Chapter VII: Introduction (6)

No strange workman sits on the reaper, but one of Milgate's best men, the most trustworthy, most faithful--the waggoner; a man well over sixty, with side-whiskers, grey eyes, a long nose, and forehead and chin carved out of granite. On his head a flat "wide-awake" hat, on his bent back a white jacket. When he speaks, his mouth moves sideways first; there's always a spot of dried blood on his lip; when he smiles a tooth-stump appears like an ancient fossil. He talks slowly, stopping to spit now and then; every day of his life he gets up at half-past three. Now, mounted on the high iron seat (a crumpled sack for saddle), he rides like some old charioteer, a Hercules with great bowed back, head jutting out, chin straight; a hard, weathered look about his face, and in his heart disgust--this year, for the first time, they are using a motor engine to pull the reaper round instead of horses. He lives for his horses; he's the "Waggoner," they are his "job;" if one falls ill, he sleeps with it. He believes in horses; but, speaking of the motor, he says: "She's arlraight--when she's arlraight!" with a look which ends the sentence for him! In his youth he had reaped with a scythe.

This "Walter Wood" is a neat arrangement, you can't deny that; one bit of mechanism works as a divider, while a big, light kind of wooden windmill arrangement, continually revolving, beats the corn down into a flat pan from which it's carried, on a canvas slide, up an incline, then shot over and down the other side in one continual long, flat stream like yellow matting. And then the needle, the "threadle" as he calls it, nips in somewhere, binding the flat mass into separate, neat, round sheaves, pitched out every few moments with perfect precision by a three-pronged iron fork. Above the one big, heavy central wheel the charioteer is shaken and jolted from nine till nine. In front, on another iron seat by the boxlike engine, the driver works. Behind runs a red-faced labourer "clearing corners." The motor has to run out the full length of its cogged iron wheel bands before it can turn, and sheaves dropped on the last round get in the way; so at each corner they have to be lifted and set back. The labourer "clears," then runs after the machine--now half-way up the field--stops at the next corner, stoops once more to lift and shift three sheaves, then runs again.

This labourer was a man of forty with a face as naive as a boy of fifteen. Though getting bald, his eyes were young; his mouth loose, untrained as a child's. He's "touched," as we say, and had never really grown up. He slept in an attic, ate in a kitchen, and worked, but was not "responsible;" he was always given "light jobs"--walking with the "clappers," weeding, cleaning sties, "clearing." His greatest friend was a boy of twelve; on Sundays they'd laugh for an hour at nothing. Going to the coast for the first time last year, he was so taken by a Punch and Judy show that he never saw the sea. His smile was the most ridiculous thing in the world. He blushed continually, panted, grinned like some boy caught kissing, and was always apologetic. Lightning made him hide his head, and he was afraid of engines--their regularity upset him. Running behind the reaper--this quick-moving, noisy thing smelling of oil, made up of sliding chains--appalled him; there were five wheels at an angle, and all the time an oil-wet, black, flat, chain-band ran round over them! Underneath, the heavy central wheel ran round and round! To the imbecile the waggoner's courage appeared supernatural.

There should have been another man to take two corners, but all hands were wanted; so the labourer had to run all day. It was hot, no wind, no shade. If he looked up for a moment, the hills and distant elms appeared bright blue. The big field itself was ablaze with colour; wheat like brown burnt amber, poppies, small white daisies, thistles. When the engine stopped the only sounds were plaintive, anxious bird-calls from the centre of the field; sometimes a rabbit or a hare looked out, then bolted back. Once five graceful, sleek, brown pheasants ran out towards the hedge, then lost their nerve, turned and went running back. The sun shone steadily; sheaves picked up by the labourer made his hands smell oily, their string band raised a blister on his forefinger. Very often he grabbed hold of nettles and sharp thistles, and the backs of his hands were swollen and covered with stings. Blue butterflies twirled in front of his face, pale moths flew out. When his hat fell off he had no time to get it. The sweat ran down his egg-shaped forehead to his long, square, hairy chin (though he could shave himself on Sundays, he looked a little like a monkey).

When the engine stuck, the waggoner asked in his slow, flat voice:

"Woan't she speak?"

"She's not comin' out!" was the youth's reply.

Once the driver was thrown up a foot when the motor went over a hole. He yelled: "Men are often killed by the reaper." The imbecile got the startled look of a child seeing snakes at the Zoo. Each time the engine snorted, or the waggoner called out "Ohoy!" a spurt of sweat ran down his spine; the blood was beating in his head; the sun shone mercilessly on his pale, bald patch; the field began to bounce before his eyes, bloodshot from stooping. When yards of bindweed shackled the machinery, the waggoner just turned his head--a sign--for the labourer, who had to run, had to catch and tear away the long green chains full of small pink flowers.

By four o'clock they were overtaking him before he got round; the driver had to turn more sharply, the canvas stuck.

"Doan you do that agen!" the old waggoner scolded with stern eye; "you'll tourn us oover!"

The engine stuck when they tried to start again; for half an hour the young driver tinkered with tools from the box, unscrewing small oily "nuts," testing "wires," feeling "levers," and in desperation wiping his black, dripping hands on his hair. Twenty times he turned the "starting handle," but "she wouldn't speak!" Then, suddenly, with a sound like a pistol-shot, the engine "fired," the machine ran backwards, upsetting the labourer, and before he could move, the central wheel ran over his ankles.

