Chapter II (5)

Canwarden did not write sonnets, or he would have composed many, not only in celebration of Petronella’s eyebrows, but of her crystalline blue eyes and burnished hair, her willowy figure of the latest and most wonderful shape, and her slim, white hands and arched insteps. But in all his plays--for he was a budding dramatist of exceeding promise--he described her in red-lined type:--“_Enter So-and-So, a fair and graceful girl of not more than twenty-five summers, with sapphire eyes and golden locks, attired in the costume of the period_” (whatever the period might be). “_She exhales the joyous freshness of a May morning, and her gurgling laugh rivals the spring song of the thrush._” This pleased the leading ladies hugely, even when their eyes were not of sapphire; but stage-managers found Urban Canwarden’s stage directions a trial. If he had been firmly seated in the motor-car of public approval, both hands on the driving-wheel as he ripped along the track of success, they would have smiled even while they writhed. But Canwarden was not yet famous, and the stage-managers were free not to disguise their feelings. However, he went on; getting thin--thin for a plump man--in the effort to make enough to marry on. For the beloved of his soul was not of the bread-and-cheese-and-kisses type of betrothed of whom we read in novels that have many years ago silted to the bottom-shelves in public libraries, and are occasionally issued as new in paper covers at fourpence-halfpenny. Her full name was Petronella Lesser, and she dwelt with her parents in an Early Victorian villa on Haverstock Hill, a residence which had been slowly settling down on one side ever since the Tube borings had started. The lease would be out, old Mr. Lesser calculated, a day or two before the Corinthian-pillared stucco and brick porch sat down. He was something in the Italian warehouse supply-line in the City, and a singular judge of olives, Gruyère, and barreled Norwegian sprats. Petronella never looked a fairer, more poetic thing than when concealing vast quantities of these zests behind the latest thing in blouses, day or evening wear, and Urban Canwarden, as he gazed upon his betrothed, or very nearly so, swore to himself that she should never know what it is to go lacking the _hors d’œuvres_ that lend piquancy to the Banquet of Life.

Petronella was a girl whose white and well-developed bosom was the home of emotions but little livelier than those that animate the beautiful person of a Regent-street wax-doll. Sawdust will burn, it is true, but the costlier puppets are stuffed with choicer stuffing. She had not fallen in love with Urban Canwarden; she had simply frozen on to him. She had liked sitting in the author’s box on First Nights, while the author tore his hair at his Club or in his chambers. She liked his person, his friends, his prospects. She looked forward to an elegantly-furnished villa on Campden Hill, with a cottage at Sonning or Hampton Wick, and mid-winter runs to the South of France, when a distinguished dramatist, the husband of a charming and attractive wife, whose _salon_ would be the constant resort of the fine flower, the top of the basket of London Society, should require rest and change of air after his exhausting labors undergone in the composition and rehearsal of the brilliant play, in four acts and eleven scenes, destined to be the opening attraction of Mr. James Toplofty’s Spring Season at the West End Theater. She would dream thus paragraphically, whenever she did dream, which was seldom, for her imaginative region was small. She was stupid and narrow, cold-hearted and mercenary.

“Since I have loved you,” Canwarden would say, “I have been able to write of noble women. You have inspired me; everything that is best in me comes from you; everything I have done that is good I owe to you....”

“You dear, exaggerating, Romantic Thing!” was invariably the reply of Petronella. “And when we are married we shall have a 28 h.p. Gohard with nickel fittings and a changeable body, and a chauffeur in livery. I used to dream of a dear little private brougham when we were first engaged, but nobody who wants to be thought Anybody would have such an old-fashioned thing now. How the world is changing, isn’t it, with motors and airships and Tubes to travel in?”

* * * * *

The Haverstock Hill villa vibrated as she prattled, and the porch settled lower by the fraction of an inch. It was a July evening, and the lovers, arm-in-arm, paced up and down the damp and puddly graveled avenue under the liquid-soot-distilling lilacs and acacias. The reflection of a large fire danced upon the windows of Mrs. Lesser’s drawing-room, and Petronella, despite the warmth of Canwarden’s love, felt chilly. She wondered why Urban had pressed her to put on goloshes and a warm wrap after dinner and take this clammy evening stroll arm-in-arm with him. And then she was conscious that the heart against which her right hand rested thumped heavily, and she felt his arm tremble, and remembered that at dinner her betrothed had shown a poor appetite in conjunction with a well-developed thirst. As pigs are said to feel wind coming, as cats--even the most sedate--set up their backs and sprint about the garden at the approach of a storm, Petronella instinctively felt that bad news was in the air. A more sentimental and much prettier girl might have anticipated a shipwreck of the affections--expected to be told that Canwarden had found his Fate in another’s eyes. Petronella’s previsions of disaster concerned only his banking account. It was that to which she was really referring when she said she felt that something had happened.

“It is true, dearest,” Canwarden said, with the kind of hoarse groan that he had not been able to extract from the leading young man in his last romantic drama even with the grappling-hooks of continued effort. “Something has happened. My great play--for that it is great I feel, and always shall, despite the slings and arrows of that eater of red meat, the Transatlantic critic ... my great play, ‘_The_ ...’”

“I know, ‘_The Popshop Hearse_’ ...” Petronella put in hurriedly.

