Chapter X: Y. Z (1)

“P.S.--I enclose P.O. for that 10s. I owe you.”

I received this letter on a Wednesday morning.

It was written from the Club, but the Club address was carefully scored out and no other given.

The “P.O.” was not enclosed.

In spite of these obstacles, however, we somehow met and arranged to start on Saturday; and the night before we dined together in that excellent little Soho restaurant--“there’s nothing,” my friend always said, “between its cooking and the Ritz, except prices”--and discussed our prospects, he going to finish a book at a Barbizon inn, I to inspect certain machinery in various Continental dairies.

His heart, it was plain, however, was neither in the cooking nor the book, nor in my wonderful machinery. Like a boy with a secret, he was mysterious about something hitherto unshared. Happy, too, for he kept smiling at nothing.

“The fact is,” he observed at last over coffee, “I’m really a vile, simply a vile sailor.”

“I remember,” I said, for we had once been companions on the same yacht.

“And you,” he added, holding the black eyebrows steady, “you--are another.” When dealing with simple truths he was often brutally frank.

“What’s the good of talking about it?”

“This,” he replied, paying the bill and giving me the amount of the “P.O.,” “I’ll show you.”

He conducted me into a little box of a place bearing the legend outside “Foreign Chemist,” and proceeded first to buy the most curious assortment of strange medicines I ever heard of. Weird indeed must have been his ailments. I had no time for reflection, however, on the point, for suddenly turning to me by way of introduction, and allowing the eyebrow next the chemist to dance and bristle so as to attract his attention, he mumbled, “This is my seasick friend. We’re off to-morrow. If you’ve got the stuff ready we might take it now.” And, before I had time to ask or argue, he had pocketed a little package and we were in the street again.

Never had I known him so brisk and practical. “It’s a new seasick cure,” he explained darkly as we went home; “something quite new--just invented, in fact; and that chap’s asking a few of his special customers to try it and give their honest opinions. So I told him we were pretty bad--vile, in fact--and I’ve got this for nothing. He only wants vile sailors, you see, otherwise there’s no test----”

“Know what’s in it?”

He shook his head so violently that I was afraid for the eyebrows.

“But I believe in it. It’s simply wonderful stuff; no bromide, he assured me, and no harmful drugs. Just a seasick cure; that’s all!”

“I’ll take it if you will,” I laughed. “I could take poison with impunity before going on the Channel!”

He gave me one bottle. “Take a dose to-night,” he explained, “another after breakfast in the morning, another in the train, and another the moment you go on board.”

I gave my promise and we separated on his doorstep. It was a lot to promise, but as I have explained, I could drink tar or prussic acid before going on a steamer, and neither would have the time to work injury. I marvelled greatly, however, at my vague friend’s fit of abnormal lucidity, and in the night I dreamed of him surrounded by all the medicine bottles he had bought to take abroad with him, swallowing their contents one by one, and smiling while he did so, with eyebrows grown to the size of hedges.

I took my doses faithfully, with the immediate result that in the train I became aware of symptoms that usually had the decency to wait for the steamer. My friend took his too. He was in excellent spirits, eyes bright, full of confidence. The bottles were wrapped in neat white paper, only the necks visible; and we drank our allotted quantity from the mouths, without glasses.

“Not much taste,” I remarked.

“Wonderful stuff,” he replied. “I believe in it absolutely. It’s good for other things, too; it made me sleep like a top, and I had the appetite of a horse for breakfast. That chemist’ll make his fortune when he brings it out. People will pay a pound a bottle, lots of ’em.”

At Newhaven the sea was agitated--hideously so; even in the harbour the steamers rose and fell absurdly. Not all the fresh, salt winds in the world, nor all the jolly sunshine and sparkling waves, nor all that strong beauty that comes with the first glimpse of the sea and long horizons, could lessen the sinking dread that was in my--my heart. Truth to tell, I had no more belief in the elixir than if it had been chopped hay and treacle.

My friend, however, was confidence personified. “The fact is,” he said, laughing at the wind and sea, “the real fact is _I believe in that chemist_. He told me this stuff was infallible; and I believe it is. The trouble with you is funk--sheer blue funk.”

We stuck to our guns and swallowed the last prescribed dose just before the syren announced our departure--and fifteen minutes later....

It was a degrading three hours; and the sting of it was that my friend, with a hideous cap tied down about his ears, a smile that was in the worst possible taste, and a jaunty confidence that was even more insulting than he intended it to be, walked up and down that loathsome, sliding, switchback deck the entire way. Not the entire way, though, for half-way across he disappeared into the dining-room, and returned in due course with that brown beard of his charged with bread-crumbs, and between his lips actually--a pipe. And, without so much as speaking to me, he paced to and fro before my chair, when a little of that imagination he put so delightfully into his books would have led him discreetly to pace the other deck where I could not see him. I thought out endless revenges, but the fact was I never had time to think out any single revenge properly to its conclusion. Something--something unspeakably vile--always came to interfere; and the sight of my friend, balancing up and down the rolling deck chatting to sailors, admiring the sea and sky, and puffing hard at his pipe all the time, was, I think, the most abominable thing I have ever seen.

“Simply marvellous, I call it,” he told me in the _douane_ at Dieppe. “The stuff is a revolutionary discovery. It’s the first time I ever ate a meal on a steamer in my life. Sorry you suffered so. Can’t understand it,” he added, with a complacency that was insufferable. I was positively delighted to see the Customs officer open _all_ his bags and litter his things about in glorious confusion....

