he was only the remote audience, that Vance was really talking to his soul, and enjoying it.

“If I were a drinking man I’d go on a terrific bust—nervous explosion, you know. Or, if I could afford it, I’d hike to Monte Carlo. I don’t do either. But one thing I can do, and it isn’t selfish. It’s sheer self-preservation. I can get away from my family, and I do.”

And so on, ending of course in a eulogy of Edith, his wife, and of the children.

“Only woman in the world who could live with me,” he would say. “She has poise; she understands! She knows as well as I do when I’ve reached my limit. Came down to see me off—but you saw her at the dock, of course. How do you think she looked?”

Vance had the egotist’s habit of repeating himself, and twice now Wallace had faced this question. Both times he had evaded it.

“There’s a certain amount of strain about such partings,” he had said. “I thought she was depressed, naturally. I don’t see her very often, of course.”

On one such occasion Vance had roused from his self-engrossment, at something in Wallace’s voice.

“You used to be bully friends,” he said. “I’m sorry you don’t come out oftener.”

“There’s a perfectly good reason why I don’t go,” Wallace returned easily. “There is nothing quite so painful to a bachelor as the married happiness of his friends.”

Vance had been quite satisfied.

To Wallace, sitting back in the hotel window, came the memory of Edith’s face that day on the pier. In repose her face had been enigmatic—a sort of tolerant resignation, with a flash now and then of humour. It was almost, Wallace thought uneasily, as if she had reached a point where she must laugh at herself, or weep.

There came to the older man’s mind, as Vance moved to a writing table, odds and ends of Vance’s philosophy of life.

“I’m not a saint, of course, but my good times have never hurt anybody.”

“I am a better husband and a better father for getting away now and then. It’s perfectly true that all of us need to invite our own souls once in a while.”

“All my capital is in my head, and about once a year I have to look after the investment.”

And that very ingenuous statement on the steamer, _apropos_ of a triangle which was holding the interest of the smoking room—

“After all, if a man has any breadth of intelligence, any larger view of life, it is almost impossible to find one woman who understands all sides of him, isn’t it?”

Wallace had had a quizzical vision of Vance’s soul, rather nice and young and naïve, saluting and accepting this second-hand wisdom as Truth.

Vance was examining the proposed itinerary of the excursion and copying it into his letter. He was writing eagerly, boyishly, and when he rose it was with a mischievous appearance of having, by sending the word home to Edith, clinched the arrangement. But he held two letters in his hand, not one.

“When do you want to start?” Wallace asked.

“The car will be ready to-morrow. Why not go while the weather’s good?” Under his carefully casual tone was an eagerness that could not be entirely suppressed.

* * * * *

Vance made a good travelling companion. His enthusiasm, which even infected Wallace, surmounted the minor mishaps of the journey—a broken brake rod, tire trouble, three days of rain which tied them up in Bournemouth, and beat the sea to a sodden plain. It was at Bournemouth that they got to the subject of dreams. Vance had had a dream. He was still shaken at breakfast, and he reverted to it when, in weather-proof tweeds, they ventured through the rain to the pier.

“I daresay it’s overwork, isn’t it?”

Wallace eyed him. He looked almost ill, strained, his mouth set hard.

“Dreams are curious things,” Wallace said reflectively. “You know there’s a theory that our dreams are our real selves.”

“I thought they were the reasonable soul run mad.”

“Not at all. During sleep seems to be the only time that the unconscious self gets to the surface. All barriers are down. The highly cultured part of one, which is only superstructure, of course, is off guard. Suppressed desires come up, wishes that would horrify us in waking moments, fears that are founded on such wishes; it’s rather abstruse.”

“‘The flattering truth of sleep,’” said Vance cynically, but he changed colour. “It’s ridiculous! I refuse to be such stuff as dreams are made of. I have never had a dream that was not incongruous, absurd. Even this about Edith—”

“The brain, of course, when the will is suspended during sleep, is like an engine without a governor. I’ll acknowledge that.”

Vance wheeled on him.

“And this dream of seeing Edith and the children sinking in a quicksand—are you going to classify that as a fear that is founded on a wish?”

It was a direct challenge. Wallace, who, dealing in the things of the soul, dealt in intangibilities that were the realest things in the world to him, could forswear neither his belief nor his friend, and compromised.