When the imbecile came to himself they were still at the corner, his feet were tied up in a jacket, he was suffering horribly, yet seemed unable to focus it; but seeing the red and yellow reaper standing close beside his head, some memory soaked his face with sweat; he fainted.

Brandy was fetched; they had lifted him on to a hurdle when he recovered again. The whole group were still at the corner. His employer stood there, stout, well-dressed, and anxious, in his grey felt hat, dark coat and trousers; the driver stood there, too, and the old waggoner. Corn was still "up" in the middle of the field. The labourer looked surprised at seeing sky before him; as a rule when he stared he saw fields. He turned his face; the men watching saw his round, boyish eyes project at sight of something red and wet and sticky (like the mess they made out sheep-killing) splashed on the stubble, while two broken boots lay oozing the same stuff in a large pool of it. Following this look, the old waggoner said slowly:

"Eh, me boy, they'm youers...." Tears were running down his stiff, dried cheeks.

"How d'you feel?" asked the farmer. His labourer blushed, then whispered to the waggoner:

"What's 'appened, Mister Collard?"

"Why, you've a-loarst your feet."

For yet another minute the imbecile lay panting, shy, self-conscious under his master's eye--until an idea struck him; once more whispering to the waggoner, he said:

"'Elp me oop. I'll get 'ome, Willy."

"You carn't walk," said the old man simply. "You carn't walk no moar."

Black hairs stiffened suddenly on the idiot's chin; he had understood that in those bleeding, mangled boots his feet were lying; he began to cry. But then, catching sight of his master, smiled as though to apologise----

THE SONG

By MAY EDGINTON

(From _Lloyd's Story Magazine_)

1922

Charlie had no true vice in him. All the same, a man may be overtaxed, over-harassed, over-routined, over-driven, over-pricked, over-preached and over-starved right up to the edge; and then the fascination of the big space below may easily pull him over.

But his wife's uncle's assertion that he must always, inwardly, have been naturally wild and bad, was as wrong as such assertions usually are, for he was no more truly vicious than his youngest baby was.

On the warm evening when he came home on that fateful autumn day, Charlie had been pushed, in the course of years, right up to the edge, and was looking into the abyss, though he was hardly aware of it, so well had he been disciplined. He emerged from a third-class carriage of the usual train without an evening paper because his wife had shown him the decency of cutting down small personal expenses, and next morning's papers would have the same news in anyway; he walked home up the suburban road for the four thousandth five hundredth and fiftieth time; entered quietly not to disturb the baby; rubbed his boots on the mat; answered his wife brightly and manfully; washed his hands in cold water--the hot water being saved for the baby's bath and the washing-up in the evenings--and sat down to about the four thousandth five hundredth and fiftieth cold supper.

His wife said she was tired and seemed proud of it.

"But never mind," she said, "one must expect to be tired." He went on eating without verbally questioning her; it was an assertion to which she always held firmly. But in his soul something stirred vaguely, as if mutinous currents fretted there.

"I have been thinking," she said, "that you really ought not to buy that new suit you were considering if Maud is to go to a better school next term. I have been looking over your pepper-and-salt, and there are those people who turn suits like new. You can have that done."

"But----" he murmured.

"We ought not to think of ourselves," she added.

"I never have," said Charlie in rather a low voice.

"We ought to give a little subscription to the Parish Magazine," she continued. "The Vicar is calling round for extra subscriptions."

Charlie nodded. He was wishing he knew the football results in the evening paper.

His wife served a rice shape. She doled out jam with a careful hand and a measuring eye. "We ought to see about the garden gate," she said.

"I'll mend it on Saturday," Charlie replied.

"I was thinking," she said presently, "that we ought to ask Uncle Henry and Aunt round soon. They will be expecting it."

Charlie put his spoon and fork together, hesitated and then replied slowly: "Life is nothing but 'ought.' 'Ought' to do this: 'Ought' to do that."

His wife looked at him, astonished. He could see that she was grieved--or rather, aggrieved--at his glimmer of anarchy.

"Of course," she explained at last. "People can't have what they like. There's one's duty to do. Life isn't for enjoyment, Charlie. It's given to us ... it is given to us...."

As she paused to crystallise an idea, Charlie cut in.

"Yes," he said, "it is given to us.... What for?"

He leaned his head on his hand. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the cloth, weaving patterns upon it. And with this question something of boyhood came upon him again, and he weaved visions upon the cloth.

"To do one's duty in," she replied gently, but rebukingly.

Charlie did not know the classic phrase, "Cui bono." He merely repeated:

"What for?"

After supper he helped her to wash up, for the daily help left early in the afternoon; and then he asked her, idle as he knew the question to be, if she would like to come for a walk--just a short walk up the road.

She shook her head. "I ought not to leave the children."

"They're in bed," he argued, "and Maud's big enough to look after the others for half-an-hour. Maud's twelve."

She shook her head. "I ought not to leave the house."

"But," he began slowly.

"I am not the kind of woman who leaves her house and children in the evenings," she said gently, but finally.

Charlie took his hat. He turned it round and round in his hands, pinching the crown in, and punching it out. He had a curious, almost uncontrollable wish to cry. For a moment it was terrible. Before it was over, she was speaking again.

"You ought not to mess your hats about like that; they don't last half as long."

Charlie went out.