In Paris that night our little hotel was rather full, and we had to share a big two-bedded room. My friend groaned a good deal between two and three in the morning and kept me awake; and once, somewhere about five a.m., I saw him with a lighted candle fumbling at the table among a lot of little white paper packages which I recognised as his purchases from that criminal London chemist who had concocted the seasick cure.

It was at nine o’clock, however, while he was down at his bath, that I noticed something on the table by his bed that instantly arrested my attention. Regardless of morals, I investigated. It was unmistakable. It was his own bottle of the seasick cure. He had never taken it at all!

Then, just as his step sounded in the passage, it flashed across me. He had made one of his usual muddles. He had mistaken the bottle. He had swallowed the contents of some other phial instead.

Revenge is sweet; but I felt well again, and no longer harboured any spite. There was just time to hide the bottle in my hand when he entered.

“Awful headache I’ve got,” he said. “Can’t make out what’s wrong with me. Such funny pains, too.”

“After-effects of the seasick cure, probably. They’ll pass in time,” I suggested. But he remained in bed for a day and a night with all the symptoms of _mal de mer_ on land.

It was many weeks later when I told him the truth, and showed the bottle to prove it--just in time to prevent his telling the chemist, “I have tried your seasick cure and found it absolutely efficacious,” etc.

“What cured you,” I said, “was far more wonderful than anything one can buy in bottles. It was faith, sheer faith!”

“I believe you’re right,” he replied meekly. “I believed in that stuff _absolutely_.” Then he added, “But, you know, I should like to find out what it was I _did_ take.”

IX

THE GOBLIN’S COLLECTION

Dutton accepted the invitation for the feeble reason that he was not quick enough at the moment to find a graceful excuse. He had none of that facile brilliance which is so useful at week-end parties; he was a big, shy, awkward man. Moreover, he disliked these great houses. They swallowed him. The solemn, formidable butlers oppressed him. He left on Sunday night when possible. This time, arriving with an hour to dress, he went upstairs to an enormous room, so full of precious things that he felt like an insignificant item in a museum corridor. He smiled disconsolately as the underling who brought up his bag began to fumble with the lock. But, instead of the sepulchral utterance he dreaded, a delicious human voice with an unmistakable brogue proceeded from the stooping figure. It was positively comforting. “It ’ull be locked, sorr, but maybe ye have the key?” And they bent together over the disreputable kit-bag, looking like a pair of ants knitting antennæ on the floor of some great cave. The giant four-poster watched them contemptuously; mahogany cupboards wore an air of grave surprise; the gaping, open fireplace alone could have swallowed all his easels--almost, indeed, his little studio. This human, Irish presence was distinctly consoling--some extra hand or other, thought Dutton, probably.

He talked a little with the lad; then, lighting a cigarette, he watched him put the clothes away in the capacious cupboards, noticing in particular how neat and careful he was with the little things. Nail-scissors, silver stud-box, metal shoe-horn, and safety razor, even the bright cigar-cutter and pencil-sharpener collected loose from the bottom of the bag--all these he placed in a row upon the dressing-table with the glass top, and seemed never to have done with it. He kept coming back to rearrange and put a final touch, lingering over them absurdly. Dutton watched him with amusement, then surprise, finally with exasperation. Would he never go? “Thank you,” he said at last; “that will do. I’ll dress now. What time is dinner?” The lad told him, but still lingered, evidently anxious to say more. “Everything’s out, I think,” repeated Dutton impatiently; “all the loose things, I mean?” The face at once turned eagerly. What mischievous Irish eyes he had, to be sure! “I’ve put thim all together in a row, sorr, so that ye’ll not be missing anny-thing at all,” was the quick reply, as he pointed to the ridiculous collection of little articles, and even darted back to finger them again. He counted them one by one. And then suddenly he added, with a touch of personal interest that was _not_ familiarity, “It’s so easy, ye see, sorr, to lose thim small bright things in this great room.” And he was gone.

Smiling a little to himself, Dutton began to dress, wondering how the lad had left the impression that his words meant more than they said. He almost wished he had encouraged him to talk. “The small bright things in this great room”--what an admirable description, almost a criticism! He felt like a prisoner of state in the Tower. He stared about him into the alcoves, recesses, deep embrasured windows; the tapestries and huge curtains oppressed him; next he fell to wondering who the other guests would be, whom he would take in to dinner, how early he could make an excuse and slip off to bed; then, midway in these desultory thoughts, became suddenly aware of a curiously sharp impression--that he was being watched. Somebody, quite close, was looking at him. He dismissed the fancy as soon as it was born, putting it down to the size and mystery of the old-world chamber; but in spite of himself the idea persisted teasingly, and several times he caught himself turning nervously to look over his shoulder. It was not a ghostly feeling; his nature was not accessible to ghostly things. The strange idea, lodged securely in his brain, was traceable, he thought, to something the Irish lad had said--grew out, rather, of what he had left unsaid. He idly allowed his imagination to encourage it. Someone, friendly but curious, with inquisitive, peeping eyes, was watching him. Someone very tiny was hiding in the enormous room. He laughed about it; but he felt different. A certain big, protective feeling came over him that he must go gently lest he tread on some diminutive living thing that was soft as a kitten and elusive as a baby mouse. Once, indeed, out of the corner of his eye, he fancied he saw a little thing with wings go fluttering past the great purple curtains at the other end. It was by a window. “A bird, or something, outside,” he told himself with a laugh, yet moved thenceforth more often than not on tiptoe. This cost him a certain effort: his proportions were elephantine. He felt a more friendly interest now in the stately, imposing chamber.