“No, no ... ‘_The Poisoned Curse_,’” corrected the author, with a wince. “My play, produced a fortnight ago at Barney and Keedler’s Classical Theater, New York, is a failure ... a blank and utter failure! Yes, yes! the management did cable to me to say it had been enthusiastically received. I showed the message to you, and you shared my gladness. But here--here is another cable from my agent, Loris K. Boodler, of Skyscraper Mansions, 49,000,000 Broadway, that says....” He drew a crackling, flimsy paper from his waistcoat pocket, and tried to unfold it with hands that shook. “I can’t read it because it’s too dark, but I remember every word. ‘_Your--play--taken--off--Saturday--following--production. Variety vaudeville substituted. Writing. Boodler._’ And I was looking forward to the author’s fees to”--he coughed in a choky way--“to furnish our house and ... and buy that motor-car you were talking about. It ... it seemed so sure a thing! I had got such capital percentages; Barney and Keedler had cabled to say the play was a success....” He choked. “And now!...”

“You told me all that before, dear,” said Petronella. “But you have two other plays coming out, haven’t you, in London theaters?... West End houses.... And one failure doesn’t spell ruin....”

“One failure can break a dramatist, when it is a failure of this kind,” said her disconsolate lover. “Those two other plays are ... were coming out at theaters held by the same lessees--Barney and Keedler, of the Mammoth American Dramatic Trust. And so, don’t you see, all my balloons are deflated at once. I’ve come down with a crash, and ... it hurts! But you will trust me, won’t you? You will go on believing in me, though I’ve had what technical people will call a set-back. And if our ... our marriage must be delayed....” He stopped under one of the liquid soot-distilling lilacs, and caught Petronella in his arms, crushing the draperies arranged by her Hampstead dressmaker roughly against his damp evening overcoat. “You will not mind!... We will wait and hope, and love each other ... love each other.... After all, while we are together, nothing is too hard to bear....”

Thus spoke Canwarden, counting his chickens ere their emergence from the shell, after the fashion of a young man too deeply in love to see clearly what manner of young woman his heart is set upon. But Petronella shivered, conscious that the Hampstead garden was clammy, and that the dazzling halo of coming fame and approaching prosperity had been banished from Canwarden’s brow. He stood before her, tall and straight, and sufficiently good to look at, with his bright brown eyes, straight, short nose, and sensitive, clean-shaven lips, though his curly hair, it must be added, was receding too fast from a brow more bumpy than, according to the accepted canons of classical proportion, a brow should be. Upon his shirt-front a lilac had shed an inky tear, and his voice was husky with love and sorrow, not of an utterly selfish kind, as he promised Petronella to work hard, never to cease working until he had regained the lost ground.

“But you never may!...” she said, and the doubt in those shallow blue eyes--he never had realized before that they were shallow--pierced him to the soul. “And Nora will be married before me, and she is two years younger, and everybody in Hampstead will say....”

Canwarden, with heat, devoted Hampstead to the devil. I am not defending him. Petronella thought him brutal, coarse, and profane. Women of Petronella’s kind always enthusiastically uphold the dignity of the devil. She told him what she thought, and she wound up in the red-papered hall of the one-sided Hampstead villa by saying that he and she had better part. She added, as women of Petronella’s type invariably do add, that the dead past might bury its dead. And she drew off her engagement ring--an olivine, imposed by a Bond Street jeweler upon the too-confiding Canwarden as an emerald, harnessed between two indifferent diamonds of yellowish hue--and thrust it back upon him, and went upstairs to her room and locked the door; and as the hall-door banged violently and the iron avenue gates clashed behind the haggard Canwarden, his late betrothed sat down to pen a little note to Percy Flicker--a young man without a chin, junior partner of a small but pushing firm of shipbrokers at No. 35,000 Cornhill. The porch made up its mind and sat down that night, and Percy the chinless called upon the following evening, and was compelled to enter his Love’s bower by the back-door.

And Canwarden, seeing volcanic ruins smoking where his Castle of Hope had stood, wandered the West End and the Strand like a thing accursed. He went into his club, and men slapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him upon the New York success. They would learn the truth later, he said to himself, and then they would chuckle and sneer. The rustling of the cablegram in his waistcoat pocket whispered “_Yes s’s’!_” Meanwhile he had no appetite for solid food, and, quenching the thirst that consumed him with iced brandy and soda, he, Canwarden, usually the most temperate of men, realized how easily spanned is the gulf that severs the sober man from the inebriate. He might, perhaps, have crossed it for good and all had he not chanced to pass the invitingly open door of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange. The shipping advertisements loomed large and gaily-colored in the window; passenger lists and railway guides hung from hooks upon the walls, and lay in piles upon the counter, and a civil clerk and an attractive girl with squirrel-colored hair were busy over ledgers and things. Prompted by his guardian angel Canwarden went in and asked for the New York papers. The mail was just in, and he got them, and, leaning on the polished shelf-desk where people write out code telegrams, he turned to the theatrical column. His drama, _The Poisoned Curse_, had been withdrawn a fortnight ago from the stage of Barney and Keedler’s Theater--slain as a thing unfit to live--and a variety vaudeville substituted in its stead. Did not the cablegram--Loris K. Boodler’s cablegram--say so? He would see the hideous announcement for himself, and then go under, as men went who had broken the golden bowl of Youth and Hope, and were too weary to go on fighting.

Could it ... could it be a mistake...? Was the play a success after all? It looked like it. For in flamboyant type _The Poisoned Curse_: a Romantic Drama in four acts and eleven scenes, by Urban Canwarden, was announced by the _New York Trumpeter_ as being presented to-night, and every night, and to-day at 1.30, and Saturday _matinées_ as announced. The play had been running when Loris K. Boodler sent the cablegram announcing its withdrawal; the play was running now--would run. Canwarden’s hands shook so that the flimsy news-sheet tore. He glanced at the girl with the squirrel-colored hair and apologized, saying that he would pay for the paper. She smiled, and he found that he was able to smile back again. He despatched a short but expressive cablegram to the office of Mr. Loris K. Boodler, relieving that smart and go-ahead agent from further responsibility in connection with the collection of his percentages, and walked out of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange with his head up--a free man.