“Not exactly that. Your unconscious self may realise that there are times when a man, to do his best work, should not have his interests divided. I should hardly call that disloyalty.”

Vance recovered himself slowly. It was as if he had peered over the edge of an abyss. Wallace realised to his surprise that he was profoundly shaken; that he must be more careful. It was a dangerous thing to turn a man’s thoughts in. Vance, thoroughly objective, must not become subjective. He was too mental, too imaginative. Perhaps Vance himself was right, had, in his graceless young way, solved his own psychology, and the girl from the Theatre Royal was a safety valve.

They had not yet encountered the other party, and after the morning on the sands at Bournemouth, Vance seemed determined to ignore its possible proximity. He ceased peering ahead at each motor they overtook; the inns where they lunched were selected at random, and not, as earlier, as if in accordance with some preconceived itinerary. He seemed to have placed his affairs on the cold knees of the gods and was waiting.

But he still dreamed. Wallace, sharing a room with him in a small inn on the edge of Dartmoor, found him sitting up by the window one night.

“It’s those damned dreams,” he said fretfully. “Of course I know she’s all right, and the children too. But do you realise that I can’t send a cable from this God-forsaken hole?”

But the mere outburst helped him. He went back to bed and almost immediately to sleep. It was Wallace who lay awake.

Until he met the girl, Wallace could not understand the depths to which he felt Vance had been stirred. It was not their first holiday together; Vance, always attractive to woman, was attracted by them. More than once, Wallace had known these holidays of the younger man complicated by a pretty woman, had witnessed his penitential or aggressively virtuous return, as the case might be. But this time there was a difference. Vance was harder hit, or perhaps he had been more brain-weary than before, and the reaction was stronger. He was not sleeping well. And when they were near the sea he took to long walks over the cliffs.

It was at Lynton that they came up with the other party, a Mr. and Mrs. Byron, and the girl herself. Her name was Lily Ruskin; she was a slender girl, much younger than Wallace had anticipated, simply dressed and without make-up. He drew a deep breath. She was so much better than he had expected; even the way her brown hair was twisted low on her neck was without affectation, without even that studied simplicity that is most artificial of all. The girl was absolutely natural, rather lovely in a slim, graceful way.

The Byrons were impossible, frankly. Mrs. Byron was a vivid person, noisily dressed and not flawless in speech. Wallace gathered at dinner that her main interest in life was her bull terrier, travelling with her, and named George Broadhurst after the American playwright.

“It was in one of Broadhurst’s plays that I made my first success,” she confided to Wallace. “I’ve got a New York offer upstairs now. If it wasn’t for Byron, I’d go in a minute.”

“You’re not going without me. You can lay to that,” Byron put in, his tone surly. “In this game it’s either double harness or single harness, and no half way about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders and turned her attention to her dinner, eating with slow and deliberate appreciation. But later in the meal, when Byron’s attention was distracted, she reverted for a moment to the American tour.

“I’m going, nevertheless,” she said frankly. “If Lily goes I go. I know a lot of Americans. We’ll have rather a cheery time.”

Lily Ruskin left the table before the others had finished, making an excuse of the heat of the room, and Vance rose with her. Mrs. Byron looked after him, with much the same air of deliberate appreciation she had shown to her food.

“Rather a nut, your friend. Lily is quite mad about him,” observed Mrs. Byron, and took some raisins.

“He’s a brilliant chap, in his line,” Wallace observed. He had lost nothing of Vance’s protective droop toward Lily, of her almost shivering consciousness of his nearness. And because the girl was straight—he knew that now; he had not expected it—the situation had taken on a new quality of tenseness. Lily was mad about Vance, mad with the unspoiled passion of the woman who has saved herself, through God knows what filth, clean for the one man, and who having found him is ready to give her all. And there was worse to come.

“Fancy!” drawled Mrs. Byron. “Brilliant, handsome and young! And yet your clever American ladies have let him escape!”

“Escape?”

“Unmarried,” she explained. “It is one of the most charming things about America. So many of your men remain unmarried!”

Wallace caught a swift glance from under her heavy lids and met it squarely.

“American standards of luxury are rather high,” he said gravely. “Comparatively speaking, we have few hereditary fortunes. A man must work for years to establish himself, before he can marry.”

Although he had preserved his impassivity, underneath Wallace was seething with fury. Vance had gone too far. He was passing with these people as a single man; it was puerile, childish, damnable. It was a great deal more—it was dangerous. Wallace found himself an involuntary accomplice, and his gorge rose.