The dressing-gong brought him back to reality and stopped the flow of his imagining. He shaved, and laboriously went on dressing then; he was slow and leisurely in his movements, like many big men; very orderly, too. But when he was ready to put in his collar stud it was nowhere to be found. It was a worthless bit of brass, but most important; he had only one. Five minutes ago it had been standing inside the ring of his collar on the marble slab; he had carefully placed it there. Now it had disappeared and left no trail. He grew warm and untidy in the search. It was something of a business for Dutton to go on all fours. “Malicious little beast!” he grunted, rising from his knees, his hand sore where he had scraped it beneath the cupboard. His trouser-crease was ruined, his hair was tumbled. He knew too well the elusive activity of similar small objects. “It will turn up again,” he tried to laugh, “if I pay it no attention. Mal----” he abruptly changed the adjective, as though he had nearly said a dangerous thing--“naughty little imp!” He went on dressing, leaving the collar to the last. He fastened the cigar-cutter to his chain, but the nail-scissors, he noticed now, had also gone. “Odd,” he reflected, “very odd!” He looked at the place where they had been a few minutes ago. “Odd!” he repeated. And finally, in desperation, he rang the bell. The heavy curtains swung inwards as he said, “Come in,” in answer to the knock, and the Irish boy, with the merry, dancing eyes, stood in the room. He glanced half nervously, half expectantly, about him. “It’ll be something ye have lost, sorr?” he said at once, as though he knew.

“I rang,” said Dutton, resenting it a little, “to ask you if you could get me a collar stud--for this evening. Anything will do.” He did not say he had lost his own. Someone, he felt, who was listening, would chuckle and be pleased. It was an absurd position.

“And will it be a shtud like this, sorr, that yez wanting?” asked the boy, picking up the lost object from inside the collar on the marble slab.

“Like that, yes,” stammered the other, utterly amazed. He had overlooked it, of course, yet it was in the identical place where he had left it. He felt mortified and foolish. It was so obvious that the boy grasped the situation--more, had expected it. It was as if the stud had been taken and replaced deliberately. “Thank you,” he added, turning away to hide his face as the lad backed out--with a grin, he imagined, though he did not see it. Almost immediately, it seemed, then he was back again, holding out a little cardboard box containing an assortment of ugly bone studs. Dutton felt as if the whole thing had been prepared beforehand. How foolish it was! Yet behind it lay something real and true and--utterly incredible!

“_They_ won’t get taken, sorr,” he heard the lad say from the doorway. “They’re not nearly bright enough.”

The other decided not to hear. “Thanks,” he said curtly; “they’ll do nicely.”

There was a pause, but the boy did not go. Taking a deep breath, he said very quickly, as though greatly daring, “It’s only the bright and little lovely things he takes, sorr, if ye plaze. He takes thim for his collection, and there’s no stoppin’ him at all.” It came out with a rush, and Dutton, hearing it, let the human thing rise up in him. He turned and smiled.

“Oh, he takes these things for his collection, does he?” he asked more gently.

The boy looked dreadfully shame-faced, confession hanging on his lips. “The little bright and lovely things, sorr, yes. I’ve done me best, but there’s things he can’t resist at all. The bone ones is safe, though. He won’t look at thim.”

“I suppose he followed you across from Ireland, eh?” the other inquired.

The lad hung his head. “I told Father Madden,” he said in a lower voice, “but it’s not the least bit of good in the wurrld.” He looked as though he had been convicted of stealing and feared to lose his place. Suddenly, lifting his blue eyes, he added, “But if ye take no notice at all he ginrelly puts everything back in its place agin. He only borrows thim, just for a little bit of toime. Pretend ye’re not wantin’ thim at all, sorr, and back they’ll come prisintly again, brighter than before maybe.”

“I see,” answered Dutton slowly. “All right, then,” he dismissed him, “and I won’t say a word downstairs. You needn’t be afraid,” as the lad looked his gratitude and vanished like a flash, leaving the other with a queer and eerie feeling, staring at the ugly bone studs. He finished dressing hurriedly and went downstairs. He went on tiptoe out of the great room, moving delicately and with care, lest he might tread on something very soft and tiny, almost wounded, like a butterfly with a broken wing. And from the corners, he felt positive, something watched him go.

The ordeal of dinner passed off well enough; the rather heavy evening too. He found the opportunity to slip off early to bed. The nail-scissors were in their place again. He read till midnight; nothing happened. His hostess had told him the history of his room, inquiring kindly after his comfort. “Some people feel rather lost in it,” she said; “I hope you found all you want,” and, tempted by her choice of words--the “lost” and “found”--he nearly told the story of the Irish lad whose goblin had followed him across the sea and “borrowed little bright and lovely things for his collection.” But he kept his word; he told nothing; she would only have stared, for one thing. For another, he was bored, and therefore uncommunicative. He smiled inwardly. All that this giant mansion could produce for his comfort and amusement were ugly bone studs, a thieving goblin, and a vast bedroom where dead royalty had slept. Next day, at intervals, when changing for tennis or back again for lunch, the “borrowing” continued; the little things he needed at the moment had disappeared. They turned up later. To ignore their disappearance was the recipe for their recovery--invariably, too, just where he had seen them last. There was the lost object shining in his face, propped impishly on its end, just ready to fall upon the carpet, and ever with a quizzical, malicious air of innocence that was truly goblin. His collar stud was the favourite; next came the scissors and the silver pencil-sharpener.