He knew other men who were as puzzled about life as himself, but mostly they were of cruder stuff, and if things at home went beyond their bearing they flung out of their houses, swearing, and went to play a hundred up at the local club. Then they were philosophers again. But for Charlie this evening there was no philosophy big enough, for he was looking, though he did not know it, over the edge of that awful, but enchanting abyss. Its depths were obscured by rolling clouds of mist, and it was only this mist which he now saw, terrifying and confusing him. He was a little man, and knew it. He was a poor man, and knew it. He was a weary man, and knew it. He hated his wife, and knew it. He hated his children--whom she had made like herself, prim, peeking and childishly censorious--and knew it.

He had not meant it to be like this at all.

When he got married she was the starched daughter of starched parents from a starched small house--like the one he came from--but she was young, and her figure was pliant, and her hair curled rather sweetly.

He had dreamed of happy days, cosy days with laughter; little treats together--Soho restaurants, Richmond Park, something colourful, something for which he had vaguely and secretly longed all the dingy, narrow, church-parading, humbugging days of his good little boyhood. But he soon woke up to find he had married another hard holy woman like his mother.

He walked along, thinking mistily and hotly. Supposing he had a baby who roared with joy and stole the sugar ... but she wouldn't have babies like that. The first coherent thing her babies learned to say was a text.

Babies.... He hadn't wanted three, because they couldn't afford them. He tried to talk to her about it. She made him ashamed of himself, though he didn't know why; and showed him how wicked he was, though he didn't know why; and how good she was, though he didn't know why--then. But he knew now that there are still many women who are gluttons for martyrdom, who long to exalt themselves by a parrot righteousness, and who are only happy when destroying natural joy in others. And he knew there were many men like himself, married and done for; tied up to these pettifogging saints; goaded under their stupid yoke; belittled through their narrow eyes.

He thought all this mistily and hotly.

He had come to the end of the road; and the end of another road more populous; and the end of another road, more populous.

At a corner of this road stood Kitty.

She was soft and colourful, painted to a perfect peachiness, young--twenty-four and looking less; old as the world and wise. She was gay. She did not much care if it snowed; she knew enough to wriggle in somewhere, somehow, out of it. The years had not yet scared her. She was joy.

Charlie paused before he knew why. She looked at him. Then the mists rolled away from the abyss below the tottering edge on which he had been balanced for longer time than he guessed, and he saw the garden far below; lotus flowers dreaming in the sun. He launched himself simply into space towards them.

Kitty helped him. She knew how.

Charlie had, as it happened, his next week's personal allowance of seven and sixpence in his pocket--for to-day had been pay day; and his season ticket. The rest he had handed over to his wife at supper time. He had also, however, the moral support of knowing that he had in the savings bank the exact amount of his sickness and life insurance premiums due that very week. So it did not embarrass him to take Kitty straight away up to town--she, making a shrewd summary of him, did not object to third-class travelling--and to stand her coffee and a sandwich at the Monico.

"I don't happen to have much change on me, and my bank's closed," was the explanation he offered, and she tactfully accepted of this modest entertainment.

It was ten-thirty when she took him to see her tiny flat a stone's throw away. She was looking for another supporter for that flat, and explained her reason for being in Charlie's suburb that evening. She'd been trying to find the house of a man friend--a rich friend--who lived there, and might have helped her over a temporary difficulty, but when she found the house the servants told her he was away. She confided these things, leaning in Charlie's arms on a little striped divan by a gas fire. She made him a drink, and showed him the cunning and luxurious little contrivances for comfort about the flat. He loved it. She didn't try to conceal from him her real vocation, for that would have been too silly. Even Charlie might not have been such a fool as to believe her. But she invested it with glamour; she made of it romance. Once more as in boyhood he saw the world full of allurement.

So he went home, having promised her that to-morrow he would come again.

And going in quietly, so as not to disturb the baby, he undressed quietly so as not to disturb his wife, and he crept cautiously into the double bed that she decreed they must share for ever and ever, whatever their feelings towards one another, because they were married; and he hoped to fall asleep with enchantment unbroken. But she was awake, and waiting patiently to speak. "Where have you been, Charlie?"

"At the club," he whispered back. "Watching two fellows play a billiard match."

She sighed.

"Charlie," she said, "you ought to have more consideration for me. Maudie said to me when I went in to look at them before I came to bed: 'Is daddy still out?' she said. 'I do think he ought not to go out and leave you alone, mamma.' She's such a sweet child, Charlie, and I do think you ought to think more of her. Children often say little things in the innocence of their hearts that do even us grown-up people good sometimes."

So the next morning Charlie left home with a suit-case--alleged to contain the one suit for turning, but really crammed to bursting. His wife being busy with the baby, Maud saw him off with her usual air of smug reproof; and that evening he did not come back. He had written a letter to his wife, on the journey to town, telling her his decision, which she would receive by the afternoon post. But he gave her no address.

He drew out the whole amount in the savings bank, surrendered his life insurance, realising L160; and he went home after the day's work to Kitty.

Little Kitty was looking for any kind of mug, pending better developments, and she certainly had found one; but what a happy mug he was! Life was warm and light, gay and uncritical. He spent even less on his own lunches--he retained his seven and sixpence weekly personal allowance, though of course he posted the rest of his salary home--so that he might have an extra half-crown or so to buy chocolates for Kitty. It was nice to buy chocolates instead of subscribing to the Vicar's Fund. And little Kitty, who was wise, guessed he hadn't much and couldn't afford her long, so pending better things, like a sensible person, she eked him out.