They had their coffee in the garden that clung to the edge of the cliff. For months after, Wallace was to remember that twilight hour, with the terraced paths winding beneath them, the heavy fragrance of flowers opening to the first dew of the night, the lights of a battleship far out from land, the distant sound of the sea far below, the excited whimpering of George Broadhurst, who had flushed a rabbit in the shrubbery.

Vance and Lily sat a little apart. They were very silent. The girl’s face looked set and white; she refused coffee, took a cigarette, forgot to light it. The air seemed charged with feeling. Rather suddenly Wallace knew that Vance had told her. Mixed with his relief came sympathy for her. Mrs. Byron had been right. She was quite mad about Vance. And she did not care who knew it, apparently. She sat, bent a little forward, gazing out to sea, and one of her hands lay on Vance’s knee. He was uncomfortable about it for a minute—then he covered it with one of his own.

The conversation languished. They had no common ground on which to meet. Vance made no effort. Wallace tried the Ulster uprising, and was countered by Mrs. Byron with the flat statement that she detested the Irish and Lady Gregory’s plays. Was Wallace a playwright? But of course not; he was Doctor Wallace—she’d forgotten.

“M. D.,” Vance made an effort. “Doctor of Minds. Be very careful, Mrs. Byron. He knows all sorts of spooky things. He’s a psychologist.”

It was clear that Mrs. Byron confused Wallace at once with the Society of Psychic Research. She roused to the first interest of the evening.

“Ghosts!” she said. “Do tell me a ghost story!”

Wallace smiled.

“I deal with ghosts, of course,” he admitted, “but they are ghosts of the mind’s own raising.”

“Any sort of ghost,” she persisted. “Once in Warwickshire, we stopped in a haunted house. Do you remember, Lily? And how you sat up and nothing happened?”

The girl did not reply. She spoke past Mrs. Byron, to Wallace.

“What do you mean by ghosts of the mind’s own raising?”

Having caught her attention, Wallace was determined to hold it. He had already formulated a plan of a sort. If he could get Vance through the evening, he thought he could talk him into reason. It was the next two hours he dreaded. For there was mischief afoot. Vance stirred, lighted a cigar. In the flare of the match his eyes were reckless, the eyes of a man who has ceased to think.

When he chose, Wallace could be vastly entertaining. He made the effort then. He held the conversational lines taut, driving hard to one point, to hold Vance and the girl to the group. So he spoke mostly to her, held her attention close, ignored the pitiful appeal of her white face. For twenty minutes or more he held them all. At the end of that time Mrs. Byron dropped asleep, her head falling forward. Byron, who had suffered complete metaphysical submergence early in the game, emerged enough a few moments later to take himself to the end of the terrace, the terrier at his heels. And still Wallace talked on.

“Dreams!” he said. “Now there’s a field for fancy, Miss Ruskin!” He was conscious that he had caught Vance’s attention. “You know, dreams show us that we never forget things. We don’t, you know. They’re all there, big and little. Along comes the scent of a flower, or some combination of scents, or a strain of music, and presto, the little memory cell closes up, completes the circuit, and we are off.”

Vance, leaning forward, lifted the girl’s hand to his cheek.

“The smell of the sea over the land of Lorna Doone,” he said unsteadily, “and all of us, here to-night.”

“In dreams,” Wallace persisted grimly, “we’re particularly liable to go back. Far back. I know of an interesting case of the sort. You know, no soul is safe from us.” The girl shivered. “In the case I speak of a young and charming woman finds she has made a mistake in her marriage. Somewhere, deep in her soul, she holds the image of a man she wishes she had married. Very deep in her soul—it took me two months to get to it, for she would not acknowledge it, even to herself.”

“I know,” said Lily. “Women have to bury—so much.”

“This chap, whoever he is, evidently represents a refuge in time of trouble, to her. It’s all unconscious. She does not know it herself. Anyhow, when things get pretty hard for her—the husband wanders, although he loves her—she goes back in her dreams to her early childhood, to a fright she had, a dog that turned on her. The dream is always the same; she sees the dog coming, and it is the other man—the chap she did not marry, that she calls to for help. It’s incongruous, like all dreams, but vastly interesting.”

He had the girl’s attention, at least.

“I see,” she said, slowly. “And to you this symbolizes something?”