Trains and motors combined to keep him Sunday night, but he arranged to leave on Monday before the other guests were up, and so got early to bed. He meant to watch. There was a merry, jolly feeling in him that he had established quasi-friendly relations with the little Borrower. He might even see an object go--catch it in the act of disappearing! He arranged the bright objects in a row upon the glass-topped dressing-table opposite the bed, and while reading kept an eye slyly on the array of tempting bait. But nothing happened. “It’s the wrong way,” he realised suddenly. “What a blunderer I am!” He turned the light out then. Drowsiness crept over him.... Next day, of course, he told himself it was a dream....

The night was very still, and through the latticed windows stole faintly the summer moonlight. Outside the foliage rustled a little in the wind. A night-jar called from the fields, and a secret, furry owl made answer from the copse beyond. The body of the chamber lay in thick darkness, but a slanting ray of moonlight caught the dressing-table and shone temptingly upon the silver objects. “It’s like setting a nightline,” was the last definite thought he remembered--when the laughter that followed stopped suddenly, and his nerves gave a jerk that turned him keenly alert.

From the enormous open fireplace, gaping in darkness at the end of the room, issued a thread of delicate sound that was softer than a feather. A tiny flurry of excitement, furtive, tentative, passed shivering across the air. An exquisite, dainty flutter stirred the night, and through the heavy human brain upon the great four-poster fled this picture, as from very far away, picked out in black and silver--of a wee knight-errant crossing the frontiers of fairyland, high mischief in his tiny, beating heart. Pricking along over the big, thick carpet, he came towards the bed, towards the dressing-table, intent upon bold plunder. Dutton lay motionless as a stone, and watched and listened. The blood in his ears smothered the sound a little, but he never lost it altogether. The flicking of a mouse’s tail or whiskers could hardly have been more gentle than this sound, more wary, circumspect, discreet, certainly not half so artful. Yet the human being in the bed, so heavily breathing, heard it well. Closer it came, and closer, oh, so elegant and tender, this bold attack of a wee Adventurer from another world. It shot swiftly past the bed. With a little flutter, delicious, almost musical, it rose in the air before his very face and entered the pool of moonlight on the dressing-table. Something blurred it then; the human sight grew troubled and confused a moment; a mingling of moonlight with the reflections from the mirror, slab of glass, and shining objects obscured clear vision somehow. For a second Dutton lost the proper focus. There was a tiny rattle and a tiny click. He saw that the pencil-sharpener stood balanced on the table’s very edge. It was in the act of vanishing.

But for his stupid blunder then, he might have witnessed more. He simply could not restrain himself, it seems. He sprang, and at the same instant the silver object fell upon the carpet. Of course his elephantine leap made the entire table shake. But, anyhow, he was not quick enough. He saw the reflection of a slim and tiny hand slide down into the mirrored depths of the reflecting sheet of glass--deep, deep down, and swift as a flash of light. This he thinks he saw, though the light, he admits, was oddly confusing in that moment of violent and clumsy movement.

One thing, at any rate, was beyond all question: the pencil-sharpener had disappeared. He turned the light up; he searched for a dozen minutes, then gave it up in despair and went back to bed. Next morning he searched again. But, having overslept himself, he did not search as thoroughly as he might have done, for half-way through the tiresome operation the Irish lad came in to take his bag for the train.

“Will ut be something ye’ve lost, sorr?” he asked gravely.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Dutton answered from the floor. “You can take the bag--and my overcoat.” And in town that day he bought another pencil-sharpener and hung it on his chain.

X

IMAGINATION

Having dined upon a beefsteak and a pint of bitter, Jones went home to work. The trouble with Jones--his first name William--was that he possessed creative imagination: that luggage upon which excess charges have to be paid all through life--to the critic, the stupid, the orthodox, the slower minds without the “flash.” He was alone in his brother’s flat. It was after nine o’clock. He was half-way into a story, and had--stuck! Sad to relate, the machinery that carries on the details of an original inspiration had blocked. And to invent he knew not how. Unless the imagination “produced” he would not allow his brain to devise mere episodes--dull and lifeless substitutes. Jones, poor fool, was also artist.

And the reason he had “stuck” was not surprising, for his story was of a kind that might well tax the imagination of any sane man. He was writing at the moment about a being who had survived his age--a study of one of those rare and primitive souls who walk the earth to-day in a man’s twentieth-century body, while yet the spirit belongs to the Golden Age of the world’s history. You may come across them sometimes, rare, ingenuous, delightful beings, the primal dews still upon their eyelids, the rush and glow of earth’s pristine fires pulsing in their veins, careless of gain, indifferent to success, lost, homeless, exiled--_dépaysés_.... The idea had seized him. He had met such folk. He burned to describe their exile, the pathos of their loneliness, their yearnings and their wanderings--rejected by a world they had outlived. And for his type, thus representing some power of unexpended mythological values strayed back into modern life to find itself denied and ridiculed--he had chosen a Centaur! For he wished it to symbolise what he believed was to be the next stage in human evolution: Intuition no longer neglected, but developed equally with Reason. His Centaur was to stand for instinct (the animal body close to Nature) combined with, yet not dominated by, the upright stature moving towards deity. The conception was true and pregnant.

And--he had stuck. The detail that blocked him was the man’s _appearance_. How would such a being look? In what details would he betray that, though outwardly a man, he was inwardly this survival of the Golden Age, escaped from some fair Eden, splendid, immense, simple, and beneficent, yet--a Centaur?