She made him so happy. They laughed. She sang--

I'm for ever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky....

She had a gramophone and she taught him to dance, and then he had to take her to the best dancing place he could afford and they danced a long evening through. He bought her a wonderful little woollen frock at one of the small French shops in Shaftesbury Avenue, and she looked exactly what she was in it; and he knew she was the most wonderful thing in the world. When he propounded the frock question to her one morning when they woke up, saying: "I would like to see you in a dress I'd bought, Kitty," she did not tell him it was wrong to consider themselves, and she would have her old black turned. She put a dear fat little arm round his neck, laid a soft selfish cheek to his, and muttered cosily, "It shall buy her a frock then. It shall."

She was sporting enough not to protest when she knew where his weekly pay went. "Three kids must be fed," she said. In fact, according to her own codes, she was not ungenerous towards the other woman.

All the while he knew: L160 can't last. What will happen when...?

Charlie's wife thought she was sure of what must happen pretty soon. So did her Uncle Henry and Aunt, for whom she had sent a day or two after the blow had fallen.

They found her cutting down Maud's oldest dress for the second child in her tidy house.

"Charlie has left me for an immoral woman," she said, after preparing them with preliminaries.

"What!" said Uncle Henry. He was a churchwarden at the church to which Charlie, in a bowler hat, had had to take the critical Maud on Sundays.

"Fancy leaving _that_!" said Aunt, when they had digested and credited the news. She pointed at her niece sewing diligently even through this painful conversation. "Look at her scraping and economising and contriving. And he leaves her!"

"He must be naturally wild and bad," said Uncle Henry. "Shall I speak to the Vicar for you?"

"Have you written to his firm?" asked Aunt.

Charlie's wife spoke wisely, gently, and with perfection as ever. "No," she said. "I have thought it over, and I think the best thing, for the children's sake, is to say nothing. We ought not to consider ourselves. Besides, I dare say it's my duty to forgive him."

"Always thinking of your duty!" murmured Aunt admiringly.

"If I wrote to his firm about it," said Charlie's wife, "they would dismiss him."

"Ah! and he sends you his pay, you say?" said Uncle Henry, seizing the point like a business man.

"What a position for a conscientious woman like you!" mourned Aunt.

"You are quite right, my dear," said Uncle Henry. "You have three children and no other means of sustenance, and you cannot afford to do as I should otherwise advise you."

"Besides, he will come back," said Charlie's wife gently. "Men are soon sickened of these women."

"Of course," agreed Aunt.

"Well! Well!" said Uncle Henry, "you are very magnanimous, my dear, and one day Charles will fully appreciate it. And I hope he will be duly thankful to you for your great goodness. Yes! You will soon have Master Charles creeping back, very ashamed of himself, and when he comes, I for one, intend to give him the biggest talking to he has ever had in his life. But I really think the Vicar too, should be told, in confidence, so that he may decide upon the right course of action for himself."

"Because he could not allow your husband to communicate, my love," said Aunt, "without being sure of his genuine repentance."

"I have been thinking of that too," said Charlie's wife. "It would not be right."

"I wonder what he feels about himself, when he remembers his dear little children," said Aunt. "Maud nearly old enough to understand, and all!"

So they lay for Charlie, while he basked and thrived in the abyss of the lotus-flower; and the L160 dwindled.

It was towards the end of the second month that Charlie sensed a new element in his precarious dream. All day when he was out, thinking of Kitty through the routine of his work, he had no idea of what she was doing. Sometimes he was afraid to think of what she might be doing, and for fear of shattering the dream, he never dared to ask. Always she was sweet and joyful towards him--save for petulant quarrels she raised as if to make the ensuing sweetness and joyfulness the dearer--until towards the close of the second month. Then one evening she was distrait; one evening, critical; one night, cold; then she had a dinner and dance engagement at the Savoy. Then he knew that his time had come.

He waited up for her. He had the gas fire lighted in the tiny sitting-room, and little sugary cakes and wine on the table; and the gas fire lighted in the bedroom to warm it for her, and the bed turned down, and her nightgown and slippers, so frail, warming before the fire.

But he knew.

In the early dawn her key clicked in the lock, and she came in, followed by a man. He was pale, sensual, moneyed, fashionable. Charlie got up stoutly; but he was already beaten.

The Jew looked at him, and turned to Kitty.

"I told you," she said, stammering a little, "I told you how it was. By to-morrow ... I told you...."

"I'll come again, to-morrow, then," said the man very meaningly, "fetch you out----"

"At eight," she nodded firmly.

He kissed her on the mouth, while Charlie stood looking at them with eyes that seemed to stare themselves out of his head, turned and went out.

"Nighty-night!" Kitty called after him.

After the front door clicked again there was a moment's silence. Kitty advanced, shook off her cloak, took up one of the sugary cakes, and began to munch it. She looked beautiful and careless and sorry and hard all at once.

"What are you sitting up for, Charlie?" she asked. "I didn't expect to see you. I brought that fellow in to talk."

"What about?" said Charlie in a hoarse desolate voice.

"Charlie," said Kitty, hurriedly, "you know this arrangement of ours can't last, now, can it, dear? You haven't the cash for one thing, dear. Now, have you? And I've got to think of myself a little; a girl's got to provide. You've been awf'ly good to me. Let's part friends."