Petronella married Percy Flicker. Canwarden is a flourishing and popular dramatist, with a thumping bank balance and a permanent predilection for bachelor existence. All the female villains in his plays are blondes. The stage directions, underlined in red, run thus: “_Enter So-and-So, a fair and slightly formed woman of barely thirty, with icy and repellent blue eyes and hair of a pale and sunless straw color. She conveys the impression of cold insincerity and self-centered absorption, and her hard and mocking laugh falls gratingly upon the ear._” Which goes to prove that Human Nature is and never will be anything but Human Nature until the Curtain drops.

THE HAND THAT FAILED

Four men were seated about a round table, with dessert and wine upon it, in the dining-room of a luxuriously furnished house in a fashionable street in the West End of London--a street which is the Eldorado of the struggling professional man, the Tom Tiddler’s ground of successful members of the faculties of surgery and medicine. The aroma of Turkish coffee and choice Havanas was warm and fragrant upon the air, and the Bishop consented to a second Benedictine. His left-hand neighbor was a dry-faced, courteous gentleman, a King’s Counsel, famous by reason of several _causes célèbres_. The third man at table was merely a hard-working, small-earning practitioner of medicine and surgery, settled in a populous suburb of the high-lying North. Coming to the host, with whom the Highgate Doctor had walked the hospitals in his student days, one may describe him as a world-famous Consulting Specialist and operator; one of the kings of the scalpel, the bistoury, and the curette; a man of medals, orders, and scientific titles innumerable. Forty-three years of age, shortly about to be married (to a widowed niece of the Bishop), and in excellent spirits--a thought too excellent, perhaps....

“Wants rest, decidedly. Pupils of the eyes unnaturally dilated, circulation not what it ought to be. Overdone.... Changed color when the servant dropped a fork just now.... He had better take care!” said the Highgate Doctor to himself. He had to deal with many cases of nervous breakdown up Highgate way, where there are so many compositors and clerks and journalists. But the Bishop and the King’s Counsel had never seen the Distinguished Surgeon look more fit, and so they told him.

“What makes it more remarkable, in my poor opinion”--the Bishop, employing his favorite phrase, emptied his liqueur-glass and folded his plump, white hands--“being that our distinguished friend here”--he waved the fattest and whitest of his thumbs toward his host--“seldom, if ever, takes a holiday.”

“When,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, playing with a gold fruit-knife belonging to a set which had formed part of the First Napoleon camp-equipment at Leipsic, “when a professional man’s brain is absolutely clear, his nerves infallibly steady; when his digestion, sleep, appetite are unimpaired by any amount of physical and mental labor; when his hand is the ready, unerring, unflinching servant of his will at all times and all seasons, what need has that man of rest and relaxation?” The strong, supple, finely-modeled hand went on playing with the historical fruit-knife, as its owner added: “Work is my play! For change of air, give me change of experience; for change of scene, new cases, or fresh developments of familiar ones. The excitement of the gaming table, or any other form of excitement, would be a poor exchange for the sensations of the operator, the skilled, experienced, unerring operator, who calculates to the fraction of an inch the depth of the incision his scalpel makes in the body of the anæsthetized patient extended on the glass-table before him. Life or Death are his to give, and the trembling of the balance one way or the other is to be guided and controlled by his unerring eye, his unerring brain, and his skilled, infallible hand. He holds the balances of Fate--he guides and controls Destiny, and knows his power and glories in it. He is a supreme artist--not in clay or marble, gold or silver, pigments or enamels--but in living flesh and blood!”

The Bishop shifted in his chair uneasily, and turned a little pale about the gills. The removal of the episcopal appendix some months previously had preserved to the Church of England one of its principal corner-stones; and the neat, red seam underneath the Bishop’s apron on the right side, on the spot that would have been covered by the vest-pocket of an ordinary layman, twitched and tingled. And the King’s Counsel, who had once undergone a minor operation for throat-trouble, hurriedly gulped down a mouthful of port. The Highgate Doctor alone answered, fixing his steel-rimmed pince-nez securely on his nose, and tilting his chin so as to get the host’s face well into focus: “He is a supreme artist, as you say, and he delights in his work. But supposing him to delight too much? Supposing him to have arrived at such a pass that he cannot live without the excitement of it!--that he indulges in the exercise of his beneficent profession as a cocaine-drinker or hashish-eater, or morphinomaniac, indulges in the drug that destroys him, morally and physically--how long will he retain in their perfection the faculties which have made him what he is?”

“As long as he chooses!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, putting down the gold fruit-knife, and rising with the easy air of the well-bred host. “He is no longer a mere man, but a highly-geared and ingeniously-planned machine, in all that concerns the peculiar physical functions brought to bear upon the exercise of his profession. To lie idle, for such a machine, means rust and ruin; to work unceasingly is to increase facility and gain in power, and, provided it be carefully looked after--and I assure you my nuts and bearings receive the necessary amount of attention!--the machine of which I speak may go on practically for ever!” And he ushered his guests through the folding doors into his luxurious consulting-room.

“Unless there happened,” put in the King’s Counsel, “to be a screw loose?”

“My dear fellow,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, with a smile, “my screws are never neglected, I have assured you. The machine won’t come to grief that way!”

“It might come to grief in another way,” said the Highgate Doctor in a queer voice. “The Inventor might stop it Himself, just to prove to His handiwork that it _was_ a machine--and something more!”