Perhaps it was just as well he had “stuck,” for his brother would shortly be in, and his brother was a successful business man with the money-sense and commercial instincts strongly developed. He dealt in rice and sugar. With his brother in the flat no Centaur could possibly survive for a single moment. “It’ll come to me when I’m not thinking about it,” he sighed, knowing well the waywardness of his particular genius. He threw the reins upon the subconscious self and moved into an arm-chair to read in the evening paper the things the public loved--that public who refused to buy his books, pleading they were “queer.” He waded down the list of immoralities, murders and assaults with a dreamy eye, and had just reached the witness’s description of finding the bloody head in the faithless wife’s bedroom, when there came a hurried, pelting knock at the door, and William Jones, glad of the relief, went to open it. There, facing him, stood the bore from the flat below. Horrors!

It was not, however, a visit after all. “Jones,” he faltered, “there’s an odd sort of chap here asking for you or your brother. Rang my bell by mistake.”

Jones murmured some reply or other, and as the bore vanished with a hurry unusual to him, there passed into the flat a queer shape, born surely of the night and stars and desolate places. He seemed in some undefinable way bent, humpbacked, very large. With him came a touch of open spaces, winds, forests, long clean hills and dew-drenched fields.

“Come in, please....” said Jones, instantly aware that the man was not for his brother. “You have something to--er----” he was going to use the word “ask,” then changed it instinctively--“_say_ to me, haven’t you?”

The man was ragged, poor, outcast. Clearly it was a begging episode; and yet he trembled violently, while in his veins ran fire. The caller refused a seat, but moved over to the curtains by the window, drawing them slightly aside so that he could see out. And the window was high above old smoky London--open. It felt cold. Jones bent down, always keeping his caller in view, and lit the gas-stove. “You wish to see me,” he said, rising again to an upright position. Then he added more hurriedly, stepping back a little towards the rack where the walking-sticks were, “Please let me know what I can do for you!”

Bearded, unkempt, with massive shoulders and huge neck, the caller stood a moment and stared. “Your name and address,” he said at length, “were given to me”--he hesitated a moment, then added--“you know by whom.” His voice was deep and windy and echoing. It made the stretched cords of the upright piano ring against the wall. “He told me to call,” the man concluded.

“Ah yes; of course,” Jones stammered, forgetting for the moment who or where he was. “Let me see--where are you”--the word did not want to come out--“staying?” The caller made an awful and curious movement; it seemed so much bigger than his body. “In what way--er--can I be of assistance?” Jones hardly knew what he said. The other volunteered so little. He was frightened. Then, before the man could answer, he caught a dreadful glimpse, as of something behind the outline. It moved. Was it shadow that thus extended his form? Was it the glare of that ugly gas-stove that played tricks with the folds of the curtain, driving bodily outline forth into mere vacancy? For the figure of his strange caller seemed to carry with it the idea of projections, extensions, growths, in themselves not monstrous, fine and comely, rather--yet awful.

The man left the window and moved towards him. It was a movement both swift and enormous. It was instantaneous.

“Who are you--_really_?” asked Jones, his breath catching, while he went pluckily out to meet him, irresistibly drawn. “And what is it you _really_ want of me?” He went very close to the shrouded form, caught the keen air from the open window behind, sniffed a wind that was not London’s stale and weary wind, then stopped abruptly, frozen with terror and delight. The man facing him was splendid and terrific, exhaling something that overwhelmed.

“What can I ... do ... for ... you?” whispered Jones, shaking like a leaf. A delight of racing clouds was in him.

The answer came in a singular roaring voice that yet sounded far away, as though among mountains. Wind might have brought it down.

“There is nothing you can do for me! But, by Chiron, there is something I can do for you!”

“And that is?” asked Jones faintly, feeling something sweep against his feet and legs like the current of a river in flood.

The man eyed him appallingly a moment.

“Let you see me!” he roared, while his voice set the piano singing again, and his outline seemed to swim over the chairs and tables like a fluid mass. “Show myself to you!”

The figure stretched out what looked like arms, reared gigantically aloft towards the ceiling, and swept towards him. Jones saw the great visage close to his own. He smelt the odour of caves, river-beds, hillsides--space. In another second he would have been lost----

His brother made a great rattling as he opened the door. The atmosphere of rice and sugar and office desks came in with him.

“Why, Billy, old man, you look as if you’d seen a ghost. You’re white!”

William Jones mopped his forehead. “I’ve been working rather hard,” he answered. “Feel tired. Fact is--I got stuck in a story for a bit.”

“Too bad. Got it straightened out at last, I hope?”

“Yes, thanks. _It came to me_--in the end.”

The other looked at him. “Good,” he said shortly. “Rum thing, imagination, isn’t it?” And then he began talking about his day’s business--in tons and tons of food.

XI

THE INVITATION

They bumped into one another by the swinging doors of the little Soho restaurant, and, recoiling sharply, each made a half-hearted pretence of lifting his hat (it was French manners, of course, _inside_). Then, discovering that they were English, and not strangers, they exclaimed, “Sorry!” and laughed.

“Hulloa! It’s Smith!” cried the man with the breezy manner; “and when did _you_ get back?” It sounded as though “Smith” and “_you_” were different persons. “I haven’t seen you for months!” They shook hands cordially.

“Only last Saturday--on the _Rollitania_,” answered the man with the pince-nez. They were acquaintances of some standing. Neither was aware of anything in the other he disliked. More positive cause for friendship there was none. They met, however, not infrequently.

“Last Saturday! Did you really?” exclaimed the breezy one; and, after an imperceptible pause which suggested nothing more vital, he added, “And had a good time in America, eh?”

“Oh! not bad, thanks--not bad at all.” He likewise was conscious of a rather barren pause. “Awful crossing, though,” he threw in a few seconds later with a slight grimace.