"'Part!'" he repeated.

His eyes seemed to start from his head.

"Let's part friends," wheedled Kitty. "Shall us?"

The night passed in a kind of evil vision of desolation, and Kitty was asleep long before he had stopped his futile whisperings into her ear.

Before he went to the office in the morning, he asked her from a breaking heart: "You mean it?"

"I've got to," she explained. She cried easily. "Dearie, you'll leave peaceably? You won't make a row? Now, for my sake! To oblige me! While you're out to-day I'll pack your suit-case and give it to the hall-porter for you to call for. Shall I, Charlie? Kiss me, dear. Don't take your latch-key. Good-bye. You've been awfully decent to me. We'll part friends, shall us?"

He kissed her, and went out to work, speaking no more. He had said all the things in his heart during the hours of that sleepless dawn. She knew how he loved her ... though possibly she didn't quite believe. He realised her position acutely, perhaps more acutely than his own. She had to live. And yet....

He had taken his latch-key the same as usual, and he found himself at the end of the day, going the same as usual to the tiny flat that was home if ever there was any place called home. He let himself in noiselessly. The little hall was dark. He stood in a corner against the coat cupboard. The flat was silent. He stood there a long while without moving and a clock chimed seven. He heard her singing--

"I'm for ever blowing bubbles....
Lal-la! la! la!... la! la! la!..."

She would be in her bedroom, sitting before the mirror in her diaphanous underwear, touching up her face. The pauses in the song made him see her.... Now she was using the eyebrow pencil.... The song went on and broke again; now she would be half turning from the mirror, curved on the gilt chair as he had so often seen her, hand-glass in hand, looking at the back of her head, and her eyelashes, and her profile, fining away all hard edges of rouge and lipstick. He felt quite peaceful as he imaged her.

Peace was shattered at a blast by the ringing of the front door bell. Then light streamed from the opened bedroom door, was switched off, and Kitty ran into the darkish hall. She clicked on the light by the front door, opened the door, and the big man came in.

He kissed her on the mouth.

Then Charlie stepped from beside the coat cupboard, suddenly as though some strong spring which held him there had been released, and the strong spring was in his tense body alone. For the first time in his life he felt all steel and wire and whipcord, and many fires. He threw himself on the intruder and fought for his woman.

Kitty did not scream. She knew better.

"Oh Charlie!" she panted. "For ---- sake go! Go! I can't have a row here. Oh, Charlie, be a good boy, do."

"He _shall_ go," said the other man.

He was a big man; and still young and lithe. Kitty opened the front door, whispering: "Oh, Charlie! Oh! Charlie!" and the man pushed Charlie out. The lift was not working at the moment, the landing was quiet, there was not a soul on the stairway beside the liftshaft when the man flung Charlie headlong down the first flight and broke him on the unyielding stone.

Charlie heard his own spine crack; but as the other, scared and pale, reached him, he heard something else also; the voice of Kitty, who stood above them, looking down, sobbing: "I c-c-can't have a row here. It'd break me. Oh! Charlie! Oh Charlie! If you love me, go away!"

Charlie loved Kitty very much. "My back's broken," he whispered to the enemy bending over him. "But if you get me under the armpits, lift me down the stairs, and put me into the street, and if the hall-porter sees us go out tell him I'm dead drunk----"

The man lifted him as instructed, an arm round him, just under the shoulder-blades and armpits. Below he could feel the crumpled weight sway and sag. He tried to be merciful in his handling. "D-d-do you no g-g-good," he faltered as he lifted Charlie downstairs, "t-to get me into a mess. I'm sorry. D-d-didn't mean.... But I've got a wife and don't want hell raised.... You asked for it.... I'm sorry. I'm sorry...." When they reached the ground floor the single-handed porter was just carrying a passenger in the lift to the floor above, so they got unobserved into the street, a quietish street, a cul-de-sac.

"Take me a f-f-few d-d-doors off, and put me down," said Charlie, and the sweat of pain ran down his face, but when the man had put him down against some area railings, and laid him straight, he was comfortable.

The other man simply vanished.

A taxi-driver found Charlie by-and-by, and the police fetched an ambulance and took him to the hospital, and in a white bed he lay sleepily, revealing nothing, all that night. But they found, searching for an address in his pockets, the address of his family, and they sent a message to his wife.

His wife received it early the next morning, and first she sent Maud for Uncle Henry and Aunt, who found that all was turning out as they prophesied, save for the slight deviation of Charlie's accident.

"They don't say exactly how bad he is?" said Uncle Henry. "Ah! but he was well enough to send for you! He knows which side his bread's buttered. Yes! we shall have Master Charles creeping back again, very thankful to be in his home with every comfort, nursed by you; and I will give him the worse talking to be has ever had in his life!"

"And if he's ill he can't prevent the Vicar visiting him too," said Aunt.

So Charlie's wife set out to do her duty.

But still earlier that morning, instructed by the tremendous peace which was stealing over him that time was short, Charlie was making his first request. Would they please ring up _Shaftesbury_ 84 to ask for "Kitty" and tell her "Charlie" just wanted to see her very urgently for a few minutes at once, but not to be frightened, for everything would be perfectly all right?

Pending her arrival, which in a faltering voice over the phone she promised as soon as possible, Charlie asked the kindly Sister who was hovering near to help him die:

"Sister, when a friend of mine comes in, a young lady who isn't used to--to seeing--things, if I go off suddenly as it were-what I'm afraid of is, she may be afraid if there's any kind of struggle--I saw a fellow die once and he gave a sort of rattle--well, will you just pull the bed-clothes up over me, so that she doesn't see?"

Kitty came in, wearing, perhaps incidentally, perhaps by some grace of kindness, the woollen frock, and she crept, shaking, round the screen, and stood beside Charlie, and said, "Oh Charlie! Oh Charlie!" opening his closing eyes.

"Kitty!" he smiled, "sing 'Bubbles.'"

The look Sister--who had taken her right in--gave her, pried Kitty's trembling mouth open like a crowbar, and leaning against Charlie's cot she sang--

"When shadows creep,
When I'm asleep,
To lands of hope I stray,
Then at daybreak, when I awake...."

The Sister drew the bed-clothes shadily round Charlie's face.

"... My blue bird flutters away,
I'm forever blowing bubbles....
Pretty bubbles in the air...."

Just then the good woman was brought into the ward, bearing with her messages from Maud worthy of Little Eva herself; and full of holy forgiveness; and at edge of the screen Sister met her.

"His wife?" said Sister. "A moment too late. I am sorry." The good woman was looking at the bad woman by the bed, so Sister made a vague explanation.

"He just wanted a song," she said.

A HEDONIST

By JOHN GALSWORTHY

(From _Pears' Annual_ and _The Century Magazine_)

1921

Rupert K. Vaness remains freshly in my mind because he was so fine and large, and because he summed up in his person and behavior a philosophy which, budding before the war, hibernated during that distressing epoch, and is now again in bloom.

He was a New-Yorker addicted to Italy. One often puzzled over the composition of his blood. From his appearance, it was rich, and his name fortified the conclusion. What the K. stood for, however, I never learned; the three possibilities were equally intriguing. Had he a strain of Highlander with Kenneth or Keith; a drop of German or Scandinavian with Kurt or Knut; a blend of Syrian or Armenian with Kahalil or Kassim? The blue in his fine eyes seemed to preclude the last, but there was an encouraging curve in his nostrils and a raven gleam in his auburn hair, which, by the way, was beginning to grizzle and recede when I knew him. The flesh of his face, too, had sometimes a tired and pouchy appearance, and his tall body looked a trifle rebellious within his extremely well-cut clothes; but, after all, he was fifty-five. You felt that Vaness was a philosopher, yet he never bored you with his views, and was content to let you grasp his moving principle gradually through watching what he ate, drank, smoked, wore, and how he encircled himself with the beautiful things and people of this life. One presumed him rich, for one was never aware of money in his presence. Life moved round him with a certain noiseless ease or stood still at a perfect temperature, like the air in a conservatory round a choice blossom which a draught might shrivel.

This image of a flower in relation to Rupert K. Vaness pleases me, because of that little incident in Magnolia Gardens, near Charleston, South Carolina.

Vaness was the sort of a man of whom one could never say with safety whether he was revolving round a beautiful young woman or whether the beautiful young woman was revolving round him. His looks, his wealth, his taste, his reputation, invested him with a certain sun-like quality; but his age, the recession of his locks, and the advancement of his waist were beginning to dim his lustre, so that whether he was moth or candle was becoming a moot point. It was moot to me, watching him and Miss Sabine Monroy at Charleston throughout the month of March. The casual observer would have said that she was "playing him up," as a young poet of my acquaintance puts it; but I was not casual. For me Vaness had the attraction of a theorem, and I was looking rather deeply into him and Miss Monroy.

That girl had charm. She came, I think, from Baltimore, with a strain in her, they said, of old Southern French blood. Tall and what is known as willowy, with dark chestnut hair, very broad, dark eyebrows, very soft, quick eyes, and a pretty mouth,--when she did not accentuate it with lip-salve,--she had more sheer quiet vitality than any girl I ever saw. It was delightful to watch her dance, ride, play tennis. She laughed with her eyes; she talked with a savouring vivacity. She never seemed tired or bored. She was, in one hackneyed word, attractive. And Vaness, the connoisseur, was quite obviously attracted. Of men who professionally admire beauty one can never tell offhand whether they definitely design to add a pretty woman to their collection, or whether their dalliance is just matter of habit. But he stood and sat about her, he drove and rode, listened to music, and played cards with her; he did all but dance with her, and even at times trembled on the brink of that. And his eyes, those fine, lustrous eyes of his, followed her about.

How she had remained unmarried to the age of twenty-six was a mystery till one reflected that with her power of enjoying life she could not yet have had the time. Her perfect physique was at full stretch for eighteen hours out of the twenty-four every day. Her sleep must have been like that of a baby. One figured her sinking into dreamless rest the moment her head touched the pillow, and never stirring till she sprang up into her bath.

As I say, for me Vaness, or rather his philosophy, _erat demonstrandum_. I was philosophically in some distress just then. The microbe of fatalism, already present in the brains of artists before the war, had been considerably enlarged by that depressing occurrence. Could a civilization, basing itself on the production of material advantages, do anything but insure the desire for more and more material advantages? Could it promote progress even of a material character except in countries whose resources were still much in excess of their population? The war had seemed to me to show that mankind was too combative an animal ever to recognize that the good of all was the good of one. The coarse-fibred, pugnacious, and self-seeking would, I had become sure, always carry too many guns for the refined and kindly.