At this remark, plopped into the middle of the calm duck-pond of sociality, the Bishop looked pained, as might an elderly spinster of severe morals at an allusion savoring of impropriety. The King’s Counsel, feeling for the Bishop, turned the conversation; but the Distinguished Surgeon and the Highgate Doctor were at it again, hammer and tongs, in a minute.

“I do not simply believe I shall not fail, my dear fellow! I _know_ I shall not! As for----” (the Distinguished Surgeon, sitting smoking in his Louis Quinze consulting-chair, mentioned a certain operation in abdominal surgery, delicate, difficult, and dangerous in the extreme) “I have performed it hundreds of times, successfully, within the last twelvemonth, leaving minor operations--scores of them”--he waved the scores aside with a movement of the supple hand--“entirely out of the question! At the Hospital to-day” (mentioning the name of a great public institution) “I operated in seven cases, bringing up the number to one thousand and one. The last was the most interesting case I have met with for some time, presenting complications rendering the use of the knife both difficult and risky, but----”

The sharp whirring tingle of the telephone bell punctuated the Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence: “But she’ll pull through; I guarantee it! We’ll have the bandages off in three weeks. She’ll be walking about before the month’s out like the others!”

“Under Providence let us hope so!” said the Bishop, encircled by a halo of fragrant cigar smoke. “Thank you, yes, I will take a whisky-and-soda. Without presumption, let us hope so, remembering, trusting in--arah--the--arah--the Divine assurance.”

“You may take the assurance from me, my lord!” said the Distinguished Surgeon. He got up and went to the fireplace (carved by Adam), and leaned one elbow lightly on the mantelshelf--an easy attitude, but instinct with pride and power. “As I have said, Case One Thousand and One is a difficult case. I could name surgeons of repute who would have hesitated to operate; but, given the requisite skill and the necessary care, failure, I hold, is out of the question. I have never failed yet--I do not intend to fail. It’s impossible!”

The second shrill, imperative summons of the telephone bell ended the Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence.

“Tch! They’re ringing ye up on the telephone from somewhere,” said the Highgate Doctor.

“Find out what they want, Donald, there’s a good fellow,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, buttonholed by the Bishop, whose urbane benevolence had creased into smiles tinctured with roguishness, as he related a clerical after-dinner story.

And the Highgate Doctor rang back, and unhooked the receiver and cried: “Halloa?” and listened to the thin ghost of a voice that droned and tickled at his ear, and turned toward the Distinguished Surgeon a face that had suddenly been bleached of all color.

“Well, who is it?” the Distinguished Surgeon asked.

“It’s the House Surgeon at the Hospital. Perhaps ye would speak to him yourself?” the Highgate Doctor said thickly; and the Distinguished Surgeon, released by the chuckling Bishop, strolled over and took the Highgate Doctor’s place at the receiver.

“Halloa! Yes, it’s Sir Arthur Blank!” he called, and the ghostly voice came back.... “One of the abdominal sections in the Mrs. Solomon Davis Ward ... Number Seven ... Mrs. Reed ... Hæmorrhage.... Imminent danger ... collapse.... Come at once!”

The Distinguished Surgeon glanced round, with eyes that were sunk in pits quite newly dug. The Bishop, still in his anecdotage, was buttonholing the King’s Counsel. Plainly they had not overheard. And as the Distinguished Surgeon took out his handkerchief and wiped the cold damps from a face that had gone gray and shiny, he knew relief. He avoided looking point-blank at the Highgate Doctor as he made his courteous excuses to his guests. “An urgent case--suddenly called away for an hour. My dear Lord, my dear Entwhistle, my dear Donald, entertain yourselves for that space of time, and don’t deprive me of a pleasant end to this delightful evening!”

But the Bishop, recently wedded for the third time, took leave, accepting his host’s offer of dropping him at his hotel, and the pair got into fur coats and a snug ante-brougham and drove away together. Soon after, somebody from the Chancery Buildings came with an urgent summons for the King’s Counsel, and he melted away with regrets, and the Highgate Doctor sat in the luxurious consulting-room, and started at every stoppage of swift wheels in the streets.

The silent servants came and looked to the fire, the Pompadour clock upon the mantel chimed eleven! And then, looking up out of a brown study, the Highgate Doctor saw his host returned, and started at his worn and haggard aspect. As the demure servant relieved him of his coat and hat, and vanished, the Distinguished Surgeon dropped into an easy-chair and sat shading his face with the right hand, whose steadiness he had so vaunted. And that infallible, unerring hand shook as if with palsy.

The Highgate Doctor could bear no more....

“O man,” he said--in moments of excitement his accent savored of from north of the Tweed--“dinna sit glowering and shaking there! I ken weel what has happened! Your pride has got the killing thrust; she is in her death-pangs at this minute I’m talking, and you stand face to face wi’ One you have denied! Am I richt or no?”

The Distinguished Surgeon moved the shaking hand and said, not in the calm level tone the Highgate Doctor knew, but one jerky and uneven:

“You are right! You shall know the truth, though it places my reputation at your mercy....”

“Forget your reputation a meenute,” said the Highgate Doctor. “As to Case One Thousand and One ... is the woman dead?”

“No ...” said the other--“no, I reached the Hospital in time ... we called up the chart-nurse and the Matron, had her taken up to the theater and----”

“Found that ye had bungled--for once in your life!” said the Highgate Doctor. “And weel for you, if not for your patient, that it is so. The ligature had slipped, I take it, being insecurely tied?”

The Distinguished Surgeon looked him steadily between the eyes and answered:

“The ligature was not tied at all! A grosser instance of neglect I never met with.” He got up and leaned against the mantelshelf, folding his arms. “I said so pretty plainly, and I have made a minute on the Hospital register to that effect. I shall also draw the attention of the Committee to the matter without delay!”