“Ah! At this time of year, you know----” said Breezy, shaking his head knowingly; “though _sometimes_, of course, one has better trips in winter than in summer. I crossed once in December when it was like a mill-pond the whole blessed way.”

They moved a little to one side to let a group of Frenchmen enter the swinging doors.

“It’s a good line,” he added, in a voice that settled the reputation of the steamship company for ever. “By Jove, it’s a good line.”

“Oh! it’s a good line, yes,” agreed Pince-nez, gratified to find his choice approved. He shifted his glasses modestly. The discovery reflected glory upon his judgment. “_And_ such an excellent table!”

Breezy agreed heartily. “I’d never cross now on any other,” he declared, as though he meant the table. “You’re right.”

This happy little agreement about the food pleased them both; it showed their judgment to be sound; also it established a ground of common interest--a link--something that gave point to their little chat, and made it seem worth while to have stopped and spoken. They rose in one another’s estimation. The chance meeting ought to lead to something, perhaps. Yet neither found the expected inspiration; for neither _au fond_ had anything to say to the other beyond passing the time of day.

“Well,” said Pince-nez, lingeringly but very pleasantly, making a movement towards the doors; “I suppose I must be going in. You--er--you’ve had lunch, of course?”

“Thanks, yes, I have,” Breezy replied with a certain air of disappointment, as though the question had been an invitation. He moved a few steps backwards down the pavement. “But, now you’re back,” he added more cheerfully, “we must try and see something of one another.”

“By all means. Do let’s,” said Pince-nez. His manner somehow suggested that he too expected an invitation, perhaps. He hesitated a moment, as though about to add something, but in the end said nothing.

“We must lunch together one day,” observed Breezy, with his jolly smile. He glanced up at the restaurant.

“By all means--let’s,” agreed the other again, with one foot on the steps. “Any day you like. Next week, perhaps. You let me know.” He nodded cordially, and half turned to enter.

“Lemme see, where are you staying?” called Breezy by way of after-thought.

“Oh! I’m at the X----,” mentioning an obscure hostel in the W.C. district.

“Of course; yes, I remember. That’s where you stopped before, isn’t it? Up in Bloomsbury somewhere----?”

“Rooms ain’t up to much, but the cooking’s _quite_ decent.”

“Good. Then we’ll lunch one day soon. What sort of time, by the bye, suits you?” The breezy one, for some obscure reason, looked vigorously at his watch.

“Oh! any time; one o’clock onwards, sort of thing, I suppose?” with an air of “just let me know and I’ll be there.”

“Same here, yes,” agreed the other, with slightly less enthusiasm.

“That’s capital, then,” from Pince-nez. He paused a moment, not finding precisely the suitable farewell phrase. Then, to his own undoing, he added carelessly, “There are one or two things--er--I should like to tell you about----”

“And luncheon _is_ the best time,” Breezy suggested at once, “for busy men like us. You might bespeak a table, in fact.” He jerked his head towards the restaurant.

The two acquaintances, one on the pavement, the other on the steps, stood and stared at each other. The onus of invitation had somehow shifted insensibly from Breezy to Pince-nez. The next remark would be vital. Neither thought it worth while to incur the slight expense of a luncheon that involved an hour in each other’s company. Yet it was nothing stronger than a dread of possible boredom that dictated the hesitancy.

“Not a bad idea,” agreed Pince-nez vaguely. “But I doubt if they’ll keep a table after one o’clock, you know.”

“Never mind, then. You’re on the telephone, I suppose, aren’t you?” called Breezy down the pavement, still moving slowly backwards.

“Yes, you’ll find it under the name of the hotel,” replied the other, putting his head back round the door-post in the act of going in.

“My number’s not in the book!” Breezy cried back; “but it’s 0417 Westminster. Then you’ll ring me up one day? That’ll be very jolly indeed. _Don’t forget the number!_” This shifting of telephonic responsibility, he felt, was a master-stroke.

“Right-O. I’ll remember. So long, then, for the present,” Pince-nez answered more faintly, disappearing into the restaurant.

“Decent fellow, that. I shall go to lunch if he asks me,” was the thought in the mind of each. It lasted for perhaps half a minute, and then--oblivion.

Ten days later they ran across one another again about luncheon-time in Piccadilly; nodded, smiled, hesitated a second too long--and turned back to shake hands.

“How’s everything?” asked the breezy one with gusto.

“First-rate, thanks. And how are _you_?”

“Jolly weather, isn’t it?” Breezy said, looking about him generally, “this sunshine--by Jove----!”

“Nothing like it,” declared Pince-nez, shifting his glasses to look at the sun, and concealing his lack of something to say by catching at the hearty manner.

“Nothing,” agreed Breezy.

“In the world,” echoed Pince-nez.

Again the topic was a link. The stream of pedestrians jostled them. They moved a few yards up Dover Street. Each was really on his way to luncheon. A pause followed the move.

“Still at--er--that hotel up there?” The name had escaped him. He jerked his head vaguely northwards.

“Yes; I thought you’d be looking in for lunch one day,” a faint memory stirring in his brain.

“Delighted! Or--you’d better come to my Club, eh? Less out of the way, you know,” declared Breezy.

“Very jolly. Thanks; that’d be first-rate.” Both paused a moment. Breezy looked down the street as though expecting someone or something. They ignored that it was luncheon hour.

“You’ll find me in the telephone book,” observed Pince-nez presently.

“Under X---- Hotel, I suppose?” from Breezy. “All right.”