The march of science appeared, on the whole, to be carrying us backward. I deeply suspected that there had been ages when the populations of this earth, though less numerous and comfortable, had been proportionately healthier than they were at present. As for religion, I had never had the least faith in Providence rewarding the pitiable by giving them a future life of bliss. The theory seemed to me illogical, for the more pitiable in this life appeared to me the thick-skinned and successful, and these, as we know, in the saying about the camel and the needle's eye, our religion consigns wholesale to hell. Success, power, wealth, those aims of profiteers and premiers, pedagogues and pandemoniacs, of all, in fact, who could not see God in a dewdrop, hear Him in distant goat-bells, and scent Him in a pepper-tree, had always appeared to me akin to dry rot. And yet every day one saw more distinctly that they were the pea in the thimblerig of life, the hub of a universe which, to the approbation of the majority they represented, they were fast making uninhabitable. It did not even seem of any use to help one's neighbors; all efforts at relief just gilded the pill and encouraged our stubbornly contentious leaders to plunge us all into fresh miseries. So I was searching right and left for something to believe in, willing to accept even Rupert K. Vaness and his basking philosophy. But could a man bask his life right out? Could just looking at fine pictures, tasting rare fruits and wines, the mere listening to good music, the scent of azaleas and the best tobacco, above all the society of pretty women, keep salt in my bread, an ideal in my brain? Could they? That's what I wanted to know.

Every one who goes to Charleston in the spring, soon or late, visits Magnolia Gardens. A painter of flowers and trees, I specialize in gardens, and freely assert that none in the world is so beautiful as this. Even before the magnolias come out, it consigns the Boboli at Florence, the Cinnamon Gardens of Colombo, Concepcion at Malaga, Versailles, Hampton Court, the Generaliffe at Granada, and La Mortola to the category of "also ran." Nothing so free and gracious, so lovely and wistful, nothing so richly coloured, yet so ghostlike, exists, planted by the sons of men. It is a kind of paradise which has wandered down, a miraculously enchanted wilderness. Brilliant with azaleas, or magnolias, it centres round a pool of dreamy water, overhung by tall trunks wanly festooned with the grey Florida moss. Beyond anything I have ever seen, it is otherworldly. And I went there day after day, drawn as one is drawn in youth by visions of the Ionian Sea, of the East, or the Pacific Isles. I used to sit paralysed by the absurdity of putting brush to canvas in front of that dream-pool. I wanted to paint of it a picture like that of the fountain, by Helleu, which hangs in the Luxembourg. But I knew I never should.

I was sitting there one sunny afternoon, with my back to a clump of azaleas, watching an old coloured gardener--so old that he had started life as an "owned" negro, they said, and certainly still retained the familiar suavity of the old-time darky--I was watching him prune the shrubs when I heard the voice of Rupert K. Vaness say, quite close:

"There's nothing for me but beauty, Miss Monroy."

The two were evidently just behind my azalea clump, perhaps four yards away, yet as invisible as if in China.

"Beauty is a wide, wide word. Define it, Mr. Vaness."

"An ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory: it stands before me."

"Come, now, that's just a get-out. Is beauty of the flesh or of the spirit?"

"What is the spirit, as you call it? I'm a pagan."

"Oh, so am I. But the Greeks were pagans."

"Well, spirit is only the refined side of sensuous appreciations."

"I wonder!"

"I have spent my life in finding that out."

"Then the feeling this garden rouses in me is purely sensuous?"

"Of course. If you were standing there blind and deaf, without the powers of scent and touch, where would your feeling be?"

"You are very discouraging, Mr. Vaness." "No, madam; I face facts. When I was a youngster I had plenty of fluffy aspiration towards I didn't know what; I even used to write poetry."

"Oh! Mr. Vaness, was it good?"

"It was not. I very soon learned that a genuine sensation was worth all the uplift in the world."

"What is going to happen when your senses strike work?"

"I shall sit in the sun and fade out."

"I certainly do like your frankness."

"You think me a cynic, of course; I am nothing so futile, Miss Sabine. A cynic is just a posing ass proud of his attitude. I see nothing to be proud of in my attitude, just as I see nothing to be proud of in the truths of existence."

"Suppose you had been poor?"

"My senses would be lasting better than they are, and when at last they failed, I should die quicker, from want of food and warmth, that's all."

"Have you ever been in love, Mr. Vaness?"

"I am in love now."

"And your love has no element of devotion, no finer side?"

"None. It wants."

"I have never been in love. But, if I were, I think I should want to lose myself rather than to gain the other."

"Would you? Sabine, _I am in love with you_."

"Oh! Shall we walk on?"

I heard their footsteps, and was alone again, with the old gardener lopping at his shrubs.

But what a perfect declaration of hedonism! How simple and how solid was the Vaness theory of existence! Almost Assyrian, worthy of Louis Quinze!

And just then the old negro came up.

"It's pleasant settin'," he said in his polite and hoarse half-whisper; "dar ain't no flies yet."

"It's perfect, Richard. This is the most beautiful spot in the world."