The Highgate Doctor blew his nose violently. His eyeglasses were misty.

“Ye have censured yourself? Ye will report yourself? O man! I kenned ye were a great one, but ye have never been so great--in my eyes--as ye are this night!”

“Thank you!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, as the two men gripped hands. “And--Donald, old fellow--I am going to take a holiday!”

“Where is the whisky-and-soda?” said the Highgate Doctor gleefully.

HIS SILHOUETTE

“He walked down Upper Bond Street, after leaving his chambers, half-way up on the left-hand side. The ground floor is occupied by the only London purveyor of American chewing-gum, who does a tremendous business in the imported article, and the shop is crowded all day by ladies, young and old, whose jaws, even in moments of repose from conversation, are in perpetual motion. Englishwomen do not yet chew gum. Let us hope that our wives, sweethearts, sisters, and cousins will be slow to acquire what, in my opinion, is an unpleasant habit, but too suggestive of arboreal tendencies inherited from anthropoid ancestors.”

The man who was telling the story stretched out his hand across the coffee-cups to select a toothpick. The man who opposed him at the table promptly annexed the glass-and-silver receptacle containing the article required.

“The original ape,” he said, “probably employed a twig. I cannot encourage you in a practice you so strongly denounce. Waiter, take these things away! Bonson, my good fellow, let us hear your story--if it is worth hearing. If not, keep it to yourself. The man began by walking down Bond Street. There is nothing original in that. I myself do it every day without being the hero of a story.”

“This man was the hero of a tragedy,” said the man who was telling the story. “Other people might smile at it for a farce--it was a tragedy to him.”

“Where did the horror of it come in?” asked the other man.

“Under Shelmadine’s waistcoat,” said the man who had been addressed as Bonson. “Shelmadine was losing his figure, which had been his joy and pride and the delight of the female eye ever since he left Oxford, without his degree, and, thanks to the influence of his uncle, Colonel Sir Barberry Bigglesmith, K.C.B., Assistant Under-Secretary to the Ordnance Office Council, took up a Second Division Higher-grade Clerkship at £280 per annum, which sufficiently supplemented his younger son’s allowance of £500 to make it feasible to get along with some show of decency--don’t you follow me?”

“If I had followed this beggar down Upper Bond Street,” hinted the other man, knocking an ash off a long, slim High Dutch cigar, “where would he have led me?”

“Into his tailor’s,” said the man who had been addressed as Bonson promptly. “He walked in there regularly every day on his way to the War Office. Clothes were his passion--in fact, he simply couldn’t live without clothes!”

“Could we?” answered the other man simply.

“I have heard that Europeans shipwrecked on the palm-fringed shores of a Pacific Island,” said Bonson, “have managed to do very well without them. Under those circumstances, let me tell you, Shelmadine would still have managed to be well dressed. He would have evolved style out of cocoa-fiber and elegance out of banana-leaves, or he would have died in the attempt. I am trying to convey to you that he had a genius for clothes. He evolved ideas which sartorial artists were only too happy to carry out. He gave bootmakers hints which made their reputations. He would run over to Paris every month or so to look at Le Bargy’s hat and cravats. He never told anyone where he got his walking sticks, but they were wonderful. I tell you----”

“Every man likes to be well dressed,” said the man who was listening to the story, “but this beggar seems to have had coats and trousers on the brain.”

“Rather,” said the narrator. “He thought of clothes, dreamed of clothes--lived for clothes alone. Garments were his fad, his folly, his passion, his mania, his dearest object in life. Men consulted him--men who wanted to be particularly well got-up couldn’t do better than put themselves in Shelmadine’s hands. He permitted no servile copying of the modes and styles he exhibited on his person. ‘Forge my name,’ he said to a fellow once, ‘but never copy the knot of my necktie!’ Chap took the advice, and did forge his name--to the tune of £60. Shelmadine would not prosecute. He was planning an overcoat--a kind of Chesterfield, cut skirty--with which he made a sensation at Doncaster this year, and when a certain Distinguished Personage condescended to order one like it, Shelmadine made the three he had got, quite new, and wickedly expensive, into a parcel, poured on petrol, and applied a match. Shut himself up for three days, and appeared on the fourth with a perfectly new silhouette.”

“A perfectly new what?” said the listener, with circular eyes.

“Shelmadine’s creed was that for a man to look thoroughly well dressed he must have a perfect silhouette. Every line about him must be perfect. The sweep of the shoulders, the spring of the hips, the arch over the instep, and so forth, must display the cut of scissors wielded by an artist--not a mere workman. Now, on this particular morning, not so very long ago, it had been brought home to him, as he looked in his full-length, quadruple-leaved, swing-balance, double lever-action cheval glass, that the reflection it gave back to him was not quite satisfactory. His silhouette did not satisfy him. Then all at once came with a rush the overwhelming discovery that he was----”

“Getting potty,” said the listener. “Those Government clerkships play the devil with a man’s waist. Nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep, walk, or drive to the Office and sit in a chair gumming up envelopes or drawing heads on the blotting paper when you’re there, until you fall asleep. Once you’re asleep, you don’t wake till it’s time to go home. Consequently you develop adipose tissue.” He yawned.

“Do you suppose,” asked the teller of the tale, with large contempt, “that Shelmadine lived the life of one of those human marmots--Shelmadine, a man so sensitively, keenly alive to the beauty of Shape, Form, Line, and Proportion? Do you dream that he lightly risked the inevitable result of indulgence in the pleasures of the table or the delights of drowsiness? If so, you are wrong. He rose at 5 a.m., winter and summer, in town or country, and after a hot bath, followed by a cold douche, pursued a course of physical exercises until seven, when he breakfasted on milkless tea, dry toast, or gluten biscuits”--the other man shuddered--“with, perhaps, a little plain boiled fish, its lack of flavor undisguised by Worcester sauce or any other condiment.”