“0995 Northern’s the number, yes.”

“And mine,” said Breezy, “is 0417 Westminster; or the Club”--with an air of imparting valuable private information--“is 0866 Mayfair. Any day you like. Don’t forget!”

“Rather not. Somewhere about one o’clock, eh?”

“Yes--or one-thirty.” And off they went again--each to his solitary luncheon.

A fortnight passed, and once more they came together--this time in an A.B.C. shop.

“Hulloa! There’s Smith,” thought Breezy “By Jove, I’ll ask him to lunch with me.”

“Why, there’s that chap again,” thought Pince-nez. “I’ll invite him, I think.”

They sat down at the same table. “But this is capital,” exclaimed both; “you must lunch with me, of course!” And they laughed pleasantly. They talked of food and weather. They compared Soho with A.B.C. Each offered light excuses for being found in the latter.

“I was in a hurry to-day, and looked in by the merest chance for a cup of coffee,” observed Breezy, ordering quite a lot of things at once, absent-mindedly, as it were.

“I like the butter here so awfully,” mentioned Pince-nez later. “It’s _quite_ the best in London, and the freshest, I always think.” As this was not _the_ luncheon, they felt that only commonplace things were in order. The special things they had to discuss must wait, of course.

The waitress got their paper checks muddled somehow. “I’ve put a ’alfpenny of yours on ’is,” she explained cryptically to Pince-nez.

“Oh,” laughed Breezy, “that’s nothing. This gentleman is lunching with me, anyhow.”

“You’ll ’ave to make it all right when you get outside, then,” said the girl gravely.

They laughed over her reply. At the paydesk both made vigorous search for money. Pince-nez, being nimbler, produced a florin first. “This is _my_ lunch, of course. I asked you, remember,” he said. Breezy demurred with a good grace.

“You can be host another time, if you insist,” added Pince-nez, pocketing twopence change.

“Rather,” said the other heartily. “You must come to the Club--any day you like, you know.”

“I’ll come to-morrow, then,” said Pince-nez, quick as a flash. “I’ve got the telephone number.”

“Do,” cried Breezy, very, very heartily indeed. “I shall be delighted! One o’clock, remember.”

XII

THE IMPULSE

“My dear chap,” cried Jones, throwing his hands out in a gesture of distress he thought was quite real, “nothing would give me greater pleasure--if only I could manage it. But the fact is I’m as hard up as yourself!”

The little pale-faced man of uncertain age opposite shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly.

“In a month or so, perhaps----” Jones added, hedging instinctively, “If it’s not too late then--I should be delighted----”

The other interrupted quickly, a swift flush emphasising momentarily the pallor of his strained and tired face. Overworked, overweary he looked.

“Oh, thanks, but it’s really of no consequence. I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my asking, though.” And Jones replied heartily that he only wished he were “flush” enough to lend it. They talked weather and politics then--after a pause, finished their drinks, Jones refusing the offer of another, and, presently, the elder man said good-night and left the Club. Jones, with a slight sigh of boredom, as though life went hard with him, passed upstairs to the card-room to find partners for a game.

Jones was not a bad fellow really; he was untaught. Experience had neglected him a little, so that his sympathies knew not those sweet though difficult routes by which interest travels away from self--towards others. He entirely lacked that acuter sense of life which only comes to those who have known genuine want and hardship. A fat income had always tumbled into his bank without effort on his part, the harvest of another’s sweat; yet, as with many such, he imagined that he earned his thousand a year, and figured somehow to himself that he deserved it. He was neither evil-liver nor extravagant; he knew not values, that was all--least of all money values; and at the moment when his cousin asked for twenty pounds to help his family to a holiday, he found that debts pressed a bit hard, that he owed still on his motor-car, and that some recent speculations seemed suddenly very doubtful. He was hard up, yes.... Perhaps, if the cards were lucky, he might do it after all. But the cards were not lucky. Soon after midnight he took a taxi home to his rooms in St. James’s Street. And then it was he found a letter marked “Urgent” placed by his man upon the table by the door so that he could not miss it.

The letter kept him awake most of the night in keen distress--for himself. It was anonymous, signed “Your Well-wisher.” It warned him, in words that proved the writer to be well informed, that the speculation in which he, Jones, had plunged so recklessly a week before would mean a total loss unless he instantly took certain steps to retrieve himself. Such steps, moreover, were just possible, provided he acted immediately.

Jones, as he read it, turned pale, if such a thing were possible, all over his body; then he turned hot and cold. He sweated, groaned, sighed, raged; sat down and wrote urgent instructions to solicitors and others; tore the letters up and wrote others. The loss of that money would reduce his income by at least half, alter his whole plan and scale of living, make him poor. He tried to reflect, but the calmness necessary to sound reflection lay far from him. Action was what he needed, but action was just then out of the question, for all the machinery of the world slept--solicitors, company secretaries, influential friends, lawcourts. The telephone on the wall merely grinned at him uselessly. Sleep was as vain a remedy as the closed and silent banks. There was absolutely nothing he could do till the morning; and he realised that the letters he wrote were futile even while he wrote them--and tore them up the next minute. Personal interviews the first thing in the morning, energetic talk and action based upon the best possible advice, were the only form relief could take, and these personal interviews he could obtain even before the letters would be delivered, or as soon. For him that money seemed as good as already lost ... and tossing upon his sleepless bed he faced the change of life the loss involved--bitterly, savagely, with keen pain: the lowered scale of self-indulgence, the clipped selfishness, restricted pleasures, fewer clothes, cheaper rooms, difficult and closely calculated travelling, and all the rest. It bit him hard--this first grinding of the little wheels of possible development in an ordinary selfish, though not evil, heart....