“Perhaps not the dream alone. There were other circumstances, of course. What she is burying is probably a feeling that in a crisis of any sort, the—the other man would be more dependable than the husband. It is possible, of course, that she has always cared for the other chap. If there is a crisis, and the husband fail her—”

Lily rose, shaking off Vance’s detaining hand. She stood near Wallace, looking down.

“And when the crisis comes, what will the husband matter, after all?” she demanded. “Your philosophy of life is wrong—all philosophy of life is wrong, when it is founded on law, and not on love.”

“Colonies have been founded on that principle—and failed.”

She hardly heard him. Her hands hung before her, clasped so close that her slim fingers were blue-white.

“Law that is best for the many may be criminally wrong for the few,” she said, and leaving them, joined Byron and the terrier at the end of the terrace. Vance did not look up after her, but Wallace knew that no movement of her white figure was lost to him. He waited for Vance to speak, but he made no effort. When she did not come back, but with Byron penetrated deeper into the garden shadows, Vance rose and flung away his cigar.

“I’m going up to bed,” he said irritably. “This whole damned party has hung together this evening as if every member of it was afraid of his own society.”

Perturbed as he was, Wallace smiled. It was so like Vance to be childish at a big moment. Of course, he knew Vance was not going to bed. He would break up the party and then come down for his cheated hour with Lily. Wallace stifled a groan of very weariness, and shut his jaw grimly. He would see the thing out, if he had to sit up all night. And it came very nearly to that.

* * * * *

Wallace sat alone on the terrace. A launch put off from the shore and headed for the battleship. The lantern in the bow moved across the black water like the reflection of some swift star. Wallace’s thoughts, too, crossed the sea. He thought of Edith Vance, of the day of her wedding, of the calm confidence in her eyes until the service had begun, of the shade of panic in them when, at the signal, she had held out her hand for the ring. Wallace had noticed her hands that day at the dock. It was warm and she had slipped off her gloves. The ring had hung a little loose.

Lily came back along the terrace, and sat down beside him. He had thought she would come. The battle, after all, was between them! Vance, sulking in his room, had already surrendered.

“I’ve been watching that boat,” he said. “There’s something inevitable about the way it’s making for the ship. It hasn’t varied a foot. That’s life, in its best sense, isn’t it—knowing what one wants, and going directly for it?”

The speech was unlucky.

“That is life,” she replied. Her voice, that had seemed light, was deeper now; the bell tone of passion was in it. “To know what one wants, and to go directly—over no matter what depths.” She turned suddenly and faced him. “You are not going to let me see him alone again. Why?”

“Because I’m in deadly fear of you.” Wallace tried to smile, saw her eyes, and looked away instead.

“You think he—cares?”

“I think he thinks he cares. It’s just as disastrous, under the circumstances.”

“He is—like that?”

The loyalty of male to male made Wallace hesitate.

“Well, not as bad as I’m letting you think. He’s fond of women—he is temperamental; you can’t measure his sort with the usual yard-stick. He’s decent enough.”

“Do you know his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me about her?”

Wallace eyed her steadily.

“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”

“She is mad about him, of course. I wonder—will you let me tell you a bit about myself?”

“Do you think—”

“I should like you to know. And afterwards—I shall ask you something. I am not so young as I look. I am twenty-three. And I have been—straight. I wanted you to know that.”

She paused. Wallace’s profile was impassive. But she knew he was keenly alert to what she was saying.

“I have no great talent. My appearance helped—I made up well—and my voice is good. I’ve had a lot of temptation, of course. That’s in the game. If I stayed straight it wasn’t because of any traditions behind me, or of any special quality in me. You know what I mean—when everywhere around one there is a sort of elastic creed, one—”

“I understand, of course.”

“I want you to know the truth, before I come to the other. I was good because in the end it paid. I couldn’t amount to much on the stage, but if I was straight, I could make a good marriage. That had to be my future. I had no other. It sounds revolting—but isn’t that after all the truth about a great many women? Only—you never heard it before.”

“Possibly,” said Wallace. “But I absolutely refuse to believe it.”

She shrugged her slender shoulders.

“It is the absolute truth with me, anyhow.”

Perhaps Wallace’s attitude disconcerted her. She did not go on at once. Byron passed them, the dog at his heels, and with a curt good-night went into the hotel. Some one above flung up a window. The launch, its star swaying in the ocean swell, clung to the side of the battleship. Lily sat bent forward, her restless fingers interlaced.