“Horrible!” said the other man. “I once tried....”

“After breakfast, in all weathers, he walked five miles, within the Radius, returning to dress for the day. Anon he would saunter down Bond Street, look in at the shops, where he was adored, and criticize the new models submitted to him, as only Shelmadine could, show himself at his Club, stroll in the Park, and get to the Ordnance Office about eleven. The floors at Whitehall are solidly built, consequently his habit of jumping backward and forward over the office-table when he felt his muscles dangerously relaxed, met with little, if any, opposition in the Department. Dumb-bells, of course, were always ready to hand. At his Club the invariable luncheon supplied to him was the eye of a grilled cutlet, a glass of claret and water, eight stewed prunes, and, of course, more gluten biscuits. He shunned fat-forming foods more than he would the devil!”

“And made his life a hell!” said the other man, with conviction.

“My dear fellow,” said the relater, “you can’t understand what a man’s life is or is not until you have seen both sides of it. A Second Division Higher-Grade War Office clerkship allows of a good deal of liberty. Picture Shelmadine as the _enfant gâté_ of Society, followed, stared at, caressed and courted, by the smartest feminine leaders of fashion, as well as by the swellest men, as the acknowledged Oracle in Clothes. There’s a position for a young man single-handed to have achieved. To be the vogue--the rage--the _coq de village_--the _village_ being London--and at twenty-seven.”

“Exhausting,” said the other man, “to keep up, but sufficiently agreeable. Quite sufficiently agreeable! And I realize that at the psychological moment, when the fellow discovered that his figure had begun to run to seed, he sustained a shock--kind of cold moral and mental _douche_ a professional beauty gets when her toilet glass shows her the first crow’s-foot. Did your friend have hysterics and ask his valet for sal-volatile? I should expect it of him!”

“Shelmadine did not employ a man,” said the teller of the tale, fixing his eyeglass firmly in its place, “to do anything but brush his clothes. For all other purposes connected with the toilet he preferred a Swiss lady’s-maid. Do not misunderstand, my friend,” he added sternly, as the listener exploded in a guffaw of laughter. “_Honi soit_ ... the rest of the quotation is familiar to you. And Mariette Duchâtel had been strongly recommended to him by his aunt, Lady Bigglesmith, as a most desirable person for the post of housekeeper. She was at least fifty--retained the archæological remains of good looks, and owned a moustache a buddin’ Guardsman might be jealous of, by Jingo! But her heart had remained youthful, or we may so conjecture.”

“I begin to tumble to the situation of the swelling subject of your story,” said the other man, pouring out a Benedictine. “When your elderly housekeeper happens to be in love with you, it is bad enough. Things become complicated when the victim of your charms happens to be your maid. Continue!”

“A visit to his tailor’s on the day on which my story begins,” said Bonson, “convinced Shelmadine that--in fact, his outlines were becoming indefinite. ‘This will not do, sir,’ said his tailor, a grave and himself a portly personage, ‘with your reputation for silhouette to keep up--and at your years. We will let out the garment one inch--a thing I decline to do even for Royal Personages, as destructive of the design--and as this is now the Autumn Season I recommend you to obtain leave. Klümpenstein in the Tyrol has a reputation for reducing weight; its waters have done wonders for several of my customers, and the Rittenberg affords several thousand feet of climbing opportunity to tourists who wish to be quickly rid of superfluous girth. But, first of all, I should consult Dr. Quox, of Harley Street. Good-morning.’

“Quox of Harley Street went into Shelmadine’s case, elicited the fact that his maternal grandfather had turned the scale at twenty stone, that his mother, Lady Fanny, hadn’t seen her own shoe-buckles for eighteen years, except when the shoes weren’t on--don’t you twig?--and that he possessed what Quox pleased to call ‘a record of family obesity.’ So Shelmadine, who, in spite of rigorous diet and redoubled physical exercises, kept getting more and more uncertain in his outlines, rushed frantically off to Klümpenstein in the Tyrol, with what was, for him, quite a limited wardrobe. He drank the water--infernally nasty, too--and climbed the Rittenberg religiously, without finding his lost silhouette. Only on the Dolomittenweg, a pine-shaded promenade of great promise in the flirtatious line, he did find--a girl. And, despite his anxiety with regard to his silhouette, they had an uncommonly pleasant time together.”

“He had left his lady’s-maid behind, I presume?” hinted the listener.

“He had,” said Bonson. “When he got back to London, though, Mariette met him with a shriek. ‘Heavens!’ cried she, throwing up her hands, ‘the figure of Monsieur--the silhouette on which he justly prided himself, where--where has it gone? Hélas! those beautiful clothes that have arrived from the tailor’s during the absence of Monsieur--_jamais de la vie_ will he be able to get into them, _j’en suis baba_ in contemplating the extraordinary _embonpoint_ of Monsieur.’

“‘Hang it, Mariette!’ said Shelmadine, quite shocked; ‘am I so beastly bulged as all that comes to?’ Mariette broke down at that, and went into floods of tears. It took the best part of a bottle of Cognac to bring her round, and then Shelmadine set about overhauling his wardrobe.”

“Nothing would meet, I presume?” hinted the man who had been listening.

“Not by three finger-breadths,” said the man who was telling the story. “Plowondllellm Wells in North Wales has got a kind of reputation for making stout kine lean. Shelmadine got extension of leave on account of bereavement....”