And then it was, as the grey dawn-light crept past the blinds, that the sharpness of his pain and the keen flight of his stirred imagination, projecting itself as by these forced marches into new, untried conditions, produced a slight reaction. The swing of the weary pendulum went a little beyond himself. He fell to wondering vaguely, and with poor insight, yet genuinely, what other men might feel, and how they managed on smaller incomes than his own--smaller than his would be even with the loss. Gingerly, tentatively, he snatched fearful glimpses (fearful, they seemed, to him, at least) into the enclosures of these more restricted lives of others. He knew a mild and weak extension of himself, as it were, that fringed the little maps of lives less happy and indulgent than his own. And the novel sensation brought a faint relief. The small, clogged wheels of sympathy acquired faster movement, almost impetus. It seemed as though the heat and fire of his pain, though selfish pain, generated some new energy that made them turn.

Jones, in all his useless life, had never _thought_; his mind had reflected images perhaps, but had never taken hold of a real idea and followed it by logical process to an end. His mind was heavy and confused, for his nature, as with so many, only moved to calculated action when a strong enough desire instinctively showed the quickest, easiest way by which two and two could be made into four. His reflections upon comparative poverty--the poverty he was convinced now faced him cruelly--were therefore obscure and trivial enough, while wholly honest. Wealth, he divined dimly, was relative, and money represented the value of what is wanted, perhaps of what is needed rather, and usually of what cannot be obtained. Some folk are poor because they cannot afford a second motor-car, or spend more than £100 upon a trip abroad; others because the moors and sea are out of reach; others, again, because they are glad of cast-off clothing and only dare “the gods” one night a week or take the free standing-room at Sunday concerts.... He suddenly recalled the story of some little penniless, elderly governess in Switzerland who made her underskirts from the silk of old umbrellas because she liked the frou-frou sound. Again and again this thought for others slipped past the network of his own distress, making his own selfish pain spread wider and therefore less acutely. For even with a mere £500 his life, perhaps, need not be too hard and unhappy.... The little wheels moved faster. His pain struck sparks. He saw strange glimpses of a new, far country, a fairer land than he had ever dreamed of, with endless horizons, and flowers, small and very simple, yet so lovely that he would have liked to pick them for their perfume. A sense of joy came for a moment on some soft wind of beauty, fugitive, but sweet. It vanished instantly again, but the vision caught for a moment, too tiny to be measured even by a fraction of a second, had flamed like summer lightning through his heart. It almost seemed as though his grinding selfish pain had burned the dense barriers that hid another world, bringing a light that just flamed above those huge horizons before they died. For they did die--and quickly, yet left behind a touch of singular joy and peace that somehow glowed on through all his subsequent self-pity....

And then, abruptly, with a vividness of detail that shocked him, he saw the Club smoking-room, and the worn face of his cousin close before him--the overworked hack-writer, who had asked a temporary £20, a little sum he would assuredly have paid back before the end of the year, a sum he asked, not for himself, but that he might send his wife and children to the sea.

Impulse, usually deplored as weakness, may prove first seed of habit. Whether Jones afterwards regretted his unconsidered action may be left unrecorded--whether he _would_ have regretted it, rather, if the saving of his dreaded loss had not subsequently been effected. As matters stand, he only knew a sense or flattering self-congratulation that he had slipped that letter--the only one he left untorn--into the pillar-box at the corner before the sun rose, and that it contained a pink bit of paper that should bring to another the relief he himself had, for the first time in his life, known imaginatively upon that sleepless bed. Before the day was over the letter reached its destination, and his own affairs had been put right. And two days later, when they met in the Club, and Jones noticed the obvious happiness in the other’s eyes and manner, he only answered to his words of thanks:

“I wish I could have given it at once. The fact is I found letters on getting home that night which--er--made it possible, you see ...!”

But in his heart, as he said it, flamed again quite suddenly the memory of that fair land with endless horizons he had sighted for a second, and the sentence that ran unspoken through his mind was: “By Jove, that’s something I must do again. It’s worth it ...!”

XIII

HER BIRTHDAY

It was her birthday on the morrow, and I set forth to find a suitable and worthy present. My means, judged by the standards of the big merchants, seemed trivial; yet, could I but discover the right gift, no matter how insignificant, I felt sure that it would please her, and so make me doubly happy. And the kind of gift I already knew, for I had a specimen of it in my humble lodgings; only of so poor a type that I was ashamed to offer it. I must find somewhere a much, much better one, if possible, perfect and without a single flaw. I went, therefore, into the great shops and saw a thousand wonderful and lovely things....

So particular was I, however, and so difficult to suit, that I wearied the salesfolk, and began to feel despondent. All that they showed me was so wrong--so cheap. In the matter of actual expense there was no disagreement, for I mentioned plainly beforehand the price that I would pay, or, rather, that I was prepared to pay. But in the nature and quality of the goods there was no satisfying me at all. Everything that they spread before my eyes seemed ordinary, trifling, even spurious. Marvellously fashioned, and of the most costly description, they yet seemed somewhere counterfeit. The goods were sham. Already she possessed far better. There was nowhere--and I went to the very best emporiums where the rich and favoured of the world bought their offerings--there was nowhere the little genuine thing I sought. The finest that was set before me seemed unworthy. I compared one and all with the specimen, broken yet authentic, that I had at home. And even the cleverest of the salesfolk was unable to deceive me, because I _knew_.