"Such," he answered, softly drawling. "In deh war-time de Yanks nearly burn deh house heah--Sherman's Yanks. Such dey did; po'ful angry wi' ol' massa dey was, 'cause he hid up deh silver plate afore he went away. My ol' fader was de factotalum den. De Yanks took 'm, suh; dey took 'm, and deh major he tell my fader to show 'm whar deh plate was. My ol' fader he look at 'm an' say: 'Wot yuh take me foh? Yuh take me foh a sneakin' nigger? No, sub, you kin du wot yuh like wid dis chile; he ain't goin' to act no Judas. No, suh!' And deh Yankee major he put 'm up ag'in' dat tall live-oak dar, an' he say: 'Yuh darn ungrateful nigger! I's come all dis way to set yuh free. Now, whar's dat silver plate, or I shoot yuh up, such!' 'No, suh,' says my fader; 'shoot away. I's neber goin' t' tell.' So dey begin to shoot, and shot all roun' 'm to skeer 'm up. I was a li'l boy den, an' I see my ol' fader wid my own eyes, suh, standin' thar's bold's Peter. No, suh, dey didn't neber git no word from him. He loved deh folk heah; such he did, suh."

The old man smiled, and in that beatific smile I saw not only his perennial pleasure in the well-known story, but the fact that he, too, would have stood there, with the bullets raining round him, sooner than betray the folk he loved.

"Fine story, Richard; but--very silly, obstinate old man, your father, wasn't he?"

He looked at me with a sort of startled anger, which slowly broadened into a grin; then broke into soft, hoarse laughter.

"Oh, yes, suh, sueh; berry silly, obstinacious ol' man. Yes, suh indeed." And he went off cackling to himself. He had only just gone when I heard footsteps again behind my azalea clump, and Miss Monroy's voice.

"Your philosophy is that of faun and nymph. Can you play the part?"

"Only let me try." Those words had such a fevered ring that in imagination I could see Vaness all flushed, his fine eyes shining, his well-kept hands trembling, his lips a little protruded.

There came a laugh, high, gay, sweet.

"Very well, then; catch me!" I heard a swish of skirts against the shrubs, the sound of flight, an astonished gasp from Vaness, and the heavy _thud, thud_ of his feet following on the path through the azalea maze. I hoped fervently that they would not suddenly come running past and see me sitting there. My straining ears caught another laugh far off, a panting sound, a muttered oath, a far-away "_Cooee!_" And then, staggering, winded, pale with heat and vexation, Vaness appeared, caught sight of me, and stood a moment. Sweat was running down his face, his hand was clutching at his side, his stomach heaved--a hunter beaten and undignified. He muttered, turned abruptly on his heel, and left me staring at where his fastidious dandyism and all that it stood for had so abruptly come undone.

I know not how he and Miss Monroy got home to Charleston; not in the same car, I fancy. As for me, I travelled deep in thought, aware of having witnessed something rather tragic, not looking forward to my next encounter with Vaness.

He was not at dinner, but the girl was there, as radiant as ever, and though I was glad she had not been caught, I was almost angry at the signal triumph of her youth. She wore a black dress, with a red flower in her hair, and another at her breast, and had never looked so vital and so pretty. Instead of dallying with my cigar beside cool waters in the lounge of the hotel, I strolled out afterward on the Battery, and sat down beside the statue of a tutelary personage. A lovely evening; from some tree or shrub close by emerged an adorable faint fragrance, and in the white electric light the acacia foliage was patterned out against a thrilling, blue sky. If there were no fireflies abroad, there should have been. A night for hedonists, indeed!

And suddenly, in fancy, there came before me Vaness's well-dressed person, panting, pale, perplexed; and beside him, by a freak of vision, stood the old darky's father, bound to the live-oak, with the bullets whistling past, and his face transfigured. There they stood alongside the creed of pleasure, which depended for fulfilment on its waist measurement; and the creed of love, devoted unto death!

"Aha!" I thought, "which of the two laughs _last_?"

And just then I saw Vaness himself beneath a lamp, cigar in mouth, and cape flung back so that its silk lining shone. Pale and heavy, in the cruel white light, his face had a bitter look. And I was sorry--very sorry, at that moment for Rupert K. Vaness.

THE BAT AND BELFRY INN

By ALAN GRAHAM

(From _The Story-Teller_)

1922

It was the maddest and most picturesque hotel at which we have ever stopped. Tony and I were touring North Wales. We had left Llandudno that morning in the twoseater, lunched at Festiniog, and late in the afternoon were trundling down a charming valley with the reluctant assistance of a road whose surface, if it ever had possessed such an asset, had long since vanished. On rounding one of the innumerable hairpin bends on our road, there burst upon us the most gorgeous miniature scene that we had ever encountered. I stopped the car almost automatically.

"Oh, George, what a charming hotel!" exclaimed Tony. "Let's stop and have tea."

Tony, I should mention, is my wife. She is intensely practical.

I had not noticed the hotel, for before us the valley opened out into a perfect stage setting. From the road the land fell sharply a hundred feet to a rocky mountain stream, the rustle of whose water came up to us faintly like the music heard in a sea-shell. Beyond rose hills--hill upon hill lit patchily by the sun, so that their contours were a mingling of brilliant purple heather, red-brown bracken, and indigo shadow. Far down the valley the stream glinted, mirror-like, through a veil of trees.

And Tony spoke of tea!

I dragged my eyes from the magnet of the view and found that I had stopped the car within a few yards of a little hotel that must have been planted there originally by someone with a soul. It lay by the open roadside five miles from anywhere. It was built of the rough grey-green stone of the district, but it was rescued from the commonplace by its leaded windows, the big old beams that angled across its white plastered gables, and by the clematis and late tea roses that clung about its porch.