“When a man loses his figure he may be said to be bereaved!” nodded the listener.

“Shelmadine tried the Wells, without success. All he ate was weighed out in ounces, all he drank measured out with the most grudging care; nothing was allowed to enter his system that contained anything conducive to the accumulation of the hated tissue, but nothing could keep him from putting it on!”

“Poor brute!” said the hearer.

“He had gone to the Wells a distinctly roundabout figure. He came back a potty young man! Despair preyed upon his vitals without reducing his bulk, however. He saw ‘Slimaline’ advertised.”

“I know,” said the listener. “A harmless vegetable compound which reduces the bulkiest middle-aged human figure of either sex in the course of a few weeks to the slender proportions of graceful youth. Three-and-sixpence a bottle, sent secretly packed, to any address in the United Kingdom. _Bis!_”

“He then,” continued the narrator, “went in for ‘Frosher’s Fat-Reducing Soap.’ Perhaps you are not acquainted with that compound, which is rubbed briskly into the--ah--the----”

“Personality,” put in the other man.

“... Until a strong lather is obtained. The lather proved ineffectual; Shelmadine took to stays.”

“Phew!” puffed the other man.

The first man continued:

“As the weary weeks went on he was compelled to return to his desk at Whitehall--crouching in a taxicab to avoid observation. But concealment was useless. From the Department allotted to the Second Division Higher-Grade clerks the secret crept out, and Society pounced upon it and tore it to shreds, shrieking.”

“Like ’em,” said the listener--“like ’em!”

“That night, as Shelmadine sat in his dainty dressing-room surrounded by mountains of costly and elegant clothes, which, though only of the previous season’s make, would no longer accommodate his proportions,” went on Bonson--“lounging clothes, shooting clothes, walking clothes of all descriptions--London did not contain a wretcheder man. The exquisitely chosen waist-coats, the taffetas shirts of the once slim dandy of the War Office--a world too narrow for the fat man who now represented him were in piles about him. Dozens of lovely gloves in all the newest shades--squirrel-gray, dead-leaf yellow, Havana-brown, chrysanthemum-buff--were scattered around by the hands that were now too stout to wear them. Piles of boots--afternoon boots, with uppers of corduroy leather, gray, fawn, or the white antelope, emblematical of the blameless pattern of virtue; walking boots, shooting boots, and shoes of all descriptions; slippers in heliotrope, rose-petal pink, and lizard-skin green, obscured the furniture. The pedal extremities that had bulged beyond all reasonable limits must now be accommodated in large Number Nines. Even Shelmadine’s dressing gowns--foulard silk, lined with cashmere--had declined to contain him.”

“’Pon my word, you make me sorry for the idiot,” said the listener; “mere clothes-peg, as he seems to have been!”

“Suicide--the thought of suicide had occurred to him.”

“He ought to have swallowed a set of enamel evening buttons or a set of five jeweled tie-pins,” suggested the listener, “and taken leave of the world in an appropriate manner.”

“I won’t go so far as to say that he would not have done something desperate,” continued the man who was telling the story, “had not Mariette--who may or may not have suspected that things were getting to a desperate pitch--appeared upon the scene. ‘Poor lamb! thou art in despair’--thus she addressed Shelmadine in the affectionate idiom with which her native language abounds--‘confide in Mariette, who alone can restore the silhouette that seems for ever lost to thee. Seems only, Monsieur; for at the bidding of me, myself, it will return. A little condition is attached to the recovery of thy figure, my child--not to be carried out if I cannot be as good as my word. _Passe moi la casse, je te passerai le séné._ All I want, Monsieur, is senna for my rhubarb--your written promise to marry Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, druggist of Geneva, if within three months you recover your beautiful figure. What do you say? Is it a bargain? Will you be fat and free, or slim and no longer single? Speak, then! You agree? _Pour sûr!_ I thought you would!’”

“And did he marry his lady’s-maid?” asked the listening man quite eagerly.

“He did not,” said the teller of the tale, “though he was very near it. Fortunately for Shelmadine, the girl he had met on the Dolomittenweg Promenade stepped in. She was an American, original, independent, and determined. When Shelmadine wrote--on Ordnance Office paper--to her in Paris, saying that Fate had stepped in between them, and that she never could be his, she asked the reason why. Not getting a satisfactory answer, she ran over to London to see for herself ... bringing her mother--a vast person, who wore a diamond tiara, mittens, and diamond shoulder-straps in the evening, and carried them in a hip-bag by day--with her.”

“The American mother is an appendage,” said the listener, “rather than a necessity.”

“The sight of Shelmadine, who had expanded like a balloon in the filling-shed since the happy days at Klümpenstein, was to Miss Van Kyper--Miss Mamie Van Kyper was her complete name,” went on the man who had been called Bonson--“an undoubted shock.”

“Of course,” agreed the man who was being told the story.

“They met at the Carlton Hotel, where she had engaged a suite of reception-rooms for the interview.”

“Not being quite certain whether one would hold Shelmadine?” suggested the other.

“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable--when I felt plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you--that I should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate devotion she twined her arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go, and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!”

“But you said he got it back again!” said the second man.

“He has,” said the first man.

“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?” queried the second man.

“Mariette,” said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father, the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.”

“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he dresses now. Fact!”

“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!” said the man who had been told the story.

A NOCTURNE

“You look,” He said nastily, as She raised her disheveled _coiffure_ and tear-blurred features from the center of a large muslin-flounced and covered cushion that sat at the end of the lounge that opened like a box, and held frilled petticoats--“you look like a wilted prize chrysanthemum.”