“Of course you know—he did not tell me he was married until to-night. All the time I said to myself that I was glad I had been straight, because now he could marry me, and there would be nothing to forget. But he cannot marry me.”

The little car of the cliff railway came up, after its final trip. The night had grown so still that they could hear the guard closing and locking the doors, could follow his footsteps as he moved, whistling softly, along the curving street.

“I knew a girl once,” Lily went on in her sweet, deepened voice. “She cared a lot about a man. They were not married, but everybody liked them both. They were amazingly popular. They used to have Sunday teas at their house, and—well, he died after a while. She was young and good-looking, and she’d had a good offer for the next season—with Fred Terry, I think. But she went out to the country where he was buried, and shot herself. It’s like that, sometimes.”

The thrill in her voice took him rather by the throat. All his life he had been denying this right of love to the throne of reason, had been fighting the cause of the mind against the heart—except once, and that was long ago, as love flies. It came to him all at once that the machine is always more powerful than the engineer that controls it, that this slim girl, in her primal appeal, was stronger than all law. For just that moment he wondered, were Vance and she right, and he wrong? Why sacrifice the few on the altar of the multitude? He found himself mumbling a response.

“Yes. It is like that, sometimes. But there are few great passions. Once in a thousand years two people meet, and there is a sort of psychic explosion. After that, I suppose in all the world there is only for the man the one woman—”

“—And for the woman the one man,” she finished, softly. “It happens oftener than you think. Only—they are afraid.”

The whole thing began to seem unreal to Wallace. The women he had known did not do battle for love. He had no precedent to guide him in such a situation. And, like most men, in spite of his profession, he feared subtleties. He moved out into the open.

“What do you want me to do?” he demanded. “Vance is married. I know his wife, and I like her. I can’t stand back and see him disloyal to her. I’m not going to leave him here—or anywhere.”

“Does she care as much as I do?”

“That’s not the question.”

“_Isn’t_ that the question?”

“There are children. Has he told you that?”

She winced, but her determination did not waver.

“Perhaps you do not understand. I am not asking him to give them up. I understand better than you think. He cares a great deal now, but not as I care. There is always one who kisses, and one who turns the cheek. I think he will never forget me. Years from now, if he hears my name, he will thrill to it. But it will be to a memory. And where he will thrill to a memory, I shall go white. That’s the difference. You see, I know. But he cares.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go away. Let us have the next few weeks, if that is all we are to have out of life.” She mistook Wallace’s incredulous silence for hesitancy. “Just think,” she went on, “I who should have all my life before me, am offering it for a month with _him_. Oh, I shan’t kill myself,” as he started. “I shall go on. You know. Stars live for big moments. I am asking you for my big moment.”

She looked up at him, faintly smiling. Then, without warning, she buried her face in her hands and cried, silently, stonily, while Wallace sat helplessly by. The break did one thing; it gave him time. When she lifted her head at last, he was ready.

“Perhaps you are right, from your viewpoint. You are free; your life is yours. You can do what you like with it. I’m not preaching morality now. It’s hardly a question of that. I mean, of course, that you are determined to evade that issue. But we cannot live to ourselves alone. If Vance wanted to go to the devil and it involved himself only, I’d probably let him alone. But he has a wife.” He met her eyes squarely. “I’m going to prevent this thing if I can.”

A coarser woman would have defied him, confident in her power over the other man. But Lily only eyed him rather wistfully.

“I see,” she said slowly. “How solicitous you are for _her_! I wonder—” She hesitated, more careful of him than he had been of her. “I hope you are not in love with her. If you are, and if you are suffering what I have suffered to-night—”

Wallace drew his breath in sharply. But she had risen, and stood looking up at the darkened façade of the hotel. Somewhere, behind its windows, Mrs. Byron slept placidly. Byron had exchanged his half-sullen apathy of the day for noisy slumber. Tourists gorged with sight-seeing rested tired muscles and weary eyes. On all save these two in a garden, and Vance keeping vigil above, the night had descended with healing wings.

Lily had noticed Wallace’s sharply taken breath after all. For she turned and held out her hand.

“How we take upon us the mystery of things, as if we were God’s spies!” she said wistfully. “I with my perplexities, your dream-woman with hers, and now—you. Good-night.”

She turned and went into the house.