She mechanically put up one hand to drive home deserting hairpins into the mass of hair He had, in the lyrical days of early passion, celebrated as Corinthian gold-bronze, in a halting sonnet of which he was now profoundly ashamed. Stifling the recurrent hiccough that accompanies a liberal effusion of tears, she stared at him blankly.

A silver timepiece, a wedding present from His mother, who had objected to the match, struck the midnight hour. The thin sound of the last stroke, spun into tenuity by silence, died, and the clanking, hooting, nerve-shattering scurry of racing motor-buses went by like a wild hunt of iron-shackled fiends. A private car passed with its exhaust wailing like an exiled banshee, a belated hansom or two bowled along the sloppy asphalt, the raucous screech of a constable-defying nymph of the pavement rent the muggy air. He hardly heard it; he had been agreeing with his mother ever since the clock had struck. To-morrow he would go and look in at 000, Sloane Street, and tell her that she had always known best. In imagination he was telling her so, when the sable-bordered tail of a dove-colored Indian cashmere dressing gown he had worshiped during the honeymoon swept across the feuille-rose carpet in the direction of the boudoir; Sada Yacco and Abé San, snub-nosed, blue-and-pink-bowed canine causes of the conjugal quarrel, joyously yelping in its wake.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” He demanded.

“You did not seem inclined to go to your dressing-room,” She returned with point, “and as I have to write an important letter, I may as well do it now!”

He knew that the letter would be addressed to Her mother, who had also objected to the match, and would contain a daughter’s testimony to the correctness of the maternal judgment. Sada Yacco and Abé San, sitting on their haunches, with their pink tongues lolling, looked as though they knew it too. How he loathed those Japanese pugs! As he glared at them she gathered them up, one under each arm, protectingly.

“Don’t be afraid!” He said, with the kind of laugh described by the popular novelist as grating; “I am not going to murder the little brutes, after paying thirty pounds for the pair.” This was a touch of practical economy that made Her lip curl. “What I say is, I decline to have those animals galloping over me in the middle of the night.”

“It is the middle of the night now,” She said, concealing a yawn behind three fingers--his wedding ring and keeper upon one--“and they are not galloping over you. Men are supposed to be more logical than women. I have often wondered why since last May.”

“We were married in May,” He said, folding his arms after a method much in favor with the popular novelist when heroes are grim.

“It seems,” She said, rather drearily, “a long time ago.”

“If I had told you last May,” He retorted, “that I object to wake in the middle of the night with one Japanese pug snorting upon my--ah--my chest, and the other usurping the greater part of my pillow, you would have sympathized with my feeling, understood the objection, and relegated Sada Yacco and Abé San to their comfortable basket in the corner of the kitchen--or anywhere else,” he added hurriedly, seeing thievish early errand-boys on the tip of her tongue, “except your bedroom!”

The popular novelist would have described her pose as “sculpturesque,” her expression as “fateful,” and her tone as “icy,” as She said:

“The bedroom being mine, perhaps you will permit me to remind you that you possess one of your own, and that it is nearly one o’clock!”

It was, in fact, a quarter-past twelve. But the door closed behind Him with such a terrific bang that the thready little utterance of the silver timepiece was completely unnoticed.

She put her hand to her throat, as a leading actress invariably does in moments of great mental stress, and uttered a choking little laugh of sorrow and bitterness. Men were really like this, then! Fool, oh, fool, to doubt! Had she not read, had she not seen, had not other women whispered?... And had her mother not plainly told her that this man--now her husband!--was more like other men than any of the other men resembled others? She sobbed a few sobs, dried her eyes, and prepared for bed. But when arrayed in white samite, mystic and wonderful, with the traces of tears effaced by perfumed hot water, the pinkness of nose and eyelids ameliorated by a dab or two of powder, the gold-brown tresses He had once sonneted, and now sneered at, brushed out and beautiful, she took up the double basket owned by Sada Yacco and Abé San, placed it in the boudoir, returned for the canine couple, deposited them inside it, and then, resolutely shutting the door of communication upon their astonished countenances, got into bed, cast one indifferent glance at the twin couch adjoining, shrugged her shoulders, and switched off the light.

“S’n’ff!”

That was Abé San snuffing inquiringly at the bottom of the door. Sada Yacco joined him, and they snuffed together. It was impossible to sleep, especially when they began to discuss the situation in whimpers and short yelps. Then they began to race round the boudoir, barking in whimpers. Then, just as She had made up her mind to buy peace by letting them in, there was a sharp bark from Sada Yacco, a joyous scrape at a distant door, and a rattling of claws as the couple, emancipated from vile durance in the boudoir, joyously galloped down the passage. Then sleep soporifically stole over the senses of a wronged and brutally injured woman. It was not chilly, sloppy December: it was radiant July. She was not in a London flat. She was in a well-known back-water above Goring-on-Thames, cosy in a red-curtained punt, with a Japanese umbrella and two Japanese pugs and a husband, very handsome, almost quite new, madly devoted, not the quite plain, absolutely sulky, unspeakably disagreeable He now conjecturally snoring on the opposite side of the passage. And so She slept and dreamed.

He was not asleep. Propped up in his own beautiful little bed in his own cosy dressing-room, he was smoking a long cigar, and, as a further demonstration of bachelor independence, a brandy and Apollinaris stood untouched beside him. By the electric light dangling over his head, where sardonically hung suspended a wooden Cupid--ha, ha!--he was perusing a book. She objected to reading in bed, that was why--ha, ha! again. The thin-paper volume, supposed to be an enlightening work on Oval Billiards, proved, by a tricky freak of Fate, to be an English translation of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. This is what he read: